Omer (00:11.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is a show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies, and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Bart Lorang, the co founder and CEO of Full Contact, a SaaS product that helps you manage your contacts and relationships better.
It transforms partial contact information into complete profiles and more useful customer data.
Bart came up with the idea for his business when he looked at how well his wife organized her contacts in Outlook.
And he started thinking how great it would be if.
If he could use software to enrich his own contact data.
He and his co founders developed a simple tool called Rainmaker that would automatically update your Google contacts with data from social networks.
They launched it in Google's marketplace and it didn't take too long for them to find the first few customers.
And then they did what many of us have done.
They had another product idea that they were excited about, so they started working on that instead.
And.
And for many months, they pretty much ignored Rainmaker other than fixing a bug or two.
After a few months working on that second product, they had another idea for a third product.
So they started working on that.
Now, basically, they ended up with three products and very little focus on what exactly they were trying to achieve.
And then one day they had a conversation that changed everything.
It was when they realized that with all these three products, they were actually trying to solve the same problem, but in different ways.
Essentially, they were taking partial contact information and turning it into full contact information.
And that's the day that Full Contact was born.
Today, their company generates seven figures in monthly recurring revenue, and they've raised over $55 million in funding.
It's a great story, and I'm sure you'll get a ton of insights from this interview, so I hope you enjoy it.
Bart, welcome to the show.
Bart Lorang (02:12.160)
Hi.
Glad to be here.
Omer (02:14.820)
So I like to start by asking my guests what gets them out of bed.
Do you have a favorite quote or in your own words, just what drives or motivates you to work on your business every day?
Bart Lorang (02:24.420)
Honestly, I've got two young children, so they get me out of bed.
But no, in all seriousness, I wake up every day.
I believe in helping entrepreneurs.
That's really a passion of mine.
And helping people grow their businesses.
And I like to.
To help people grow their businesses by making their relationships better between themselves and their customers.
And that, that is a super personal thing for me.
I've Been an entrepreneur for 30 years, so I understand the value and importance of relationships and in succeeding, and I love to impart that, that knowledge and that capability onto others.
Omer (03:01.170)
So for people who aren't familiar with Full Contact, can you give us an overview of what does the product do for who?
You know, what problem are you guys trying to solve?
Bart Lorang (03:12.570)
Full Contact really is about making relationships better.
And to do that, we have understood that to have a great relationship with somebody, it starts with trust.
And trust really comes from this notion of empathy and understanding somebody.
And, you know, empathy and understanding actually comes from insights.
And insights are generated at the end of the day by data.
And so when you think about modern life and all the relationships we have, we often don't necessarily have context about people that we need to interact successfully.
So Full Contact brings all this information about people together in one place, keeps all your contacts up to date, enriched, clean, verified, and provides actionable insight for you to be awesome with people.
And it does that at an individual scale.
So you as an individual entrepreneur out there with your thousand or five thousand contacts in your phone and your Gmail and your Outlook, or it can do that for a business as that scales up to a million records or 10 million contact records and the like.
But it's really about making sure that you can make your relationship better with the people that matter most to you, which are your customers.
Omer (04:30.460)
So tell me about how that works.
So if I am somebody who's thinking about using Full Contact, let's say as an individual, and I sign up, what happens to kind of start creating this database of contacts on your end?
Like, what do you guys do?
Bart Lorang (04:50.780)
So you can sign up via the App Store or the Google Play Store or the web, a number of different ways to do that, but it really gets you started and says, hey, where do your contacts live in your life?
Are they on your phone?
Are they in your Gmail, Are they in Outlook?
Are they on different social networks?
Where are all the places that you actually have your contacts scattered all about.
Then from there, it consolidates them all into one place, automatically de duplicates the data, cleans the data up, enhances the data with data that's available on the public web, and then keeps that current continuously.
It extracts emails from your business cards, if you want, with a click of a button, or extracts contacts from your email signatures.
It just brings it all together in one place for you.
Then you can install this capability on your iPhone, your Android, as a sidebar.
In Gmail, you could use this web app and have this data synchronized everywhere that you work.
Omer (05:49.850)
And if I'm a business and I'm using Full Contact, is it kind of like a CRM that I'm kind of using Full Contact?
Or if not, what's different?
How is Full Contact different to using a more traditional CRM?
Bart Lorang (06:03.850)
It's very similar to what I described for the individual, but it's for the business.
So when a business on boards, what we found is a cloud adopted business, has typically about 13 different systems where contact data lives.
So you might have your CRM, but then you might have your marketing automation platform, which might be different from your email platform, which might be different from your help desk platform, which might be different from your accounting platform.
You get the picture.
Full Contact synchronizes about 130 different platforms and you can unify all that data across the enterprise into a single master record, essentially a 360 view of the data and pulls all the data together so you have Almost a virtual aggregated 360 view of every individual that matters.
And then you can synchronize that data in a number of different places so you have a single place of truth for the business.
Omer (06:54.410)
And I also noticed that there was like when I was kind of looking across the fullcontact.com website, there was also talk about identity resolution.
Can you kind of explain what that means?
Bart Lorang (07:09.760)
Yeah.
So that's probably the marketing term for what I just described, which is taking all those people, those contact records and resolving all those various records into a single unified person and identifying who that person is and understanding them.
And so, you know, a layperson might call it just contact deduplication, but in the marketing industry they call identity resolutions.
Omer (07:35.560)
Got it.
Okay.
Okay.
So we've got the plain language version and the marketing version.
So.
Okay, that's clear now.
Great.
Now I want to kind of give people a sense of the size of the business and where you are.
Currently you've been running the business for about eight years now.
You've raised around $55 million.
You've acquired a number of companies along the way.
And then in terms of revenue, although we're not going to talk about specific numbers here, you're doing seven figures in mrr.
So that's kind of like the state of the business today.
But I'd love to kind of go back to 2009, 2010 before you had launched the business, and kind of really spend a little bit of time hearing about how did you come up with the idea for this business and then how did you turn that idea into a product business?
And sort of go and get your first ten hundred customers.
I know it's a while back, you know, you've been running this business for a while, but it would be great just to, you know, maybe just start by telling us like, where did the idea for full contact come from?
Bart Lorang (08:54.520)
So that's actually a funny story.
I had exited my previous company.
I was kicking around trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I actually started dating my wife Sarah, who's now my wife, but we just started dating really early on.
Right.
It's sort of the early stage of the relationship where everything's very exciting and interesting and I can't remember why I did this, but I remember getting a peek at her Outlook contacts again.
I'm not sure why I was looking at her Outlook contacts, but I just started being astonished by her Outlook contacts.
They were the most amazing Outlook contacts I'd ever seen in my life.
They were spectacular.
They had a photo, they had complete data in every data field, including spouse, name, anniversary date, kids names, birthdays, detailed notes, fax numbers, you know, home address postals, things you'd ever imagine.
And I, I was shocked by the, the quality of Sarah's contact data.
Omer (09:58.630)
She sounds like a very organized person.
Bart Lorang (10:00.910)
Yes, yes.
She had a severe case of, you know, ocd and she just, you know, was, was just obsessed with keeping the data clean.
And I looked at her contacts and I looked at my contacts and you know, I had about 5,000 just mangled contacts.
And I was sort of in the process of migrating from, you know, Windows Outlook World to a Mac world with Google.
Right.
And it was just this gnarly mess of a problem.
And I remember thinking, I want my contacts to look like that.
Personally, as an entrepreneur, that'd be amazing.
What could I do with contact data that was that clean?
There's so many possibilities.
And then I realized that, you know, as a serial entrepreneur, I'd started, you know, three companies prior and worked with lots and lots of businesses.
Every business I'd ever encountered had that same problem.
I said, you know, I want my businesses to have great data like this too.
Right.
What if we, if our contact database was perfect, right.
What could we, what could we spend our time on in terms of, you know, communicating with our customers and getting new ones?
And then I started thinking about the problem and I thought, wow, this is delicious.
Hard data problem.
You know, as a, as an ex software engineer, every time I've done dealt with contact data as a developer, I realize it's really gnarly and messy and not, not very clean.
And I thought, well, this, this problem is really a giant math problem to say, you know, this person is that person and deduping records.
And I started thinking about, well, all the data is kind of out there.
Like, it's in my email, it's in my social network, it's, you know, on the web.
I can go find it on Google, but like, my address book still is awful.
And at that time in the year 2010, the rise of SaaS APIs was relatively new.
The previous 20 years, anytime you wanted to integrate with a business system or a customer's platform, you had to sort of poke inside the firewall and integrate with some obnoxious SAP or Oracle SDK, right?
Which.
Omer (12:02.920)
The good old days, right?
Bart Lorang (12:04.560)
It's like write once, test every everywhere.
Omer (12:07.350)
Right.
Bart Lorang (12:09.670)
And, you know, I realized with SaaS APIs, you could actually interface with customer platforms, you know, in a relatively smooth way.
And so I thought, wow, there's actually like a room for a company just to like focus on the contact data for the individual and for the business and just make that data amazing so they can be, you know, awesome with their customers.
And that was the genesis of the idea.
So, you know, and my wife, of course, like, you know, she just looked at me as I ideated around this, you know, two months in the relationship and she's like, you're a pretty big nerd, aren't you?
I'm like, yes, I am.
And she's like, that, that's okay.
And so, you know, we're happily married with two children now.
So, you know, she was indeed the inspiration for the company.
But what is relevant is that, you know, my wife Sarah, the reasons her contacts were so pristine was she previously had worked in five star hospitality for 20 years.
So I'm talking, you know, Four Seasons Vegas, Four Season CC Bellagio, Exclusive Resorts, and her relationships with her clients was her livelihood.
So she used this data just to kind of be awesome with people and be emotionally connected with people and remember small details and send gifts and thoughtful gestures during the course of the relationship.
So she had a.
So I thought, you know, what if everybody could be like her and have this contact data layer, wouldn't it be amazing?
Omer (13:37.820)
Right?
Bart Lorang (13:38.860)
And so that was how the business started.
And so what I did is I crafted an application, started coding, called it Rainmaker, and you could hydrate your contacts by buying raindrops.
You could pay 25 cents a contact record to do this.
So it take all your data from your world, your social Networks and populate your Google contacts with this data.
And we launched it in the summer of 2010 on the Google Apps Marketplace, I think it was called back then.
And it was one of the first sort of apps on Google.
So Google basically, you know, was very, very helpful in terms of getting it some publicity.
We did a webinar with Google where we're featured.
Then a couple weeks later, Unbeknownst to us, Lifehacker.com featured Rainmaker on the front page of their.
Their website for three straight days.
Omer (14:37.860)
Nice.
Bart Lorang (14:38.820)
And that was awesome, but not awesome.
It was three sleepless nights where our servers were definitely not ready to handle that load.
And we had tens of, tens of thousands of signups, people wanting to buy this thing.
Right.
And we couldn't handle the load.
But it taught us that people actually had the same problem we did in terms of this problem with our contacts.
And people were actually willing to swipe their American Express.
And the first customer that we didn't know that paid US$50 to buy, I think it was 400 raindrops.
You know, we promptly went to the local Mexican joint and spent all the, all the profits on tacos burritos.
Right.
And so that was just sort of how everything got started.
Omer (15:27.490)
Did you build the product yourself?
Bart Lorang (15:29.170)
Yeah, I did with a couple other co founders.
Omer (15:33.250)
And what was the technology you used to build it?
Bart Lorang (15:38.290)
I think at the time it was.
It was a Grail stack.
So that was the Java version of, of Ruby on Rails, like used Groovy and a Grails framework.
And then we had a MySQL database underpinning it.
We built it all on AWS.
A lot more sophistication these days, but that was what we initially went with.
Omer (15:59.579)
I actually found the post on Lifehacker.
It's still up there.
Rainmaker automatically updates your Google contacts with data from social networks.
Bart Lorang (16:10.060)
Wow, that's awesome.
Omer (16:12.330)
And they have some screenshots of the app there as well.
Bart Lorang (16:15.770)
I'll have to.
Omer (16:16.290)
Google has changed a lot.
So you have this idea, you build an app.
How do you end up doing a webinar with Google?
Bart Lorang (16:24.490)
Well, we were one of the first developers to really post a listing in the Google Apps Marketplace.
And so at that point, the developer evangelists were super helpful and they were just doing webinars and tools that could help small businesses.
Right.
And so they thought that ours was really interesting.
And so they just sort of reached out to us and said, hey, this is cool.
Now, I don't think the webinar was gigantic by any means.
I think it was like 50 people.
But I think one of those 50 people was influential enough to like, you know, get us on Lifehacker.
Omer (16:56.360)
And so you didn't pitch to Lifehacker.
It just happened on its own.
Bart Lorang (17:00.600)
It just showed up.
I literally remember it.
I was actually creating a SQL query at the time to create a daily report of how many users we were receiving.
And that would email us every morning.
I remember doing run the SQL query and then testing it out and running again.
And the numbers kept changing and it kept increasing really, really fast.
I was like, what the heck is going on here?
I looked at the detail.
I'm like, wow, we're getting like a sign up, like through signups a second, guys.
And so then we're like, what?
What?
What?
And then we had to use the Google Analytics traffic real time to figure out that all these referrals were coming from lifehacker.com and we had to go check it out.
Like, oh, man.
Wow.
Omer (17:45.360)
Oops.
Wow.
Bart Lorang (17:46.320)
Right?
So we didn't.
We were not prepared.
Omer (17:49.200)
Wow.
And how long did it take for you to get your first customer?
Did that.
Did that sort of happen because of the Lifehacker?
Bart Lorang (17:57.330)
Yeah.
The first person we didn't know.
Yeah.
Omer (18:02.250)
Yeah.
That's the most important one.
Bart Lorang (18:03.690)
That's right.
They don't even know us personally.
They trust us.
Omer (18:07.610)
Yeah.
Okay, great.
So you've got a product.
You get a quick early boost from Lifehacker, which exposes a whole bunch of other problems that you weren't expecting to probably deal with.
That's that soon.
In terms of scaling and all of that stuff.
Where did you go from there?
Bart Lorang (18:28.410)
Well, from there, on top of that, immediate success, I think we were at lunch one day, and I think we were actually eating at a local Mediterranean joint, and we came up with an idea for an application called who Sent It?
And who Sent it would basically take those same principles that we had with Rainmaker, creating this full contact record, and, you know, apply it to incoming email.
So, you know, you get an email from some random person, they're emailing salescme.com and you want to identify that person, understand how to enrich them, and have all this intelligence.
And we thought it was a brilliant idea.
We could apply it to every email distro in the world.
And so we promptly stopped working on Rainmaker and we started creating the product who sent it.
We created a marketing video, we created a new application.
So now we're three people without significant revenue and a product that isn't scaling on one hand.
On the other side we're creating who sent it, of course, without any customer feedback, by the way, and creating this whole beautiful application for the next two or three months.
So that's what we did then.
Omer (19:43.210)
I kind of, free to ask, how did that turn out?
Bart Lorang (19:46.730)
It was amazing.
We launched this whocented application.
We did all this hoopla and all this fanfare and got all these people to sign up for the beta, whatever, and nobody bought it.
Not one single person.
We didn't do any customer development before we launched the thing, and it was too hard to set up, too confusing, you know, kind of like an interesting thing, but, like, not that compelling.
And we spent all this marketing money, you know, as a bootstrap company, and it totally failed.
Omer (20:21.870)
I want to kind of just stop and talk about that, because that's a really interesting kind of thing you went through.
And I think a lot of us do that, where you've got a product, you get it out there, you've got some early interest, and an unknown person gives you money.
And then it almost seems like you got the shiny object syndrome and decided to build something completely different.
Well, I'm sure part of it was just what many of us go through, which is, you get this idea, and it sounds exciting.
Let's go and build it, and we'll build it, and they'll come, et cetera.
Right.
We've all been there.
Did you guys have any conversation about, well, should we not do that and continue with Rainmaker?
And if not, what was it about, despite having some early signs of success, that you decided not to invest more time there and then with Rainmaker?
Bart Lorang (21:22.590)
Yeah, I don't think we had a lot of thoughtful, strategic conversation.
It was definitely like, new shiny thing, new use case of a similar concept.
Right?
It was a completely different use case, but it was the same foundational thing.
So we literally, like, we're like, this is exciting.
Let's go build it.
Omer (21:39.100)
And then in those few months, were you doing anything with Rainmaker or you were just focused on this?
Bart Lorang (21:44.780)
We were fixing a bug here and there.
I suppose we'd kind of gotten it up to where it was, like, keeping the lights on, but we were, like, kind of intimidated by the notion of rebuilding the application for scale.
And so I think we were subconsciously shying away from that.
Omer (21:59.990)
And your co founders, it's Travis and Dan, like, how did you guys get together?
So, like, you've got this idea for Rainmaker.
You started building it like, there clearly wasn't enough revenue coming in, certainly in the early days to have a self Sustaining business.
You were self funded.
So how did you guys get together and kind of like, what was the plan?
Like?
Were you doing this as a part time thing?
Did everybody sort of jump in and start working on together full time?
Like what happened in that first year?
Bart Lorang (22:38.540)
Travis and Dan had actually worked with me at a previous company.
And so that first year we sort of got together and said, yeah, let's do something, right?
And total science experiment trying to figure out how we're going to bootstrap things as plan A.
And then plan B was raising capital and obviously we went down the raising capital route.
Omer (23:05.170)
Okay, so you spent a few months on who sent it and the product ships and nobody wants to buy it.
And then at what point did you guys decide to go back to Rainmaker?
Bart Lorang (23:19.980)
What we realized what we were doing was we needed an API for both of these things.
Right.
So we did something I think kind of smart in this process for once is I wrote a set of API docs and published it on our website.
It was like literally Rainmaker CC API.
By the way, we had a CC domain which is pretty sketchy.
Omer (23:43.510)
Love this.
Bart Lorang (23:44.550)
So it's like, it's like we, I just wrote like a WordPress page like Rainmaker CC API.
We.
I used like SendGrids, like email campaign tool to send like an email to all of our users that had signed up for Rainmaker and said, hey, do you want an API for Rainmaker?
Check it out and if you want early access, click this button.
Here are the docs and tell us what you're going to use it for and we'll give you early access.
Literally all I had was a JSON doc that was totally fake and phony.
We hadn't built the API, we hadn't written one line of code.
I was like, okay, let's just test and see if people want this thing.
When we emailed out the list, we got hundreds and hundreds of responses saying, yes, I would love an API for this, Please, please, please, and here's what I'll use it for.
And even people volunteering how much they pay without prompting and all these different use cases.
And we're like, wait a second, it seems like this user base really actually also wants an API for their own purposes.
And we said foundationally, the API is really the thing here that would power the Rainmaker application.
Take a partial contact, turn into full contact, and then who sent it?
Take a partial full contact, coming in the email, turning into a full contact.
An API is really the primitive here.
Let's go build that during that process, we decided to go build an API.
Now we had Rainmaker who sent it, and Rainmaker API.
So three products.
Omer (25:20.600)
At least this time you had some, some validation, I guess that sending that email out and getting some feedback there was a promising sign.
Bart Lorang (25:28.690)
That's right.
So we built essentially two applications on a Kluge together platform, and we're gonna formalize the platform and open that up to third party development.
And so we got down that path and I remember we went to some angel investment pitch forum in Boulder, Colorado, and it was put on by the folks at techstars, you know, David Cohen and Nicole Boleros.
And you know, it was a five minutes, five minute blitz pitch.
And you know, I got up there and I think I pitched the three products and I think it simply confused everybody, right?
Like, what are you doing, you know, three products.
Now as entrepreneurs, as bootstrapping, you know, entrepreneurs, we thought that that pitch is awesome because we're demonstrating how awesome of a team we are that we could have three products, right, With a team of three, and the more products is better.
And we're like, this is going to be amazing.
We're going to go up there and show them like, yeah, we know how to build things.
Well, it turns out the opposite is true.
Wow, y' all are really confused.
And so we got asked by Nicole to essentially apply to techstars so we could help you out.
And so we applied to techstars and lo and behold, we actually got into techstars, which is pretty cool.
But the very first night of techstars, there's this big dinner and welcome with everybody and all these things.
And it's this four hour affair.
And at the end of it, David Cohen emailed me and said, I'd like to see you three in my office right now.
And we're like, oh no, are we already kicked out of the program?
Like, that didn't take long.
Like they made a big mistake, I think, right?
And he just sat us down.
He's like, you know what you guys do is really simple.
You turn partial contacts into full contacts and don't screw that up, right?
And we're like, yeah, but turning partial contacts into full contacts, fixing people's address books is really, really freaking hard.
He's like, yeah, that's exactly why you should do it, because it's really, really hard.
And he's like, you know what, you should just focus on the API first and just be an API company and let people experiment on your platform, right?
I think there'll be a lot of People interesting in submitting a contact record and getting back a full contact record at scale.
So we thought about that and then that conversation kept playing in our mind.
And then finally we came up with the idea, what if we call the company Full Contact?
Omer (28:05.020)
Right.
Bart Lorang (28:05.980)
And so it was like, oh, it's like everybody loved it.
Like, oh my goodness, that's an amazing name.
So we went and found the domain name and it was I think $30,000 or something.
And at that time we managed to raise about $300,000 of angel money.
So we spent 10% of it on Domain and we rebranded during Techstars and we launched full contact at Techstars demo day, as, you know, Full Contact, the API that turns partial contacts into full contacts.
Omer (28:34.220)
Love it.
Love it.
Yeah.
And I think that's really a crisp explanation of at the core, what the product does.
That's really good.
That's great story, by the way.
So thanks for sharing that.
I want to talk about growth and sort of what you guys did to continue to grow the company.
And I know that content marketing played a big role for you, but maybe not in a way that some people might expect.
Can you share a little bit about like, what were you doing there and how content marketing helps you grow?
Bart Lorang (29:13.890)
Yeah.
So, you know, early on, you know, we just needed traffic from technical people and we tried all these different approaches, ppc, some ads, things like that.
This was sort of after we raised our first million and a half in funding techstars demo day, and none of it was working.
It turns out a lot of software engineers don't really click on ads or follow Google AdWords results or anything like that.
And so I remember having a moment.
It's one of those moments in your life.
And again, this is back to my wife Sarah.
Sarah had written, she had gotten into blogging a little bit.
She had her own blog.
She really wasn't super technical, but she started like doing a blog called Domestic Dilettante.
And it was about her learnings, becoming, learning how to cook and things like that.
And she followed this recipe for apple pie baked inside of apple.
So it's like this.
If you Google it, you'll see photos of this.
But it's, you know, this is, it's a sort of carved out apple that looks like an apple pie on top of the apple.
It's, it looks incredible.
And she created a blog post about this and posted out there and somebody on Pinterest like captured that photo of her apple pie baked in an apple and post on Pinterest in this, apparently Like, Pinterest person was a super influencer on Pinterest, and they had all sorts of influencers.
And it got, like, repinned like a gajillion times, right?
And we were actually off site celebrating her birthday, and she said, I'm getting spammed.
Like, all these crazy comments are coming on my blog.
I'm getting emailed, like, every three seconds.
So a little bit similar to my life hacker moment, right?
And I'm like, what do you mean, like?
She's like, yeah, like, all these hackers are attacking me.
And I, like, took her.
I looked at her email.
I'm like, no, no, these are actually like, you're getting, like, actual posts and comments on your post.
And I had her log into her WordPress stats and just looked at the traffic.
She had gotten, like, a million page views overnight of her blog post, okay?
And it was just incredible.
She's like, what?
What's this?
I don't know how that happened.
Like, she's like, she went supernova viral on the Internet, like, overnight, okay?
I promise I'm getting somewhere with this.
So I was just incredulous that my wife, with, you know, 30 minutes of work, had created this crazy inbound organic funnel, right?
And I think she had, like, eclipsed the number of, like, page views that I had gotten in a blogging career spanning 10 years.
Like, in one post, right?
My cumulative traffic.
She did close by, like, 100x with one post.
And I was just like, this is insane, right?
So I got kind of fired up by it.
My ego is a bit bruised, to be honest.
And, you know, I just started thinking, like, okay, I'm going to, like, show her that I can go do a viral thing too.
And so what I did is, like, two days later, I wrote a blog post titled don't grin F your users, right?
And I posted that on Hacker News, and it got voted up to the number one slot for, like, 24 hours.
And it drove insane traffic to our website from developers.
It was all about, like, customer feedback and user feedback and that, like.
And I realized I was like, okay.
And I got like, I think, like, 25,000 impressions or something like that.
And I felt like, whoa.
That generated more signups for our API product than anything we'd ever done.
I continued along that path of creating very controversial, outlandish blog posts.
And it turned out those returned a ton of traffic.
So we start creating interesting creative things in the company.
We created a policy called paid paid vacation, which is all about going off the grid, disconnecting.
And we pay employees $7,500 to do that.
And that went supernova, viral, international.
I was on every news station imaginable, every major network.
We probably got about $20 million of earned media from that single blog post I posted on Hacker news that went crazy everywhere.
So our content marketing strategy has been hitting home runs and grand slams rather than creating a content farm approach.
And that's worked quite well for us.
So long story short, that's our content marketing approach.
Omer (33:52.540)
So so far we have Sarah to thank for the idea for the business and the growth strategy.
Bart Lorang (34:00.140)
Yes.
Omer (34:01.180)
You're a lucky man.
Bart Lorang (34:02.540)
Yeah, I know, right?
So she deserves.
Absolutely.
Omer (34:07.020)
You were also doing a lot of sales, like outbound sales, to grow the business, right?
Bart Lorang (34:13.260)
Yeah, that was sort of my DNA as an engineer turned salesperson.
And my last business, I had done a lot of enterprise sales in technical arenas.
So I just went out and started talking to people and talking to the people who signed up for a key and then also just reaching out to other technical founders in the techstars network and in the community, saying, hey, you should really bake our stuff in.
And pitching them almost as a meta product manager of saying, yeah, here's your product, but here's your product with full contact, they can see side.
What do you think of that?
And you know, I sold the first 20 or 25k of MRR personally to kind of prove to myself that it was possible.
And then from there we, we hired, you know, my first VP of sales and we started scaling from there of just literally outbound, cold prospecting product people, founders of tech startups, and convincing them to bake our capabilities into the product.
Omer (35:12.860)
Okay, so when you were doing the outbound sales, you talked about kind of working your network and other techstar founders and so on, but that alone couldn't have got you to the 2025 K MRR, or did it?
Bart Lorang (35:26.740)
Yeah, that's what got us there.
And so, you know, $250, 100,000 MRR at a time, trying to figure out what the value was for our product inside of their.
In their stack.
Omer (35:38.730)
And then what were you doing to.
Were you just kind of emailing these people out of the blue or like.
Bart Lorang (35:45.210)
Yep, I was emailing people out of the blue and we had sort of built a little bit of a reputation with that brand air cover on, you know, hacker news.
And yeah, just sort of.
I was, I was literally pasting in screenshots of here's your product without full contact, here's your product with full contact, and creating mockups.
Omer (36:07.000)
Wow.
And how long did it take you to get to that 2025 K MRR?
Bart Lorang (36:15.400)
Let's see.
That was probably about six months.
Omer (36:18.520)
This was in what, 20?
2011.
Bart Lorang (36:21.560)
That's right.
Omer (36:22.200)
Okay.
And then once you had your VP of Sales on board, was it just doing the same?
But at scale, there's a lot doing
Bart Lorang (36:32.450)
the same as working inbound API key signups.
We started adding a couple different sales reps here and there, learning the ropes.
We didn't really understand how the industry was segmented or anything like that, but it was a lot of selling.
The now, what's called the Martech 5000 when we started was the Martech 150 to give you a sense of things.
So we actually rode that wave of the rise of martech and CRMs.
Omer (36:58.140)
How did you figure out who your target customer was?
Because in the early days, there was, I guess, some obvious candidates, but sort of beyond that, as you're starting to grow the business in the first year or two, how did you figure out who your ideal customer was?
Bart Lorang (37:13.980)
Initially, it was very rudimentary.
It was like, how many contacts are in your database?
Omer (37:19.180)
That's a good place to start.
Bart Lorang (37:21.420)
Talk to Salesforce.
Like, hey, how many contacts do you guys have across all your databases?
It's like billions.
Oh, great, You're a target customer.
And we were literally just pricing the same, regardless of the use case of like, you know, a penny a record.
So we could do the math really quickly.
Like, well, they have 5,000.
They have 5 million.
Let's go after the one with 5 million.
And the ones with the large databases were the service providers.
Right.
Omer (37:49.110)
And you also acquired, I think it was eight companies.
Bart Lorang (37:54.350)
Yep.
Omer (37:55.310)
What type of acquisitions were they?
Bart Lorang (37:58.270)
Largely, the acquisitions were centered around IP data or people that could accelerate our product roadmap and a lot of small acquisitions.
So in our particular space dealing with contact data, shockingly, it's a really, really challenging space to kind of have perfectly accurate data on everybody on the planet.
And a lot of these problems are just, like, harder than you could possibly imagine that just require multiple years of work to get it right and in production.
So we required some companies that just helped us along that path.
Here and there.
We had figured a way to make a business out of what we were doing.
And so a lot of companies that sort of had built an interesting feature, but they really need to be part of something larger.
We snapped into the portfolio.
Omer (38:48.500)
And you also learned some lessons along the way in terms of acquisitions and kind of bringing people on who are the right fit.
Can you kind of talk about that and maybe give us an example of kind of what happened and what you learned from that experience through the process.
Bart Lorang (39:07.300)
Me and my co founder Travis talking about this, that as a values driven business, we care deeply about our values.
Our number one value is be awesome with people.
And we've got a handful of other values, but we actually hire, fire, reward and recognize people and values.
Every person who works here gets assessed on their achievement of the values or not.
And we will actually terminate people if they do not behave in accordance with values consistently.
A lot of the acquisitions we went deep on values and really assessed everybody on the team.
And some we took some shortcuts.
And even if somebody's aligned on five of the six values, but not the sixth, that will make a difference.
It sounds small, but it becomes a big thing and it becomes a negative culture dynamic.
And so we've missed on a couple times in terms of the values of both the founders and the employee base that we're acquiring.
And the acquisitions haven't returned what we expected.
That said, our approach to acquisitions is not.
Is far more one of a portfolio.
Like some acquisitions will be great, some won't work.
And we think of it that way as opposed to every acquisition has to absolutely work because the reality is most acquisitions don't work.
Omer (40:22.240)
Yeah, I was just looking at your values.
So we're awesome with people.
We ship, improve, repeat, open, honest and constructive.
We are customer obsessed.
We win and lose as a team and we've got grit.
So I like all six of those.
How did you come up with those?
Bart Lorang (40:43.990)
A lot of work.
Actually.
This is probably the second rev of our values.
In 2013, we constructed our first core set and then a couple years ago was the next rev.
I actually think the best way to do it is to once, once you're a little bit at scale, look at your company and just think about the people in your business and think about if you could replicate them, you could take over the world.
Right.
And think about the characteristics that they have and just write those characteristics down and pick out those people across your org that are just amazing and then look at all the characteristics and pattern match and look at the intersection of those and say, yeah, this is what we need more of this.
And obviously it has to, you know, align with the founders and their, their core values.
But it's not something to be taken lightly.
I also think it's very useful to think about anti values.
So let me give you an example.
You know, you talk about one of our values is.
Is customer obsessed.
It's useful to articulate a company that exhibits the anti value of that of anti customer obsession.
Which is maybe I'll pick on a company.
How about Comcast, my favorite cable company?
Comcast.
The customer service is awful.
I have stories where they bounce me around nine different times.
Screw up the service calls, everything.
They're not customer oriented and customer obsessed.
Values are not right or wrong for any organization or good or bad.
I avoid those labels.
They're just a signature culture this company has.
You know, if you don't share those values, there's probably another organization that you can share like minded values with.
You know, if you compare the values of say Facebook in the early days is move fast and break things versus Apple's mentality of, you know, perfection.
Right.
Is one right or wrong?
No.
But one works for one culture.
So that's how I think about it.
Omer (42:48.210)
Yeah.
So I'm curious.
You talked about like how you came up with them and kind of looking at the attributes of people that you had working there.
Was this shaped by the people that you had hired initially or was this shaped by you as a founder and the things that you value the most about building and running a business?
Bart Lorang (43:11.330)
Yeah, more the latter in the early stages.
It's about the founders, plural, and the core values they share.
I've been my co founders for 20 years.
Right.
So there's certain shared values that have brought us together and it's really about getting those in writing and the do's and don'ts around that value.
I think that the people you hire tend to have.
The early people who hire especially tend to share those values.
Omer (43:34.550)
Yeah.
And now it's probably even more important that you've gone from three founders to what, 250 odd employees now?
Bart Lorang (43:44.370)
That's right.
Omer (43:45.730)
So a whole, whole different set of challenges to deal with.
Bart Lorang (43:48.690)
Yeah.
And especially with three offices internationally, there may be different values in the cultures.
Right.
In different countries around the world.
But people remarked that they actually feel when they go from office to office, they still feel at home at full contact.
Like the people component is still there.
Omer (44:07.860)
Where are your other offices?
Bart Lorang (44:09.380)
We have an office in Tel Aviv, Israel.
We have an office in Riga, Latvia.
We have an office in India.
All of them from acquisition.
Omer (44:18.260)
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean that's, you know, there's so many cultural differences and you know, obviously you can tell from my accent that I mean I'm in Seattle, but I grew up in England and I spent a lot of time traveling around Europe and just kind of going from France to Spain.
You can have so much difference in culture and the way people do business or think about business.
And when I was working at Microsoft, there was kind of this culture of you're supposed to speak your mind and challenge people's ideas and doesn't matter if, you know, it's a, you know, it's a senior vice president or somebody, you still kind of speak your mind about the product or the business or what you think is doing, you know, what you think is the right thing to do for the company.
But you're in.
If you're in England, it's kind of considered quite rude to do that, you know, so you.
You kind of have an interaction with people there where people are kind of sitting more quietly.
And, you know, even these little kind of nuances can kind of make a huge difference.
And then when you have a company across multiple countries, there's a whole, you know, becomes even more complicated.
Bart Lorang (45:34.790)
That's right.
Omer (45:35.590)
That's right.
Okay, great.
So we have covered a lot.
I'd love to keep going and talk more, but we should wrap up and should let you go.
So let's get on to the lightning round, and I'm gonna ask you seven questions and just let's try to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Bart Lorang (45:55.580)
Okay.
Omer (45:55.980)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Bart Lorang (45:59.900)
You can't be you if you're trying to be somebody else.
Omer (46:03.100)
Like it.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Bart Lorang (46:07.180)
I would recommend the book the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
It's about stoicism and the impediment to action.
Omer (46:16.780)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Great.
Of course it's one of your values.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Bart Lorang (46:30.730)
Well, full contact, of course.
But more importantly, I tag my contacts using Full contact and capture notes about every interaction so that next time I have an interaction, I can actually be a little bit more like my wife.
Omer (46:44.570)
Awesome.
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Bart Lorang (46:51.870)
I'm a huge fan of aerospace and rockets.
I think like a lot of computer engineers, so I'd love to get involved into a space startup.
Omer (47:01.630)
That would be fun.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Bart Lorang (47:07.470)
I'm a mathlete, so I competed at the very top levels of mathematics as a teenager, quite highly in multiple competitions.
Omer (47:18.870)
Wow.
And that's probably why when we started this conversation, you talked about the whole idea of full rainmaker or full contact being a math problem.
And yes, that's why it interested you so much.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Bart Lorang (47:35.110)
Golf.
Omer (47:36.870)
Are you good at it?
Bart Lorang (47:38.150)
No, but it's one of those things you don't have to be good at to enjoy.
Omer (47:43.190)
Yeah, totally.
All right, great.
Bart, thanks for joining me.
It's been a pleasure.
I really enjoyed the conversation and kind of you sharing the story of how you and your co founders have sort of taken an idea and turned it into a business that's doing really well.
Bart Lorang (48:01.910)
Thank you, sir.
I enjoyed it very much.
Omer (48:04.230)
If people want to find out more about full contact, they can go to fullcontact.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Bart Lorang (48:13.690)
They can just email me Bardotillcontact.com I'm pretty good at email.
Omer (48:17.770)
Awesome.
Thank you, my friend.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you all the best.
Bart Lorang (48:21.210)
All right, cheers.
