The SaaS Podcast

Bart Lorang, FullContact

3 Products, 1 Winner - Finding Product-Market Fit

Bart Lorang is the co-founder and CEO of FullContact, 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 he could build software to enrich his own contacts 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 did not take long for them to find the first few customers. But then they did what many founders do. They had another product idea they were excited about, so they started working on that instead. 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 too. Eventually they had three different products, one of which had paying customers who loved it. They were spreading themselves too thin and realized they needed to focus. The process of finding product-market fit meant accepting that only one of their three products had real customer demand. In the end, they decided to double down on the idea that customers were already voting for with their wallets. They rolled everything into what eventually became FullContact. The company has since raised over $25 million in funding and grown to over 300 employees. In this interview, Bart shares the lessons he learned about focus, finding product-market fit, and why sometimes the best idea is the one you are already ignoring.