The Ledger
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iContact scraped Constant Contact newsletters to acquire its first 500 customers
“We subscribed to about a 100,000 of their customers' newsletters, and then as soon as we got them, we'd send a reply back offering them half off. That got us our first 500 customers.”
Marc Benioff offered $95M for iContact before walking away in 2009
“In 2009, Marc Benioff reached out to us and he said, I wanna buy your company. We're gonna buy, pay you ninety-five million. I said, that sounds good, let's do it. He strung us along for a few months finally ended up buying ExactTarget a few years later. Walke…”
Bill Gates Sr.'s law firm sent iContact a cease-and-desist in 2003
“We did the same thing with Microsoft List Builder back in 2003 when they were around, and what we got was a cease and desist letter from Bill Gates' dad's law firm.”
iContact took zero outside capital until reaching $1M ARR
“We didn't take any outside capital. We lived in the office for the first year. We took no salaries for the first three years and just accrued them. And then once we got to a million, then we raised capital.”
iContact's $500 CAC and $1,800 LTV enabled a $40M fundraise
“That we were an annuity cash flow stream engine that was trading 500 dollars up front for 1800 dollars over three and a half years, and that math allowed us to go to the investors, raise about forty million dollars over the course of the next five years, and s…”
iContact raised $40M from JMI Equity, including $15M in secondary sales
“We went to a mid-market growth equity firm out of Baltimore called JMI Equity. Worked with Jitson Ha over there and Brad Wallison, and we raised a forty million dollar round of capital with the help of an investment bank, Allen & Company. Fifteen million of th…”
iContact generated $20M ARR from 1,400 enterprise customers
“So we had 68,000 SMB customers, 1400 enterprise customers. Now, if you do the math, it's about thirty million in SMB revenue, twenty million in mid-market or enterprise revenue.”
iContact sold to Vocus for $169M in February 2012
“And we ended up selling in February of 2012 for one hundred sixty nine million dollars to Vocus, which is now owned by Cision.”