Matthew Herbert, Co-Founder of Tracksuit, a revolutionary brand tracker, has made the B&T 30 Under 30 list for his career in innovative tech. With remarkable success working with top brands such as Snapchat, Coca-Cola, and Red Bull, Herbert helped Tracksuit achieve impressive growth and a $45 million valuation. StopPress caught up with Herbert to find out what drives him and his vision for the future.

Over the course of his relatively short career so far, Matt Herbert has worked with a long list of the biggest brand names in the business. As one of the only Kiwis to be recognised in the B&T 30 Under 30 list, he is making waves in the international business and marketing community.

Early on in his career, Herbert built a name for himself through his work helping to bring Uber to New Zealand and launching it in Christchurch.

“Looking back, Uber was a brand that was decently sized internationally but was operating before the regulations went through. It was a new brand and it had a way of operating and innovating in a traditional market that we had the opportunity to launch and grow,” he says.

“I think that for me was the first introduction to the world of start-ups, scaling businesses, and brand new businesses as well.”

This experience led to him moving to Sydney with Mish Guru, a brand building software company, and working with SnapChat.

“Snapchat was becoming a new channel, a way of communicating and a channel for brands and individuals to connect.” Being a part of that growth was “phenomenal”, he says.

He then moved back home to New Zealand and jumped at the opportunity to co-found Tracksuit, an affordable, always-on brand tracking dashboard to measure and communicate the value of businesses’ brand-building activities. Initially attracted to the opportunity to help loved brands continue to grow, Herbert was able to draw from his previous experience to champion brand marketers and great brands.

“That experience is that the biggest and most well-known brands have been marketing and doing market research and implementing brand tracking for the last 40 to 50 years. It’s not a new concept, but it is the reason that big well-known business are big well-known business,” he says.

“That there is to say, what are big businesses doing? What is the enterprise best-in-class way to operate and how do we take those learnings and help and share here the best brands of today and tomorrow and support that? That experience tied into growing Tracksuit and the brands that we get to work with has had a massive impact.”

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As for the secret to Tracksuit’s success, Herbert puts it down to being clear about what impacts the business is setting out to have right from the start.

“We wanted to find and create a way that brands get measured and managed and support brand marketers to do that. Contributing to that is looking at setting the goal, setting the vision. We want to be that common language to measure, communicate, and understand the value of brands and doing it in a way where we can support marketers and brand leaders, communicate with stakeholders in their business at a board-level and to people that have no idea about brands and no idea about marketing.”

He says this simplified common language approach to getting buy-in to brand, contributed to the software’s success as well as its people-first approach.

“It’s a software platform but backed by real humans taking real care and understanding and a drive and energy to create this impact.”

Herbert has been open about his goal of building Tracksuit to the point of acquisition within the next three to five years and is aiming for Tracksuit to be used “in every strategic growth conversation of the best brands of today and tomorrow”.

“Everything that we do, we want to make sure that we’re building to scale and along the way to achieve that being that common language to measure understanding and communicate with the value of brands and the impact of marketing. The vision is to get it to that point where it is being used as a common language globally. The next three to five years is doing everything we can to get it to that point.”

As for what motivates him to chase these goals, it all comes down to the people he works with, he says.

“Bringing expertise and people together and looking at a shared vision and channelling everybody’s energy and efforts towards that direction and a common goal. I think that’s probably the biggest motivator.”

This is especially the case at Tracksuit, he adds, where he enjoys working with his team as well as customers and partners.

“We get to work with the best brands and the best people in those brands. So, we’re having a lot of fun and that’s quite motivating in itself.”

Herbert says it was an honour to be recognised in the B&T 30 Under 30 and be able to represent Tracksuit in a space that celebrates the best and brightest talent in the advertising world.

“To be able to go up there and represent Tracksuit and kind of the impact that we are having, it was fantastic and means a lot,” he says.