How Bombora CEO Stephen Lilly grew Bombora 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...