Growthverse attempts the impossible: making sense of marketing tech

“Out of chaos comes order.”

German philosopher Nietzsche accurately described the driving force behind Growthverse.

It’s an elegant, interactive effort to create a sane visualization of the marketing tech landscape that has otherwise been depicted as an insane circle of Hell by marketing tech specialist Scott Brinker.

This interactive HTML5 topology was coauthored by Kobie Fuller, a partner at VC firm Accel Partners, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, chief marketing officer at the Mozilla Foundation. The site was built by Beutler Ink, a digital agency that specializes in data visualization and social media marketing.

They turned the 2,000 or so companies in Brinker’s landscape into a mere 600 by making judgment calls based on what they understood people were using. Mercifully, ad tech was left out as a separate category, although it is represented in several tools.

“I was trying to make sense of the ever more confusing landscape of marketing tech,” Fuller told me. His day job, he pointed out, is still being an investor.

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He hopes marketers will use the tool to find answers to things like putting together a marketing tech stack.

Any marketer using the visualization, however, will first have to decide which categories and subcategories at each level are relevant to their question.

The “structured taxonomy,” as Fuller calls it, is not really structured to provide answers. At the bottom level, the companies are listed and linked but without any qualitative assessment.

Nevertheless, kudos to Fuller and Kaykas-Wolff for simply attempting to sift this ocean.

The visualization is a free resource and there is no business model here, Fuller told me. Marketing tech companies in which Accel has investments are included, but Fuller said they’re not emphasized inordinately, and non-Accel companies are included.

Users can suggest additional companies or email feedback, which Fuller said will inform updates over time.