Prospectify.io
Matt Ekstrom co-founded Prospectify.io after previously co-founding Hiring Solved. The product is a B2B SaaS tool for salespeople, particularly at the top of the funnel, that helps them prospect against their ideal customer profile faster and save time. The long-term aim is to scale sales personalization.
According to Ekstrom, the company ran a short beta in January 2016 and launched in February 2016. He and co-founder Noah began building aggressively around November 2015. The company works on a monthly subscription that uses credits, where each credit is a verified email address. Plans on the site were $40, $190, $490, and $975 per month. To collect data, the team first relied on third-party providers such as Full Contact to validate the concept, then built proprietary crawlers that check company pages for changes. Cloud hosting ran on startup credits from Amazon and Google.
The team said it put no money into marketing beyond using its own tool. Early prospecting used Google to target individuals, and the most success came from outbound searches for terms like 'sales hacker.' Word of mouth spread after early customers found value. One pair of wealth advisors bought the largest package, pulled about 5,000 prospects, and then stopped needing the tool.
The company reported less than 5% annual churn. It also reached over $20K MRR before adding staff, which helped justify its valuation to investors. Churn remained a concern, since many data-tool customers pay once, export data, and cancel. The company planned to address this with company search, alerts, triggers, and CRM integrations, of which it already had four.
Prospectify had about 100 customers and a team of four based in Phoenix. It had just closed a $1 million round at a $3 million pre-money valuation.
- •Using the product internally as the main growth engine lets the team compound word-of-mouth without a marketing budget.
- •Reaching over $20K MRR with only two founders before raising suggests the product delivered clear value to early buyers.
- •Cheap infrastructure from cloud startup credits kept the cost of running daily crawlers low, which protected margins during early growth.
- •Investors valued the traction and month-over-month growth more than the revenue alone, which shows that growth rate can matter as much as the size of the business.
- •Low churn among targeted buyers shows that the product fit a repeatable need for top-of-funnel prospecting.
- 1.Use your own product to run your own sales and marketing before buying outside channels.
- 2.Start with a narrow outbound list built from specific search terms to find early buyers manually.
- 3.Offer credit-based monthly plans with tiered pricing so customers can start small and expand.
- 4.Apply for cloud startup credit programs through accelerators or investors to cut hosting costs early.
- 5.Build integrations with the CRMs your customers already use to reduce churn and increase daily use.
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