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Brandon Silverman, the founder, and CEO of the Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle, is leaving the company; team members were reassigned several months ago. ( Alex Heath / The Verge)

AdamMarch 29, 2023

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A few months ago, the founders of CrowdTangle, an online analytics platform that helps businesses understand their user engagement data, were allowed to either stick around and continue building the company or move on. Brandon Silverman, who co-founded the company with his brother and childhood friend James, decided he would rather leap. His new venture is called CrowdFusion, and its goal is to take a data-driven approach to the social media advertising industry.

What is the Profile of Silverman?

Silverman started with CrowdTangle in 2009 as an analytics intern. He was the first hire when CrowdTangle launched in 2012. As CEO, he’s overseen the company’s rapid growth from 4 to 30 employees and $1M in annual revenue. The tool helps businesses understand and improve their social media marketing efforts by assisting them in measuring their content better. He recently told Business Insider that the most important lesson he learned was building a product that solves a customer’s pain point.

What happened to the Crowdtangle?

Crowdtangle, a crowdsourced marketing platform, raised $3 million in May 2014 to help marketers measure the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. But less than a year later, the startup shut down. Why did Crowdtangle fail? CEO Ryan Holmes offered two reasons. First, the market for social media analytics is crowded, making it hard to differentiate yourself. And second, the product failed to deliver on its promise. Crowdtangle’s analytics needed to be more accurate, its targeting methods were flawed, and its software didn’t work well for its target customer.

Why did CrowdTangle end up with so many employees?

After two years of trying to build its platform, CrowdTangle ended up with over 100 people at its peak. They had hired about 40 employees by June 2015, but then, by the fall of 2016, they had grown to about 180. There are two main reasons that CrowdTangle ended up with so many people: (1) they wanted to be agile and move quickly, and (2) they wanted to build customer relationships. Crowdtangle ended up hiring all its staff to be a full-time company, but there was no need for a full-time staff since it only planned to make money once it started generating revenue from advertisers. After they had developed a significant amount of income, they planned to hire more employees to handle the additional demand.

How Is CrowdTangle’s Founder and CEO, Brandon Silverman, Impacting Facebook’s Business?

CrowdTangle is a data mining company founded in 2011 in Austin, Texas. The company creates software tools and mobile apps that allow businesses to track customer engagement and sentiment. The founder and CEO are Brandon Silverman. Silverman is an MIT graduate who has worked at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Microsoft, and Fidelity Investments. His experience in finance led to his current role as CEO and cofounder at CrowdTangle. He has been working with big data since 2010 and was part of the founding team at a large social media marketing firm before starting CrowdTangle.

Conclusion

CrowdTangle has been around for just over four years, and at that time, it was a relatively new platform. The idea of social analytics wasn’t even in vogue back then, so the company needed more traction. Today, it’s a full-fledged market leader with billions in annual revenue. While the company has only been around for so long, it’s achieved tremendous growth and success. That means there’s no reason to stay quiet about the lessons you learned as an early employee. So, I’m writing a book about how to go from zero to a million dollars in the next year. Read all about that here.