Artesian

Andrew Yates has spent about 25 years in sales and marketing, and he set out to help sellers engage buyers more effectively. Artesian's pitch is that sales teams should be "customer curious." The platform tracks customers, prospects, and competitors, surfaces business triggers such as hiring, expansion, M&A, and new contracts, and helps reps decide whom to contact next. Yates describes it as a way to bring a tailored suit rather than an off-the-shelf one to sales engagement.

Artesian started providing service around 2010. Early on it had two services. The first was trigger-based news delivered as a low-cost, per-seat product. Large enterprises licensed it in the thousands of seats, with one bank receiving a daily market news alert on its devices. The company later layered its machine-learning and natural language processing engine over structured firmographic filters, scanning more than 10 million sources. Each customer defines its own sales triggers, so deployments differ from one client to the next.

By the 2017 interview, Artesian had over 120 enterprise customers and about 30,000 paying seats. Contracts range from about $10,000 a year to a largest contract of over $2 million annually. Yates said that 68% of the goal for that year was already contracted, and that about 80% of revenue came from larger enterprise accounts. He reported an average enterprise customer paying about $6,000 per month, with annual contracts.

Artesian's retention and engagement numbers were the strongest signals in the interview. Yates cited 93% annual gross retention, 120% net retention, a Net Promoter Score averaging +43, and average daily user engagement of about 89%. The company also reached the number two spot in G2's sales intelligence rankings, behind DiscoverOrg. Yates estimated customer acquisition cost at about one times in year one, and tracked average customer lifetime at 5.2 years.

The company also took a harder path. Cash burn once ran $300,000 to $400,000 per month, and the company raised about $40 million in equity and debt. In late 2016 it chose to slow growth and aim for cash-flow break-even around May 2017. Yates said it had enough cash to operate for about two years without new investment.

At the time of the interview, Artesian was running at about $700,000 in monthly revenue, with a team of 60 people. Its goal was to reach a $10 to $15 million run rate by the end of 2017. Yates also said a market consolidation was inevitable and that he personally handled any M&A discussions.