Our company is called ExactBuyer. We’re focused on building corporate and contact intelligence across the global marketplace.
We’re pretty much focused worldwide. We analyze the history of every single company – SMB, mid-market, and enterprise – and all the strategic embeds of that company over their lifecycle.
We basically want to build a timeline for every company, in order to understand what decisions they make at different points in their company and how that affects their growth over time.
We have a wide variety of customers across recruiting, sales, and marketing. We have folks who just use our APIs [both our company and contact APIs] to build specific workflows to build it into their existing products, or to build it into their go-to-market and revenue workflows.
We have a couple of different personas, typically, on the sales and marketing side, it will be mostly growth teams.
So, teams who are ingesting data from the API might want to do some lead scoring on the fly, they might want to do things like understanding more details about their customers, in order to segment better. They can personalize lifecycle emails more effectively, by having more information – the list goes on and on. But, those are the types of things trending within the CRM and sales and marketing world.
Public web data is what our business is predicated on. There are 32-and-a-half million small and medium-sized businesses in the United States. And they represent about 99% of all the companies in the country.
More of those companies are coming online now than ever before, especially during COVID, where if you weren’t online, you couldn’t survive as a small business.
Typically, in the mid-2010s, you would find that 80-85% of companies that were coming online had a website. Now, what we’re seeing is that they don’t only have a website, but they have maybe three or four or five different social identities on the web.
They might be on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter or LinkedIn, and now, it’s not enough to just look at someone’s website, because they’re investing a lot of their resources across all these other channels, and oftentimes, a lot more resources than they are on their own website. And knowing that information is incredibly valuable because if you know where they’re investing their time, effort, and money, you can make sure that you match them with the person who can help maximize their efforts on that specific channel. And so, that’s the job that we’re trying to help solve.
I think, using web data collection platforms saves a lot of time where it’s super easy for us to just add that flag into whatever calls we’re already making. And then knowing that our service provider handles all of the super complex logic for making sure that we’re successful, is really valuable.
Plus making sure that they do all the retries on our behalf to make sure that they get the response. That is really valuable, especially because when we’re running bulk jobs, analyzing tens of millions of companies on a monthly basis, that’s going to be incredibly time-consuming for us.
Using a data collection platform has saved us at least the work of one or two full-time developers at this point. And as we scale, then that number is obviously going to scale.
I actually used Bright Data at previous companies. We settled on Bright Data mostly because we did use it previously and we’ve had success with it in the past.
Additionally, I was seeing that there’s a lot of improvements being made with the Web Scraper IDE, and the Web Unlocker – which has really improved our capabilities to extract more data – and a couple of different new products that Bright Data was launching, and I thought this was a good fit to continue working with to provide the best insights to our customers.
The Web Scraper IDE is super valuable, and Bright Data is really responsive to adding attributes to the product. We’ve worked with the teams a couple of times to really get more information and extract more information or details that we might need through the Web Scraper IDEs.
Also, just understanding that Bright Data is already approaching some of the problems on the social side that we wanted to tackle, as they are doing with the Bright Initiative.
It’s been really good. I think the team has been really receptive on the Web Scraper IDE side adding new attributes to work with us to figure out if we don’t have a Web Scraper IDE – how do we add one? How do we do so in a timely manner? While working on time-sensitive projects that we had, and still getting things delivered to folks. So, that’s been really great.
I think Bright Data is a foundational resource. You need to use a tool like Bright Data if you are doing data collection, data analysis, or market intelligence at scale.
We’re definitely on a one-way trajectory, and I think there’s going to be more and more businesses incorporating the use of data collection in the near future. It’s going to accelerate even more than it already has in the last few years.
With regards to using data collection tools, it’s sort of a necessity. For the long-term, we’re going to be consuming more and more data over time. And you not only need to get data once for a company, but you need to replicate those results every month, sometimes every week, or every day, depending on what you’re doing.
Therefore, the scale at which people are going to do data acquisition is going to grow immensely. And I think that Bright Data is obviously well-positioned to grow along with everyone else’s needs.