E-Tail Insights
E-Tail Insights is a bootstrapped annual-subscription SaaS database that indexes e-commerce retailers and sells the data to companies like Bronto. It had about 150 customers at an average of roughly $9,000 per year, and the host estimated 2015 trailing revenue around $1.35 million. The company relies mainly on an outbound sales team and has about 18% normalized annual churn.
Darren saw that while selling email marketing software at Bronto, the company could not identify or size the mid-market of about 10,000 online retailers. He built a database of e-commerce companies to solve that prospecting problem.
- •Selling a niche dataset built from the founder's own sales pain gave the product a clear buyer who already understood the problem.
- •Focusing only on e-commerce let the company claim accuracy that broad generalist data providers could not match.
- •An annual upfront subscription at about $9,000 with roughly 82% renewal yields a lifetime value about four times the cost to acquire, which supports a sales-led model.
- •Bootstrapping with about $100,000 forced disciplined spending, so revenue grew from a small base without outside capital.
- 1.Start by identifying a segment that existing data vendors cover poorly, such as mid-market companies in one vertical.
- 2.Build or license the data yourself, and credit any third-party sources you use.
- 3.Price as an annual upfront subscription sized to what a customer's sales team would otherwise spend on prospecting.
- 4.Use an outbound sales team to prospect the segment directly, and track acquisition cost against annual contract value.
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