How HG Insights CEO Elizabeth Cholawsky grew HG Insights to $35M revenue and 200 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 help on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka okay top drive this week's winner of The 100 bucks that I give away every Monday is Kim dust she's in the entertainment industry and is currently working a full-time day job and doing her side hustle on the side Kim congrats for you guys this chance to win 100 bucks every Monday simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to officially enter again text the word Nathan to 3344 for after you subscribed many people ask me what tool I used to sell my first company heyo the answer is the top inbox.com I used it to send emails schedule emails to be sent out later and set reminders inside my inbox so I would know when potential buyers were actually interested and I easily remembered to follow up with ones that hadn't replied to me you can try it for free at the top inbox.com Nathan laa here this episode 536 coming up tomorrow tomorrow morning you're going to learn from Justin Mcgill and how he raised 150 Grand then his CTO left now he's cruising at 30,000 bucks a month year curring Revenue with his company lead views top jop good morning Nathan Latka here our guest today is Mark Godly he has helped he has held leadership positions at technology companies of all different sizes from pre-revenue to publicly traded he's best known for driving Revenue at significantly that significantly outpaces industry growth while rejecting herd mentality that really is well you know thought of throughout the entire industry he breaks many of these molds Mark is equally proud of his accomplishments outside of work finding time daily to read workout and cook all while being being an Engaged father spouse and citizen Mark are you ready to take us to the top absolutely that guy sounds pretty interesting let's have some fun all right tell us what HG data does and how you guys generate Revenue uh HG data is in the competitive intelligence space whatever that means uh to to break it down we build data sets used by sales and marketing teams to do Precision targeting at scale is the phrase we use um so the Gen the general gist of what we're trying to accomplish is the days of mass marketing from a B2B perspective are over people are expecting you to know something about them their company before you reach out and we provide information that we believe allows people to do that at a scale never never before possible and when did you launch what what year was the company launched in uh I am not the founder uh Craig Harris founded the company in 2012 after a prior exit he had built a similar techn similar company in the philanthropic space realized that um uh for-profit companies had a lot more money he sold the prior brand and customer base to blackb uh CRM company maintain the underlying IP and decided to be a greedy capitalist uh by applying the the same methodologies to the B2B Arena what a beautiful thing I love greedy capitalism so Mark you uh just to be clear you are not the founder CEO but you are the cro today right the chief Revenue officer yes I have a fancy title that not even I'm uh sure I know what it means it's one of those Silicon Valley buzzword C we love money so you could argue I mean many people would say the cro is actually more interesting to talk to than the CEO right that's where everything happens uh fair enough fair enough to to to be specific about what I do I handle all the market facing functions for the company which includes um sales marketing product service all but engineering and um you know one could argue given what I do manage to some degree indirectly engineering uh has a is highly influenced by me as well great so walk us through some of the economics of the business today how many customers are you currently serving here in December 2016 um customers so that's an inter interesting very interesting topic that I hope we delve into a little bit more when the company was founded it it it served largely the Enterprise space which is very different for early stage uh startup companies so we started selling to companies like HP IBM Etc uh and only in the last year or so have we started to go uh down Market to be very specific because I know you're a guy that's going to pull those out of me sooner or later um we have about 15 to 20 Enterprise clients my Enterprise clients I mean folks that are spending mid six figures with us again the likes of the ibms the hpus of the world six figures annually Mark absolutely yeah recurring Revenue model yeah um and then the other traditional customer we've had is OEM Partners who use our data set as part of their product and those folks uh are names like the data.com of the world the Discover orgs of the world the dam Brad streets of the world uh the predicted vendors like lattice engines and Lead spaces and these kind of folks we have about 50 of those um they spend about high five figures so you know 80 to $100,000 with us annually um and then what what's most interesting is uh We've really transitioned from being a data company to a product company the last year or so by offering uis and skins on top of our data for the mid-market companies that don't have the internal teams to to onboard third party data sets and uh we probably have 100 to 125 of those uh with an average ASP about 25 Grand so you add all that up which I know you're trying to do as I annual sales price ASP yes yes that all adds up to we'll finish the year somewhere between 10 and 12 million uh which is we've doubled the business each of the last four years so if you roll that back you know it was one and a half million then three then six and now 10 to 12 guys don't you love it when I have a guest on that's listened to the show it's like I I don't even have to be here I just let Mark you just talk to the microphone and just give it to my people you know all the questions I'm G to ask all right so you'll finish here in 2016 with around 10 to 12 and you said you did about 6 million in 2015 yes okay very good so uh break down that Revenue in 2015 you said is was more topheavy and and your hope is that in 2016 2017 you're going to kind of go increase the customer base but lower arpus exactly so when I came into the business uh a couple years ago and largely was responsible for putting the go to market strategy in place again it was these large Enterprise clients and honestly I thought this was a great problem to have because most SAS companies start with selling to their buddies that are other VCB companies that don't have a lot of Revenue um or budgets and then they eventually try to Leap Frog into Enterprise we've done the exact opposite um in that we have a very very uh secure Enterprise client base you know I can I can throw out that that silly Silicon Valley term of negative churn all of them come back and actually spend more money with us and what we're now endeavoring to do is um I would say make the use of that data that we sell which is hundreds of millions of rows of data much more usable by a 25-year-old bdr you know two years out of college or much more usable by a marketing coordinator so we've created use case specific experiences and we're selling uh rather than selling the data we're selling subscriptions to those uis and that's why the ASP is is coming down from from six figures down to frankly low low five figures in the $20,000 range well any of this like if a big company that's paying you you know let's call it 100,000 bucks they signed a two-year contract they're paying you 200 Grand on that if they see you introduce lower pricing do they call you and go hey give me the lower price like does this cannibalize any of your Revenue so there there in is the the tricky balance we're trying to walk matter of fact it's not just the large Enterprise customers Nathan keep in mind what I said earlier it's also the OEM Partners matter of fact if I get real specific I'll tell you that 50% of our revenue is direct clients the other 50% is Partners those partners that are about 50% of our Revenue wait and hold on hold on those those Partners sorry those those partners are are people like full contact discover org not full contact specifically but that ilk those type of companies okay so here here's the tricky challenge they are selling into the midmarket in OEM space directly so how do I enter that that market without cannibalizing them that's what I worry more about because at the Enterprise space the product is differentiated they have access to Columns of data and longitudinal analysis that the midm market has no interest in so those big boys see they're introducing mid mid-market products it really doesn't apply to their use case what I'm worried about is how can I how can I double in7 without pissing off all my partners and saying we're going after their clients that's the that's the Rob that frankly we're in the process of trying to figure out what's Your Gut tell you how you're going to do that right now I know it's not perfect well I come from a background where cannibalization and channel conflict is um what a vpf spends 30% of his or her time on and it's a freaking nightmare what I'm really uh intrigued about at HD data...