How Bombora Reached Well Over $30M in Revenue and Close to 2,000 Customers on a Bootstrapped Path (Interview with CEO Erik Matlick)

Channel Intro

Nathan Latka

00:00You'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 thirty minutes hanging out answering any questions you have. In fact, leave a comment below about data points or what you think is gonna 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

00:18profile as well and give your videos some love as well. In the meantime, enjoy the interview.

Guest Introduction: Erik Matlick and Bombora

Nathan Latka

00:25Hello everyone, my guest today is Erik Matlick. He guides the vision and corporate strategy to a company called Bombora, bringing over fifteen 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 IndustryBrains and MediaBrains. He began his career in ad sales at Ziff Davis and divides his time between Miami and New York. Erik, you ready to take

00:46us to the top?

Erik Matlick

00:47I'm ready.

Nathan Latka

00:47Alright, man. So

Bootstrapped Growth and Company Scale

Nathan Latka

00:49a couple things if... You know, quick highlights. If people missed your first interview, you're playing in the b to b intent data space, but you're a rare case where you've actually bootstrapped the company to pretty significant scale. Correct?

Erik Matlick

01:00Correct.

Nathan Latka

01:01Yeah. I mean, you don't wanna brag about yourself, but I I teamed Yeah.

Erik Matlick

01:05No. We we we've taken a different path. We didn't raise a lot of venture money. We've self funded pretty much and and bootstrapped and grown to pretty pretty good size, pretty good scale.

Nathan Latka

01:16What what scale are you at right now?

Erik Matlick

01:18It was... It depends on how you measure it. You know, we have a 100 and... Little over a 130 employees. We're well over $30,000,000 a year in revenue. A lot of our revenue over over 50 plus or 65% of our revenue today is subscription revenue. So SaaS, but with a data spin to it, so really DaaS if you will.

Nathan Latka

01:18Yep. Yeah.

01:36And okay. So what... Let's let's... We're gonna 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, b b b b SaaS companies using you before the virus?

What Bombora Does: Company Surge Analytics

Erik Matlick

01:47Another word. What is what is Bombora doing? What is our what is our product? Our our core 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.

02:13And we identify if there's a spike or what we call a surge in research activity on some really granular topics, about 7,000 topics that we care about.

Nathan Latka

02:23Okay. And how many customers

Erik Matlick

02:24If you're a marketer, how you use that, right? So you would 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 as a marketer. Number one is sales enablement. Right? You have most marketers of sales teams, SDRs, outbound sales teams, and they usually have a a

02:47list of accounts that they are trying to sell into or renew. And 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 side of things, you're typically doing campaigns that could be ABM campaigns or or targeting specific companies with display advertising, digital

03:20advertising, 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 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 those individuals

03:45to get the best response?

Sales Enablement and Salesforce Integration

Nathan Latka

03:47So Erik, 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 NPS 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 gonna buy

04:08soon.

Erik Matlick

04:09Correct. So... Yeah. I mean, what I think about that there and get into the tactics. Most of our customers and prospects use Salesforce. They have more... Such 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 one are what are they interested in, which ones are most likely to engage with

04:31you because they're surging on on products or services that you sell. So it sort of highlights them, surfaces them, brings brings them to the top so that you start to live your day and reach out to those customers.

Nathan Latka

04:31Your tech though

04:42is cookie based?

Erik Matlick

04:44Sorry?

Nathan Latka

04:45Cookie based, IP address based?

Data Cooperative and Publisher Relationships

Erik Matlick

04:48We use a lot of different tactics. You know, at the core of what we do, there's there's a few a few pieces of technology that we've we've 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 b to b publishers

05:14from some of the biggest b to b brands you've ever heard of to some very niche b to b publishers.

05:22Cover essentially anywhere that a business professional will do research is pretty much who we work with.

Nathan Latka

05:28G2, Capterra, DiscoverOrg?

Erik Matlick

05:32I'm talking about the publishers, more like the Wall Street Journal, the Forbes, the Business Insiders, and Bloomberg, as well as the Queen Street. 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. About 70% of those relationships that we have with those publishers are exclusive. So there there is no way to to get the the buying signals

05:55anywhere else other than through Bombora. Right. You know, in order to to make... To turn all of this content consumption, if you will, into something that a marketer or salesperson cares about, and turn it into what we call a company surge, we had to build a lot of the intellectual property ourselves. We built an NLP engine, which looks at all those pages. We see 30,000,000,000 pages on a given month. Those are events of users reading content,

06:18and we have to look at those, try to understand what those pages are about, and identify if they map to one of our topics, our taxonomy.

Nathan Latka

06:18Mhmm.

Erik Matlick

06:18And 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

06:42call that IP to domain or IP to company. We built our own graph, if you will, identity graph of of IP addresses and what domains they are. So that's another piece of the model, if you will, that you...

Customer Count and Direct Sales Launch

Nathan Latka

06:55And how many customers are paying you out today?

Erik Matlick

06:58There's there's close to 2,000 customers that purchase 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.

Nathan Latka

07:20Okay. So these are ACVs then that are gonna on average are gonna be in like the what $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $100,000 range?

ACV and Revenue Growth History

Erik Matlick

07:26Yeah. Our our ACV was around $150,000 but it's it's 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, ACV's.

Nathan Latka

07:39Yeah. But 30 in a... 30,000,000 in AR today, and that's up from about how much a year ago?

Erik Matlick

07:45Well, I guess it's... So a year ago, we only exclusively focused on the largest companies in the world. So your Fortune 1,000, and so it was a different package that we presented to them. They could use it worldwide. They got more topics. There was a different... Essentially, they got more... A lot more data. The ACV there, was around $125,000 to $150,000.

Nathan Latka

08:03K. Sorry. No. No. I just meant your... I was just going back to a macro level with the entire company's growth. You said you're over a 30,000,000 run rate today. Where were you a year ago?

Erik Matlick

08:11Yeah. So, well, two years... 09/09... 2019, we did over 30. 2018 was 26. This year, we were planning on growing around 35%. And I'll tell you that we we did we did take our numbers back a little bit over the last few weeks.

Nathan Latka

08:30Well, talk... Let's let's go into the virus stuff now. So as a CEO of a SaaS company, let's start there. How did you alter those plans?

COVID-19 Impact and Strategic Response

Erik Matlick

08:36Yeah. So we... How do we alter the financial plans or just overall strategy or...

Nathan Latka

08:42Yeah. Talk to me first about like, okay, you thought, you know, you projected it before the virus that you were over 25, 30%. 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 a VC firm, correct?

Erik Matlick

08:53Correct.

Nathan Latka

08:54Yeah. Yeah. So this is really for your own internal purposes. I mean, how have you changed the make of the company in the face of the virus? Have you laid people off, furloughed, like what strategic decisions?

Erik Matlick

09:04Yeah. Interestingly enough, know, we haven't we haven't had to do anything like that. We haven't 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 q one. In fact, in March, in the last two weeks in March even, we closed more new logos, new customers than we've really ever closed before. And I think that's a strong testament to what our team has

09:30built 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 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, haven't changed there. We have. I will tell you, on own budget,

09:56the big obvious thing is that 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 still, under 500 employees, we we had a big hole in our budget. As all these events got canceled, we are redeploying some of that money to other tactics that are lead gen oriented, but we won't deploy

PPP Application and CARES Act

Erik Matlick

10:22all all of it. We'll we'll 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... Anyone that's listening that has less than 500 employees, we are actively looking at the the CARES Act. We've already applied. We put our application

10:41in specifically for the PPP, and we're trying to get some of that money to, you know, apply towards employees and rent and things like that.

Nathan Latka

10:51Erik, what... So that math on that is February 2019 to 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 $23,000,000 check?

Erik Matlick

11:04Exactly. It's a little over 1,000,000 for us. I have no idea what to expect. We put the application in and it's a it's a whole process. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:13This morning, right, I mean, it's April 3 we're recording this. It just opened today. So you did it with your bank this morning?

Erik Matlick

11:18Yeah. We did it. We've been working on it for a couple days and... For a few days actually. And as we're doing it, I'm sort of changing the rules. They're they're announcing new rules. But but, yeah, we're... Yeah. So it's interesting times. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:30The process.

Erik Matlick

11:30Certainly helped to to have some of that and and... Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:34So let's now shift. You have a very unique, maybe the uniqueness view into like b to b behavior as at macro level because of the virus. Right? You're looking at Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, you have access to all these things. Do do you believe, you know, just general interest in b to b is gonna be increasing or declining as everyone's now remote and people are not going to offices?

B2B Intent Data Trends During COVID

Erik Matlick

11:54So first of all, we know it's increasing. That... That's actually something I can show you, and that's what this chart is. I don't if you can see my screen.

Nathan Latka

12:02Yeah. Describe it to us for people listening to audio only.

Erik Matlick

12:04So yeah. What what what this is showing that there's the amount of consumption that business professionals are doing has been very steady in the last few weeks. This has increased significantly. Of course, as you would expect, this looks at a bunch of different large topical areas like business, energy, finance, health care, HR, legal, marketing, and technology. The biggest winners are finance and health care, as you can imagine. Right? Finance, people are are looking at anything financial

12:35right now. There's a lot of uncertainty. Health care, self explanatory. Right? Those are the biggest gainers. There's... The point is that there's a lot of business research going on. In fact, it's more than more than ever. So the

12:50the other thing that I... So 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 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

13:13look at, well, 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 and January. There's a bit of a lull as they're doing... Finishing distributing their budgets. They haven't decided what they're going to purchase yet. But then by the first or second week of February, companies start looking like they're going to purchase products or

13:39purchase 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 diversion or a dip in company propensity to purchase. And we know why that was, most likely because of COVID. And and that is

14:08actually what happened over the last six weeks. The good news here is that last week was the first week where we saw saw a normalization, a stabilization, and even a slight increase.

Nathan Latka

14:20Yeah. The trough... We hit a trough, it looks like, potentially.

Erik Matlick

14:23That's what it was. And and by the way, we're we're monitoring this day by day, week by week right now to to see if this stabilizes and continues to to scale back up. We're keeping a very close eye on it. But I thought that that'd be very interesting because all your... Anyone that's that's listening is is is likely selling to other businesses or purchasing or selling products. So this is a this is a pretty important macro

Vaccination Topic Surge as Data Validation

Erik Matlick

14:44chart to look at.

Nathan Latka

14:44Yep.

Erik Matlick

14:44And then just to... For validation purposes, our our team wanted to see, well, how accurate is is our data? And and sure enough, we did we we we asked our our our engine to tell us 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

15:18companies 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 COVID in The United States. It was in the New York Times. Literally, on that day, all of a sudden, it starts spiking across our dataset. And the number of companies that were doing significant research and increased research on that topic started to

15:46spike, and it's continuing to spike. And today, we're up to about a 180,000 companies that are surging on the word vaccination.

Nathan Latka

15:55Yep. Interesting trends here. Erik, put out a link real quick. Is there a link you're publishing this data on a weekly basis that my audience can continue to check out?

Erik Matlick

16:02Yeah. We're we're... It'll be on our website. We're... We literally just... We just published this and announced it internally for our company this week. We just did our all hands this morning, And there's a couple of... We we we will release it early next week. It'll be on our website at bombora.com. We'll have...

Nathan Latka

16:02Okay.

Team Composition and Engineering Headcount

Nathan Latka

16:18And just so people understand like the technical prowess going into your platform. You said total teams I say is about a 130 people. Is that right?

Erik Matlick

16:25Correct.

Nathan Latka

16:25How many engineers?

Erik Matlick

16:27Well, let's let's let's just say r and d. R and d is is about 50%.

Nathan Latka

16:3250%. Okay. 67.

Erik Matlick

16:34Data science in there. Don't if you put data science and engine... That's why I say data science engineering product QA. It's 50...

Nathan Latka

16:40And how many quota carrying reps do you have out of curiosity?

Erik Matlick

16:43It's just under 20.

Nathan Latka

16:4620.

16:47Okay. There you guys there you guys have it.

16:48Erik, this

16:48is good stuff, man.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

16:49Let's wrap up here with the famous five. We'll make sure we link to this data in the show notes as well. But wrapping up here, number one, favorite business book?

Erik Matlick

16:56I don't know. I don't have a business book. I... I'll tell you, I literally just read...

Nathan Latka

16:59You said Lords of Finance last time.

Erik Matlick

17:00I just said it last time. I'm not sure this cons... Is considered a business book, but I just finished Zucked a couple years ago.

17:08So I'll just go go with that. So I just...

Nathan Latka

17:09Number number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Erik Matlick

17:13I I can't... There's so many. I...

Nathan Latka

17:18We'll we'll skip it. Number three, is there a favorite online tool that you're using to build the company?

Erik Matlick

17:23Zoom is top of mind now. I'm on it all day long now that we're working from home.

Nathan Latka

17:27Number four, how many hours of sleep you getting?

Erik Matlick

17:30I'm I'm good in that category right now. I'm I'm hitting my eight hours, seven to eight hours every night.

Nathan Latka

17:34Fair enough. Alright. And situation, married, single kiddos?

Erik Matlick

17:38Four kids, married and four kids.

Nathan Latka

17:41Four kids and how old are you?

Erik Matlick

17:4319, 17...

Nathan Latka

17:44No no, you.

Erik Matlick

17:46Me? That's personal, 49 still.

Nathan Latka

17:52Yeah, gonna be very personal.

Erik Matlick

17:53I Hanging on cards right here.

Nathan Latka

17:55Kid kid's age would be personal. Yours not so much. Okay. 49 years young. Last question. What do you wish your 20 year old self knew?

Erik Matlick

18:01That I don't know as much as I thought I knew.

Nathan Latka

18:05Guys, there you have it. Bombora. Again, built a massive data cooperative with big b to b publishers. Many of these are exclusive. The company broke 26,000,000 in revenue in 2018, 30,000,000 2019. Now projected 20 to 30% growth this year, maybe a little tighter obviously because of the virus, but more importantly they're looking at very unique dataset into what b to b brands are doing in terms of searching for vaccinations or things related to COVID. It's obviously

18:28increasing purchasing searches and things related purchasing going down. We'll check up on bombora.com to stay updated. Erik, thanks for taking us to the top.

Erik Matlick

18:35Thank you.

Nathan Latka

18:37Do 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

19:00points from the world's leading SaaS CEOs, click and watch.