How Jebbit CEO Tom Coburn grew Jebbit to $23.3M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is jonathan lacoste he is uh the co-founder and president of jeb an enterprise software company in the digital marketing and consumer data space his focus is on helping the world's largest brands create a declared data strategy using explicitly consented data and their digital marketing channels jonathan you ready to take us to the top sounds good good right here yeah thanks for having me so first off give us some definitions here what does declared data mean declare data is a type of consumer data where customers are actually declaring or sharing information with brands so quite simply it can be answering a question in a piece of content or it could be filling out some information uh in a survey or a lead form so let me ask you a question facebook right now they were just shut down by apple a certain app they had because they were paying consumers to essentially give them access to their data i actually said wow this is great at least facebook's paying people for their data most people just collect it without even done the consumer at all however the storyline that took off online was very much the opposite which was wow facebook is they're breaking privacy laws they're capturing all this data and really most companies do it anyway and never pay the consumer so don't we want to see more companies google apple offering to pay consumers for their data yeah i think it's interesting we always talk about a value-based exchange where companies if they're going to collect and use consumer data there needs to be an enhancement to the experience so a personalized recommendation or some type of value maybe even monetary like that's totally in the realm yeah i think we're facebook overstepped here in particular is they used a protocol with apple where it was only supposed to be an internal employee app and they kind of kept it secret and used it as an external market research tool breaking apple's rules and then there's always kind of the you know iffy line of it it monitors everything you did on your mobile device for people all the way uh as young as 13 and 14 years old so i think it gets to kind of the ethical question of how much data is too much to share with these companies and what should consumers be able to control and when should they be able to give it yes this is very interesting for those people who really like the idea of universal basic income for these big tech companies that love data so much i actually could see potentially a way to fund ubi as being these tech companies paying every consumer in the u.s a grand a month right for access to the data and it's essentially opt-in by consumers because they value the data so much it's really interesting i think what you're hitting on is we are moving quickly to a world where consumers will own their data and it could be treated as a fundamental human right and companies have to respect that and treat that data a lot differently whether we ever get to the point to your idea around you know monetizing it or like a basic income totally totally open for discussion but what certainly is true that consumers are going to have a lot more control of their data moving forward than in the past yeah we'll see what happens okay so how's jebe fit in the picture here what do you guys do are you i mean is it a sas company or what yeah it's a sas platform and enterprises all around the world right now are being faced with the challenge of how do we collect and use this data in a really transparent and simple way that not only drives business value but is also respectful for everything that we just talked about with the consumer and so enterprise companies license our technology the short answer is they build these immersive mobile experiences they launch it as a part of their digital strategy with the whole goal of giving consumers the ability to share what they want to share with enterprises the preferences motivations so that enterprises can immediately alter the experience and give them a more personalized and relevant uh you know shopping experience or browsing experience as a part of their journey is this the kind of data that an expedia might use to know it's a mac user not a pc user and charge 10 times the airline prices because they assume the mac user has more money that's inferred data so a lot of the data that they're looking to get from customers is really just understanding on a conversational level like why are you searching so if expedia sees you searching for a flight to hong kong uh they may see your location and what device you're browsing and all of those things but with jevitt they want to understand the why behind the action why are you going what motivations uh you know is it for uh with a spouse or is it for a honeymoon or just a friend's weekend when you arrive what type of hobbies are you interested in i think in an ideal world consumer data sometimes is treated too much as kind of this programmatic transactional exchange between consumer and brand and we're trying to add a human element to it to make it a little bit more relevant to consumers interesting okay and then help me understand kind of who you're selling to the average customer is paying about how much per year for your technology it's uh it's a six-figure contract i mean we're selling to you know working with the largest brands in the world um and at the end of the day we're selling into product and marketing teams apparently so fair to say then again just because the average kind of acv even in year one is above 100 grand and why would someone pay a hundred grand per year versus a million right per year what what are the pricing axes you pricing against i think it's all about how much they're using the platform so um you know we're based here in boston and so we primarily focus on companies in north america but pretty frequently when our customers in north america find success they refer to other divisions within their company or they refer to their european or asian counterparts so i think as the platform continues to expand internally and they upgrade with certain features or the usage increases um that's when you start to uh based off what though usage based off what what's the metric well new teams are licensing it they're launching more experiences more consumers are going through it and they're collecting more data so a variety of factors okay so just be clear you have an inside sales team that says hey you are moving from a team size of a hundred to a thousand you should pay more or you're you know you should add this feature set across all your seats you should pay more or hey you just passed a million consumers through your experience in one month you should move to like the next level yeah we see a lot of enterprises start based on where they're at in their declared data journey right like we're building a category as a sas platform and so a lot of customers are coming to us and they don't know necessarily what technology they need to solve these problems so to your point around pricing and packaging a lot of the time what we do is we start someone on the basic platform which gives them a certain number of experiences a certain number of interactions and then as they need more advanced capabilities unique custom apis more integrations into their crm and dmp more experiences to launch in more regions that's when you start moving up those price points so on average what do you see contract values increase from percentage-wise from year one to year two are we talking doubling or fifty percent growth or ten percent or what uh it totally depends but most of our customers are doubling or tripling their spend within the first uh twelve months which i think is a really exciting um metric that we keep track of because it directly correlates to value no obviously the doubling can't keep going per account year over year otherwise you'd be a multi-billion dollar company at this point obviously people kind of flatten out so when you look after kind of a rapid acceleration up to a certain price point over the first 18 to 24 months i mean do you see it kind of calm down where expansion you over years maybe like whatever 10 20 uh we're not even at that point yet to be honest right i mean as a as a sas company that's you know three years into building the category a lot of what our focus has been is just continuing to add customer value and these enterprises we're dealing with are at such a scale that um we keep finding new global teams to work with new new brands new divisions so we're still kind of at that point where we're still accelerating when did you launch the company's been around seven years but we formally announced declared data kind of at our customer conference at the beginning of 2017. so it's been uh over two years now of just kind of really focusing on building the category okay but i mean you have some i mean you have some history here though it's not like you don't have any cohort data to analyze so 2012 was launch date you were always a sas company right or were you like an on-prem kind of thing and you morphed to a sas company yeah we we've had a couple different um evolutions we were a marketplace for a period of time launched our sas offering in 2015 okay focus specifically on mobile interactive content to the mid market and then we shifted to an enterprise uh software solution focused on this larger declared data challenge at the beginning of 2017. and have you driven this growth in terms of capitalization bootstrapped or raised we've raised a couple rounds of ec and um primarily a lot of the growth has been from again land and expand uh type go to market strategy with customers we have a couple of really key partnerships we're excited about so snapchat...