3y
Dear reviewer,
We are sorry to read that you hold a grudge against Marketer, and that your time here has not lived up to what you expected. You are of course fully entitled to your personal opinions on both the company, its management, as well as other elements of our internal affairs. However, we need to address some of the allegations put forward in your review, as they are simply not true.
We take pride in the work we do, the technology and solutions that we deliver to our customers globally, and we are very proud of our talented employees. We are deeply saddened that you choose to dishonor the hard work put down by all your colleagues, with false claims such as “the main product ain’t even selling or live yet”. Below we will address your concerns and claims chronologically.
As all responsible companies, we run strategy cycles where we define the desired target state in the mid-long term (in this case 2025) while also doing detailed planning for the short-term to take the right steps towards the target state. There is no conflict in planning for the future while at the same time adapting to the current market environment and executing on a 6-12 months plan.
2022 has been a challenging year, especially with regards to the macro economic environment, impacting most companies and also private consumption, as we are sure you are aware. Many companies have been forced to take action to adapt and mitigate risk caused by the unfavorable market conditions. Particularly in the tech start-up / scale-up scene, companies have been forced to lay off their workforce in large numbers, often 20-30% in total. Marketer is not an exception here, and has recently completed cost cutting measures, which unfortunately included a temporary lay-off. The temporary lay-off represents about 5% of the total workforce, and is mainly related to scaling down investments in initiatives that are not expected to generate revenues in the short term, and do not impact the overall growth or ability to deliver our main product lines. Such actions are unfortunate and, needless to say, something we seek to avoid, but it is considered necessary to secure sustainable operation of the overall company, including all relevant responsibilities an employer has.
As mentioned, we continue delivering our main product lines to our customers, and move forward with high revenue growth and a sustainable cost base. We have sufficient run-way and a clear path to profitability at full scale. The claim that “economics are ruinous” is simply not a fact.
Our main product has been sold and delivered successfully since early 2017. We recently released our next iteration of our offering, a full-scale sales, marketing and after-market platform for residential real estate developers. Implementation for clients has already started, and the feedback from the market is good. We are very proud of the platform and the response so far, and somewhat disappointed that you chose to minimize the achievement of this new offering which wouldn't have been possible to deliver without the hard work over the last 1-2 years from all of our colleagues.
The event / party you are referring to was the official launch event in Norway of the abovementioned platform. The guest list comprised 200+ representatives from the residential new builds market in Norway (i.e. customers), and the purpose was to give an exclusive introduction to the platform. The event was a successful marketing initiative, resulting in multiple sales dialogues in the period that followed. The band you are referring to, who performed a mini concert at the event, is indeed one of the best and most popular bands in Norway. Luckily for us one of our employees is in a domestic partnership with the lead singer, and thus we were able to engage the best band in Norway to perform at our event at an extremely low cost. The cost of the event came out of the marketing budget, which is an investment any company needs to undertake to drive sales, and the event had no causation of the temporary lay-offs, which you are implying that it had.
We’d like to take the opportunity to comment on our remote working policy as well. We have a policy that states that working at the office is the default, but flexibility is allowed and we only ask our employees to let their closest leader know if they plan to work remotely. We have benchmarked against comparable companies, and found that our policy is in line with the common trend post Covid. We experience that our employees enjoy working at the office, which may have to do with the fact that we have invested in a nice office (as you mention as a Pro), with an average of 3% working from home /remotely on Mondays, somewhat increasing though the week as we approach the weekend with 7% on average working remotely on Fridays. We also have an international workforce, with several people working from non-Oslo locations throughout Europe.
Lastly, we would like to thank you for your review. We encourage all employees to have their own opinions, and all opinions provide us with valuable input on how we can improve and develop further. We are sad that your experience in Marketer has not been what you expected it to be, and we would like to extend an invitation to a direct dialog, should you feel comfortable doing so, and together address your concerns to restore your confidence in Marketer.
