How CB Insights Reached $100M ARR With a Newsletter-Led Growth Strategy (Interview with CEO Anand Sanwal)

Introduction and Speaker Background

Anand Sanwal

00:01Alright. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Alright. Good. We're doing good. I got a 110 slides. I got twenty minutes, so we're gonna go. It's 97 things not to do in your SaaS company, so I'm not gonna talk about start up valuations. I'm not gonna talk about venture funding, anything of that sort. I'm coming off a cold, so apologies if I if I have to grab some water at times. So let's jump in. A little bit about

What CB Insights Does

Anand Sanwal

00:29me, I won't read this all to you. My my prior startup experience of interest was a company called cosmo.com. If any of you were in the first.com of New York, we had a revolutionary business model where we would buy things for $2 and sell them for $1, and we tried to make it up in volume, and that didn't work. So that's that. If you don't know CB Insights, thanks for the kind words earlier, we're building a

Disclaimer and Thesis

Anand Sanwal

00:55technology marketplace. Our goal is to connect technology companies with advisers, investors, acquirers, and customers. And we do that by just assimilating a gargantuan amount of qualitative and quantitative information, basically trying to make sense of the technology economy. So I'll jump in. A disclaimer. Right? So this is there's gonna be things I'm gonna say here that some of you may disagree with, you'll be offended by, and that's okay. These are not laws. These are just my learnings

01:25of building a SaaS company over over many years. This will be useless for these folks. You can just read it. Wantrepreneurs, if you believe how many of you are bootstrapped in this room? Alright. Nice. You know, if you care about your personal brand and you really if that's what you know, like, all that shit is nonsense, so I it won't be good for you all. Alright. This is the general thesis of this presentation. I love this

Don't Take Advice From Non-Customers

Anand Sanwal

01:51Charlie Munger quote. My goal is to try to share with you the things the stupid things we've done so you avoid doing stupid things. And some of them, again, won't be relevant to you. Hopefully, some of them will be. So let's jump in. And I'm gonna go quickly since I've got a lot of slides. Why did you say slide 55? Alright. Don't take advice from non customers. You know, talk to people who have to live with

Hiring, Culture, and Avoiding Averages

Anand Sanwal

02:14consequences of the feedback they give you. You just don't tolerate high performing assholes. You're on a team. You have a sit you know, and I we had some remarkable salespeople from a performance perspective. They were cancerous to culture. They were jerks to our SDRs. You have to get rid of those people that metastasizes in an organization. This one's a little bit nuanced. So we tend to talk about averages. So if you have a sales team, you're

02:40like, oh, what's the average AE selling? What's the average SDR doing? What you actually wanna look for is what what what people will call positive deviance. So the people who with the same amount of information and the same training are actually over delivering, and that's who you wanna study. Right? And sometimes you end up talking in averages, and you don't wanna be average. You know, focus on positive deviance. You know, this shit, you gotta all stop.

03:04Don't half ass onboarding of new teammates. You know, people make a decision about whether they feel like they can build a career in your organization in the first thirty days, and so that onboarding experience and when you're you know, when we were five people, 10 people, it was just like, here's your laptop. Go. And that's fine. Like, don't overengineer it. I'm talking some of this some of this is stage relevant, but you gotta spend time on

Don't Believe You Have to Raise VC

Anand Sanwal

03:27onboarding new teammates and making sure that they're set up to be successful. Don't believe you have to raise VC. All of VC is the best marketed money. That's what it is at the end of the day. Right? The odds that a VC alone is gonna change the trajectory of your business is close to nil. It is capital. So revenue is the best funding. Don't be pressured into raising VC. This might be a common theme. This one,

03:54you know, for those of you who are bootstrapped, when people call you a lifestyle business, just you should call them an asshole on the spot.

PR, Media, and Staying Grounded

Anand Sanwal

04:02Don't waste money on PR to get customers, you know, and maybe this relates to the next point. I think the key here with PR is to go for relevant media. So everybody wants to get that or a lot of people like to get that little TechCrunch thing as seen on TechCrunch in the bottom of their website. Most of your customers don't live on TechCrunch. So go find where they live, and if it's in some supply chain

04:24magazine or some other esoteric thing, like, there. Like, all this chasing and paying we hired a PR firm. We fired a PR firm. Like, it's gonna you know, again, at the right stage, maybe it makes sense, but early days. You know, we're kind of in that 100,000,000 ARR category and we don't have a PR firm still. So, you know, maybe maybe when we're 200 or 500, we'll be there. You know, there's gonna be good days, there's

04:51gonna be bad days, there's gonna be people who are gonna say you're the shit. You know, just don't, like, don't, you know, get high on your own supply.

05:00You know, don't get fixated on losses. Like, if you're building something that's good, you're gonna lose a lot. Right? Like, the amount of rejections you take on any front is significant, and, like, I'm wired this way to really get kind of in my head about losses, and that, like, can be really destructive. And if you have a team, it's destructive as well.

Knowing Your Market and Picking a Lane

Anand Sanwal

05:21Yeah. You know, sometimes your market we thought we were gonna sell primarily into VCs and bankers, and what we realized was it was large enterprises, and we had to we learned that only by talking to lots of customers. I think that's the benefit of being bootstrapped for sure because you don't have this sort of war chest. Your your customers are your investor. At the same time, you can't be promiscuous about your market forever. So being opportunistic

05:46is really good in the early days, but we had a we had a period where we were 12 people, and I think we had three products. And, like, that's just a not sustainable way of growing. We had to we had to pick a lane, and so eventually, you know, we we picked the lane, and and luckily, that's been going alright.

Hiring Under Pressure and Culture

Anand Sanwal

06:02You know, self explanatory, you gotta have a plan, you know, irrespective of how smart somebody is. This is a big one. Never hire under pressure. So we've had a a a senior VP role available or a marketing role open for fifteen months, and the team's like, hey, this person's pretty good. Can we just hire them? Like, never do that. If you ever hire under pressure, you will regret it. Right? Like, we just gotta get somebody in

06:28seat. If you don't love them when they join, you're definitely not gonna love them in six months.

06:35It's hard to do this, but culture is driven by what you tolerate, and it's by the people that you hire as well as who you let go. And it's hard to let go of people, but great people see that you're not doing that, and they you lose faith in you as as a leader. This one's funny. For the how many of you had a 10 person or less company? Right? So, like, I'll see 10, you know,

07:00I'm just picking on that size where they're like, okay, we have a CTO, we have a CFO, we have a CIO, and it's like, guys, like, what the fuck are you doing? Right? Like, you gotta have titles that make sense that help you scale. Right? If somebody's gonna be a CTO when you're three people and then you get to 30 and that person no longer is relevant in that role, then you're gonna have to top them.

07:22They're gonna look like they took a demotion. It just creates all sorts of agita and anxiety that you can avoid by just giving people reasonable titles. Like and and when you go if you sell to Enterprise and you show up and we're like a 10 person company and here's our c level, like, you look like jokers, so don't do that. Don't be afraid to hire expert advisors. I did payroll. This is the worst probably one of

07:43the worst things I did. I did payroll by hand for the first four years. Just horrible idea. Don't do that. If you have a bad advisor, get rid of them. This one like, there's always like the the soup of the day in startup land. Right? And like, everybody's like, oh, what are they doing? And like, you gotta do what's right for you. Everybody, you know, Evernote was hot shit until they weren't. Dropbox, same. Like, everybody goes

08:11to these phases, and so don't take this advice that comes from luminaries or, you know, founders who are good at sort of talking about what they do as gospel, you know, assimilate it into what you do and then adopt it. It never gets easy. This doesn't matter. We've been out funded by numerous competitors. They've all they've all failed or aren't doing very well. So money is just oxygen. It doesn't buy you the ability to execute, and

08:37I think that's really important. It's really important, I think, to make sure the team knows that too because they'll be like, oh, did you see somebody just raised $50,000,000? Like, what are we gonna do? Like, just stick to what you're doing and, you know, in some markets, maybe you need capital, but I don't think in a lot of b to b markets, especially in SaaS, it's necessarily what determines winning. Again, something I'm really bad at, you

08:59can't just celebrate the humongous wins, small wins. You gotta make sure you recognize people and make sure that they feel like, you know, you're there kind of behind them irrespective of it being big or small.

09:11This one probably changed my view on this a little bit older. We used to sell the startups in the early days and maybe this has evolved, but, you know, they die, they churn, they require lots of support, they don't have a lot of money. So it's kind of like the perfect SaaS hell.

Pricing Mistakes and Customer Feedback

Anand Sanwal

09:29You know, lowest priced product in the market, you know, generally, again, none of these are laws. I I think this one generally is path sucks. You know, so getting cute with pricing. So this was CB Insights pricing, like early early days. And so we'd end up having these absolutely ridiculous conversations with customers because they were like, oh, I want the limo plan, and I want and you just the whole conversation kinda sounded ridiculous. Right? So, like,

09:54and nobody's buying you because of your cute pricing. I think before this, we had like Doberman, Pitbull, Chihuahua. It was just like it it was all just kinda stupid, and we spent so much time thinking about what dogs to put on the pricing page, and like all of that energy could have been reallocated to something that was actually useful. You know, you gotta talk to customers. You gotta ask them point blank. You gotta give them a

10:20lane in which to give you honest feedback. Most people actually are nice and they wanna see you succeed, but they also are reluctant to give you really hard feedback. And so you just if you ask hard questions of them, meaning where you say I want honest feedback, where you just say what what makes our product suck? Like, they're like, okay. This is that type of conversation. Right? But you gotta be willing to listen and not be

10:42and not be defensive in those moments. Don't respond to trolls. I do it. I shouldn't. Don't worry about perfecting your tech too early. So again, this one changes with scale, but in the beginning, I remember we used to have conversations about like, we got tech debt. We got tech debt. And I was like, hey, we don't have any fucking revenue. Like, I don't care about tech debt. Right? Like, let's go get some revenue, and then we

11:03can solve all this tech debt nonsense we keep talking about. Over time, as you get revenue and stuff, you do have to pay that down. So again, this is, you know, as companies evolve, this will change. You know, in b to I guess most of you are b to b. Anybody not b to b? Okay. Very few. In b to b, the beauty of b to b marketing is the bar is so ridiculously low. Like, your

B2B Marketing and Sales Tactics

Anand Sanwal

11:27competition's marketing is probably unbelievably forgettable. Right? Like, they put out, like, stuff that they when people sell the b to b, they're like, I have to talk in this, like, ridiculous way that nobody ever in the real world talks like that. So just try to be human. You ultimately are selling to a business which is made up of humans. If you just keep that in mind, you'll be better than 95% of b to b marketers out

11:54there.

11:56PLG, ABM, whatever, you know,

12:01you have to eventually train your biz dev and CS teams. In the beginning, they can sit next to the founder and learn through osmosis, but eventually, you're gonna need to have some sort of regimented way of building habits. Habits build systems. Systems build expertise. Expertise is what helps you win. Again, you don't want to prematurely optimize for this, but eventually, you'll need to get there. I'm really behind on time. Alright. Hire customer success early. We didn't

12:27do that. This one's big. You know, something's not right. Oh, this function's not going well. Hey, we're just gonna hire somebody, they're gonna fix it. There's no one higher messiah. It doesn't work out. You have to have a fundamental understanding of the problem before you can just go hire somebody. Rarely does somebody just kinda work out that way.

12:47Do hardcore reference checks on your execs. If you don't get effusive reference checks, don't hire that person. Right? If somebody that you're hiring at the senior level especially can't put together five people who are gonna say they're the best things in sliced bread, like, that's a problem.

13:06If you're gonna meet with VCs, you're you are pitching. Whether you think you're pitching or not, you're pitching. VCs, private equity, whatnot, there's no, like, coffee chats. Like, they're making an evaluation of you down the road or now as to whether they're gonna do something with you. So if you're gonna meet with them, be ready for pitching. Don't price based on competition, channel partnerships. I think, you know, it depends on stage. Early days channel partnerships aren't

13:30great. When you talk to customers, when you if you're how many of you are founders who are selling still? So, you know, the big thing I had to learn was, like, I used to think, oh, if I go and talk a lot during the conversation, that's a good conversation. And actually, in a thirty minute conversation, if they're talking twenty to twenty five minutes, that actually means I'm asking questions. I'm actually getting insights from them. So don't

13:52dominate. In the beginning, you know, the founding team and the engineers are the product management team. I think folks, if you try to outsource product management too early, bad recipe. You gotta ask for the sale. I'm no by no means a natural salesperson. I sold the first couple million of CBI subscriptions, and one of the things that was really hard for me was just, are you gonna buy? Do you wanna buy? Right? I just I was

14:14like, hey, they'll tell me when they're ready. Like, no. No. No. You gotta go and push the you gotta go push the pace. And if they say no, that's great. Cut chop cut them off your list and go to the next one.

14:26This is if you sell into Enterprise, you'll get a lot of these jokers who come around who are like, I want a partner. Just run away from these people if they have no money. They are time wasters and tourists, and they're like trying to look smart in front of their boss, and they generally are gonna do nothing for your business. So just run the hell away from these people. Don't worry about scalability of everything. Like, elegant

14:47systems are nice, and they're sort of intellectually interesting. Sometimes you just gotta put it in an Excel spreadsheet and grind it out. You know, read this stuff by Jeff Bezos on competition. We spent so much time trying to get number one on hacker news. Unless you sell developer tools, like, totally useless. Right? We would get we did get there a couple times. Our Google Analytics traffic spiked, and then we just got, you know, a bunch of

15:13people who said our product sucks in the comments. So that was fun.

15:19Don't try to innovate in HR. So your your focus is to build a product, and your innovation should be in the product. So I see companies who are like, oh, we're doing a three day work week, and your dog gets pedicures, and all this other crap. It's like nobody cares. Like, the people who actually care about that stuff are not the people you want as teammates in your business. You want people who are there to do

15:38the work that helps customers. And if, like, dog pedicures and other sabbaticals after your second week or whatever are the thing, like, you gotta not do that. Gotta be able to sell it yourself. Like, it's again, just like product management, you can't outsource early. You have to you have to kind of be able to do it on your own. You're gonna see good leads. You're gonna see bad leads. Focus on the good ones. Don't worry about

16:01don't try to convert people. Try to tell people who are already of your religion, just try to get them over the finish line. Converting people who aren't your religion, that's a lot of work. It's really painful. You know, don't build product by committee is probably the best way to say this one. I see this a lot. I'm probably in the in the opposite, like, you know, this personal brand thing. Like, if you're trying to build a

16:25business, build the business. Right? Like, you know, your personal brand, if it's additive to the company, sure. But I see peep founders who like this this stuff they do on Twitter especially is completely unrelated to their business. And it's like, if I'm a team mate looking at what you're doing, I'm like, what are you are you here for the business or are you just here to like, you know, be an influencer? So I think that's something

16:50to be is important. Don't try to act like a salesperson. There's no one way to sell. Have conversations.

16:59VC nonsense. The big thing here is that, like, in startup land, Google and Facebook are extreme extreme outliers. Right? I hope CBI becomes one. I hope many of your companies become one of them, but they are by by definition outliers. Most exits of technology companies are sub $200,000,000. So you read all of this sort of VC survivorship bias in the media, like most of us are not building those two companies. Right? Unfortunately. Right? So, like, just

17:27play the odds a bit.

Newsletter Strategy and Pointless Networking

Anand Sanwal

17:30We have a newsletter, which is pretty successful. We spend a lot of time thinking out, should we do video? Should we have a clubhouse channel? All this, like, if, you know, instead of planting new seeds, water the seed that you've already planted. Right? If something's working, lean into that. And then when you exhaust that, which takes a while, then move on. Pointless networking, I yeah. I mean, just self explanatory. Like, this is, I guess, related to

17:57pointless networking.

18:01I say generally, it's a waste of time. I really like Nathan. I really like SaaS founders, so this was a good one to do. But your your reach in the in a in online is just so much more significant.

18:14Don't ever have you there's I think I've been I've seen one panel discussion in probably a thousand that's actually good. Like panel discussions by definition are garbage because everybody agrees with each other, so don't participate in them. They're just they're useless for the speakers. They're useless for the audience. It's like a it's just mutually self assured destruction.

18:38Focus on the essential few. Ruthless prioritization is really important. Man, I got a minute. Alright. This is if you haven't seen this post, Christophe Johns has this post about how to make a $100,000,000 business, and it's really clarifying because it just tells you how to think about your business. I'd recommend finding that. Think there's another thing, like, feel like failure's okay. Failure's okay is this whole, like, mantra now. Like, yes, it happens, but, like, don't make

19:05it okay. Don't make it okay within your team.

19:10You know, just this is what our Chubby Brain is the CB in CB Insights. So we started off as this. This is our first logo. So it's never going to get worse than this. And so don't worry about it, and we've done okay. Clients will not tell you what to build. We talked about this. People care about what's in it for them. Right? And so they don't care about you. They don't care about your product. They

19:33don't care about your story. They care about the problem you're going help them solve, and you always have to keep that front and center. When you're hiring somebody, if you're ever doing a pros and cons list, that tells that means you shouldn't hire them immediately. If it's like, well, they're okay at this and they're bad at this, it's like, no, no. You're it's over. Right? It's not a hell yes.

Culture, Reorgs, and Accountability

Anand Sanwal

19:52I'm not sorry. Your culture becoming shit brown. So this is an important one. If you ask everybody what their favorite color is, you're gonna say red, you're gonna say blue, you're gonna say purple, somebody's gonna say green. And when you mix that all up, the color you get is shit brown. And that's a problem with cultures. If you give everybody input into what the culture is gonna become, you're gonna have a shit brown culture. And so

20:11what you gotta do is say, nope. This is our culture, we're gonna spike on these two colors, and that's it. And if you wanna be part of that and it gets you excited, you come here. And if you don't, you don't come here, but we're not building a ship around culture. So this is important. We mess this up, and it takes a while to undo this. So you just wanna get it right from the beginning. Executives

20:30who come in who wanna do reorgs are it's a problem. Right? Because they're like, they actually don't wanna do any work. They're just like, oh, I don't have the right people. Let me move the deck chairs around. Let me get new people in. And then ten months later, you're like, shit. That person actually is an idiot. Right? But you didn't realize it because they were doing all this like, you know, all this like moving of deck

20:49chairs around the place. Like, don't let people come in and who are like, oh, the thing I wanted because it sounds good. It sounds fancy. You can put the PowerPoints together. This never works. Never second guess your instincts. Don't become a feature factory. With leaders, they'll say sometimes, I delegated it to somebody. You can delegate and like there's this, you know, mantra of empowerment. Right? Like you should empower your team. At the end of the day,

21:15if you're a manager, you still have to deliver. So you can't be like, well, I gave it to I gave it to Joe and he didn't do it. It's like, well, no. That's your fucking problem. You have to deliver that. So you can't say I delegated it and abdicate away your responsibilities, and you have to hold your leaders accountable for results, and that's what managers and leaders have to do. Yeah. Pedigree is overrated. When you see

21:39somebody who's taking a lot of l's, like, you know, hey, I was at a startup, it failed. My prior startup had this problem. And you look at their resume, it's just like a string of losses. Like, don't hire that person. Like, you don't want that juju around you. Right? You want, like, you want, like, people who are winners around you. Right? Like, you get one I mean, I've I was at a failed startup, so I think

21:55everybody should get one. Right? But you got a string of losses, like, that's that's problematic. Martech and sales tax vendors are so good at creating problems that don't exist. And so what you're gonna end up buying is a lot of expensive software that you don't use for a problem that they've convinced you to buy. So just be very, very careful of sales and martech vendors. They're exceptional. I'd hire people from there because they're really good at

22:18making up problems and selling you shit you don't need, which maybe you wanna do in your company, but don't don't don't hire them. You gotta be performance driven. Another one, mediocre managers will often say like, oh, no. The system's a problem. I gotta go buy the system, and then we'll be good. I love this quote. A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools. Right? You can't let mediocre managers be like, oh, I gotta have this new x

22:43y z state system of record. Look, that's never the problem. The problem is you, the manager.

22:50Every situation is different. Best practices are for losers, full stop. They're for people who want to be average. Like, nobody who follows best practices builds great companies or builds exceptional companies. If you want average results, go follow best practices. The beer test is a weird one. Like, do you wanna have a company of people who get stuff done, or do you wanna have a fraternity? Right? Like, I I don't care. I don't I like my leadership

23:15team. We all get along. I don't know if we'd all be friends, like, in day to day life, but they're fucking awesome at what they do, and that's what I need them there for. And hopefully, they think I'm decent at what I do. Right? But I'm not trying to start a social club. Award winning marketers. This is, I think, very specific to marketers. Like, you'll see it on LinkedIn. It's like, I need people who get work

Equity, Letting People Go, and Speed

Anand Sanwal

23:35done, who don't wanna be on the speaking circuit winning awards. Right? So like, this is a weird like clout chasing phenomena in certain functions. You only have a 100% of equity. Guard it like like a, you know, like a rabid dog. Right? Like, don't give away. I talked to a founder earlier this week. He's like, I'm gonna give away 9% of my company for a 170 k, and I have a 150 k in MRR or ARR.

23:58And I'm like, what in God's name are you doing?

24:03They're not gonna change your likelihood of success. When you're letting somebody go, you they should never be surprised. If they if they're surprised, that means you failed or your manager failed because you didn't set expectations that were clear for them. This is a bad look. It's a bad way. This is the kind of thing that, like, is corrosive to an organization. Don't tolerate underperformance. Results is all that matters. Relationships are important, but results for managers are

24:29key. You're gonna have to some people that were great from one to two aren't gonna be great from two to four. Ninety days to get up to speed for execs is way too long. They should be contributing in thirty days. Right? Like, I need to do a ninety day listening tour. That's bullshit. You gotta get in there and get some shit done quickly. If you haven't somebody has never let somebody go, they're not a good manager

24:52at scale. Like, if you haven't haven't had the hard conversation, that's a problem. Perks become entitlements, your kombucha, your cold brew, all that stuff. When the market turns and you take it away, people freak out. So just be careful about what you give in the beginning because it's not it's not a perk. It becomes an expectation very, very quickly. Speed is a weapon. Run quick interview processes. If somebody says no to your offer initially, just let

Final Advice and CB Insights Resources

Anand Sanwal

25:18it go. Convincing them. You're always gonna be if they do come, you're always they're they're always gonna be wondering, did I make the right decision? You're always gonna be wondering, are they happy? There's already enough overhead in a in a startup. You don't wanna deal with all that. You need drivers. You don't need passengers. It never gets easier, and don't blindly follow this advice. So, you know, I'm a random guy here. You don't know me. I

25:41don't know your business. Just make sure what's right for your business. Final thing, if you don't get the newsletter, please get it. A lot of people like it. And if you're a b to b startup and you wanna reach, customers, vendorbriefing.com, tell us a little bit about your business. It's free, and hopefully, we'll get you some customers. If you want investors, maybe acquirers, we can help there. Alright. That's it. Thanks. Sorry for going over.