SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 344: Business Did $15M in 2015, Weird Way David Fortino Got Job at NetLine
03 Jul 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.
Chapter 2: How did David Fortino convince NetLine to hire him?
You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.
Chapter 3: What unique approach does NetLine take in lead generation?
We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Every Monday, I give one of you, Top Tribe, 100 bucks to invest in your idea to get it to the top. To enter for your chance to win, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444. Top Drop.
Chapter 4: How does NetLine's content syndication platform work?
This is episode 344. Coming up bright and early tomorrow morning, you'll hear from Max Nossenbaum, who broke down how he's replacing property managers with a $79 flat fee and how he did 31K in MRR last month with his company, EnterCastle.com.
top tribe good morning our guest today is david fortino at age 26 he discovered netline and pitched their president on hiring him now they weren't hiring right so this is a big deal and he wanted to basically go in there and develop a publisher distribution network well that business has evolved into rev response the number one b2b publisher platform
and has processed in excess of 30 million leads. Prior to NetLine, David managed audience development and business development at VerticalNet, a dot-com era B2B player with peak valuations of over $15 billion. David, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Okay. Whenever we talk about dot-com, I always love asking, so how much money did you lose on paper from your equity?
Easily millions.
Oh, it's brutal.
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Chapter 5: What is the revenue model for NetLine's services?
Yeah, yeah.
It's brutal. Absolutely.
Let's not talk about that.
Yeah, good. We'll skip past that then, right? By the way, is that company still around today or did it go under?
So the company lives on in a few different derivatives. It was broken up into two different business groups, one called Vert Markets.
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Chapter 6: How does NetLine ensure quality leads for clients?
Vertical Net was acquired by Bravo Solutions, a Italian enterprise software organization.
So did you see any upside there besides your salary or no? Equity got wiped out.
I made a little bit out of it, but nothing resembling what was potentially possible. And how old were you? 26 at the point of leaving there.
Yep. And that's when you then jumped into Netline. Why were you so focused on pitching yourself at Netline?
Chapter 7: What challenges does David face in audience development?
What'd you like about him?
Yeah, so the beauty of it was I was at VerticalNet specifically responsible for generating new and incremental revenue streams, revenue models for the business and was one of NetLine's first distribution partners as they were trying to kind of find a model that made sense for them.
From the outside looking in, I thought the uniqueness of it was quite compelling in the sense that as a biz dev person, I was able to monetize my audience base through contextually relevant content inclusions without it actually being the normal things that you'd expect, such as just tons of banner ads, striving e-commerce conversions, things like that.
And so from the outside looking in, I liked the model. I thought... my skill set specifically could lend itself quite well. And, and reached out wrote this really lengthy email thinking that they're probably just going to ignore it. About a week later, their CEO flew me out and the rest they say is history.
Chapter 8: What insights does David share about business growth strategies?
I love that. So why that you're still with the business today, right? Correct. Okay, so how many years has it been?
14, 13, 14, something like that.
OK, so you're now what, 40, 39, 39. OK, awesome. So so tell me what the business does. How does it actually make money? Netline?
Sure. So we are operating the largest B2B specific content syndication and lead gen platform on the Web. Quite simply, large enterprise technology companies work with us to distribute content.
much of their thought leadership collateral and or top of funnel demand gen collateral across our entire distribution portfolio that commonly takes the shape of white papers, e-books, case studies, analyst reports, things like that.
The platform itself is specifically designed to algorithmically match the content that our clients are providing to us with audience segments and audience personas on a one-to-one basis that exist on the platform.
Okay, let's get a real example real quick so we can kind of get more focused in. So I'm a finance company. I put together a 25-page e-book report that summarized data from 2015 in the finance industry. I hire NetLine. I want you to use the e-book as lead generations to capture people's emails. What do you do after I give you the e-book? Absolutely.
So the first thing before launch is we identify explicitly who you're trying to reach. Are you trying to reach simply financial professionals or are you trying to reach a specific job level, a job function, perhaps financial professionals that are working within a certain company size or a certain industry?
Let's do a real example. Financial people that are in a company with 100 employees or less.
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