Alchemy spins out Tadpole, a bargain branding agency for startups

Tom Nixon and Brent Eastman have worked with a lot of entrepreneurs in their years as part of the leadership team at Alchemy, a Troy-based marketing agency.

They know the well-established ones make good customers, but the new ones launching startups have the most potential. The problem is those companies usually have the most limited budgets at the time they need the resources the most to effectively get to market. Nixon & Eastman spun out Tadpole with the idea of providing a bridge of sorts for those companies.

“A young company [usually] has a great idea and some funding, but they [often] don’t have enough funding to pay a firm to bring the product to market,” Eastman says. “A marketing agency is one of the last things they will spend their money on.”

Tadpole finds a way to help startups circumvent that pitfall. It provides them with expert analysis and consultation, market research and proof-of-concept, a brand strategy and engineering, a launch plan, and a marketing execution roadmap. And it does it all for the first year at minimal cost.

Tadpole works on a deferred-compensation plan, so the startup business has minimal financial outlays for the first 12 months of the engagement. Rates are steadily increased in subsequent years so they are affordable to the startups as they begin to generate revenues. The end game is to help them become future clients of Alchemy.

Tadpole will choose four to six startups each year to work with, specifically companies that are beyond the product development stage but not quite to second stage where they are generating sustainable revenues.

“We define a tadpole as a company that has moved beyond the startup phase but isn’t quite to stage two,” Nixon says.

Source: Tom Nixon and Brent Eastman, co-founders of Tadpole
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit’s growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.