SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1720 Bombora CEO Hits $30m ARR, Applies for PPP, Finds Virus Patterns Among B2B Brands
09 Apr 2020
Chapter 1: What updates did the host share about the podcast format?
Hey guys, I'm recording this here on April 5th. It's Sunday. Everyone's trying to survive the crisis. Quick note to you guys, we are moving, you know, we used to delay these episodes by, you know, four to eight months after we recorded them in terms of releasing them on the podcast. We've changed that.
A lot of these interviews you're gonna hear over the next many months are gonna be ones we recorded only
days prior we think that's a smarter way to run the show i've made the change so expect more urgent information coming out secondly i am getting destroyed on itunes reviews by these people that say nathan's rude he's hard-hitting blah blah blah which by the way i am it's part of my style it's what works the problem is people that love that style never take the time to go leave a five-star review
So I only get one or five star reviews on iTunes. And right now there's a streak of one star reviews that is driving me crazy. It would mean the world to me, guys. If you're loving the show, you love how direct I am. You like the style. If you go leave a review on iTunes now, if you do that and tweet it to me, text it to me, email it to me, whatever you want.
I'm going to reply with a very special surprise. I think a lot of you guys will really like it is heavy, heavy data oriented. All right. So I appreciate that. Thanks, guys. Enjoy the show. Bombora, again, built a massive data cooperative with big B2B publishers. Many of these are exclusive. The company broke $26 million in revenue in 2018, $30 million in 2019.
They projected 20% to 30% growth this year. Maybe a little tighter, obviously, because of the virus. But more importantly, they're looking at a very unique data set into what B2B brands are doing in terms of searching for vaccinations or things related to COVID. It's obviously increasing purchasing searches and things related to purchasing going down. Hello, everyone.
My guest today is Eric Matlick. He guides the vision and corporate strategy to a company called Bombora, bringing over 15 years in founding board and executive management experience. Prior to the company, he was founder and CEO of several advertising technology companies, including Madison Logic. He also founded Industry Brains and Media Brains.
He began his career in ad sales at Ziff Davis and divides his time between Miami and New York. Eric, you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready. All right, man.
So a couple of things, if you know, quick highlights, if people missed your first interview, you're playing in the B2B intent data space, but you're a rare case where you've actually bootstrapped the company to pretty significant scale, correct? Correct. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to brag about yourself, but I team it up.
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Chapter 2: How did Bombora achieve significant revenue growth?
Number one is sales enablement. Most marketers have sales teams, SDRs. outbound sales teams, and they usually have a list of accounts that they are trying to sell into or renew. This will identify all those prospects, which subset is going to be most respondent to their messaging, whether it's a phone call or an email or other tactics. That's on the sales enablement side.
Another way to think about us is on the marketing side of things. You're typically doing campaigns that could be ABM campaigns or targeting specific companies with display advertising, digital advertising, billboard advertising, whatever it might be. We're able to help you identify which subset of the universe or your ideal customer profile you should be marketing to and with what message.
So we're able to also identify of the companies that you are trying to engage with What are they researching right now? And what is the messaging or even the content that you should put in front of those individuals to get the best response?
So Eric, on the sales enablement side, if I'm a company that wants to pay to use Bombora, I might upload my customer list to you. And I sell to my customer list like an NPS measuring tool. You'll basically tell me each morning, each week, hey, you should reach out to this company because someone from their IP address at their location was just searching NPS tools last week or yesterday.
You know, they're going to buy soon.
Correct. So yeah, I mean, when I think about that there and get into the tactics, Most of our customers and prospects use Salesforce. They have such market share. So we have an integration into Salesforce. And the way it would work is when you're about to start your day as a sales professional, you log in and it shows you your accounts. What are they interested in?
Which ones are most likely to engage with you because they're surging on products or services that you sell? So it sort of highlights them, surfaces them, brings them to the top. so that you can start to live your day and reach out to those customers.
Your tech, though, is cookie-based? Sorry? Cookie-based, IP address-based?
We use a lot of different tactics. At the core of what we do, there's a few pieces of technology that we've built. First is an NLP engine, so we are able to identify, and I should back up for one second. The reason that we're able to do what we do is because Over the last five years, we've built out a data cooperative.
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Chapter 3: What unique data insights does Bombora provide regarding B2B brands?
So that's another piece of the model.
And how many customers are paying you now today?
There's, there's, close to 2,000 customers that purchased the Bombora data. Until very recently, we sold almost exclusively through channel partners. We just launched our own direct sales effort and what we call our growth effort by building our own sales team. And today we have almost 200 customers that are buying us directly.
Okay. So these are ACVs then that are going to, on average, are going to be in like the, what, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $100,000 range?
Yeah. Our ACV was around $150,000, but it'll go down actually now that we're focusing on the mid-market, if you will. And so those are like the $30,000 range ACVs.
Yeah. But $30 million in AR today, and that's up from about how much a year ago?
Well, like I said, so a year ago, we only exclusively focused on the largest companies in the world, so your Fortune 1000. And so it was a different package that we presented to them. They could use it worldwide. They got more topics. Essentially, they got a lot more data. The ACV there, ARR, was around 125 to 150.
Okay.
Sorry, no, no. I was just going back to a macro level with the entire company's growth. You said you're at about a 30 million run rate today. Where were you a year ago?
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