Developing a distinctive marketing tone with CB Insights' Anand Sanwal
Anand Sanwal: Every decision we make about what product to build, what customer segment to go after, what marketing initiative to launch who to hire, it's always a bet. Right? And so with any bet it could go right, it could go wrong. And so if you can make three decisions in the time it takes your competitor to make one, even if you get one of those three wrong, you've still made double the number of good decisions as your competition.
VO: I'm, Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know: how much is strategy? How much is luck? And how do they win? This week, Anand Sanwal, co-founder and CEO of CB Insights, a business intelligence platform that enables organizations to make technology decisions faster and with more confidence via high quality data. Launched in 2010, CB Insights is on track to hit 100 million in ARR this year, with over 400 employees and thousands of clients. In this episode, we talk about CB Insights incredibly successful content strategy, and discuss why the ability to prioritize is essential to growth. Let's get into it.
Anand Sanwal: We started...I'd worked in venture and M&A, and the idea was to build essentially a deal's database tracking financings, exits, IPOs. That was what we started out to become. Today, we're not that company or product. We saw another opportunity over time. We were bootstrapped for a bunch of years. And so, saw a bigger opportunity over time.
Peep Laja: So how many years until you started to see the signs that they initial business model or hypothesis was not the optimal one? And how did you see that there's a better path?
Anand Sanwal: We were revenue funded, or I guess the more common term is bootstrapped, for the first six years. And the beauty of being bootstrapped is that your customers are your investors. So, we would speak to all of our customers, and what we were noticing was large enterprises were signing up for the platform, but they weren't from the VC or M&A teams. And so when we talked to them, we kind of were very frankly just asking them, "Hey, why did you sign up? Because we don't really understand what your team does." And these were folks from digital transformation or product or competitive intel strategy innovation teams, and what they told us was, "Hey, we think this data set that you have is a really interesting leading indicator one: of where the world is going. And then, two: these companies that you collect are our future partners and our future vendors. And so we use it to source partnerships and vendor relationships." And so that kind of unlocked this insight for us, that there was a much bigger market there of folks that we could help and so we studied that a bit and then we realized that actually technology decisions increasingly are moving out of IT. And so because of SAS and cloud low-code/ no-code APIs, this confluence of factors was actually driving technology decisions to functional heads, heads of business units. So we saw fragmentation on the buyer side and then on the sell side, the vendors, instead of it just being IBM, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, there were all of these tens of thousands of companies that were being created and so there was this unique opportunity to help this diffuse set of buyers find the vendors that could help them improve operations, drive revenue, whatever their goals might be.
Peep Laja: How big was the business when you pivoted to that direction?
Anand Sanwal: We were around 8 million ARR at that point. And, you know, I think pivot was-- like, we still have a very large contingent of investor M&A clients. But when you look at the market, if you take a large enterprise, there's one VC team, there's one M&A team, but they'll have multiple business units, multiple heads of functions, so when we looked at these enterprises, we thought, okay, there's a much bigger opportunity for us to help solve this problem for a lot more folks in the organization by expanding beyond that initial group. But yeah, we were 8 million and then we shifted our focus and that's when growth really took off.
Peep Laja: Was there also fear in the business of, well, what if we are abandoning our source of money here and chasing ghosts?
Anand Sanwal: I think there wasn't that fear just because when you are revenue funded, you have to be very cognizant of and very focused on chasing things that have a high probability of generating revenue. And so we were already ringing the register, for lack of a better term, on that type of client base. It's just that by talking to them, it crystallized that actually this is the bigger opportunity. So, it didn't feel very speculative. And then just doing some basic kind of addressable market analysis, when you looked at it, it was like, "Oh, there's actually just a lot more of that type of buyer out there." And so, it didn't feel risky at the time. There's plenty of other things as we built the company that felt risky, but that decision wasn't one of them.
VO: New products replace old products. New services will replace old services. New channels emerge, and old ones stop working as well. Your best fit customers change. New buyers will appear and the old ones will stop buying. This has happened to a lot of companies you know. You need to figure out when to switch focus. Disrupt yourself before others do. Cook up your next competitive advantage while milking your existing one. The age of sustainable competitive advantage is over.
It's all transient. The market will tell you where the most demand for your product is, you just need to listen. That's the lesson Jorge Rios, founder and CEO of Bridgefy, learned when their app that had been intended as a tool for messaging at concerts began to be used for communication during political conflicts and social unrest.
Jorge Rios: We didn't plan for it to be used the way that it's being used today. Our users were telling us through downloads, through messages on social media, through a lot of email, that they needed this for a different use case. They needed this for a different situation than we had originally envisioned. People still use it for events. There are a few thousand people using it at Coachella, people still use it at schools. Nevertheless, the main main usage right now is situations in which there is censorship, in which there is a political problem going on. And so, we kind of had to pivot, we didn't choose to pivot. And so we built the app and then we realized that it was being used for these other things. And then at the same time, we were building out the Bridgefy SDK, which is basically software that other companies can integrate into their own mobile apps and make their apps work without the internet. So imagine one day being able to use Twitter or Facebook Messenger or a Red Cross app when you don't have access to data. And so we started building that in a different way. We started building that with security, with privacy, with anonymity in mind, because we had been led to this pivot, our users told us that they wanted it.
Peep Laja: How were you acquiring customers up to that point? And how did that change?
Anand Sanwal: From the beginning, content has been the thing that we've relied on. So, back in the day, OkCupid, if you remember them, it was a dating site, they had this phenomenal blog that took dating data and broke it down in this very funny but data driven way. It was Nate silver who had this politically oriented blog again that took data and demystified politics. And so we said, well, we have this data set. We don't have the money of an S&P to take people to state dinners. So how do we get our name out there? And we just started publishing research content. And the only rule really was it has to have a graph. And so we would take data, generally on sort of what's happening in startups and venture land, and publish about that. We would then create reports. We'd send that out to media and say, "Hey, listen, we just published this thing about X topic, you know, X industry. And if you write about it, please link to us." That got some SEO juice going for us. It created some awareness, created a bit of social proof. But content was really how we grew. We started doing a newsletter which grew quite slowly. Now it's 850,000 people, but that's often people's first introduction to CB Insights, is our research and our newsletter.
Peep Laja: Has that changed over time or is content still number one?
Anand Sanwal: Yeah. Content is still probably the front door for us. But, we're 400 people now, you need to become what I'd call a full stack sales and marketing organization. So now we have a really great group of SDRs who are doing outbound. We do paid, we now have the full ensemble of activities that you'd expect of a company of our size, but we still lead with content. It's very much a give, give, give, then ask type of view that we have. So, we try to provide a lot of value either in the data or the research that we offer. And then I think we do it also with a voice that's a bit atypical in B2B. Part of the thing with having 850,000 people on the newsletter is you want them to open it up every time we send it. I get a lot of pings on, "Hey, how'd you get to 850,000?" If you look at our growth, it was 50 people to 70 people to like...I think it took us four years to get to a thousand. And then we changed the tone up and started doing some things, and then it started to grow. I think a lot of B2B marketing tends to be quite terrible, to be honest. So I think we've tried to develop an irreverent but authoritative voice that keeps people reading just cause it's not just like, "Hey, here's another piece of data and here's another piece of data." We try to keep it interesting.
VO: Most marketers lack creativity and guts, not data. We're all content producers now. Millions of marketing emails, cold sales pitches, new blog posts, podcast episodes, white papers, social media updates. Companies are doing content marketing automation and outbound sales way better than they did 10 years ago. That also means that to stand out today, what you produce needs to be way different or better than it had to be. Good examples are Harry Dry's marketing examples newsletter, or Growth.Design's comic book style case studies. Those come with different formats, they're useful, they're entertaining. And that level of content takes lots of hours to produce. And it's hard work. Yes. And that's good. Whenever an idea seems too hard or it takes too much work, be happy. Too hard is a decent first moat. All the easy things have already been done.
Peep Laja: At what point did you start looking around in the market also at the competition?
Anand Sanwal: I like to think that we're competitor aware, but customer obsessed. We raised a bit of money, but we still haven't touched any of that. So I think customers are definitely the investor in CB Insights. So, I think we try to maintain that focus, but I think there's a lot to learn from looking at what the competition does and being aware of them. I think of the market on sort of two axes. For tech economy information (is what I think we play in) there's players that focus on breadth of information. So, they tend to be shallow in terms of the depth of information they have but they cover lots of companies. And so there you'd have your traditional data players, like an S&P Capital IQ. Then there's players like Gartner who go deep, but they go deep on a very small set of tech companies, mostly because it's very human intelligence driven. Right? So they have analysts who talk to these companies. And so there's a scale problem that they run into. We figured out ways of engaging companies to actually get information from them, to get deep information about pricing and customers and why they're better than competition, but doing it in a technology driven way. So, I think we're at this intersection of, we cover lots of tech companies, like an S&P Capital IQ or any other data company. And then we have lots of deep information like a Gartner, but actually at a scale that's much larger. So yeah, kind of at the intersection of those two is where we sit.
Peep Laja: What's stopping any of those competitors, or a new emerging competitor, from coming and doing exactly what you're doing?
Anand Sanwal: The existing competitors, right? Somebody who is built on a human driven sort of intelligence gathering method, it's very hard for them to rearchitect themselves to think about using software and using technology to do something that they believe humans are uniquely capable of doing. So, I think for large companies it's often just inertia that makes it hard. And we're sort of counter positioned, I would say. Just from a business model perspective it'd be hard for them to do it. I think a fledgling company, sure. I think that'd be great. I think it pushes us if somebody came along. You know the thing with the data business, which is what our core is, you have to have an extremely high pain tolerance to do data well, right? I see lots of companies that want to sprinkle machine learning on top of an unstructured information set and hope to sell data; that just doesn't work. If you want to charge a lot of money for data, you need to invest a lot in technology, a lot in manual QA to make sure that data's good. We're just used to pain, I guess, for lack of a better term. We spent a lot of time building the systems to generate and create and synthesize and analyze data. There's nothing that somebody else who had that pain tolerance couldn't do. I'd say we've got a 12 year head start on them in many regards so I think it'd be hard to do, but yeah. I tend not to think too much about that. We spend a lot of time thinking about how do we just go faster than everybody else, even as we get bigger and I think that's probably one of our cultural tenants that I think has served as quite well.
Peep Laja: It's interesting, the phrase pain tolerance. Is that something that you figured out along the way? Was that something that you believed from the get go?
Anand Sanwal: Yeah. I've always believed that. I love the phrase like, "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." I think sometimes there's just no getting around just grinding it out. Right? And I think the team we've built believes in that ethos too. Sometimes you just have to do things in unscalable ways to get to the metric, or to get to the result that you want. As you get bigger, I think it actually becomes easier to get seduced by over-engineering things and you actually spend more time doing that. What it tends to mask is a lack of understanding of the problem. Right? So, why build some ornate cathedral of technology when you could just do it in an Excel spreadsheet really quickly? I've never really understood why folks do that, but I think we've always maintained that grind it out kind of ethos within the company and I think it served us quite well to be relentlessly resourceful when it comes to thinking about how to approach problems.
VO: Have high standards for the type of work you produce and for what you accept from others. Work a little harder than others are willing to. As Anand said, tolerate a little more pain. This kind of commitment to excellence is what creates the type of culture you want to be in and what gets you and your company places your competitors won't reach. You don't get to poor customer support by not caring once. You don't get to a mediocre blog by posting a "meh" article once. You don't become an average performer by not trying hard that one time. Your actions become habits. Excellence is not a one-time thing you do. It's a habit. The only way to get to excellence is to do mediocre work first. Nobody gets it right from the get go, so don't let fear hold you back. Experience and right guidance will get you there. And this is where excellent management comes in. The best managers ask for the best from their team and get it.
Peep Laja: You mentioned being faster than the competition. Is that a priority for you, and what are you specifically doing to make the boat go faster?
Anand Sanwal: I think as an insurgent company, which is how we think of ourselves, it's the number one weapon that we have, right? Because we're always making decisions in the face of uncertainty. And so every decision we make about what product to build, what customer segment to go after, what marketing initiative to launch, who to hire...it's always a bet. Right? And so, with any bet, it could go right. It could go wrong. And so if you can make three decisions, and hopefully they're good, in the time it takes your competitor to make one...even if you get one of those three wrong, you've still made double the number of good decisions as your competition. So that's sort of the thinking that we have. In terms of how we go quickly, a lot of it starts with just hiring people Who have good instincts on how to make good decisions. And so that comes down to ruthless prioritization, right? It's easy to get distracted by shiny objects or new things that come up and so having ruthless focus about the essential few versus the trivial many. So if you figure that out, that's really helpful. And then from there, having really high decision quality and decision hygiene around, why did we make this call? And so I think the things we try to avoid are group think-- like, decisions should not be democratically made, right? They should be made based on the merit of the idea and the merit of the data information that you bring. They shouldn't be made because, "Hey, hot company X in our space is doing this and hence we should do that." So, trying to think from a first principles perspective once you've figured out the priorities helps us get to the right way to approach and solve a problem. And then hopefully doing that quickly. The term we use internally a lot is napkin math, right? Like, how do we just sketch it out quickly and say, "Okay, if this goes right, how big is the reward?" And so sometimes even if the thing goes remarkably well, you look at it and you're like, oh, it's going to only generate that. And then you're like, it's not even worth doing. And so let's just abandon that and move on to the next thing. So yeah, I think it starts with right prioritization, then really good people that are great at making decisions. If we do those two things well, a lot tends to fall into place.
VO: Knowing what to focus on to move the needle is massive. It's the difference between minimal growth and 50% growth. You could tinker with something on your website, but if it doesn't matter, the ROI on that is zero. The lever might be something else. Prioritize identifying what actually matters. It's too easy to get caught in the whirlwind. Have an ambitious vision for what you're building. This helps you prioritize and do the good work without chasing the next shiny thing. Building moats takes time, but be deliberate about which ones you're building. Here's Steve Jobs addressing Apple employees about the importance of focus and saying "no" to ideas that would not help them.
Steve Jobs: I know some of you spent a lot of time working on stuff that we put a bullet in the head of. I apologize. I feel your pain. But Apple suffered for several years from lousy engineering management. I have to say it. And there were people that were going off in 18 different directions, doing arguably interesting things in each one of them. Good engineers, lousy management. And what happened was you look at the farm that's been created with all these different animals going in different directions and it doesn't add up. The total is less than the sum of the parts. And so we had to decide what are the fundamental directions we're going in and what makes sense and what doesn't. And there were a bunch of things that didn't. And microcosmically they might've made sense. Macrocosmically they made no sense. And you know, the hardest thing is when you think about focusing, right? You think, well, focusing is about saying, "yes." No. Focusing is about saying, "no."
Peep Laja: So strategy is where to play, meaning which companies you're going after and how to win. Your theory of advantage. How clear are you on those two things, and the rest of your team?
Anand Sanwal: We think that the moat that we can build is a data moat. Right? And so we started with this machine learning derived data that we were collecting from government documents, press releases, et cetera. What happened over time-- and it's actually interesting because about six years ago, we reached out to companies and said, "Hey, give us your data. Tell us about your products. Tell us about your pricing, about your competition." And it was radio silence, right? They didn't know who we were. Right. And so we recently went back to them last year, basically with the same request. And what was interesting was the response has been totally different, mostly because we actually now appeal to their enlightened self-interest, which is CB Insights is a little bit more of a known quantity. We have a newsletter that they know is influential with buyers of technology, investors of technology, acquirers of technology. And so in the last 11 months, 10,000 companies have given us really off the grid information, right? Stuff you couldn't crawl if you wanted to. And so, what's interesting is now company X will say, "Hey, here's why we're better than company Y and Z." And company Y and Z will now see that when they come on their profile and they'll say, "Oh, company X is saying this about us. We need to now do an analyst briefing as well." And so this interesting flywheel has begun where companies are now giving us information because it helps them get their name out there, helps them get in front of buyers, investors, et cetera. It's everybody from seed stage to your Decacorns. And publicly traded companies now are submitting information too. But yeah, that was something we tried to do six years ago and people were kind of, in a nice way, just told us to kind of "F off" just with their silence. And now I think we bring something to the table. And so they are a lot more receptive to it.
VO: What has will get more. If you rank for a bunch of stuff on Google, you will start ranking for even more stuff as content writers looking for articles to cite will find you in link to your content. Whoever manages to get big first in a category, will keep getting bigger. If you look at the companies in any category, they are mostly at the top because they managed to get big faster than others. This is the law of increasing returns, a phenomenon first identified by professor Brian Arthur.
Brian Arthur: It became very clear to me that there is a phenomenon going on in technology that you didn't see so much in the rest of the economy. The sort of firms I was looking at, if one of them got ahead out of half a dozen it could get further ahead. You couldn't predict which one would get ahead. It would start to get enough advantage that it could dominate the market and get still further ahead. It would lock in. It will have so much cost advantage or, now we'd say so much user base, that it would be hard to dislodge. Microsoft got ahead with certain contracts very early in the game. They locked in a lot of the personal software in the 1980s. Similarly, other systems came along since. There were search engines, like Alta Vista, as well as Google and others. Google gets ahead and began to dominate that market and now has a pretty well locked in. We now call it network effects, companies like that set up a network of users. You want to be with the dominant network.
Peep Laja: Tell me about your marketing strategy and competing on brand. Is there any underlying philosophy that guides your bets on what you guys are doing?
Anand Sanwal: We come back to content quite a bit. Right? Because I think it's the thing that's gotten us quite far. We're lucky to have, or lucky might not be the right word, but we've built over time this newsletter so we have this direct line to our customers. I don't really love the owned audience versus rented audience term because we actually don't own this audience. Every time we send the newsletter, they have the right to unsubscribe. And so we have to constantly serve them and get them to renew their subscription, even though it's free. But content is where we tend to lead. I think from a brand positioning perspective, and I'd say we still have work to do here, the thing we look at is how to be different, not just better. Right? In a better battle, the advantage accrues to the incumbent or it accrues to the cheaper player, right? In a battle of different, well, there's nobody else like you. So when I think of that breadth versus depth of information piece, I feel like we're uniquely positioned, actually nobody else could say they have this thing because we're just different. I think if we got into a better battle versus Gartner...they're a $25 billion market cap company with an obscene amount of resources. That's not a fight that you want to pick.
Peep Laja: How conscious are you with your founder persona doing marketing? Because I've seen you for years posting hate mail that you get, this is like how you promote the newsletter, is with the funny hate you get. So, is that strategic? How are you going about it?
Anand Sanwal: We used to send the newsletter as CB Insights. We AB test a lot of things. And then we sent it as from me, Anand Sanwal, just as an experiment. And the open rates were higher, so we said, okay, interesting. Let's go test that. It continued to be higher. I think at the core, just because you sell to B2B doesn't mean that people are personalityless or have left their interests of other types like when they logged into Zoom this morning, they just became this automaton that's boring. And so I think keeping that personality, right? The same person who is making million dollar purchases of technology is also looking at cat memes and is also surfing Reddit and often within the same hour. So one, we try to write the newsletter as if I was writing to my one friend. Right? And I think what we want to be is the irreverent, authoritative, smart friend that you have. And so I think when you think about the audience as one person, it actually helps quite a bit. I use Twitter and LinkedIn candidly as, I guess the best analogy is what stand-ups do, they go to open mic nights on like a Tuesday and they try out material and then whatever lands they go on their Saturday show. My Saturday show is the CB Insights newsletter, and LinkedIn and Twitter are just where I try stuff out. And most of it bombs. But, if it doesn't get engagement on those channels, it's not going in the newsletter. And if it does well there, it goes in the newsletter. But it's just having a voice, right? B2B is just really-- it's beautiful for us because B2B marketing is generally god awful. So it's actually much easier to stand out. I think if we were like a consumer news company or something, I can't even imagine the level of competition there. But in B2B, everybody's trying to talk like a grown up in their marketing and use a lot of words to say nothing. So it's actually like a beautiful place for us to be competing just because the competition is generally quite terrible.
Peep Laja: So you've been at it for 12-plus years and picked up a few business lessons along the way. If you had to pass on some advice to fellow founders, what would be the advice you would give?
Anand Sanwal: I think my biggest mistakes in building the company probably came down to culture, clarity, and communication. When we were 10 people, or 20 people, and in a really cramped, crappy office, culture was just...you like lived in it right? You didn't have to tell anybody about the culture, the environment told you the culture, right? It's like, we're scrappy. We have no money. I'm writing your paychecks by hand and I'm asking you not to cash them until Tuesday because there's not enough money in the bank. And so, you knew the culture by that. As we got bigger, I wasn't as intentional about culture as I should have been. So, culture happens or you can shape it, right? And then, what works at 50 doesn't work at 100, doesn't work at 200. So, I'd say like we've gotten a lot better there, but I think articulating our values, ensuring they flow through everything we do, who we hire, who we promote, who you reward, who we part ways with was something we haven't been as good with historically. I think we're now way, way better. Communication, probably the other big one. Again, a lot of these aren't problems at the 25 person stage, but as we've gotten bigger, you just can't over-communicate enough. And now that we're a much more distributed company, making sure that we are being really deliberate about over-communicating. And so sometimes, you know, talking about connecting buyers and sellers on the platform. To me, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know that." But, I'm not the audience, right? The audience is the rest of the team and all these folks that have been at the organization, often less than six months. So, I think figuring out methods of communicating with the team. Our team has done a really good job, I think, of introducing more all hands. So, we do an all hands every six weeks. I now write an internal newsletter to the company, and then I record it as an internal podcast for the org, since people like to consume information in different ways, that tries to break down accomplishments and what's going well, how the market's looking, et cetera. So that's culture, communication, and then clarity. And I've been very guilty of this. Like, make the main thing, the main thing. You know, in the early days we had the newsletter, we should have just doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the newsletter. But, you know, folks were like, "Oh, maybe we should do video, or we should do this, or we should do that." Every time we've not focused, I think it's been to our detriment, right? Like instead of trying to do twelve different things well, "Hey, this is working. Let's just ring as much juice out of that until it's dead. And then we'll figure out what's next." Right? Same with the product. We got distracted by trying to do too many things in product. So, having clarity on here's who we serve, here's what they need. And let us do that. And even if some other idea comes up, if it's not in that lane, like just quickly say no to it. And so, those would be the three that I think, if I could have some do-overs on, I would certainly take.
VO: So, what are the three key strategies that spelled success for CB Insights? One, they identified opportunities for growth into bigger markets by staying in constant contact with their customers.
Anand Sanwal: The beauty of being bootstrapped is that your customers are your investors. So we would speak to all of our customers and that unlocked this insight for us, that there's a much bigger market. There are folks that we could help.
VO: Two, they tried to be as militant as possible about prioritizing projects with the greatest potential for growth and passing on everything else.
Anand Sanwal: It's easy to get distracted by shiny objects or new things that come up. So having ruthless focus about the essential few versus the trivial many. So if you figure that out, that's really helpful.
VO: Three, they created a highly successful content engine thanks to original research and a unique tone of voice.
Anand Sanwal: We try to provide a lot of value, either in the data or the research that we offer. And then I think we do it also with a voice that's a bit atypical in B2B. Part of the thing with having 850,000 people on the newsletter is you want them to open it up every time we send it.
VO: One last takeaway from Anand.
Anand Sanwal: I like to think that we're competitor aware, but customer obsessed. So, we raised a bit of money, but we still haven't touched any of that. So I think customers are definitely the investor in CB Insights. So I think we try to maintain that focus.
VO: And that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.