How Bombora CEO Stephen Lilly grew to $56M revenue and 300 customers in 2024.

you're gonna love this interview just got done editing it i'm glad i got it live for you i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes hanging out answering any questions you have in fact leave a comment below about data points or what you think is going to happen to the company and i will respond to every comment additionally if you're just loving the content click the thumbs up and i will go and check out your profile as well and give your videos some love as well in the meantime enjoy the interview 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 zif 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 things if you know quick highlights if people missed your first interview you're playing in the b2b indent intent data space but you're a rare case where you've actually bootstrapped the company to pretty significant scale correct correct yeah that's i mean you don't want to brag about yourself but like i teamed up yeah we've taken a different path we didn't raise a lot of venture money we've uh self-funded pretty much and um bootstrapped and grown to pretty pretty good size pretty good scale what scale are you at right now it was it depends on how you measure it you know we have 100 and a little over 130 employees we're well over 30 million dollars a year in revenue a lot of our revenue over over 50 clusters 65 of our revenue today is subscription revenue so sas but with a data spin to it so really if you will yeah um yeah and okay so walk let's let's we're going to talk about virus stuff here in a second but let's talk pre-virus first what's the main use case of how people are using you you know to be satisfied is using you before the virus another what is what what does bombard do what is our what is our product our product is what we call company surge analytics and think about it at a high level of we're able to identify what companies are doing heavy business research on or showing a propensity to potentially buy a product so in order to do that we canvas about literally millions of companies worldwide we monitor their consumption habits we build trends and baselines and we identify if there's a spike or what we call a surge in research activity on some really granular topics about 7 thousand topics that we care about okay and how many times you're a marketer so you're a marketer how you use that right so you you look at the data and it would identify out of the universe of companies that you care about which ones are most likely to be your next prospects and then there's a number of ways you can use this data as a marketer uh number one is sales enablement right you have 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 and um this will identify of those prospects which subset is going to be the most respondent to their messaging whether it's a phone call or an email or other tactics so that's on the sales enablement side another way to think about us is on the marketing on the marketing side of things you you're typically doing campaigns that could be avm campaigns or targeting specific companies with display advertising um 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 are the what is the messaging or even the content that you should 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 i'm a tool and i sell to my customer list like an mps 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 that marxist 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 which what what are they interested in which ones are most likely to engage with you because they're surging on on products or services that you sell so it sort of highlights them surface of them bringing it brings them to the top so that you start to your day and reach out to those customers your tech though is cookie based sure cookie based ip address based we use a lot of different tactics um you know at the core of what we do there's a few a few pieces of technology that we we've built versus 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 we've worked with thousands of b2b publishers from some of the biggest b2b brands you've ever heard of to some very niche b2b publishers we cover essentially anywhere that a business professional will do research which is pretty much who we work with g2 capterra discoverorg i'm talking about the publishers more like the wall street journals the forbes is the business insiders and bloombergs as well as the queen streets like many many many many many publishers that's where people go to do research right when they're when they're researching products to buy so we're on all of those publishers above 70 of those relationships that we have with those publishers are exclusive so there is no way to to get the um the buying signals anywhere else other than through bombora right um you know in order to to make to turn all of this content consumption if you will into something that a marketer or a salesperson cares about and turn it into what we call company surge we have to build a lot of the intellectual property ourselves we built an nlp engine which looks at all those pages we see 30 billion pages on a given month those are events of users reading content and we have to look at those try to understand what those pages are about and identify if they map to one of our topics in our taxonomy and as you've mentioned the ip address is pretty important as well right being able to identify that that a user is actually working works at a particular company you usually do that if you're looking at the ip address if you could determine what domain owns that ip address so we call that ip to domain a record company we built our own graph if you will identity graph of ip addresses and what domains they are so that's another piece of the model and how many customers are paying out today there's there's close to 2 000 customers that purchased the bombora data we 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 going after 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 40 50 100 000 range yeah our acv was around 150 but it's it's um it'll go down actually now that we're focusing on on the mid market if you will and so those are like the 30 000 range um acvs yeah but 30 and a 30 million ar today and that's up from about how much a year ago well like i said so 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 more a lot more data the acv there are uh was around 125 to 150. okay sorry no i just meant you're i was just going back to a macro level with the entire company's growth you said you're about a 30 million run rate today where were you a year ago yeah uh so well two years 2019 we did over 30. 2018 was 26. this year we were planning on growing around 35 percent and i'll tell you that we did we did take our numbers back a little bit over the last few weeks well so talk let's let's go into the virus stuff now so as a ceo's at sas company let's start there how did you alter those plans yeah so we um had to be able to work with the financial plans or just overall strategy or yeah talk to me first about like okay you thought you know you projected you know before the virus that you went over 25 30 percent you have a strategy meeting with the team by the way you don't really answer to anyone either so it's not like you're reporting these out to the vc firm correct correct yeah so this is really for your own internal purposes i mean how how have you changed the make of the company in the face of the virus did have you laid people off furloughed like what strategic decisions yeah interestingly enough you know we haven't done we haven't had to do anything like that we haven't um done any furloughs we haven't laid anyone off businesses is as as as usual for us right now we we actually had a very strong q1 in fact in march in the last two weeks in march even we closed more new logos new customers than we really ever closed before and i think it's a strong testament to what our team has built and the value of the product and i think that now more than ever it's really important for companies to try to identify what's working what's not working which companies are really going to buy from them or not they have less resources everyone's looking at their budget and we're able to identify what companies are really interested in who is likely to buy or not so fortunately things haven't haven't haven't changed there um we have i will tell you on on our own budget the the big obvious thing is that we had a we had a big budget for a larger a largest part of our budget was for events you know we do a lot of events and for a small company like ours i call ourselves small stills or under 500 employees um we we had a big hole in our budget as all these events got cancelled we are redeploying some of that money to other tactics that are legit oriented um but we won't deploy all of it we'll we'll hold on to some of that because we're trying to be a little cautious about what the rest of this year looks like especially the next quarter or two the other thing that we're doing as a business and this is appropriate probably to any of your uh anyone that's listening that has less than 500 employees we are actively looking at the care act we've already applied we put our application in uh specifically for the ppp um and we're trying to get some of that money to you know apply towards employees and rent and things like that eric what so that math on that is february 2019 to january january 2020 total payroll excluding contractors divided by 12 to get it average per month multiplied by 2.5 i mean what are you expecting there like a two three million dollar check exactly it's a little over a billion for us i have no idea what to expect we put the application in and um it's a whole process this morning right i mean it's april 3rd we're recording this it just opened today so you did with your bank this morning yeah we did it we've been working on it for a couple days and um for a few days actually and as we're doing it up so they're changing the rules they're announcing new rules but but yeah we're yeah so it's interesting times but yeah process certainly helped to have that and uh yeah so let's now shift you have a very unique maybe the uniqueest view into like b2b behavior as at a macro level because of the virus right you're looking at walking general bloomberg you have access to all these things do you believe you know just general interest in b2b is going to be increasing or declining as everyone's now remote and people are not going to offices so first of all we know it's increasing that that's actually something i can show you and that's what this chart is you know if you can see my screen yeah describe it to us for people listening to audio only so yeah what this is showing that there's the amount of consumption that business professionals are doing has been very steady and the last few weeks has has increased significantly of course as you would expect this looks at a bunch of different large topical areas like business energy finance healthcare hr legal marketing and technology the biggest winners are finance and healthcare as you can imagine right so finance uh people are looking at anything financial right now there's a lot of uncertainty healthcare self-explanatory right those are the biggest gainers there's the point is there's a lot of business research going on in fact it's more than more than ever um so the um the other thing that i so at that's at a sort of a content level but what we do as a business which is more specific is we look at there's a the difference between just consuming content and sort of the propensity to buy right so you can consume a lot of content that doesn't mean that you're doing research in order to purchase a product right and that's that's a big difference distinction so we we took a look at what does this mean for companies that are planning to buy products and how does that compare to last year okay and so seasonally we usually do see companies coming out of december in january there's a bit of a lull as they're doing finishing their budgets they're distributing their budgets they haven't decided what they're going to purchase yet but then by the first or second week in february companies start looking like they're going to purchase products and purchase services and so their propensity to buy starts to scale up very quickly throughout february and march this year we saw that dynamic start to happen in the first and second week in february but by the second week in february something very strange happened and all of a sudden there was a pretty big divergent or a dip in company propensity to purchase and we know why that was most likely because it covered and and that is actually what happened over the last six weeks the good news here is that last week was the first week where we saw a normalization um a stabilization and even a slight increase yeah the trough we hit a trough it looks like potentially that's what it looks like and by the way we're monitoring this day by day week by week right now to to see if this stabilizes and continues to scale back up but we're keeping a very close eye on that but i thought that would be very interesting because all your anyone that's that's listening is is likely selling to other businesses or purchasing or selling products so this is a pretty important macro uh chart to look at yeah then just for validation purposes or our team wanted to see well how accurate is is our data and and sure enough we did uh we we asked our our our engine to tell us uh what what was the consumption by companies on the topic vaccination right that's pretty specific and we looked at it over the last few months and it was very stable in november and december roughly 30 to 40 000 companies in the world are really looking at vaccination as a topic all of a sudden on january 20 it happens to be the same day that that the who organization announced its first cases of covet in the united states it was in the new york times literally on that day all of a sudden it starts spiking across our data set and the number of companies that were doing significant research and increased research on that topic started to spike and it's continuing to spike and today we're up to about 180 000 companies uh that are that are surging on the word vaccination yep interesting trends here eric put out a link real quick is there a link you're publishing this data on a weekly basis that my audience continue to check out yeah it'll be on our website or where we literally just we just publish this and announce it internally for our company this week we just did our own hands this morning and there's a couple of uh we will release it early next week it'll be on our website at bombora.com and just so people understand like the technical prowess going into your platform you said total teams i say is about 130 people is that right correct how many engineers well let's let's let's just say r d um r d is about 50 50 okay 67 data science in there i don't know if you put data science and engine that's why i say data science engineering product uh q a it's 50 and how many quota carrying reps do you have out of curiosity it's just under 20. 20. okay there you guys there you guys have it eric this is good stuff man let's wrap up here with the famous five we'll make sure we link to this data in the show notes as well um but wrapping up here number one favorite business book i don't know a business book i'll tell you i literally just really said lords of finance last time as i said last time i'm not sure this is considered a business book but i just finished zooked a couple years ago um so i'll just go with that number number two is there a ceo you're following or studying i i can't no just so many we'll skip it number three is there a favorite online tool you're using to build the company zoom is top of mind now i'm on it all day long now we're working from homes yep number four how many hours of sleep you get in i'm good in that category now i'm hitting my eight hour seven to eight hours every night fair enough all right and situation situation married single kiddos four kids uh married four kids four kids and how old are you 19 17 no no use me that was personal uh 49 still yeah that'd be a very personal kid's age would be personal here's not so much okay 49 years young last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew oh that i don't know as much as i thought i knew guys there you have it bombora again built a massive data cooperative with big b2b publishers many of these are exclusive the company broke 26 million bucks in revenue in 2018 30 million 2019 i 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 uh into what b2b brands are doing in terms of searching for vaccinations or things related to covid it's obviously increasing purchasing uh searches and things related purchasing going down we'll check up on borah.com to stay updated eric thanks for taking us to the top thank you you guys know i fight like heck to get these data points for you from these ceos that rarely do these kinds of shows if you want more shows like this make sure you subscribe right now we're trying to get 10 000 youtube subscribers by the end of september here 2019 and it would mean the world to me if you clicked now to subscribe additionally i've got two more great interviews for you if you want more data points from the world's leading sas ceos click and watch