Insight Pool

Devon Singer's path to Insight Pool started with an earlier exit. He had built a data company, eVerify, which tracked individuals and had almost 3,500 people in the field. He sold it in early 2012 for what he described as a nine-figure deal, and he remained under NDA with the private equity group that now owns it. With money and time on his hands, he became a venture investor.

He noticed that social data was becoming the newest and most valuable dataset. Two founders working on a product that matched a person's music taste with their social media history caught his attention. He seeded them, and that relationship became the foundation for the company.

The team launched the product in 2013. Insight Pool's core idea was that brands no longer win on what they say about themselves. As Singer put it, people care more about what other people say about a brand. The company built a software-as-a-service platform to find influencers, help brands build relationships with them, and turn those people into a marketing army.

Pricing is subscription-based. Customers pick a plan and expand as they add users and features. Singer framed the value in funnel terms: a 5% click-through rate means 95% of marketing fails, while getting ten influencers talking about a product can drive a hundred buyers.

Insight Pool sells to large enterprises rather than small businesses. Singer said the company serves over 100 large enterprises per month, and many of those customers have multiple properties, so the count of served properties exceeds 200. The sales motion combines outbound work on target accounts defined by industry, such as CPG and auto, with an inside team that handles inbound interest and closes deals. Customer acquisition cost averages around $12,000, with a payback period of roughly four months.

The unit economics were a strength. Average revenue per account is just over $3,000 a month. Monthly gross churn averages about 2.5%, or roughly 27% annualized, and upsells offset much of that, bringing net annual churn to around 15%. Singer also argued that lifetime value should be calculated against actual contract values, which typically run 12 months or more, rather than a generic three-year assumption.

Funding has been a mix of equity and debt. The company closed an A round that brought total invested capital to just under $8 million, then took a few million dollars in debt in March of the prior year. Singer said it still had more than 12 months of runway.

As of the interview, Insight Pool had about 60 employees and had moved out of Atlanta Tech Village into a custom office. Singer's stated target for the year was a 2.5x increase in MRR, which the host projected could put the company near $1 million in MRR by year-end. Singer did not confirm the host's estimate of roughly $300,000 in current MRR, saying only that it was close but could not be released.