The List (Winmo)

The List is a sales intelligence business with roots going back to 1995, when it was founded as a privately owned and operated company in Atlanta. Dave Curry joined in 2005 through a joint venture with a UK company, drawn to the North American advertising market, which he described as the largest in the developed world. The company never took outside money. As Dave put it, "we're completely bootstrapped from day one."

For more than 20 years, the company sold two established products, AdData Express and The List Online. Over the last 12 months before the interview, it launched Winmo, an evolution of those two platforms and now the flagship. Winmo is a subscription platform built for the media, sponsorship, agency, and ad tech markets, where customers target national advertisers and their agencies. Customers sign up for a 12-month subscription and can access the platform from any device. Dave said 100% of customers sign annual contracts, with no monthly plans. Pricing starts around $6,000 to $7,000 for the base tier, plus an additional $400 to $500 per user per year, which puts the average at about $7,000 per year.

Until 2014, the company spent heavily on paid search and traditional advertising, roughly $100,000 to $150,000 a year on acquisition. It then cut that spend to about $50,000 and moved the rest into content marketing. The team first tried outsourced content writers, but found it worked better to bring the writing in-house. Dave said the move toward inbound marketing was deliberate given the relatively low ACV. In 2017 the company still planned about $50,000 of paid acquisition, mostly Google AdWords, with a target of under $150 per qualified lead and a roughly 25% lead-to-customer conversion rate. That implies a back-of-the-napkin customer acquisition cost of about $600.

Retention was the strongest signal. Dave said the company aims for the 90s on annualized revenue retention and that expansion revenue exceeds churn, so net revenue churn is negative. The company measures retention on a 90-day window, treating a customer who fails to renew within 90 days as a new sale. Dave also pointed to a correlation between a customer logging in within the first two weeks and higher account revenue retention over the term. Lifetime value was harder to pin down. Dave said the company had never gotten "a great handle" on it because of agency cycles and its consistent 90-day retention definition.

By the time of the interview in Q1 2017, The List had 85 employees, mostly in Atlanta, with teams in New York and across the country. It served between 18,000 and 25,000 users and 2,000 to 3,000 customer accounts. The recap said it was doing around a million dollars in monthly revenue, and Dave described growth as steady and compounding, with anything above 12% annually considered healthy for a self-funded business. He said the company had no plans to raise capital and that the business was not for sale, even at $120 million.