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 and twitter are our partners of ours where we have a unique relationship with their sales and customer success teams can also sell the gemin platform and so we find a lot of value in those parts okay so raised to date about how much uh just over 10 million okay 10. and all that was priced equity or any debt or venture debt or anything uh no all priced all priced okay great and then um round out the team for me today how many folks uh 54 full-time employees uh here in boston uh austin texas and in new york austin very good that's great and um okay so 54 folks and how many of them are focused on kind of onboarding sales marketing uh half the company is sales marketing customer success and partnerships and the other half is product engineering okay the reason i ask i'm curious i mean how aggressive are you being in terms of cac so if you're when a cv is 100 are you willing to spend that whole amount for 12 month payback or how aggressive are you being with acquisition no i mean we've been pretty lean if anything i mean i think because so much of our growth and this is something that we talk a lot about when we think about sas unit economics so much of our growth is coming organically from customer referrals internally expansion we have unique partnerships and so we're able to get lead generations of customers that are interested in what we're doing without putting a ton of paid dollars behind it so a very early uh an intent thoughtful part of our go to market strategy was really around what are the unfair advantages we can have to keep that cac low and those were two of the areas we wanted to lean in on okay but just be clear when you look at fully weighted it's not just drug paid spend you're looking at if you have a sales team that's half your company obviously there's commission structures built in there you know their desk space all kinds of their software you pay per employee to use yesware or whatever you're using so when you look at fully weighted i mean what are you paying fully weighted to get a new dollar of ar uh still very small percentage we have a five person sales team so um again a lot of this is is genuinely from uh you know our three-person partnerships team working with uh uh the partners to get an inbound lead or our customer success team working to get an introduction okay so if you so if the cac number is a harder question answer let me ask it differently again what kind of payback period are you happy with three you know three months 12 months 24 months i mean we're we're happy in the three to six month range the the sas vcs of the world uh the best ones will tell you anything step 12 in enterprise software yeah yeah no no i don't care about them i care about i want to be about you right so like you've optimized for it sounds like less than essentially a three-month payback period yeah okay and and so why not be more aggressive right knowing that the standards are much higher than that i mean by the way there's nothing wrong with the quick payback i think it's wonderful the best payback is like zero right but um why not be more aggressive aggressive in what sense high hiring i i have no idea i don't know your business but have you identified ways to be more aggressive or is that the exact problem you don't actually know how you'd be more aggressive if you tried no i mean i think we have a pretty clear road map we tripled the business this past year and we've had a lot of really interesting conversations about what what 2019 will be uh we're at 55 employees now the the road map has us uh getting closer to 80 or 90 by the end of the year so there's a pretty clear plan for enterprise sales rep going direct to brand and continuing to build the enterprise pipeline uh one area we do want to invest more in is partnerships so i mentioned snapchat and twitter there's about a dozen more that are in the works right now that we haven't announced um and so those are areas that we're definitely going to lean in on uh this year what's the incentive you pay for those for those partners to come to the table is there some kind of kickback or rev share or value add why do they do it no i mean if anything the the incentive is that they get to bring a new solution to their customers that they feel a genuine pain pain point for so because of regulation gdpr in europe california has a state initiative that is going to become law january 1 2020 just 11 months from now everyone has to be evaluating how they collect and use consumer data and in the marketing in the advertising world the entire infrastructure infrastructure and ecosystem is built on collecting and using third-party first-party infer data without consent and so everyone's being forced to think through different solutions that help them and jeff is one of those solutions okay but if this is going to be so critical right to these companies i mean why on earth would they would they basically outsource this via you wouldn't they want to be building this internally well there's a there's a couple ways to think about this so one is everyone's going to build the infrastructure internally to a certain extent or on their own properties everyone is already leveraging kind of the infrastructure from like a technology standpoint of their their pure marketing tech stack their crm their dmp etc um but this is exactly what we've been focused on solving for the best for the past five years and there's something to be said about kind of being really laser focused on one unique niche problem and pain point um and so we built the platform as opposed to in the marketing space you hear a lot about cdp's consumer data platforms that are trying to help you collect and combine a lot of the data so a long way of saying we're pretty uniquely focused on this and no one else in the space is really focused on solving this problem as of today okay and how effective have you been you mentioned you've been doing this for kind of five years how many customers have you scaled to yeah i mean but publicly we talk about just under 100 enterprise customers again we've built the business in the retail and e-commerce space travel and hospitality um media entertainment sports leagues and teams um consumer packaged goods i mean these are the big categories that we find um have the biggest need for first-party declared data so jonathan i mean just south of 100 let's just say you mean 90 by that 90 times 100 000 price point which at about 750 grand a month right now in revenue and in terms of mrr is that about right uh yeah we're not allowed to talk uh figures but uh you can you can extrapolate off that well yeah and just to be clear i'm i don't want to make anything up these are numbers you gave me directly these are direct quotes you said less than 100 customers and you said 100 000 year one acv yep both of those are true okay so 3x year over year growth that means about a year ago you'd be about again one third of 750 so call it maybe 250 something like that uh yeah again really not allowed to comment we're going through a financing uh uh sequence right now but um yeah those are those are the things we're allowed to talk about publicly yeah again jonathan i'm not i'm not asking you to share anything you haven't already shared i'm multiplying things you've already shared so you said 3x year over year growth you said less than 100 customers i said 90. so you said 100 000 acv if that would put you at 750 today one third of that is 250. is there anything or any of the inputs you gave me leading me the wrong math yeah i think uh under a hundred customers i wouldn't pick 90 specifically but um yeah we're we're really excited about the the tripling of growth and i think we're going to try and aim to 2.5 or 3x the business again this year okay yeah and look the reason i ask this question is because a lot of times people will say we 100x year over year or 10x year over year and it it deceives my audience because it's easy to go from a dollar to 10 and call it 10x year over year growth you see what i'm saying and that's a very different you learn something different than someone going from a million bucks a month to 2 million bucks a month so from what i'm hearing you say and i won't push any harder than this you're saying less than 100 maybe not quite 90 but we look forward to getting there pretty soon and part of the process of how we're going to do that is raise some capital right now to fuel some growth yep yeah we're we're on the same page since you're in that those kinds of conversations right now you're struggling as a very intelligent guy so you want to make sure you have as much leverage as possible did you wait until you got the company back to break even from the 10 point you've already raised before you start go out and raising now or are you still burning a little bit no our strategy has always been to uh to to burn we're not uh we haven't taken the uh the other route okay so you are still burning today so you have a finite runway you have to raise x by x amount otherwise you can't do payroll next month um i mean theoretically if we kept any sas startup that's burning at that rate that that's definitely how the economics will work out but um we have a diminishing burn rate let's just put it that way got it you you can you can decrease it by cutting some you know variable expenses if you needed to one one of my favorite things about the sas model and with high retention rates and with a partnership ecosystem is um over time as you know as your expense base increases um your growth rate increases at a much faster rate so uh we have been very fortunate to surround ourselves with some world-class advisors uh i mean bill bill masitis the former cro cmo of slack technologies is one of our board observers uh we work with a lot of folks at salesforce and adobe as well um we've kind of really tried to architect us to be scalable to many many folds beyond uh what we're talking about today you know that's great and then um last question last question here first ten customers you got what were you doing to hustle to get those first guys or gals oh man uh cold outreach on linkedin showing up to networking events and and introducing yourself um trying to get customer referrals um i think uh yeah all three of those have have candidly turned out to be some of our largest customers as well and just quickly the targeting on linkedin what were the keywords um or no not even paid advertising i'm saying going to like a marketing event and and just shaking hands and doing cold outreach like physically messaging people on linkedin what was one of the first marketing kind of events you went to uh in boston we have a lot of these uh like ad club or like uh mitex as an organization locally they'll hold e-commerce summits and so what we found to do and what i talked to a lot of other sas founders about is instead of going to these big shows like south by southwest and dreamforce find an audience of a couple hundred people talking about a really niche problem either in a specific vertical category or type of buyer um and go and kind of network in the room and that's always worked really well for us very good all right let's wrap up here quickly famous five one word answers number one favorite business book bad blood number two number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um benioff number three what's your favorite or sorry what billing tool do you guys use billing tool um raidu spell it uh r-y-d-o-o i think uh expensive competitor okay yeah yeah number four how many hours you sleep to get every night uh six and what's your situation married single kids uh girlfriend okay so not married no kids yet how old are you yeah uh 25. last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um be more patient and be more um thankful guys be patient be thankful launch in 2012 again jebet really trying to help folks understand declare data remove any ambiguity around who owns what data and really creating safety for brands and knowing that they can do whatever they want with data collected from consumers in this particular way less than a hundred customers paying call at a hundred thousand bucks per year in terms of a c v growing 3x year over year 10.2 million bucks raised so far team of 54 in boston austin and new york city you know cac and payback periods you know three months payback period so healthy economics as they look to scale and potentially raise here shortly jonathan thank you for taking us to the top awesome thanks nathan