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From: "Anand Sanwal" <anand.sanwal@cb-insights.mail.intercom.io>
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Hi Hunter,

Below is our year-end 2014 Investor Update.

I know you’re wondering why you are getting our investor update.
Here’s why:

We’ve never raised outside financing from investors, and as a re
sult, you, as a customer, are one of our de facto investors.  Given
your role in our success, we wanted to provide an update on how we’
re doing and where we are going.

This email is broken down into 4 sections:



Key Metrics &amp; Highlights

Lowlights

What’s Next?

Asks





2014 Metrics &amp; Highlights

Overall, it has been a great year.  Going into 2015, the product, p
eople and processes we’ve put into place feel very solid and read
y to scale.





Annual Contract Value (ACV) – We ended 2013 with ACV (aka subscri
ption value) in the low 7-figures.  Although the year is not over, i
t looks like 2014 will end with ACV growth of nearly 200%. December is al
ready our biggest month ever.



Revenue diversity – In 2013, our top 5 clients represented 22% of
our revenues.  In 2014 YTD, our top 5 clients represent 8% of reven
ue.



Retention – Our retention rate stands at 86%. This is with underi
nvestment in customer success (see Lowlights below)



Pricing trend – Our average price per subscription has moved up s
ignificantly and is more than 10x our subscription rates when we initiall
y launched in February 2010. There’s been no discernible impact o
n churn.



Technology &amp; Data - Presently, machine learning accounts for 75% of o
ur data with the remaining 25% coming directly from investors. On the mac
hine learning front, we now crawl over 150,000 sources daily (regulatory
filings, press/blogs, company &amp; investor websites, trade/news publica
tions) to identify financing and exit events (and soon partnerships &amp;
customer events as well). Our data mining / machine learning technology
continues to be one of our primary advantages. In addition, as the number
of corporate M&amp;A groups using us has increased, we’re seeing
more data submitted directly from investors who have a natural self-inte
rest in ensuring their companies are in front of potential buyers. 



Content marketing – Research content, and by extension our newsle
tter, continues to be our major customer acquisition vehicle. Our newslet
ter grew from 27k in May 2014 to 50k subscribers and now grows by about 1
000 per week.  In late 2013/early 2014, we generated 1200-1500 free
trial signups per month organically (no paid acquisition). We now generat
e 3500-3800/month.



Client diversity - Corporate strategy/innovation and biz dev groups were
our biggest areas of growth in 2014. That said, growth was strong across
the board (VCs, corporate M&amp;A, investment banks, economic development
, universities, service providers, etc).  In terms of industry, we s
aw interest from financial services to oil &amp; gas to healthcare corpor
ations. While we’re limited in who we can disclose, some of the n
ew names on our client roster can be seen here.



Asia - Geographically, behind the US, Asia was our fastest growing market
.  We started the year with a growth spurt in Japan and concluded th
e year with significant momentum in China.  In general, we’r
e seeing the most traction in the US and Asia and slower growth in Europe
.  We're finding Asia customers aggressively focused on growth, and
this type of mindset fits well with usage of CBI.







Product development pace stays strong – We’ve migrated ne
w product capabilities every week this past year. Some of the year’
s highlights include: integration of company-specific Performance Metrics
, integration with LinkedIn and Google Apps for Work, enhanced Chrome Plu
gin and the Portfolio Momentum Dashboard to name just a few of the nearly
100+ enhancements we've made.



Pitch &amp; Demo day - We held our first ever hackathon where we took 3 d
ays off from core work to try new experimental ideas. This was a huge suc
cess as it got people from engineering, research, marketing and biz dev c
ollaborating (and competing) with one another. You’ll see so
me ideas from it unveiled soon including mobile alerts and CB Insights TV
. It also reinforced our focus on experimentation. Here is a great perspe
ctive on the demo day from one of our teammates, Michael, who talks about
its impact on our culture.





Lowlights

There were, of course, things that could have gone better.  We have
a plan to attack all of these in 2015 and will report on how we're doing
in a future update:





Infrastructure migration – We moved from Digital Ocean to Amazon
Web Services this year. Our migration didn’t go smoothly resultin
g in a fair amount of stress for the team and some uneven performance for
our customers. This won’t happen again.



Hired customer success late – Our retention has been fairly solid
(86%) somewhat fortuitously.  Because churn wasn’t a big pr
oblem, we underinvested in customer success efforts which are critical in
(1) educating customers about new capabilities and ensuring they are get
ting value from CBI and (2) helping us generate negative revenue churn th
rough successful land &amp; expand strategies.  



Leaky middle of SaaS funnel – While we’ve been very good
at generating leads, we’ve not done as well on conversion from le
ad to demo as we should have.  As a result, the middle of our conver
sion funnel has underperformed versus our expectations.



Suboptimal pricing – Our original pricing model severely limited
our revenue potential with large customers who’d pay the same pri
ce as an organization 100 times smaller. As a result, we’ve moved
to a Team License model to better align price with value and customer su
pport requirements.



Culture – I’d mistakenly thought that company culture jus
t happened. It became apparent as we have gotten bigger that it needs to
be actively cultivated if we want the company’s operating system
to work the way we want it to.  I came to this realization a bit lat
e and so have been focusing on this along with the team to get it right.
 My screwups on company culture and in other areas are detailed here
.





What’s next?

So where are we going in 2015? Here are some of our priorities:





Target key, large customer segments  – We have seen signific
ant traction with biz dev/sales organizations as well as corporate strate
gy teams this year.  We believe there is a significant untapped oppo
rtunity to serve them better. For those in business development, we belie
ve we can use data to help them target, nurture and prioritize opportunit
ies better. For those in corporate strategy, we believe there are aspects
of what management consultants do that we can do better taking a more pr
ogrammatic approach (using data and technology).



API - If we look out over the medium-term, we’re increasingly goi
ng to become an API company plugging into our customer’s internal
and external applications. The API has already been a fast-growing areas
for us in 2015, and we plan to to do a lot more with it so customers can
consume our data any way they wish.



Make product more valuable &gt;&gt; Increase ticket size – With s
ome of the product goals for the customer segments above, we believe we c
an significantly increase our average subscription to the $50k range.



Recruit, recruit, recruit - We are planning to nearly double headcount in
2015 to 50+ people by year-end. We need to build a better recruiting eng
ine.





Asks

Typical investor updates end with how you can help. I realize I may be o
verreaching here, but hey, why not? :)

Here are some areas we could use your help:





Referrals – We’ve closed many new subscriptions this year
because of existing customers telling their peers at other firms or form
er colleagues about us.  If you like what we are doing and we are ma
king your life easier or making you look good in front of customers/your
boss, we’d love any type of referrals or introductions. Feel free
to intro to me via email or call me directly at 212-292-3148 ext 1000.



Case studies – If you are willing to do a case study (1 page) abo
ut how you use CB Insights to do your job better, we’d love to he
ar from you. We can do all the work (write-up) and run by you for approva
l. Or if you prefer, even just a comment for our customer love page.



Know talent? – We’re hiring positions across engineering,
marketing, content and biz dev. If you know any smart folks who’
d like to work for a fast-growing NYC startup, we’d love to hear
from them. Here are all of our open jobs.



Thanks for reading and for your investment in CB Insights.

We’re fortunate to be a revenue-funded company because you had e
nough faith and belief in us to become a customer. Thank you so much for
that.

We look forward to sharing more updates on what’s next in the co
ming months.  If any questions, comments, or ideas, I’d love
to hear from you.

Thanks and happy holidays.  Have a wonderful year ahead.

Best,

Anand

212.292.3148 ext 1000

@asanwal