Podcast Ep 258: Interview with Andy Culligan, founder of Purple Path, about building a global digital marketing platform and the Vienna tech scene.
Andy Culligan, an Irishman based in Austria is building a global online marketing business.
Recently named Marketer of the Year at the 2025 Tekpon Awards, Culligan is CEO and co-founder of Purple Path, an outsourced marketing business, which recorded half a million euros in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, alone.
“We’re purely thinking in terms of recurring revenue. That’s how we see the world and how we build our pipeline. If it works for the multi-billion software industry, I’m surprised more industries don’t think that way”
In this interview Culligan discusses his go-to-market consultancy Purple Path, the evolving Austrian start-up ecosystem, and how AI is changing the SaaS landscape.
The era of the fractional CMO
In essence, Purple Path is an outsourced marketing business that delivers what Culligan terms the fractional CMO (chief marketing officer) and CRO (chief revenue officer).
The businesses focuses getting new ventures – typically bootstrapped software-as-a-service (SaaS) start-ups – to a point where they are bringing in revenues. A specialist in account-based marketing (ABM), Culligan helps to drive commercial success by helping companies find the strategies, people and tools to fit their revenue generating ambition.
The business is bootstrapped by a €700,000 founders’ investment.
Culligan graduated from Technological University Dublin with a BSc. in Marketing Management and moved to Austria 15 years ago for the martech opportunities available there.
Initially, in Vienna, Culligan worked with Emarsys (since acquired by SAP), the world’s largest independent marketing platform company, progressing to Director of Global Demand Generation over a three-year tenure. Roles as VP Marketing for Exponea (since acquired by BloomReach) and CMO with Leadfeeder followed with Culligan subsequently developing his own Fractional Marketing Leadership career, working with high-potential start-ups and scaling tech businesses.
Clients across the US and Europe have included Ireland’s leading omnichannel customer engagement platform, Xtremepush, and marketing software platforms including Marmind, Reachdesk, involve.me, Luigi’s Box, Capsule CRM, to name a few.
On a Viennese roll
While most Irish tech entrepreneurs either build businesses from Ireland or gravitate to Silicon Valley, Culligan built his career in Vienna and remains happy to remain there.
“I think it’s changing somewhat. I’ve been living in Austria for 16 years, and I’ve seen the city and country grow quite a lot, especially in the past 8-10 years. It’s become much more international. When I first moved here, even going into supermarket shops, nobody would speak English. Now I see a lot more people speak English.
“Is it Silicon Valley? Definitely not. However, there have been some really great success stories coming out of Austria. One of the biggest was Emarsys, the marketing automation platform I did a lot of my growing up with in tech. They specialised for retailers, e-commerce companies, travel companies, and worked with mega clients like eBay for over 20 years. Emarsys was subsequently purchased by SAP about three or four years ago – that was one of the big Austrian success stories.
“In the past 10 years, there’s been a good, stable ecosystem setup. There’s an Austrian start-up community and a number of funds based out of Vienna. Some of those funds are from the guys who managed to see an exit with Emarsys. Once one company manages to see a very large exit, you get an injection into that market of that knowledge and experience, and they start bringing that forward.”
The go-to marketeer
So what is Purple Path’s secret sauce and what’s driving it towards its €1m target for this year?
“Very simply put, we are a go-to-market team. Go-to-market basically means all things that are sales and marketing, or all things that help you bring your product to market. We mostly work with SaaS businesses, and we jump in as your marketing, sales – whatever team you need – and do that on your behalf.
“It started because I had been in the tech space for a number of years and left a full-time CMO role at a scale-up. I just really wanted a break after Covid. People started reaching out asking if I was interested in full-time work, and I said no, but I can help. That sort of snowballed from there, and that’s almost five years ago now.”
In a nutshell Purple Path helps SaaS firms to start selling and then helps them to establish their own sales teams.
“It starts with marketing. The team I’ve built at Purple Path are experts I’ve worked with at different organisations throughout my career – guys from Emarsys, Exponia (sold to BloomReach), and other businesses. They come in as marketing experts for their specific areas of expertise.
“For example, we have someone who’s been head of content at over 20 companies, someone who does marketing operations and digital with experience at 30 to 40 companies, and someone focused on product marketing who handles messaging, positioning, and brand work. I’ve been either a CMO or fractional CMO at 40-odd businesses in the past 10 years. Together, we’ve got about 70-plus years of experience running go-to-market strategies for tech companies.
“Whenever I go into a business, I always say I’m happy to help source your next CMO or internal team. Typically what happens is they say ‘that sounds great’, and then two or three years later, we find ourselves still in the same position with the same customer. We do sometimes see customers come and go, but typically we see ourselves as a long-term engagement. We run it like a SaaS model – we have annual recurring revenue, we upsell for expansion revenue, and we renew to keep the monthly recurring revenue coming in.”
Culligan says that 90% of his customers are in the SaaS space and 10% are not far off that business model. “The majority are tech companies selling to mid-market to upper mid-market – relatively expensive products with contract values somewhere between €70,000 to €100,000 a year to their customer base. We typically work with companies that have just received a round of funding and need to scale their business.
“We don’t work with companies trying to find product-market fit – we’re too expensive for that stage. We come in once they have product-market fit, have funding, and are ready to scale their marketing efforts.”
The Impact of AI
While SaaS has been in steady growth mode for almost two decades, artificial intelligence looks set to change everything. I asked Culligan if AI is an opportunity or a threat to SaaS enterprises.
“AI is enabling companies to create products that are sellable almost overnight. I work with a founder here in Vienna who created a problem-solving product using AI in half a day – complete with website, payment engine, branding, messaging, and backend. He’s not an expert in all that; he just wanted to have fun with AI and managed to create something he can sell.
“But you still need people. We use AI tools to help, but I’m never going to have an AI agent tell me what my marketing plan should be. You still need to feed the AI engine with the right prompts, and you need to be an expert to create those prompts to get expert information back.
“For us, AI enables us to move quicker. We can build target audiences for customers within minutes that would have taken hours to build manually 10 years ago. We can tier companies based on priority and automate our marketing against each tier. But AI isn’t an expert – it just makes us more efficient.”
While Purple Path is on a trajectory to hit €1m in revenue this year, Culligan is more interested in the long-term potential. “We’re growing organically and funding ourselves. We’ve been doing a huge amount of work building our personal brands and social networks. A lot of it is word of mouth.
“We’re eating our own dog food – we have a marketing plan for ourselves. We have a podcast called Growth Path with interesting guests from world champion surfers to astronauts to tech CEOs. We’re getting a large amount of inbound interest. Where we’ll struggle is scaling ourselves since we’re a services business, so we’re focused on bringing more people on board and getting them into the same mindset.
“We think of ourselves as a SaaS business, even though we don’t offer software. The main difference between us and other agency models is mindset – we’re purely thinking in terms of recurring revenue. That’s how we see the world and how we build our pipeline. If it works for the multi-billion software industry, I’m surprised more industries don’t think that way.”
Background image at top: Photo by Olga Mandel on Unsplash
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