How Owler Built a 3M+ User Crowdsourced Intelligence Platform with Over 100 Customers (Interview with Executive Chairman Jim Fowler)

Introduction and Owler Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Jim Fowler. He is the founder of a company called Owler, the crowdsourced competitive intelligence platform that business professionals use to outsmart their competition, gain insights, and uncover the latest industry news and alerts. Before Owler, he founded Jigsaw in 2003 and was CEO until it was acquired by Salesforce in 2010 for $175,000,000. Jim, you ready to take us to the top?

How the Crowdsourced Platform Works

Jim Fowler

00:21Yes, sir.

Nathan Latka

00:21Alright. Owler. So first off, I love the platform. In fact, I I paid to put a promo through you guys and and did, you know, fairly well. You've built a massive network of business professionals. Why are they using Owler? Give us the overview.

Jim Fowler

00:33We've got over 3,000,000 business professionals using this now on a daily basis. And it's a crowdsourced platform where you get information about companies that you care about, whether you're a salesperson, a CEO, a product person. And 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

01:04they're customers, or because they're

01:10potentially an investment company as well. A lot of investors use this as well.

Data Quality and the Wisdom of Crowds

Nathan Latka

01:15And explain to me, with any kind of data platform like this, source of truth and how you get data is obviously critical for folks to understand. So explain how you capture data.

Jim Fowler

01:23Sure. So many of our users use it for free. It's a freemium model in a way like LinkedIn. And the idea 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. And at that time, we'll ask them to do something like perhaps rate the CEO of the company, or hey, what's the, if for a private

01:50company, 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. Revenue of the employee is one of the most important ones.

Nathan Latka

02:03How do you... So obviously, if, you know, someone is on the Inc. 5000, you see the revenue, someone will report that in the Owler. 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 somewhere you might or your crowd might say the revenue is 2,000,000, but the CEO is like, Nathan, just so you know, we're

02:22doing like 30,000,000. Right? So how do you make sure you don't lose the trust of these kind of 3,000,000 daily users?

Jim Fowler

02:29Right. So 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 the reality is that all we have to do is be a lot better than Dun & Bradstreet, who's really and we blow those guys away. So we've done every year, one of our critical benchmarks is how good is

02:53our data comparative to Dun & Bradstreet? And 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.

Nathan Latka

03:06Yep. And these people that are... You know, I early on when you launched, you came back on in September 26, I became a user of Owler. 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 Owler. So I put in the accurate information, like like whether it was revenue or employee counts or things like that. Who

03:24who 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 that usually?

Jim Fowler

03:33It it... That's a great question. It was the same with Jigsaw, which is, of course, also a crowd... You know, crowdsourced database. It's really interesting 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. And the reality is there's no rhyme or reason to it. Humans are kind of like ants or bees. We

03:59are workers, and we like to build things and make them right. And it's that gene that gets triggered, and it can be from everywhere. Sometimes it's salespeople, sometimes it's product people, sometimes it is. We love, by the way, investors 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 algorithm.

Nathan Latka

04:25Yeah, an investor who's sitting on the board who gives a revenue update, you know, you can probably trust, right?

Jim Fowler

04:31What 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, 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.

04:52It's... We found some really... There's always really crazy interesting things you learn from crowds.

Revenue Model and Million-Dollar Data Deals

Nathan Latka

04:56Yeah. 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 model. How do you guys make money?

Jim Fowler

05:03So we have just launched a freemium model now, and that's doing really well. But we also do huge data deals. It actually follows a lot what we did with Jigsaw, where we go out. 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 really doesn't have a mirror anywhere else in the market. And so we're able to

05:32go out there and in a data as a service or a SaaS model, you know, do these deals where we get multi year contracts to use large data.

Nathan Latka

05:43Mhmm. And are you these... Explain to me kinda what's in one of these million dollar kinda deals. If I'm paying you a million bucks per year, are are you feeding into, like, I have now a direct API connection to Salesforce and the Owler information updates on my Salesforce records? Or like, what typically is included in that?

Jim Fowler

05:57That's actually our our pro where we actually pump our... A lot of the news alerts about companies into Salesforce.

06:05It's all API deals with these big million dollar deals. So they'll want 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. Dun & Bradstreet copied that model for I'm quite proud of that. But the whole point is that it's all about just taking whatever of our fields, and we have many fields in our database. Some people want them all,

06:33some people just want some of them.

Nathan Latka

06:34What's the most popular field that people want?

Jim Fowler

06:38For sure, it would be revenue, private company revenue. It's just a difficult one to get a number of employees. If you think about it, every company uses those two fields to set sales territories.

Nathan Latka

06:51Now, do you will you do things like analyze all of the Nordic, right, government reports, and then use that because they have to report certain things, use that as a sample cohort to project upon similar US companies and project or guess their revenue?

Jim Fowler

07:07That's a hell of an idea, Nathan. And no, we don't do that yet. Right now, we're really focusing on getting The US market because they don't have to report. I think a lot of US 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 not like here in The United States. But no, we don't do that yet. As we get larger,

07:33we will.

Nathan Latka

07:34Yep. Okay, good. And then put this, I remember, I think you said you launched in 2011. Is that right?

Jim Fowler

07:39Yes, we did. Yes, we did.

Total Capital Raised and Debt from Silicon Valley Bank

Nathan Latka

07:412011. And then when so one thing I always like to ask, and 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 19,000,000?

Jim Fowler

07:50We had. Yes. Correct.

Nathan Latka

07:50Much to date?

Jim Fowler

07:5019,000,000.

Nathan Latka

07:54Yeah. Any more since then or or still 19,000,000 total?

Jim Fowler

07:58We just took some debt, which is very common. So once you start having a, you know, a regular revenue stream, we took some debt. And then we took a strategic investment last summer. So that was... But just that was small.

Nathan Latka

08:13Who was the strategic? Was it public?

Jim Fowler

08:16So yeah, well, actually, I think it's public for sure.

Nathan Latka

08:20Let's make it public. Who was it?

Jim Fowler

08:23It was the founder who's no longer CEO of of Morningstar. So you would probably know him well. So...

Nathan Latka

08:30Well, look, this is an interesting add on to a PitchBook kind of hub and spoke M and A roll up in the data space kind of model, right? Mean, you in acquisition talks right now with Morningstar?

Jim Fowler

08:40Oh, well, first of all, I couldn't comment on that if we were, but no, we are not. I can I'll

08:48say that no, that's not Morningstar isn't exactly where we go, although there's a lot of really interest. We have several

08:56hedge fund customers that use us to get our data. Obviously, as you well know on Wall Street, having any sort of edge on any sort of data about companies that you might invest in is huge. So we have a lot of customers there. But no, Morningstar's not in the.

Nathan Latka

09:13Yep. Okay. So total total in the company then at this point is is is what? 20, 21, 22? Like, much debt did you end up taking?

Jim Fowler

09:20Three. So total would be if you include debt, 25.

Nathan Latka

09:2325. Okay. So this... Listen, this debt model is becoming very interesting. A lot more SaaS companies are doing this because you preserve equity, right? As the founder, who did you choose to work with on the debt deal? Was it like a CIBC or Hercules or Tamiya or what?

Jim Fowler

09:34We actually worked with Silicon Valley Bank.

Nathan Latka

09:36Okay. So this was very much like a three, four, 5% term loan kind of thing.

Jim Fowler

09:41Exactly, exactly.

Nathan Latka

09:42Did they take warrants?

Jim Fowler

09:45Yes.

Nathan Latka

09:45Jim, Jim's given up warrants now. I would never have expected this. Why'd you do that?

Jim Fowler

09:51That's just the model. It's a small amount of warrants, really. I mean, at the high level, it's just a mechanism for taking capital into your business to grow without giving up so much equity. So it's far less dilutive than equity. Warrants are just a model to do that.

Path to First Revenue in 2014

Nathan Latka

10:09Yep. Very good. Okay. So launched in 2011. First line of code was then I know you were building a streaming model, and you could afford to do it because you were able to tell your Jigsaw story and raise a lot of capital upfront. How much total capital do you remember this? This is probably going be painful. How much total capital did you spend before your first dollar of revenue? Do you remember?

Jim Fowler

10:26Oh boy, that'd be tough. We pushed off revenue for a long time to grow our user base over a million. And so I would say, what was it, 2014? So we had raised certainly that 19 before first dollar revenue.

Nathan Latka

10:43So that's what I'm saying, you potentially spent many millions between 2011 and 2014, correct?

Jim Fowler

10:48Yes. Yeah. But no way do you do that without having a prior, know, Jigsaw was a was a great outcome. No way does that happen. And you know, without that, so.

Nathan Latka

10:58Alright, very good. So build MVP first dollar revenue was in 2014. '14. What was that first deal size? Was it like a $100 or you went right for a million $1,000,000 a year upfront?

Jim Fowler

11:06It was... I remember our first deal was over... It was 6 figures. And I remember going, we're gonna set... I wanted to set the mindset of our whole team that, hey, this is worth 6 figures. So that was was fun to do. We do deals that are much smaller than that as well, but that was our first deal.

Nathan Latka

11:26Well, it's interesting that you lead with because there's so many companies in this space. Let's look at Mattermark, for example, right? They had a lot of data, but ultimately it just failed. I mean, shell for $500. So you're probably your friend at... I don't know if you know Bart, but you probably do at FullContact. And, and I mean, that that model where you try and sell a million salespeople at 50 a month just didn't work

11:43with data, but I doubt they tried anything like what you're doing, which is just sell the hedge funds for a million bucks a year.

Jim Fowler

11:48Right, right. Yeah, no, I remember Mattermark at the time, because I think it was Danielle was the CEO, I can't remember who found it. She was really good at getting PR. I mean, she got, you know, she was great about that. I remember there was a few people on our team, and I had a board member that in particular was worried about Mattermark, and I remember going, mm-mm, this one's not going to work.

Nathan Latka

12:11Why do you know so clearly?

Jim Fowler

12:13Because they were all over the map on their business model. I could tell, I don't know, you just start getting a smell about these companies now where, to me, what it's all about is how do you get market separation, right? I get up on stage all the time and preach, there's no new ideas. It's just new execution. And I think I was reading some of the bullet points on your book.

Nathan Latka

12:35Yeah. I was gonna say, Jim, that's exactly... I see the exact same thing.

Jim Fowler

12:39Exactly. I saw it like something about how to copy without being... And my main point is it's all copying. I mean, it really is. I mean, Leonardo da Vinci thought of the helicopter. Right? He just couldn't didn't have the ability to execute on it, right? And so my main point is that to me, business information companies have taken lots and lots of funding. Some have been very successful. I just knew that the way that their model,

13:07it was... They just didn't have a clear concept. Were kept jumping around. And you have to kind of stick to it, and really figure out that repeatable sales model.

Customer Count and Jim's Transition to Executive Chairman

Nathan Latka

13:16Yep. No, mean, you're exactly right. They pivot all over the place. Okay, good. So that's good to understand. You again, 2011 was your date. Fast 2014 first dollar revenue. How many customers now serving today?

Jim Fowler

13:27Boy, well, as you well know, or we haven't talked about yet, I'm now executive chairman. One of the things that's really fun is when you step aside and say, stay super engaged in the business from a strategic perspective, but no longer carry that heavy operational burden. I don't know the exact number, but we have certainly over 100 customers. I'm not sure of the exact number.

Nathan Latka

13:51100. And what was the day... When did you walk away from CEO role and switch to chairman?

Jim Fowler

13:56Two summers ago, exactly. But it had really been in the works for a year before that. In fact, I had been grooming my, you know, our current CEO, Tim Harsch, who's awesome, and hopefully one day I'll be on this podcast with you, and running a much larger company than I ever did, I. E, Owler becomes much bigger than Jigsaw ever was. But, you know, I had kind of groomed him from the beginning. He was funny enough,

14:22he started just out of Dartmouth. He was my super intern. We had a whole string of Dartmouth interns at Jigsaw. Because one of my investors, Jeff Crow from Norwest Ventures, you know, went to Dartmouth, and he would always funnel us these awesome, you know, college kids who were interns. Tim was the best of them all, and I told him after he was an intern at Jigsaw, good the news is you're the best intern I've ever had.

14:47The bad news is if you don't come work for me, I'm gonna tell everyone you suck. So he ended up coming and working for Owler as our first employee, and I was grooming him from the beginning because I knew he had the skills you know, to become CEO one day.

Nathan Latka

15:02And no no family connection there. Right?

Jim Fowler

15:04Tim Harsch? No. No. No.

Nathan Latka

15:06No way. For some reason, my my my research team had said that to ask you about it. Was there family connection with the with the pass off to the to the to the current CEO? So no no family relations there?

Jim Fowler

15:17Oh, no. No. Not at all. Not at all. I mean, you look at Tim, Tim's Tim's super handsome guy. He looks like a Ken doll is what I heard from, you know, Ben.

Nathan Latka

15:25That's a perfect kinda guy to potentially run this kinda company. Right? You're you're

Jim Fowler

15:28Oh, yeah. He's got that perfect UI.

Nathan Latka

15:30The mad the mad men the mad men kind of deal things going down.

Jim Fowler

15:34Oh, for sure. For sure.

Gross Churn, Expansion Revenue and Net Dollar Retention

Nathan Latka

15:36Jim, alright. There's some other questions here, especially because you learned all this at Jigsaw. I would... I have to ask about these because we're gonna learn a bunch. Expansion revenue is critical in any SaaS company. Right? So what mechanisms are you using to drive contract values in year one to doubling in year two and three?

Jim Fowler

15:51So from a SaaS perspective, I'm sure your readers have all read Byron Geeter's 10 Laws of Being Sassy that I think he wrote back in 'six, and then just redid ten years later, or twelve years later. Byron, I know Byron, he's a close personal friend, and I think, you know, I'll just stand on the shoulders of giants here when it comes to how to do this kind of stuff in SaaS. But for us, it's really about

16:19you've got to... Year one is all about making sure they understand the value. There's a big upfront investment for most SaaS or DaaS, Data as a Service customers, which is what we are, and that it takes a long time to actually implement it, even though you say, hey, it's out in the cloud, we don't have to install anything.

16:41Dirty little secret of SaaS is that it's much more difficult to install and use, especially when you're trying to figure out the data side of it. So for us, it's really about making sure they understand the value of the data and having a customer success or renewals person on from the beginning. That's critical.

Nathan Latka

17:00And so a couple questions around that. So first off, if you look at gross revenue churn, so before expansion over the past twelve months or the last twelve months that you were there, the last twelve months that you remember, what was gross revenue churn?

Jim Fowler

17:11Oh boy, again, because it's been two years, these What are the I know is that if your churn is anywhere above 10%, you're toast.

Nathan Latka

17:11So you

17:22are below 10% annually?

Jim Fowler

17:25Oh, for sure. I'm guessing, and again, Tim would have to ask. It's below five. Yeah. Of course, that's just well, that's Okay, it depends on how you look at churn. Is that new or old, right? Because you know, then you have growth of year one deals.

Nathan Latka

17:40Ignore the growth for a second. Yeah. Just gross revenue churn on the historical core that signed up a year ago is... It sounds like less than 5%. The next question is how much have you guys ex... Do you expand that same cohort over the first twelve months? I assume it's gonna be more than 5%.

Jim Fowler

17:52Oh, for sure. If not, again, you're dead meat in a SaaS model.

Nathan Latka

17:57So are above 140 net? Does your expansion more than 40 or 50% year over year on those historical cohorts?

Jim Fowler

18:03Oh, good question. I don't know the exact answer, but I'm guessing that we are not that high. But I'd say we're probably more in the 30% growth.

Nathan Latka

18:13Yep.

Jim Fowler

18:13I'm guessing.

Nathan Latka

18:13100 and so if it's thirty percent and five churn, you're talking like 125 net?

Jim Fowler

18:21I'd say it's probably more like 130 net, 130 or above. That's what sticks to me from last year. But again, remember, you know, we're still relatively early in on this. And you know, these first couple of years, it's kinda janky.

Nathan Latka

18:36Well, you've got your your average contract size, though, obviously obviously, have some that are a million. But but I mean, would you say your average is more like a $100,000 across all your customers? Is that a fair enough average? Fair average?

Jim Fowler

18:46Yes. I think direct Correct.

Nathan Latka

18:48Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then look look. I mean, that... That's helpful to understand, like, expansion and churn metrics there. Now the second question I have for you there is, obviously, you raised a bunch of capital upfront. Right? How aggressive were you willing to be with user acquisition? Were you happy with a twelve month payback on a $100,000 a year one ACV?

Jim Fowler

19:02Oh, for sure. Mean, the good news is, is that SaaS model is now well understood. I mean, it's been over a decade or two getting on, if you will. I mean, obviously, we don't SaaS is still used, but Mark Benioff, the positioning genius out there, I've had many conversations with him personally, and no one positions better than Mark. I mean, he is the animal of it. Really kind of taking the whole conversation more about cloud, right?

19:28But we still use this term SaaS, as you will. So the metrics for this are all now well known. I mean, everyone understands if you're not getting there, customer acquisition is always very expensive in SaaS, because you're not getting that huge upfront. That's why SaaS models usually have to raise a lot of capital.

Sales Strategy and Use of Owler's Own Database

Nathan Latka

19:47So where are you... So let's say you spend a $100 to get it for a $100,000 in in, know, contract value year one. Where are you spending that $100 typically? Is it sales commissions, direct paid spend?

Jim Fowler

19:57Yeah, for us, because we're very specific about how we go, you know, we aren't big enough yet to go do a lot of the advertising and do like a big huge dream for us. Obviously, you know, Salesforce is kind of a one of a kind. I mean, Mark just went, go big, go home from the very beginning, and you know, gotta tip the cap to the guy. He's just created an amazing company. Although I'm not gonna

20:21lie, I've been predicting ever since they bought us that this thing's gotta slow down at some point, you know, and it just keeps That just keeps going.

Nathan Latka

20:28So where are you spending that money though then, if it's not on direct paid?

Jim Fowler

20:33We spend our money mostly on sales. A bit on marketing, we're very specific and targeted on marketing. And of course, for us, luckily, we use our own database. I mean, we have 3,000,000, over 3,000,000 growing quickly. I think we're gonna, we'll certainly be over four by the end of the year, maybe even five. But we use our own database a lot.

News as the Primary Driver of Free User Growth, and Team Size

Nathan Latka

20:53Yeah, what's growing so many new of these free signups so quickly? Because there's not really like a invite your team member model. I obviously use a tool. I can't spot any kind of viral coefficient flywheel or anything.

Jim Fowler

21:05Yeah. No. It it just... It is what we just believe from the very beginning is create a great product and people talk about it. And what's driving us surprisingly is news. And really, I think the number one use case on this thing is it's just a really great replacement for Google Alerts. And Google Alerts is just really messy, and this just gives you a really clean interface, and there's a lot more data input on it. And

21:32so I really think it's the news that drives it. People just need that news. And I was surprised because I really felt like when we founded the company that news was such a commodity. But it turns out, really well curated news, and we spent a lot of time on our engineering team, and we have a team in India that actually hand curates parts of it for the really important companies.

Nathan Latka

21:53How many engineers total?

Jim Fowler

21:56So we have data folks that I'm not going to leave in this, Those are just folks that actually look at the data from a human perspective, and then give feedback to the algorithm. But our engineering team is now, Oh, 12.

Nathan Latka

22:09Okay, and total team, do you know?

Jim Fowler

22:12Total teams? Gosh, 40.

Revenue Growth: Doubling Year Over Year

Nathan Latka

22:1540 folks. Okay, very good. All right, good before and then look growth. I'm curious growth year over year revenue wise, you had 100%, hopefully 200%, something like that, or what's growth at?

Jim Fowler

22:24Oh, for sure. I mean, but again, it's easy to do 100% growth

Nathan Latka

22:24Small numbers.

Jim Fowler

22:24When you're small, right? But mean, and the but the reality is any company, in fact, you know, Jeff Crow is now rockstar VC, who was on my board at Jigsaw. Jigsaw was his first His win. As a VC back in the day, and now he's doing huge deals like he did LendingClub. Anyway, Jeff said, Hey, any company that is doubling its revenue

22:51year over year is doing great. Now granted, it's much easier to do when the number's small, but yeah, for the last couple of years, we've doubled our revenue, but it's gonna be harder to do this year.

Revenue Target Discussion

Nathan Latka

23:02Obviously, yeah, gets bigger numbers. What's the big revenue target this year, the uncomfortable one, where if you hit it, you're celebrating, if you miss it, it's like, we'll get it next year.

Jim Fowler

23:11Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I'm not sure. You know, this is one, Nathan, I want to be careful about. Tim's the CEO, and I think I'm gonna be stepping on on his stuff a little bit. It's not that I'm trying to avoid your question.

Nathan Latka

23:25Wait. We actually we actually have Tim on hold. I'm a call him him right now. Give me one second. No. I'm told... Jim, I'm totally kidding. I'm kidding. No. No, no, Jim. The reason I ask is so you said 100 customers kind of average ACV of $100,000, right? I mean, if those numbers are directionally correct, that would put you at about $830,000 a month right now in revenue or about a $10,000,000 run rate. So without pushing

23:46you harder, is it fair to say you're about a $10,000,000 run rate today?

Jim Fowler

23:51I'd say that might be a little bit higher

23:57than we actually really.

Nathan Latka

23:57You have a couple months left in the year. I mean, do you think you can pass that this year, or you're gonna need another couple quarters?

Jim Fowler

24:04You are... You need to be like an investigator on a on a... You can solve a lot of crimes.

Nathan Latka

24:10I'm asking... I'm just asking the right questions. Only based off the only numbers you gave me. You said a 100 customers, $100,000 ACV average.

Jim Fowler

24:18Yeah. Yeah. If we hit 10,000,000 in revenue this year, I would do cartwheels. I'd be so thrilled.

Famous Five: Books, Tools and Habits

Nathan Latka

24:23Good answer. Good. That's a fine answer. I'm good with that. Alright, Jim, let's wrap up with a famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Jim Fowler

24:30You know, I think it's changed from the last one. I was looking at my answers from the last time, was good to great.

Nathan Latka

24:30Yep.

Jim Fowler

24:30I'm gonna argue now, there was just... The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, I just read that, and it's just like this work of art, I think. Both The Innovator's Dilemma and the follow on The Innovator's Solution, which really in some ways is almost one book, I just think it's so fascinating in the

24:53way that it talks about innovation. So that's my number one now.

Nathan Latka

24:56Number two, is there a seat besides your own, obviously, there a CEO you're following or studying?

Jim Fowler

25:01Yeah, I've been obviously Bezos since we've talked has really emerged. I just find him so fascinating. So yes, I'm really paying close attention to him, but so is everyone. That's boring, I know. I wish I had something more esoteric for you, but he just fascinates fascinates me.

Nathan Latka

25:20No problem. Alright.

25:21Number four. Alright.

25:22Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building your company besides your own?

Jim Fowler

25:25Oh, boy. HubSpot is just crushing it for us. We're watching those guys just go bananas, and we use them, and they're fantastic.

Nathan Latka

25:34Number four, how many hours of sleep again?

Jim Fowler

25:37More now than I'm executive chair, not gonna lie. It was probably certainly six or at best, I'd say I'm more getting seven ish now, maybe even a little tiny, but I'm enjoying it. I'm not gonna lie. I'm not as much in our I'm not as much in our

Nathan Latka

25:54Yeah. That's good. Remind everyone situation, married, single, kids?

Jim Fowler

25:58I'm single.

Nathan Latka

25:59No kiddos running around?

Jim Fowler

26:01I do. I have, my son's 18 and just graduated from high school. Got long born air by the way for any of you who actually look at me. My son better enjoy that. He's doing awesome.

Nathan Latka

26:11That's good. One kiddo and how old are you, Jim?

Jim Fowler

26:13I'm 54.

Nathan Latka

26:14Take us home. Last question. What do wish your 20 year old self knew?

Jim Fowler

26:19Oh, boy. How to breathe. Just don't be in such a hurry. Take more time to breathe, and it'll come a little easier for you.

Nathan Latka

26:32Guys, Jim Fowler founded owler.com, raised $19,000,000 to get it going after he sold his last company, Jigsaw, to Salesforce for well over a $100,000,000. Now serving over a 100 customers paying, call it, between 50 and $100,000 a year on average with eyes on that, call it, $10,000,000 run rate in the next couple quarters. We'll see if they do it. In the meantime, again, teams 40 people growing 12 engineers, 5% gross revenue churn annually, but 35% expansion puts them

26:57up in the 130 ish percent range in terms of net revenue retention. Totally comfortable economics wise with his twelve month payback period as they chase additional million dollar data deals with folks like hedge funds. Jim, thanks for taking us to the top.

Jim Fowler

27:08Pleasure, Nathan.