‘We want our partner business to grow substantially in 2025 and beyond’: New MirrorWeb CRO on huge channel opportunity

Meet the SaaS company’s C-suite hire whose career has been ‘intertwined’ with the channel and is now on a mission to replicate this success

MirrorWeb is on the hunt for MSPs to help it capture a bigger chunk of the financial services industry.

Founded in 2012 by a trio of technologists in Manchester, England, MirrorWeb is a SaaS company that provides digital communication capture for regulated businesses that face the modern compliance challenges of today's world.

The organisation secured a $63m growth equity investment from Mainsail Partners

in September and now has offices on two continents and a global staffing presence.

MirrorWeb also boosted its leadership team at the start of the month with the appointment of Joshua Yulish as president and chief revenue officer.

Speaking with CRN, Yulish details how the SaaS company plans to continue expanding its web with the fresh capital.

“We’ve increased our workforce by around 40 per cent in recent months,” he says.

“From the capital investment we’ve put a lot of those funds into our engineering and product teams to drive innovation into the go-to-market teams, expanding our local US presence, in addition to our very strong UK presence.”

Yulish adds MirrorWeb is also putting the cash towards marketing and events to enhance visibility and awareness, build out its brand into the channel to help bolster revenue opportunities and invest back into the channel to help enable partners to grow.

“And then from that investment in engineering I think you'll see a lot of really innovative solutions on our roadmap with game changing products and features.”

MirrorWeb’s channel ambitions

MirrorWeb works with MSPs, resellers and referral partners, with its partner ecosystem currently contributing double digits to the overall business.

“Today it’s around ten per cent of our ARR, which, from my perspective, is a huge opportunity that provides significant growth potential in the business, as we continue to expand.

“We want our partner business to grow substantially, both in 2025 and beyond.

“My whole career has been intertwined with the channel going back 25 years, and it has driven significant growth through channel and channel opportunities.

“So, there's no reason we shouldn't do the same here. We have a great foundation to build on.”

He continues to explain his approach to partner onboarding, opting for a ‘less is more’ style.

“My approach is I'd rather have the right number of partners generating more business and mutual value than a lot more partners that sit around but it's not really benefiting either of us.

“So we’re currently focused on MSPs and compliance partners, these organisations that help provide best practices, or potentially to outsource compliance to the financial services industry.”

Challenges

Yulish explains how MirrorWeb’s biggest challenge to date centres on the bad reputation of players in the industry thanks to two culprits.

“There have been two established legacy vendors in the space that really haven't innovated or needed to innovate or invest in their customers because they were these two dominant players.

“And what that's done is it's created a really negative impression that we now have to sell against to help customers realise there is a modern and native platform with customer-obsessed people that we have to now turn that challenge into our biggest advantage.”

Another challenge, Yulish adds, is agility. MirrorWeb is “intrinsically linked” to how people communicate, which dramatically shifted when the Covid pandemic hit.

“How rapidly that had to shift was a challenge we knew we were going to face when we came into the space, and we have now built our technology to be able to pivot rapidly when that's needed,” Yulish explains.

“And then lastly, the regulators. How the regulators change their focus and what they demand of the businesses that they regulate is something that we have to rapidly adjust to to make sure we can provide our customers the ability to be compliant based on new regulation.”

Yulish notes that, in a rapidly changing world of compliance and regulation, the imperative to have a modern and native architecture to support that compliance is ever more critical.

“Depending on legacy, where everything is text-based and stored as these text-based artifacts versus how it is in the modern world, like emojis for example,” he says.

“We support those things natively and our partners and our customers need the ability to be modern and native and cutting edge to stay ahead of compliance, not be dragged down by yesterday's compliance alternatives.”