2 Fast-Growing Marketing Startups You've Never Heard Of

As cloud computing continues its expansion, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies have become a popular investment option and a hot topic on Wall Street. Public companies like Oracle Corporation ORCL, Workday Inc WDAY and salesforce.com, inc. CRM have become the public face of SaaS, but there is also some exciting new competition in the space as well.

Drip
Drip is a burgeoning SaaS company that is primarily focused on providing easy-to-use software that allows customers to design personalized, highly-targeted automated email campaigns.

On its website, Drip bluntly markets its services as “lightweight marketing automation that doesn’t suck." The company prides itself on its simplicity and value as an alternative to Eloqua, Marketo, Ontraport or Infusionsoft at 10 percent of the cost.

Ambassador
Another rising star in the SaaS world is Ambassador. Ambassador specializes in referral marketing, which involves a business rewarding its customers for helping to promote the products or services it offers.

This type of marketing is essentially incentivized digital word-of-mouth marketing, and Ambassador’s growth shows just how in-demand programs like these are. “In 2015, we grew from 11 to 40 employees and 3x-ed our topline,” CEO Jeff Epstein told Benzinga. In addition, he emphasized that the young company remained cash-flow positive on the year as well.
 

Takeaway

Drip and Ambassador are just two of the countless startups outside of the big-name SaaS players that are changing the way the world thinks about business. The big-name players may have the resources and influence, but these companies prove that large-cap public companies will never have a monopoly over innovative SaaS ideas.

Disclosure: the author has no position in the stocks mentioned.