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Data-Driven Marketing and Sales with Alex MacCaw of Clearbit

Episode #015

Alex MacCaw started Clearbit.com as a solo founder, and he's since grown it to millions of dollars in annual profit. Learn the marketing and sales techniques he's used to reach over 1000 customers.

  1. 1

    My Main Takeaways:

    • MacCaw didn't do a CS degree but taught himself how to code

    • MacCaw is a ruby developer

    • He dropped out of school to focus on his consulting full time

    • Do a bunch of open-source work to build up your resume

    • MacCaw says that he believes everyone can get to the point that they can create their own lifestyle business

    • Don't be afraid to charge money. Get the experience with charging money

    • Before jumping into businesses, understand the margins, make sure that you find the desirable.

    • If you can't find a problem to work on, work for a successful company and identify the problems. Unless you've worked in these companies for a few years, it's unlikely that you've found valuable problems to solve.

    • Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner with money, and then you will be able to identify lucrative problems to solve. Not just in the shoes of a consumer because the average consumer's budget is far smaller than a successful business owner's budget.

    • At the start, new ideas will come from educated guesses, and be tested by MVP's. Afterwards, you can build new products straight from customer feedback.

    • MacCaw sold his successful lifestyle business to work on something more ambitious as he felt he'd have more energy in his 20s and 30s, so might as well go for it,

    • MacCaw built up a following of 15k followers by the time point he started looking for customers to sell his data company services to. He built up the following knowing that it may come in handy if one day he wanted to start his own business.

    • If all you want to do build a lifestyle company, you can probably get away with word-of-mouth in San Francisco

    • MacCaw defines marketing is: Establishing yourself as thought leader in your niche, so people have you in mind when they decide to make a buying decision.

    • MacCaw raised $3.5 million from investors in the valley

    • The first emploeyes MacCaw hired were jack-of-all-trades, and he was looking for people who already started businesses before

    • Be a solo founder, then bring people in to work with you. This works especially if you are building a lifestyle company

    • Do qualification programmatically, do drip campaigns programmatically (scale your sales and marketing methods programmatically)

    • MacCaw has a system that determines the location of incoming traffic and associates it with the company it came from, then sends a personalied email to the a key decision maker in that company as a way of "warmed-up cold emails"

    • MacCaw raised money because he wanted to make a big company. He says he likely could have bootstrapped it and it may have taken a few more years, but raising money helped him grow a big (non-lifestyle) buisness, quicker.

    • If you want to build a lifestyle business, you likely shouldn't be getting advice from a venture capitalist.

    • MacCaw says that people don't realise how possible it is to create their own business. So he encourages people to start their own business. A year from now you could own a lifestyle business that puts money in the bank and you don't need to work a 9-5

    • MacCaw says that the thing with B2B companies, is that if you stick around for a while, it will be hard for you NOT to make money. All just because you were giving really value, and stuck with it.

  2. 1

    This is the most interesting and useful interview I've read yet.