This week, we trace Braze’s decade-long journey from an early bet on mobile to IPO.
Braze’s Path to Product-Market Fit — How to Build for a Market That Doesn’t Exist Yet
Page the calendar back to 2011, and the state of mobile looks a lot like AI in 2025. The release of the iPhone brought mobile to the mainstream in 2007 much like ChatGPT did for AI in 2022. Within a few years, the first wave of consumers had caught on — but existing businesses hadn’t yet figured out how (or why) to treat mobile as a growth lever.
That year, a few recent M.I.T. grads and Bridgewater alums had the idea to help mobile devs monetize their apps. They called their new startup Appboy (before later rebranding to Braze).
There was just one problem: “The market wasn't ready for us to sell to it yet,” says Bill Magnuson, Braze’s co-founder who was originally CTO before becoming CEO in 2016. You could scroll Facebook or play Angry Birds on your phone, but it would be a while before major enterprises like banks and retailers — the types of customers Braze now has an extensive roster of — set up shop in the App Store.
“Our best answer to ‘why now?’ was to get a multi-year head start on something we had strong conviction in. But not everyone agreed with that. In the early days, it was sometimes difficult to maintain that full conviction because of how long it took,” he says.
Today, the customer engagement platform pulls in hundreds of millions in of dollars in Committed Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR) and has a multi-billion dollar market cap and a listing on Nasdaq. But the company’s path to get there was lined with doubts and detours:
- When they first launched a public beta in 2012, most of the 1,000 users that signed up churned because many of those apps went under (their ICP of mobile marketers wouldn’t emerge for another few years)
- Investors told them to build for gaming apps instead of building a horizontal platform, because at the time, that’s where all the money was
- It wasn’t until the Braze team raised a Series D that they received more than one term sheet
It took several years after founding to see the first meaningful sparks of traction — signing and retaining enterprise customers who were early experimenters with mobile marketing.
In the latest installment in our Paths to Product-Market Fit series, Magnuson and Chief Product Officer and early employee Kevin Wang take us through how they built a product for a market that was just starting to coalesce.
“A lot of people fall for the headlines of this or that acquisition happening quickly and in the early years,” says Magnuson. “So when they guess how long it takes on average for a company to IPO, they grossly underestimate it.” In Braze's case, it took a full decade from founding to IPO.
Braze’s story serves as a reminder that no matter how fast today’s buzziest startups zoom to revenue milestones in record timelines, building an enduring company is a long game. Magnuson and Wang share plenty of tactics and reflections for builders eyeing a market that’s still in its infancy.
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
Recommended resources:
-Tips for choosing the right OKRs for early-stage startups
-Inspo for a “how to work with me” guide (and check out this Review article for more pointers on how to write your own)