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 said are you above 50,000 or below above 50,000 customers so above 50,000 customers you said you have 2 million free users what's included in the free plan and and how are using that kind of as lead gen yeah so what's included free plan is you can connect one of your address books so one of iCloud or exchange or Google uh you get you know five business cards a month you get a th000 contacts of storage uh you get some basic capability uh but the Premium plan actually offers you much more in terms of connecting up to five address books gets you 50 business cards a month gets you email signature extraction unifies your contacts continuously um has a lot more capable features for for professionals and what are these FOC I mean it sounds like you've got a wide variety of kind of arpo monthly arpo ranges based off number of contacts but if you had to take a weighted average what would you say the average customer is paying you per month oh that's a great question um I think it's probably um if I did wait it it's probably somewhere around you know a couple hundred doll okay okay and again uh you kind of hesitated when you said that is just that just because you have such a wide variety yeah such a wide variety I don't even I sort of always measure by segments so I don't even do the way to okay but that's that's walk us down kind of what cohorts are you are you kind of uh uh separating out sure so obviously are individual customers who actually use our applications and understanding those different demographics in terms of are they premium where do they live that sort of thing and then when we get into our teams plans we have different um sort of sets of teams that pay us more for that the application and then we start getting into the uh larger developers and larger Enterprise accounts that pay us anywhere from you know $100 a month to $220,000 a month and we separate those into different Industries different use cases Marketing sales customer services use cases different Industries like retail cpg e-commerce I mean so and then software Partners so we have a thing that's very unique about our business we got a very very broad um Universal platform with lots of different verticals we sell into and that's that's that's not traditional but it's it's how we operate and is it fair I mean is the math as simple as doing about around a $200 R po times you know greater than 50,000 customers to say you guys are doing greater than 10 million bucks in Mr currently does that math work uh I'm not sure if that math Works I'd have to double check that but okay what what uh you feel free to give it to us as as a range or whatever but about what size are you guys in terms of Mr well we're we're well over seven figures well over seven we yeah we don't disclose our our figures publicly so we'll say we'll say but since 10 million you sound surprised we'll say somewhere between 1 million and 10 million is that a fair enough not not IPO we're not quite at IPO what's the number companies have to get to you think in kind of the SAS Enterprise SAS space right now to IPO in terms of ARR uh I think you have to be 150 million AR right now that much realistically yeah I just I just think so I think that with the um you know recent like IPOs of say twilio and you know now you have the success uh lately of box um I just think that you got to be north of 100 well well North I don't think you you go public at at 70 million anymore but that's one person's opinion yeah what I think you got to be wellon market cap to be and and the reason is because you got to be above a billion dollar market cap otherwise analysts won't cover you get sort of a dead zone and with the SAS multiples uh having dropped you got to have your Revenue up there so your SAS multiplier gets you above a billion dollar market cap that makes sense yeah it makes perfect didn't H wasn't HubSpot at around 50 million and then popped at what 1.2 billion I think uh yeah they were no they were I think they were about 100 million ARR oh okay um if I recall okay yeah I'm wrong there okay great okay that's helpful to understand and then walk us through you have so many customers which means you have a great sample size which is a luxury kind of in the SAS space talk to us about things that really affect a lot of SAS businesses like churn what's your gross monthly customer churn so our gross turn is actually quite low it's less than uh 2% and our net turn is is actually negative so we have a expansion of our customers and what is the number one I mean do you have a kind of tell us the number one driver of your expansion Revenue you're driving each month is it a kind of a no touch uh uh value based upgrade inside the app VI contacts or do you have an inside sales team actively selling we have an inside sales team that actively sells our account management team is awesome and they help customers understand uh how they can use us more and better different ways y great makes good sense uh so less than one person or sorry than 2% gross monthly customer turn net negative turn what are you willing to acquire pay to acquire one of these customers well again it depends have such if I if I the low end we're willing to pay $50 to acquire you know a premium customer at the high end when we talking about some Enterprise accounts we're willing to pay 50 or $60,000 y so we have such a wide range which is a unique challenge I was would to say you are basic I mean I talk to Stats companies all the time usually they're playing in one of these ranges right no never does anyone give me a Range a CA range of $50 to 50 Grand but it makes perfect sense with what you do because it just scales with with size it does it does and so it is a challenge it is always a constant question of focus but uh we got to constantly look at how we segment by customer and my product yeah that makes good sense where are you guys based is the whole team based out there in Boulder we got some people in Denver some people in Boulder some people in Dallas some people in lvia and some people in India we actually have a sort of global presence and how many total team members I think it's now up to 210 or 220 something like that very cool and what date uh you said you raised 50 million what date did you do your last round on and what round was it series a we announced in August of this year oh so recently yeah very good congrats and what was that your series C yeah it was $25 million financing got it and what uh for we have entrepreneurs on I had Andy on from wealthfront the other day you know they' raised about 130 million uh kind of the finch space he was able to tell us kind of in the finch space how companies are thinking about valuation you don't have to share what your valuation was but when you went out since you just did this so recently how are investors in this space thinking about SAS Enterprise valuations um yeah so I think that there's there's been a an adjustment or correction I think that if you have um great growth rates meaning over 100% year-over year you get a healthy valuation that is are you guys over that yes so we've always grown over 100% every year so you get basically somewhere in the you know 8 to 12x multiplier um effect on your revenues on your forward-looking revenues on a pre-money basis um and it varies by investor and you know where your stack upan can your competitors um now some some stas companies who aren't growing as as well might get a five or Sixx multiplier got it okay good that's good to know and you kind of mentioned competition if you had to mention you know four or five kind of competitors who maybe do one thing that you do or close to you who else is kind of in the space that you're watching yeah yeah to be honest I mean I think the main competitors we look at are um Apple Google Microsoft in the generic offerings they have um as that's sort of the the Baseline um you know LinkedIn kind of plays in our space a little bit but they're much more of a wall Garden we an open platform yeah um and uh and then there's like in the high-end Enterprise space there's there's MDM companies like uh Informatica and maybe inside view that are playing there at the very highend what is the I've never heard that term what is MDM space Master data management so like your contact data would be a set of Master data that you manage across multiple silos interesting very cool well Bart uh as you continue building this business I think people are going to want to follow you you're killing it where's the best place for them to connect with you online well just go to full contact.com or email me Bart font.com all right guys I talked about this earlier but I schedule like so many meetings that would blow you your mind I mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds of bunchers I talk to monthly I schedule and you know what I do it so efficiently I get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means I'm not switching in between tasks all day long I get them to back so I can be very efficient it's so critical and I use a tool called Acuity scheduling to do this at naa.com SL schedule it eliminates back and forth between me and people I'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my noshow rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to naa.com schedu to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this I hit people hard I make great deals and Gavin the CEO has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14-day free trial if you use my link na.com schedu you get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to Nathan lat.com schedu right now to sign up and I'll see you there all right guys we'll link that in the show notes at Nathan lat.com slthe toop forward SL again the top and uh B let's jump into last part of the show Famous Five these are rapid fire answers and quick uh or sorry rapid fire questions quick answers you ready yep's number number one what's your favorite Business book my favorite Business book is hard thing about hard things by Ben har that's a good my favorite thing he says in that is uh if you're going to eat don't nibble so true right all right number two is there a CEO that you're following or studying right now uh I I'm actually following and studying Warren Buffett quite a bit right now why I just like his long-term thinking and approach right I mean it took 18 years to become a unicorn uh growing 18% year over year yep yeah that's true number three is their favorite online tool you have like top tow other than full contact other than you I mean I actually like uh doc you sign a lot just because I sign a lot of contracts number uh four yes or no do you get eight hours of sleep every night no okay and you already told us what you said you're 37 with a two and a halfy old yeah yeah two and a half year old contributes to that yeah I was G to say good so last question take us back 17 years Bart what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew I wish my 20-year-old self knew about emotional intelligence mindfulness how to connect with people on an emotional level and it's not about how smart you are it's about how you make people feel guys there you have it from Bart luring it's about how you make people feel he's building full contact theyve raised 50 million bucks so far have over 50,000 paying customers over 2 million users RP is around 200 bucks less than 2% gross monthly churn net negative Revenue churn because they do a great job upselling pxs big range from 50 bucks to 50K with his team of over 210 people between Colorado lvia and India Bart thank you for taking us to the top all right thank you if you enjoyed Bart today go back and listen to Henry shuck yesterday they do 70 million AR with their B2B SAS company discover org okay top tribe I'll see you Bri and early tomorrow morning and don't forget before you listen to any other episodes subscribe on iTunes right now for your chance to win 100 bucks every [Music] Monday