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Launching 'the sequel to SQL' for a $1.6B enterprise: Looker

Looker is a software company employing business intelligence to make data accessible to organizations and data analysts.

Company Goal:

Create a single source of truth in data

Clarity's Challenge:

Launch the Sequel to SQL

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San Francisco

About

Once upon a time Looker, now valued at over $1.6 Billion with offices in New York, London, and San Francisco (just like us – minus the $1.6 Billion), was a tiny stealth startup out of Santa Cruz with the incredibly geeky dream of teaching the world to speak a new query language: LookML.

Armed with a great product, $2m in seed funding and about 20 small(ish) customers, Looker wanted to make a big impact out of the gate. Unfortunately, telling reporters in 2013 that you’ve created a new product that will simplify and democratize business intelligence was akin to a 10 year old Elon Musk saying he will land on Mars someday – “sure you will, kid.”

Looker needed a strategy that fought for credibility and took nothing for granted. No one was going to instantly recognize their value, and $2m in funding just wasn’t going to be enough to win the day. The Clarity team developed a strategy that focused heavily on the credibility of the company’s founder, Lloyd Tabb, and the problems that existed in business intelligence, rather than a dry laundry list of Looker’s benefits.

We didn’t take the easy route, but we knew we needed to elevate the message in order to get Looker the attention it deserved. We invested heavily in media training to craft the right message and sat Lloyd down with reporters from the most technical B2B publications in the world to make sure our message was battle-tested.

As a result, the launch of Looker generated significant demand for the previously-unknown upstart that would later take over the BI world. Clarity continued our work with Looker for a number of subsequent announcements and played a critical early role in establishing the solid base for future growth.

Results

  • Looker launched with coverage across publications ranging from TechCrunch, to Reuters, to eWeek.
  • New business leads flooded into the young startup at a pace they couldn’t even keep up with, and they had to create a queue for new customers. 

Selected Press

Looker scores $16M from Redpoint to take on Tableau & SAP in business intelligence

Big data and analytics startup Looker has raised $16 million in its first round of funding to promote data-driven discovery in “big data” software and to help it take on major players in the space. Looker’s web-based product is taking on a crowded business intelligence field that includes such players as SAP, Tableau, KissMetrics, GoodData, and Mixpanel. But it claims to differentiate itself by making the software easier to use than most. So much so that it “gives anyone the ability to query live data.” It accomplished this by created a proprietary language it calls LookML, which “radically simplifies the process of scripting and recycling SQL queries.

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