Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - Getting Our First 100 Customers Was Impossible | Jager McConnell - CEO of Crunchbase

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Lessons - Getting Our First 100 Customers Was Impossible | Jager McConnell - CEO of Crunchbase · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode, discover how leveraging existing audiences can accelerate growth,
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  the importance of high-quality data in building scalable platforms and strategies for becoming an
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  indispensable resource in your industry. Learn actionable insights on data optimization,
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  partnership-driven growth, and mastering your market position.
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  How did you get your first, say, 50 customers on that? First 100 customers, it was just through,
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  like, you leverage media, I'm assuming, because you had tech crunch, you had tech crunch disrupt,
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  so obviously you do have a little bit of reach there, but was there anything innovative,
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  any marketing strategies, anything that you did that was a little bit different to actually
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  acquire users? Well, this is the sort of secret strength of crunch spaces. We already had
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  20 million people coming to our website, right? So they're already coming.
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  Oh, we really have to do this market to the people that are already coming to site,
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  and this will always be our strength. Like I mentioned earlier, 80 million people using
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  crunch space. Can we go and sell them something? So we don't have to, our marketing budget
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  relative to other companies, our size is quite small, because we're just trying to leverage our
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  strength, which is people coming to site. And now it's like, well, who are the people we should
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  sell to? Who shouldn't we sell to? Are we trying to sell them the big thing, the little thing,
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  the media's size thing, all that sort of funnel while trying to impact the user experience as
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  little as possible, so that the people that are getting value for free continue to get value for
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  free. We don't want them to go away. We just want to, with a rate of evolve into a little bit
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  further in their career or a little bit further in their prospecting, they pay us money.
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  And then all we do is put up a toaster on our website saying, hey, check out
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  crunch space pro. Here's a video and show you what it does. And again, but by the time we,
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  so we turned a backstage at TechCrouch Distrap down about to go on stage to announce this new
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  product, we had already sold licenses. But in the time that we turned it on five minutes before I
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  walked on stage, just because people were so eager to buy it from us. So it was, it was rewarding
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  because when I went on stage, I was already duplicated because at least someone had bought it and it
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  wasn't my mom, you know? No, that's amazing. And well, I mean, there's a lesson in that
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  ended up itself. I mean, if you like every company, I believe should be a media company. Like,
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  technically, you leverage the 20 million people that were already coming to your site. You didn't
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  have to, you didn't have to find a new audience, a target or a new, you know, a new user-based
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  target, which is very important. So I mean, that's, that is a lesson for startups. Obviously,
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  if they don't have 20 million people hitting your site every day, they had to figure some way
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  to monetize. But ultimately, if you become a media company, if you build masses, you can find a
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  way to sell into that audience, too, which is something that you, you did day one. But the other
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  thing that you probably wanted to optimize is the data. So I'm curious when you first launched
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  that product, was the data valuable enough for people to pay for? Or did you find out which data
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  people would actually fork up some cash for and what was not acceptable?
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  Yeah, it was, it was a scary learning for me. Because when it's a lookup tool, you look
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  up a company. If you've heard of it, the data is probably pretty good, because it's probably a
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  pretty well-known company. But when you have a discovery tool, and now people are prospecting for
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  companies just based on a set of criteria, it shows all of the bad data. So for instance,
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  you could say, show me all the companies made before 1900. And it's like, okay. And then you see
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  like, we have companies from like negative 32 BC. So what is that? I don't even know what a negative
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  nut year is. And obviously, it's not right. So we had a huge cleanup project where we just had
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  to do all of the stuff that we thought people might do to sort of figure out what data might be
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  exposed as horrible. And for me, that flipped a switch on, we have to invest more on our data,
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  get ones we get funding to go and change how we get data. So it can't be user-generated because
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  you get squirrely things from people doing weird stuff, like giving themselves a hundred billion
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  dollar funding round. And it's like, okay, we need to go and put some controls on this. Which is
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  now what we've done. So you asked a question earlier about marketplaces. That was actually the
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  next thing we did after pro. Well, we we re-platformed the entire data set and the
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  and the outside the entire website, the entire application because we had inherited this thing that
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  was pretty terrible. So we had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. Now that we have proven
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  this prototype that worked and we were able to sell. The next thing we did after that then was
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  marketplace, which allows us to go and integrate all the source of data sources into what crunch
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  bases. So I can talk for hours about how we get our data and how data works. But the net net is
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  we expanded the data from not just user data, but we also formed thousands of partnerships to go and
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  get data and from governments, et cetera, as VCs, data providers, all that is flowing now in a
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  crunch base to to make a unified profile. Okay. Yeah. I was going to say there's a couple of ways
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  that we could take this because I wanted to ask some great startup lessons. But then I'm trying
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  to like bridge startup lessons plus the conversation about data because I saw one of your previous.
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  So I mean, like it all started to bind. I mean, you've built this incredible platform. We're talking
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  about data. I'm curious about and it may be I'll just let you speak about all these different topics.
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  So like data security, what people feel comfortable aggregating, especially if they're not if it's
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  not user generated, GDPR, Castle, all the different data compliance items that you have to be careful
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  of and cognizant of what else also the fact that you use all these different partners. So I
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  would say let's talk about all the different data things that I'm sure you've dealt with. And then
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  also all the different strategies you use to not just collect data, but I know you also use
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  partners to build out the organization because you've used all these different all these different
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  you have like, I don't even know if this is a case still, but at one point you didn't have your own
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  QA team. You had a partner for QA. So not only do you have all these partners for data collection,
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  you like, you built a business with partners so that you don't have to deal with a lot of those
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  internal cost is another interesting strategy. But first let's talk about data that we can go into
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  like sort of business growth strategy. So talk to data all things data. It sounds good. So let's
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  start with just how we get data. So today we still have a great million user plus community of
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  people who just put in data in the crunch space. Why? Because they want to be well represented on
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  our platform. If your company is wrong on crunch space, investors are going to miss you.
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  They're not going to pay attention. Job seekers are going to think that you're dead in the water
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  or you're not growing or not as because they thought you'd be all those things require you to
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  update your crunch space profile because our brand matters in the ecosystem. Just like you keep
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  your LinkedIn profile up to date. It doesn't matter which other profiles are out there about you.
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  LinkedIn you keep up the date because that's the limit matters for you as a person. Crunch
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  space is the parallel for a company profile. So that's one aspect. Then we've got, as I mentioned,
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  about 4,000 partnerships with governments, accelerators, VCs all over the world who give us that data.
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  Why? Because these companies, these governments, these VCs want to be well represented on our
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  platform again. They want to look like tech hubs. They want to be look like their matter that
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  they matter and that are active. So they give us data directly. We have about 60 data providers
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  that go and stream data into crunch space. Mass massive amounts of data. You think about G2
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  crowd. They've got all those data on products. Those are tied to company. So we're able to go and
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  absorb that into crunch space. So you have this one stop shop that has all these different data
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  facets coming together. There's no way we as a company could go and get as our core competency
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  to go and generate all that data. There's entire companies that do that. Let's just absorb that
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  data into crunch space. Again, we're going to do it for us because of our brand and they want to be
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  well represented. Some of our partners, you've never even heard of like, well, I'd be about
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  having to hear a bond board. They give us intent data. That data comes in the flows in the
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  crunch space so you can merge it with other data sets. So that is another aspect of what we are.
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  So no one in the world has ever combined all these data sets into one unified profile before.
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  And now you're able to do prospecting against all these different flavors of data all at the same
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  time. And that's very, very powerful. So that's three. The fourth way is our machine learning, our AI
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  systems. So that is a combination of crawling legal sources of data for us to go and get data
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  from. And that's sort of table stakes. But some of the secret sauce is we also generate a lot of
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  our own data based on what we see from all these other data sets. So even from our own usage,
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  right? So if everyone's flowing to a company profile page to go and check it out,
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  that's probably an important page right now for whatever reason. That helps to drive our
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  trend scores and our growth scores and our sort of recommendation engines. All these things are
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  looking at which data has impacted funding rounds. Are there more news stories? Are there
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  people tweeting about this company a lot right now? All those things drive into does this company
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  matter or not? And that helps figure out which companies we should prioritize. So that's the fourth
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  way. Then the fifth way is we have a team of about 20-ish people who work for crunch space and they
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  manage a team of about 250 people overseas that go and do manual cleanup of data. Those
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  automation, the AI systems flag things that I can't figure out is this spam, is this bad, is this
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  good? It kicks it over to the humans to go and add a human brain on top of it to go and clarify.
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  So we spent like 20 million dollars a year just making the data as good as it can possibly be and
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  of course expand it. All that's a combination of those five things. What's beautiful about that is
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  no competitor out there can do what we do. Like I don't care who it is. There's no one who has all
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  five of those things and can get themselves to a place where they can compete. A lot of people
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  are like, oh, I'll just crawl and I'll be crunch space. Yeah, good luck. You're the
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  I asked like a, I did a horrible thing. I asked like a compounded question. So there was like
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  10 other things that I asked, but I don't want to let you go on because I actually want to just
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  pause you here and just sit down on one thing you mentioned. And then we can keep going.
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  So the one thing that I realized is that you became you became you've mentioned this a few times
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  the source that people want to represent themselves on. Now that's that's incredible because if you
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  even look at what you said you you you get data from G2 and I don't know all the different sources
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  you get data from it. G2 could even be considered a competitor, but technically not because they're
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  feeding data into you. So how in the world did you become the person that everybody wants to be
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  represented on because that that is magic. Whoever you managed to achieve that. That's
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  incredible. That market position that you're in. I think it really comes down to like G2 is definitely
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  a partner or not a competitor in our minds as an example. You're going to go there. You know what I
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  mean though? Yeah, I also represent companies, right? Totally, but you would never go to G2 to
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  like figure out if they've got funding, you know, or if they or if they what their website traffic
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  case like you never you went everything to go there. You say, oh, I'll go to a similar web or
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  an Alexa for website traffic data, but no one had combined it all together into one place.
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  And that was based on our roots. That was very easy for us to do because when
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  the use case for at the very beginning of country was what the hell does this company do?
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  I have no idea. I'm going to go look at that by crunch base. I'm going on a date with someone they
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  work at fiddlesticks.com. Like what the hell is fiddlesticks.com to do? You Google it and
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  crunch base comes up. And then you go and look at it. That base level that what I like to call
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  the master record of a company was already what crunch base was we have all the companies,
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  but for the companies that we did have we were the master record of companies. And then with that
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  framing, then we can go and take all these different facets of data like G2 products and plug it
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  in. And G2 gets exciting because we're going to give we give it brand recognition as G2's data.
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  Here it is. Click here if you want more data from G2CRAV. So they see as a lead source.
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  Happy to do that because they're providing value to us.