Prospectify

Matt Extram spent over a decade in recruitment tech and sales roles, repeatedly facing the same friction: finding qualified B2B leads and verifying their contact information required juggling multiple expensive tools. "I spent a good time in the recruitment tech industry, but always in a sales, marketing or growth position of some sort, and faced these challenges that exist today." Between startups, he spent 18 months consulting and noticed every client had the same problem—B2B contact data decays 7-10% month-over-month, and prospecting remained painfully manual.

He and co-founder Noah realized they could solve this better. Rather than endless customer interviews, they trusted their own experience. "Probably not the answer that we should be giving, but we didn't do a lot of customer interviews honestly. The reason being, to a degree, we're scratching our own itch." They invested $30K and built a beta in just two months (November 2015 to January 2016), combining email verification, social enrichment, and personalization data into one tool.

The two-person team moved fast. Matt recalled: "It was only about two months, I think, collectively, we probably sunk $30K into it." They launched a beta in early January 2016 but learned critical lessons. The beta cohort was too homogeneous—mostly experienced salespeople—and they shipped with zero onboarding. "We had no real onboarding experience inside the app. So that didn't work. A lot of people got in and they were staring at a portal and like, okay, what do I do?" Once they opened to the public, they acquired wealth advisors, agencies, and other use cases that exposed these gaps. The lesson stuck: "You know, probably when you think you're done with beta, probably at least extended a few weeks, if not double the time you've done it."

They didn't buy lists or run ads. Instead, they ate their own dog food. Matt found prospects through professional communities—Salesforce power user groups, for example—and used Prospectify itself to extract verified emails and personalization data. "Looking for groups where people are hanging out or meeting together over common interest or common career profession was the best way for us to target." Early customers came from word-of-mouth and free trial signups.

Once someone signed up, the team obsessed over onboarding. They sent automated emails daily showcasing features, but the real magic was manual founder outreach. "The not automated portion of it is that we could have automated, but we didn't. It's been a week and they haven't used this feature... instead what we chose to do was more manual outreach... I think overall, especially because there's something about a founder breaching out to them in a personal one-to-one way that I think really makes them feel more special." They'd call, email, or message in-app. This hybrid approach, combined with demos for qualified prospects, converted free trial users to paid accounts.

Three ingredients drove the $20K MRR milestone in under nine months:

**1. Partner Integrations:** They built native connections to Reply, Salesforce Cadence, and HubSpot—tools their customers already used. This wasn't just technical; it was relational. "They had a lot of great ideas that they brought to the table pretty quickly, like different ideas how we could co-market." Customers naturally flowed between platforms during sales conversations. "Most of the leads come about naturally that way during the sales process."

**2. Customer Success as Differentiator:** Using Intercom, they tracked feature adoption and proactively reached out when customers lagged. They provided onboarding tips, best practices, and personalized guidance. This bred loyalty and word-of-mouth: "I know it did because we have a lot of people that were never on any of our target lists, but they came to us and told us, you know, so and so, told us about you guys."

**3. Founder-Led Outbound:** Rather than inbound or broad campaigns, Matt personally executed cold outreach to high-intent segments, leveraging his domain expertise to identify ideal customers and inviting them to demos.

But growth came with pain. At 12K MRR, Matt turned to Noah and said: "Man, we have probably too many users and too many customers right now for just the two of us." They worked 16–18-hour days, customer support lagged, and they couldn't invest in the product. They also realized pricing was too simple: different customer cohorts (sales teams vs. wealth advisors) had vastly different unit economics and willingness-to-pay.

By December 2016, Prospectify had reached multiple six figures in annual revenue and just closed a $1M Series A. Matt and Noah began hiring engineers, sales, and customer success staff. They were rolling out company search (launching January 9th)—a feature to target firms by funding stage, tech stack, and industry—which they'd validated with controlled cohorts to optimize pricing and messaging.

Matt's reflection captures the journey: "Know when to say no." The team now splits focus between supporting their growing customer base and building the next layer of their platform, with a clearer sense of their ICP and the multiple use cases they serve.