Full Contact

Bart Lorang had just exited his previous company and was looking for his next move when he met Sarah, who would become his wife. While reviewing her Outlook contacts early in their relationship, he was astonished by the quality of her data—complete with photos, spouse names, anniversaries, kids' birthdays, and detailed notes. In contrast, his own 5,000 contacts were "mangled." He realized this wasn't just a personal problem: every business he'd worked with as a serial entrepreneur had the same issue. As a software engineer fascinated by the mathematical challenge of deduplication and data enrichment, Bart saw an opportunity to solve this at scale using the newly emerging SaaS APIs.

Bart started coding Rainmaker in 2010 with co-founders Travis and Dan—both of whom he'd worked with previously. The product was simple: it hydrated Google contacts with data from social networks, monetized at 25 cents per record. They launched on Google's Apps Marketplace and quickly got validation. A webinar with Google's developer evangelists led to a Lifehacker feature that drove three sign-ups per second—overwhelming their unprepared servers. Their first paying customer gave them $50 for 400 raindrops, and they celebrated by spending the profits at a local Mexican restaurant.

But success bred distraction. Over lunch, the team got excited about a new idea: "Who Sent It," an app to identify incoming email senders and enrich them with intelligence. They stopped maintaining Rainmaker and built Who Sent It over two months—without any customer validation. When they launched with marketing fanfare, nobody bought it. The product was too confusing and lacked compelling value. Meanwhile, they had three products and no focus.

The turning point came when Bart published fake API documentation on a WordPress page (rainmaker.cc/api) and emailed all Rainmaker users asking if they wanted an API. They received hundreds of responses—some users even volunteered pricing without being asked. This validated that an API was the fundamental primitive: take partial contact data, return complete contact data. During Techstars (2011), David Cohen told them directly: "You turn partial contacts into full contacts. Don't screw that up." That night, the rebranding moment arrived—the company became Full Contact, with the API as the core product. They'd spent $30,000 on the domain (10% of their $300,000 in angel funding) and launched it at Techstars Demo Day.

Early growth came from viral content marketing—an unlikely channel for B2B SaaS. Bart was inspired by his wife Sarah's viral blog post about an apple pie baked inside an apple (1 million page views overnight from Pinterest). He wrote a provocative post titled "Don't Grind F Your Users," posted it to Hacker News, and got 25,000 impressions. He continued creating viral content, including a "Paid Paid Vacation" policy ($7,500 for employees to disconnect), which generated an estimated $20 million in earned media.

Bart also did direct sales, personally selling the first $20-25K MRR over six months by reaching out to technical founders and pitching them on integrating Full Contact into their products—showing side-by-side mockups of their product with and without Full Contact baked in. Once he proved the model, they hired a VP of Sales and scaled outbound prospecting to product teams and founders.

Full Contact grew to seven figures in MRR and raised over $55 million in funding. The company made eight acquisitions, largely around IP, data, and people to accelerate the product roadmap. Bart emphasized that successful acquisitions required alignment on company values—"be awesome with people," "ship, improve, repeat," "open, honest, and constructive," "customer obsessed," "win and lose as a team," and "grit." The company now has 250+ employees across four offices: Seattle (HQ), Tel Aviv, Riga, and India—all from acquisitions. Despite operating across vastly different cultures, employees report feeling at home at Full Contact. The product evolved from enriching individual contact data to helping enterprises unify contact information across 130+ platforms, providing a single 360-degree view of customer data.