The Exchanges

Q Okay, good. So we'll, we'll give a nice big range to keep it vague. Um, help, help us understand, uh, help us understand more about how you're getting your customers. So you said salespeople and recruiters are like a big thing for you. Now your technology, ironically, it sounds like does this, it probably finds recruiters and you probably do some outreach cold. Is that the case?

A Um, you know, we did do that. So initially, so around the, you know, between January, 2016 to maybe March, 2016, we were doing a lot of outbound, uh, user acquisition. So we'd send, you know, sort of emails to people, try to acquire them. But since March, um, you know, we got featured, featured in product hunt and we built a bunch of, uh, uh, SEO, um, operations. And so most of our, in fact, like a hundred percent of our user acquisition now, Is through, uh, completely through SEO and it's free. So people will, you know, so the way that this will work is let's say that I'm interested in talking to Nathan, right? So I'll type in Nathan's name and Rocket Reach's page, um, will show up as usually one of the top five results if you type in Nathan email, Nathan email. Um, so that's how people find out about us. They sign up for an account. There's a freemium model and they end up Paying, um, you know, buying one of our subscriptions. Um, that usually leads to then us talking to them to try and get them to sign up for team deals or APIs.

AI assessment note: “we did do that. So initially... like a hundred percent of our user acquisition now, Is through... SEO”

Q What are the costs in a business like this? Like what do you have a real technical, I mean, and this is, don't take offense to this cause I know you have all kinds of patents and stuff, but do you guys have a true technical advantage here or is this whole space email hunter? Everybody is, is it really about who markets better?

A No, it is. I mean, so this is the one key difference between us and our users, right? So if you look at our website, if you look at our profile pages and our product, I mean, it's not, it's not super polished. We are trying to, we're working on it, but we, you know, but you know, like thousands of users are signing up for our site, you know, for our product every day. And we ask them, why are you choosing us compared to our competitors? And the answer again and again, consistently is the quality of the data. If you use something like email hunter and data.com, the, you know, the accuracy is going to be around the 40 to 50% mark, whereas ours is 85%.

AI assessment note: “consistently is the quality of the data... accuracy is going to be around”

Q Okay. Got it. Uh, got it. Cool. Okay. So what did you do? You, you looked at the product, you put in a beta, you didn't like it. What'd you do?

A So we decided that, you know, the direction that we want to go with the company is not a lead generation, um, you know, not lead, not a lead generation play, but a more of a productivity play. So we want to think of, we want our customers to think of rocket reach as, A productivity tool that is always installed, you know, on their browser, always something that they access and they don't think a lot about. Like, it's, it's almost like, you know, a sales force. Anybody who's in sales uses Salesforce. Anybody who's in a sales team uses Rocketreach, right? Uh, we want that, we want it to become more of a de facto, um, productivity tool for sales teams. And so the features that we're focusing on, um, you know, they are catered towards teams being more productive than rocket reach. So, uh, directly being able to send emails through our website, through our plugin, being able to track their effectiveness, uh, being able to add and remove users. We've made our plugin a lot more powerful so that Uh, it can pick up, you know, it can pick up basically profiles from all sorts of other websites. Um, so essentially making it easier for people to use.

AI assessment note: “we decided that, you know, the direction that we want to go with the company”

Q So what, what gives you the advantage? What gives you that advantage? Are you just, are you just, you just have more inputs, you have more sources. How do you get that advantage?

A No, it's more, it's better science. I mean, to be completely honest, right? So between me and Andrew and Alan, I mean, we've got a total of 30 years of data mining experience working on petabyte scale data. That's not a trivial advantage. We know what we're doing and we know how to do it at scale. So not only are we looking broadly, we have a scoring system which actually, you know, predicts searches and then evaluates the value of the, evaluates the output using, um, Using essentially a regression system, um, at, at real time and both because we're going very broad and we're doing it at real time. Our data is likely to be much more accurate and it's not a small advantage.

AI assessment note: “No, it's more, it's better science.”

Q Okay. So call it seven people. You're bootstrapped. You have one of the highest cause you're bootstrapped, uh, uh, revenue per employees in this industry. When you compare across leadero lead genius, everybody else. I mean, are you thinking about raising capital or do you think you can just feel growth off revenue? Um,

A You know, I think that it makes, so if we had gone with the lead generation model, I think that we, it would have made sense for us to, uh, raise money, scale a sales team, and then grow revenue, grow revenue that way. That was actually the original plan. But what you're trying to do is trying to scale without hiring a sales team. Um, and it remains to be seen whether that can be done. I mean, there's, there's a healthy amount of skepticism about it. I mean, we've spoken to a lot of people who say, you know, you really need a sales team to, uh, grow, uh, Quicker. And that might is, might quite possibly be the case. Um, but we want to find out if we can do it with software alone.

AI assessment note: “we want to find out if we can do it with software alone”

Q Okay, great. And you, so you mentioned one of your focuses here in Q one is to get more teams signing up. So, so how do you do that? Pragmatically, how are you approaching that?

A Yeah, so a little bit of a journey, right? So what, what, what have we been up to? So we've, um, we, we tried to do a few things to figure out how to accelerate our revenue growth. One of the, um, approaches that we tried is we tried to go more into the lead generation space, which is, um, rather than just providing contact information and just doing contact discovery, let's give customers a list of leads based on, uh, users who've signed up For their service every day or something. We called it lookalike, uh, lead generation. The key learnings from trying to do a lead generation product were, one, that, uh, the end customers hold us responsible for much higher, um, you know, a much higher value of, you know, a much higher quality of data, and for things that are out of our control. If we provide a list of leads to our customers, then they have to actually, you know, reach out to them and follow up on Those leads. Um, and how well they do that will affect how they gauge our data, which I'm, which is sort of unfair.

AI assessment note: “One of the, um, approaches that we tried is we tried to go more”