How Owler CEO Jim Fowler grew Owler to $10M revenue and 100 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is jim fowler he is the founder of a company called our the crowdsource competitive intelligence platform that business professionals use to outsmart their competition gain insights and uncover the latest industry news and alerts before hour he found a jigsaw in 2003 and with ceo until it was acquired by salesforce in 2010 for 175 million bucks jimmy you ready to take us to the top yes sir all right owler so first off i love the platform in fact i paid to put a promo through you guys and it did you know fairly well you've built a massive network of business professionals why are they using our give us the overview uh we've got over uh three million business professionals using this now on a daily basis and um it's a crowd source platform where you get information about companies that you care about whether you're a sales person a ceo a product person and you when you give information about it you get a lot more information back which is the beauty of a crowdsourced model so business professionals use us to stay on top of companies that they care about either from a competitive perspective because they're customers uh or because you know they're they're um potentially a an investment company as well a lot of investors use this as well and explain to me with any kind of data platform like this source of truth and how you get data is obviously critical for folks understand so explain how you capture data sure so most of many of our users use it for free it's a premium model in a way like linkedin and the idea is is that you're getting news in particular but we also give a lot of other insights about companies so for instance we might say that hey this company just acquired another company uh and at that time we'll ask them to do something like perhaps rate the ceo of the company or um hey what's the uh if for a private company estimate the revenue of that company so we kind of use a wisdom of crowds model to get information about these companies that's very difficult to get yeah uh revenue of the employee is one of the most important ones how do you so obviously if you know someone is on the inc 5000 you see the revenue someone will report that an hour you have really accurate numbers on those kinds of companies there are a lot of companies though that are pretty private and the knock i've seen on owler is that there are some where you might or your crowd might say the revenue is 2 million but the ceo is like nathan just you know we're doing like 30 million right so how do you make sure you don't lose the trust of these kind of three million daily users right so the the we actually had to deal with this at jigsaw as well because what people want when they deal with business information or any kind of database is they want perfection and they want it for free usually and uh the reality is is that all we have to do is be a lot better than duna bradstreet and we blow those guys away so we've done every year one of our critical benchmarks is how good is our data comparative to dun bradstreet and we we blow them away in terms of accuracy unfortunately it's not perfect and so what we're trying to do is just provide the best possible that we can get yeah and these people that are you know you know i early on when you launched because you came back on september 26th i became a user of owler and so occasionally when i get an email i would actually go in and rate a ceo or you know i talked to a ceo and then saw it wasn't accurate on aller so i put in the accurate information like like whether it was revenue or employee accounts or things like that who are typically the ones that are providing that feedback is it usually investors or ceos wanting their profile to be accurate so they update themselves like who is they usually it that's a great question it was the same with jigsaw which is of course also a crowd you know crowdsource database it's really interesting um because i've always gone in and really tried to get a handle on who are these i call them data geeks and you're clearly one of them and we love you we worship you um and the reality is there's no wrong no reason to it it's um humans are kind of like ants or bees you know we we are workers and we want we like to build things and make them right and it's it's that gene that gets triggered and it can be from everywhere um sometimes it's sales people sometimes it's product people sometimes it is we love by the way um investors uh because they have a very good view so we really look hard and our algorithms weight different votes differently by the way it's not just a you know there's a lot behind the scenes in our algorithms yeah an investor who's sitting on the board who gives a revenue update you know you can probably trust right what we have found is that people tell the truth far more often than they lie because what we try to do is go out and say okay we know this answer now how do we figure out who's giving us correct one of the things we thought at the beginning was you know if you competed with a company you would go and give inaccurate information about that company we've actually seen that does happen but it's not the norm it's we found some really there's always really crazy interesting things you learn from crowds yeah okay that's okay so this is interesting again i love the model we geeked out there a little bit but tell me the revenue mod how do you guys make money so we we uh have just launched a premium model now and that's doing really well um but uh we also do huge data deals it actually follows a lot what we did with jigsaw where we go out um we've actually now closed a couple of deals above a million dollars a year with customers because they'll of course everyone builds this database it's a corpus of information that that really doesn't you know have a mirror anywhere else in the market and so we're able to go out there and in a data as a service or a sas model uh you know do these deals where we get multi-year contracts to use large-scale mm-hmm and are you these explain to me kind of what's in one of these million dollar kind of deals if i'm paying you a million bucks per year are you feeding into like i'm now the direct api connection to salesforce and the alloy information updates on my salesforce records are like what typically is included in that that's actually our pro where we actually pump our a lot of the news alerts about companies into salesforce um the uh it's all api deals um with these big million dollar deals so they'll they'll want um different fields in our database so it's a very jigsaw really brought the concept of data as a service to market and now many people do it um you know duna bradstreet copied that model for you know i'm quite proud of that um but the whole point is is that uh it's all about just taking whatever of our fields and we have many fields in our database some people want them all some people just want some of them what's the most popular uh field that people want for sure it would be uh revenue private company revenue it's just a difficult one to get a number of employees because if you think about it every company uses those two fields to set sales territories now do you will you do things like analyze all of the the nordic right government reports and then use that because they have to report certain things then use that as a sample code to project upon similar u.s companies and project or guess their revenue um that's a hell of an idea nathan and no we don't do that yet right now we're really focusing on getting the the u.s market because they don't have to report i i think a lot of u.s listeners may not be aware as you are that most of the european companies require private companies to report their revenue something that we would certainly uh not like here in the united states um but no we don't do that yet we as we get larger we will yep okay good and then put this i remember i think you said you launched in 2011 is that right uh yes we did yes we did 2011 and then um when so one thing i always like to ask this is especially true for you because i think you you if i remember right when you came on back in september 2016 you guys had raised 19 million we had yes correct how much today yeah 19 million yeah any more since then or still 19 million total we just took some debt which is very common so once you start having a you know regular revenue stream we took some debt um and then we took a strategic investment last uh last summer so that yeah yeah so that was but just that was small who was the strategic was it public uh so uh yeah well actually i i think it's public um for sure let's make it public who was it it was uh the founder who's no longer ceo of morningstar so you would probably know him well so well look this is an interesting add-on to a pitch book kind of hub and spoke m a roll up in the data space kind of model right i mean are you in acquisition talks right now with morningstar oh well first of all i couldn't comment on that if we were but no we are not i can i'll i'll uh uh say that no that's not morningstar isn't exactly where we go although there's a lot of really interest we have several um uh hedge fund customers um that use us to get our data...