How Fullcontact CEO Bart Lorang grew Fullcontact to $17.1M revenue and 50K customers in 2024.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per top 5 and6 million he is help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top tribe this week's win of the 100 bucks is Rhett Gillan he's in the restaurant industry and he feels stuck he wants to start his own software business so congratulations Rhett for your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday morning simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now in order to enter and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed folks many of you reach out to me and you say Nathan so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching but whenever I try and batch you tell me this you go Nathan they don't book backto back times so you or they don't show up after they book it's frustrating the answer is guys you have to use Smart Tools I use a tool called a cuti scheduling at Nathan lat.com I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode Nathan lka here don't forget to tell all your friends to listen to the top podcast on their holiday travels it's great and educational and a lot of fun and come up tomorrow morning it's no different we have Alexander Grau Mueller they raised $120 million okay we have amazing guests right 120 million they're helping a million consumers get over 100 million bucks in credit lines who have no other choice his company is called credit Tech top dbe good morning Nathan lka here our guest today is Bart langang and he is a proven entrepreneur executive and manager in the global technology industry he's very active in the startup technology Community as an angel investor strategic adviser and speaker at many industry events in fact he supports entrepreneurs as his his in its co-founder position and managing director at v1v a $5 million seed stage fund dedicated to again helping crazy entrepreneurs change the world but more importantly he's an entrepreneur himself he's currently running full contact and is responsible for communicating its vision and strategy he's a Visionary technologist with extensive experience conceiving designing building marketing and selling Enterprise sofor Solutions on a global scale Bart are you ready to take us to the top I'm ready all right let's do this tell us for first what does full contact do and then get into how do you make money so full contact is a universal contact management platform uh we essentially unify all your contacts in one place keep them automatically up to date and sync them everywhere for you or your business and and then walk us through the revenue model is it pay as you go is it SAS how do you make money yeah so it's essentially SAS uh and you basically pay for number of contacts under management so we have a free tier and then above a certain threshold like a th000 contacts you pay us you know 60 bucks a year and then business accounts pay because they have lots more contacts under management then developers can actually pay for access to the developer platform as well which one right now is kind of your biggest Revenue stream the developers in the API access or the kind of like a business facing uh brand yeah so the uh the developer access is actually our largest revenue stream uh we have over 40,000 developer partners that have uh plugged full contact into their applications yeah that uh we didn't I didn't tell you this beforehand that's actually how came across my radar um I done due diligence on a lot of companies and I kept seeing when I was in their general ledger payments to full contact and I'm going who are these full contact guys well that's good to hear that's a good thing to yeah I say that's a good thing to hear all right well walk us through let's focus on the business side first not the developer side so you said people are paying you based off kind of a value metric that's how you're increasing arpus based off number of contacts is there anything else that used to drive arpu in increases yeah I mean we have certain uh capabilities and features uh that we gate um like how many address books you're actually plugging in uh we have other capabilities like business card transcription which we use human beings to double and triple check transcriptions which is another value ad we have other you know services like our company API and our person API we provide so a variety of of features but we have a core metric around number of contacts okay great and then before we get into kind of understanding more story about the business give us an example if you can actually name the company uh that's using you on in that format so uh yeah I mean we've got uh for example HubSpot uses us uh and plugs in HubSpot into full contact infrastructure to provide um contact sort of the full contact information about people uh in the HubSpot applications so for example like in maybe there sidekick product inside of Gmail on the sidebar that that information they're showing might be verified by you yes yes or or leads that come in the hopspot market application right so that sales people don't have to go search for that information themselves understood got it and okay so tell us more kind of about the story so what year did you found the business in uh 2010 I founded the business and uh it was really just to solve my own problem right as a an entrepreneur as a hustler as somebody who's dealt with contacts for a long long time I was just annoyed that I didn't have a unified Central datab base that was always up to date for me or for my business and there was no application out there that actually focused on cont tax if you think about it all the SAS applications focus on something else as the core transaction right MailChimp focus on sending emails Salesforce focuses on sort of opportunities um netw Suite focuses on financial general ledger and contacts are sort of like oh we have to have that so let's build a generic table but it's not really very intelligent and so we added we want to add contact intelligence as a layer that unify that data from all these different services and do you remember Bart uh what you're 20 I always love asking this it's usually embarrassing but what was your 2010 your first year Revenue do you remember I think it was probably like2 or $3,000 okay it's not horrible at least you didn't lose money right all right two or three two or three, bucks and give us some more for you know people here listening some people are stuck in corporate trying to get out or their students thinking about starting a business instead of you know getting a job give us context like you got into this because you said you had this problem yourself as an entrepreneur did you were you running a business before this and if so what it do yeah um so I've had a couple businesses in my career uh before that before this I was running an an MDM system integration company bootstrap for 13 years before that I was running a web design and Tech firm so I had I had run multiple businesses before and I just decided that I wanted to solve my own problem with contact that makes makes good sense what is the uh you mentioned that you bootstrapped the last one have you guys a fund raised or are you still bootstrapped in full contact yeah full contact we definitely fundraised we went to venture capital r because I sort of looked at the size of the problem I said said whoa this is way too big to bootstrap um that was our assessment and we've raised about $50 million today okay that's an important uh that's an important kind of assessment you made you said you you looked at the market and you said whoa that's too big to bootstrap someone listening right now how can they look at that market and tell if it's too big to bootstrap well question it's all it's all about the size of your vision and how fast you want to execute it so we looked and said we want to be the world's Global contact management platform um and looked at the data data set we'd have to acquire and build and we looked at the technology we have to build and we said yeah it really doesn't and we looked at the competitive landscape where we actually have to compete with all the generic offerings right everything that apple or Microsoft or Google come up with and we said look this is going to take a lot of capital to get there to where we even have minimum viable product so you sort of just have to say you know when will customers pay for it and how fast do you want to go and um do some Financial sensitivity analysis um but it's there's no there's no one siiz it's all and also what kind of Lifestyle do you want um do you want to be in the double or triple your size your company every year because it's incredibly stressful and make those decisions um sort of thoughtfully where are you in life right now how old are you are you married single you have kids I'm I'm 37 I'm married and I have a two and a halfy old son wo okay that you got your hands full um so take it take us back you talked about kind of customer base where are you guys at today in terms of total customers you're serving oh we've got uh we've got millions and millions of customers um and then you know a lot of them are free customers but uh uh so we' got tens and tens of thousands of paying customers okay like would you say above 50,000 or below yeah both sure yeah above 50,000 yes no no Bart sorry I'm at of cut out there I...