MARK MULLEN

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MARK MULLEN

Double M Partners

Brentwood

Before Mark Mullen upped his investment in social media marketing company MomentFeed late last year, he wanted to know if customers liked the Santa Monica company’s product.

MomentFeed offers a software suite that lets businesses with lots of locations – Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, for example – do customized Internet marketing for specific locations.

Mullen, managing partner of Brentwood venture capital fund Double M Partners, wanted to know whether that was useful. So he talked to clients. His main question: Do you love MomentFeed?

“Are they really helping your company?” he asked them. “Is it something you need or something you’d like to have if it doesn’t cost too much?”

If customers love it, he said, that’s a sign that it’s a product that can be sold.

“You know you can continue to reach out to new customers who will see it as a solution,” he said.

He had other questions, too – how much MomentFeed spent on sales, how many sales it closed and how many more customers it could bring in if it spent a few million dollars. But his chief concern was making sure MomentFeed’s service solved real problems.

He took a similar approach in 2011 before making his first investment in MomentFeed. (Mullen would not disclose how much he’s invested in MomentFeed, but said his firm typically invests no more than $750,000 in a single company.)

MomentFeed founder Rob Reed was a friend – they met through their wives – who had told Mullen about his idea for the company long before he had a business plan. They’d get together every few weeks over breakfast burritos in Pacific Palisades and talk about Reed’s idea as well as how to pitch to venture capital firms.

Mullen at the time hadn’t founded Double M and was investing his own money. But first he wanted to understand if potential clients had any use for the kind of tools Reed was talking about.

He had started by making the same type of investigation he later undertook, calling Coffee Bean and a few other companies to ask how they were marketing through social media. Companies told him they had a hard time interacting with customers at particular stores and that they’d like to do more targeted marketing because customers in California are different than customers in Mississippi.

That convinced Mullen a market existed and that it could be big. Without that, he likely wouldn’t have invested.

“With early companies, there’s not a lot of diligence you can do,” he said. “First you have to identify a market that has a need. If you can do that, then you have to execute.”

However, he cautioned: “If you have a great CEO and you can execute, but you have a tiny little market, who cares?”

– James Rufus Koren

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