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RocketReach Blog

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Customer Spotlight: How SellPersonal is making it easier for sales teams to do their jobs.

"Sometimes you just have to take a leap, and build your wings on the way down." - Kobi, Yamada, "What do you do with an idea?"

Last year we built a pretty lightweight API, anticipating that our technology would be useful to other systems. Little did we know how far reaching its applications would be.  

When you use the RocketReach API you are using the same underlying stack (platform) as the one that powers our web UI, as well as our (ever so powerful) RocketReach Chrome Extension. We really built it for ourselves, or systems like ours - in the sales intelligence space.

And, while a majority of our API users are other Sales Intelligence systems, every few weeks we’ll see the API being used to build systems and solve problems we could have never anticipated.

For example, a leading payroll company uses the RocketReach API for customer analytics, and a european university uses it for academic research into career progression. We’re constantly amazed by the versatility and wide reaching applications of our API.

The latest one of note, is SellPersonal, who has incorporated our API into their slack bot.

SellPersonal helps you “build a scalable sales process for your sales team”. Per Christien Louviere, SellPersonal is “on a mission to solve one of the major challenges sales teams face”... with thousands of sales technologies on the market, how can revenue generators sift through the noise and find the best tools to create a targeted and bullet proof sales pipeline?

Choosing the wrong tools could slow a team down, make them work 2x as hard for the results they need, and create a huge hole in their pockets. Christien and his team at SellPersonal set out to solve that challenge by helping revenue generators build a targeted sales pipeline faster, using proven sales workflows. They can analyze an existing Sales Pipeline, and turn it into a sales flywheel that is scalable, predictable, efficient and successful.

Basically, SellPersonal wants to make it easier for sales teams to do their jobs. Well, we’re onboard with that!

SellPersonal’s Slack Bot, powered by the powerful RocketReach API, is a vital part of their sales stack. It allows customers to quickly discover and share their prospects within a Slack Chat, saving them time, and increasing productivity. And using the slackbot couldn’t be easier.

To learn more about the awesome work the folks at SellPersonal are doing, reach out to them directly at [email protected].

And if you’re interested in adding a bit of RocketReach magic to your own product/service, check out our RocketReach API or email us at [email protected] anytime!

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4 ways to get thousands of customers without spending a dime on Google or Facebook ads.

So you’ve got an awesome product/service, a great team, all the product-market fit you can hope for...now all you need are customers! 

You could try Google and Facebook ads. They can be awesome, there is no denying it. If your customers actively search for targetable keywords, Google is an unparalleled source of new customers and leads. Facebook is often more expensive than Google, but users on Facebook are highly engaged and Facebook’s ad targeting is extremely powerful. 

The major issue with these channels is often cost, and its detrimental effect on margins. 

We can all agree that your customer acquisition cost (CAC) should be no higher than your customer Lifetime Value (LTV). However, Google ‘‘LTV:CAC ratio” and you’ll come upon 1001 opinions on what that specific ratio should be. 

While we won’t delve into this here, most would agree that your CAC, relative to LTV,  should be as low as possible. Plus, CAC isn’t ad spend alone - you have to pay your sales people and account managers. Your ad spend will constitute only a portion of your overall CAC. How much you can afford to spend will depend upon your unique circumstance, but if you are spending more than 33% of your ARR (or specifically - revenue per customer for year 1), you are doing something wrong.  

Let’s look at a typical example:

Say you are paying $3 per click on Facebook ads 

Your conversion rate from click to signed-up user is 10%

Your conversion rate from signed-up user to paid user is 10% 

Your ad spend per conversion ~ $300

You still haven’t paid your sales people, engineers etc. 

Your lifetime value needs to be at-least $1000 or more.  

When RocketReach first started, we did not have a LTV of $1000, and spending more money on Facebook or Google ads would have been the most expedient way of killing the company. We did try some other things however that worked great on our shoestring budget, and what follows are some tips and tricks that we learnt along the way:

1. Seek Out Partnerships: Find influencers who compliment your offering and can get your product/service in front of potential customers. Partners might include companies offering a complimentary product/service, industry experts, or online reviewers. Reach out to them and see if they would be willing to do a joint webinar, podcast, promotion or blog post with you, or for you.

When RocketReach was first launched we partnered with a bunch of incubators- 500 Startups (https://500.co/), Startup Health (https://www.startuphealth.com/ ), Berkeley Launch (http://launch.berkeley.edu/) etc.

E.g. RocketReach was offered to every 500 Startups portfolio company at a special introductory rate. This was a pivotal moment for the company. 28% of new signups in 2 months came from this 1 partnership, adding many amazingly useful and influential customers to our user base as well. (Read more about that here later.)

2. Encourage Early Adopters: Your early adopters can make or break your company. In the first few months, we spoke to maybe 100 different people who’d tried RocketReach. We fixed bugs, improved our product, and built something that they were excited about. Our early adopters became our evangelists, and referred us to other customers and partners. 

An early adopter of RocketReach ‘hunted’ our product on Product Hunt. That day we reached the #4 Product of the Day spot, and within hours thousands of new users were signing up to give us a try. We had so many new users that day that our site actually went down for a short time due to the sudden burst of new traffic!

3. Speak Up: Join relevant communities such as Reddit or Quora and engage with your user community. As you post answers, articles, comments, it will increase your sites ranking on google, and all that traffic will lead to more users. This is a long game, however, and your returns are proportional to your input. This may be frustrating at first, but if you carve out an hour a day to do this, you will start seeing the traffic build up over time.  Remember thoughtful  and frequent participation is key and can go a long way. Valuable participation in relevant communities has also helped us address the common question of, "is RocketReach legit?”.

In our first 2 months, 75% of our users came from Disqus. We were quite active on Sales and marketing blogs and that drove traffic back to our site. Of almost 800 clicks during that time frame, we saw over 200 conversions. For us, the equivalent acquisition cost via Google ads would have been around  $4,000. 

4. (Valuable) Content Is Still King: Another way to help with SEO is to make sure your site has content of value to your potential customers. Do you offer information, tips, case studies or relevant advice that they would find helpful? The better the content, the better you position yourself as an industry leader, and a go-to resource for information, ultimately driving repeat traffic, reputation, referrals, and new business! 

By sharing articles on social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter our newly launched blog has already started to gain traction with 35% of blog traffic coming from social sources alone. On ‘Quindar’ you will find articles that cover helpful topics like this one, growth hacks, advice learned from (lots of) experience, best practices on how to use RocketReach, and much more. 

We’ve mastered trial and error and are happy to share what we have learned with you (hopefully sparing you some of the same mistakes in the meantime). If there is a topic you’d like to learn more about please send us an email at [email protected] and we are happy to consider it for a future article.

Need email addresses for influencers and potential partners? Check out RocketReach.co and sign up for a Free account today.

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If this blog had theme music

Read more about them here

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How to use RocketReach to land your next job

Let’s face it, job hunting can be a drag. You’re spending hours scouring the web and applying to what seems like 1000s of jobs, only to feel like your resume is going into a black hole.

And if you’re like most people, you’re likely not hearing anything back beyond the standard “thank you for applying” email - no interview, no follow-up, no feedback about why you weren’t selected… just silence.

Between trying to make it past Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), networking, and constantly updating your resume, job hunting can feel like a full time job - an extremely discouraging and frustrating full time job. Unless of course, you’ve discovered the job-search hacks that’ll help you land a job faster.

Here’s a recipe for job hunting that’ll help you land your next gig in record speed:

Fine-tune Your Resume with JobScan. The JobScan app analyzes your resume based on the job description of the position you’re applying to. It’ll make sure your resume includes the keywords that’ll help your resume stand out.

Find Hiring Managers with LinkedIn. Once you’ve found a job you want to apply to, do some research on LinkedIn to find the hiring manager for that position.

Grab Their Email Fast. Now it’s time to set yourself apart from the rest of the applicants! While everyone else is relying solely on their online application, you’re going to reach out directly to the hiring manager. Here’s the deal, ATS keeps most resumes from making it to the desk of a recruiter. By reaching out directly, you can drastically increase your visibility and get your resume to the top of the stack. While on the hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile page, click the RocketReach chrome extension and RocketReach will return all the verified emails and social links found for that contact.

Craft a Standout Email and Reach Out. Now that you know who you’re reaching out to, it’s time to craft the perfect email. Not sure what to say? Check out this pretty awesome email template from the Muse. Pro Tip: You can also use RocketReach to find the Hiring Manager’s social links, so that you can get his/her attention through a well-crafted tweet.

Track your emails. Use an email tracking app to keep track of when your emails are delivered and read. You can also create a simple Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet to keep track of and schedule your follow-ups.

Once you’ve aced your interview, don’t forget to send “thank you” emails. You can use RocketReach to find the email addresses of your interviewers.

So if you’re ready to kick your job search into high gear, sign up for a free RocketReach account now to get started.

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Is RocketReach Legit?

If you’ve ever Googled, “Is RocketReach” you’d see a whole slew of autocomplete search terms like:

Is RocketReach legit?

Is RocketReach safe?

Is RocketReach legal?

Is RocketReach free?

Is RocketReach reliable?

I wonder if anyone’s googled “is RocketReach awesome?”- which BTW it is! It absolutely is 😃, but more on that later. Let’s address these points first.

Is RocketReach legit?

RocketReach now has over 1 Million registered users, and as we speak, RocketReach is trusted by sales people and recruiters in some of the largest companies on the planet - Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon to name a few. Google and Amazon have over 400 employees each who trust and use RocketReach everyday. That’s about as legit as it gets. And users are switching over from more expensive alternatives like data.com, zoominfo and hoover by the droves. Unlike our entrenched competitors, our data is generated and checked in real time, and costs as little as $49/month. Whereas, the moment you sign up for those other services you’ll be out $40,000 even before you know whether the data is worth anything. And many times - it isn’t.

Is RocketReach safe?

We take privacy seriously. When you create an account on our site, your information is never shared with anyone else - period. We encrypt all sensitive data. We only serve pages over HTTPS. We never collect or save your credit card information, and all of your personally identifiable information is housed inside external payment processors (Braintree, Stripe, and Paypal) so we NEVER have access to them.

Is RocketReach legal?

RocketReach upholds strict ethical standards and is legally compliant. We mine profile information using a combination of a web crawler (similar to Google) and data mining algorithms such as entity recognition, email prediction etc. In essence, the information provided by our site is already publicly accessible on the internet. If our crawlers can find it, so can Google, Bing etc. Email addresses listed on our site are either found via entity search or predicted. For more information on how we mine information, check out our help center article.

Is RocketReach free?

A vast majority of our users use RocketReach for free. If you are a casual user, who only needs to reach out to a few people a month, you can essentially use RocketReach for free forever. It’s only if your usage exceeds certain thresholds that you’ll need to upgrade. RocketReach also doesn’t restrict certain features to paid plans only, so even as a free user you can still take advantage of our Chrome Extension, Bulk Lookups, Advanced Search, API and CRM integrations free. You are only limited by the number of lookup credits you have available in your account. 

Is RocketReach reliable?

Our site is up 99% of the time, and Accuracy is 87% on average. Though there will always be some emails that are not available due to reasons beyond our control, you will never use a lookup credit for lookups that come back ‘email not found’ or only partially verified.

In short, RocketReach works hard to bring industry best practices under one roof making prospecting quick and easy.

But don’t just take our word for it, give it a try today and see for yourself why over 1 Million users trust RocketReach.

Our team is always happy to answer any questions that you have, or address your concerns anytime. Just email us at [email protected]. 

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Become a master prospector in 2 mins or less

We spoke with some of our customers about the challenges they had with their old way of prospecting, and they threw out terms like...

“Time consuming” “Tedious” “Pain in the…”

Well let’s just say, they found it frustrating.  

If this sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place. The team at RocketReach works hard to make it as easy as possible for you to reach the people most important to you, and your business.

Features like Advanced Search and our Chrome Extension will take your prospecting and lead-gen flow to the next level. Some have even called them genius.

So, if you’re ready to be a prospecting ninja, check out our YouTube channel for tutorials on our most powerful features. Most of our videos are around 2 minutes or less, so it’s as easy to learn as it is to use. And remember to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss the new features and additional tips that we'll be posting soon.

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How we grew from zero to one million users, without raising a single dollar in Venture Capital.

It’s been a few weeks since we reached a major milestone -  RocketReach now has well over One Million registered users. For a 2 year old SAAS company started by a bunch of “developers”, we’re pretty stoked about how far we’ve come.

It’s been a crazy ride so far. We did lots of things wrong, but we also got a few things right (sometimes even intentionally).

Ode to the Stapler  

It’s late 2015 - Andrew & I have been working in a job which was, at best unmotivating, at worst … much worse. We’d spent 2 years building a product which had been “in stealth”, for essentially, a majority of those 2 years. The product team was operating in a vacuum, without any real world feedback. Product direction was determined primarily on management whim, which wavered pretty frequently.

We knew we wanted to get out of there. Andrew & I spent our lunches brainstorming ideas. There were many ideas - RocketReach wasn’t one of them. We hadn’t really settled on anything yet, but staying on the job was getting unbearably painful. One fine morning... I rage quit. In retrospect, that wasn’t very smart. 

I was a 36 year old immigrant, without much of a financial safety net, a mortgage, a 3 year old child, and barely a few months into my green card. We also had no concrete product idea, no direction.  Those initial months, where we were unfunded, had no product, no traction, and burning through our meager savings, was probably the most stressful period of my life. I never knew you could be in physical pain from stress. This would have been much easier to do when we were childless, mortgage-less, energetic and in our 20s. But as a legal immigrant, that wasn’t possible (more about that in a future blog post).

At some point we decided we’d start a company called “Panelly” to help product teams recruit user research panels. We even had a cool domain - pn.ly. The plan was to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product), get traction, and raise money - simple right? VC capital was very appealing. It would take the financial pressure off, and allow us to hire faster and build faster. 

Flight of a kakapo

Things, quite unsurprisingly, did not go according to plan. We had some pilot customers, including some prominent ones like UserTesting.com. 6 months in though, and we’d only made about $15 in revenue. It was time to be honest, and pivot. This, despite how much people talk about it, is always difficult. These conversations can be contentious, and testing, and painful. But the alternative isn’t ever any better. 

It would take us many more months of user feedback and testing to build a product that people would actually use. By the time we got any meaningful traction on our product, it’d been about 12-15 months or so.

This meant that for a majority of this period, we operated without any real capital. There were many things we did not have. No swanky office, no free lunches. Most of the time, we worked from an illy cafe down the street. The upside was that it also forced us to be very frugal and very creative. We couldn’t afford to spend 100s of 1000s of dollars on Facebook or Google ads. We couldn’t hire designers. It was 3 of us, and we had to figure out a way to do everything from development, to design, testing, marketing, sales and customer support.

Too cheap to pay $75

As panelly was failing, and we were trying to figure out our next move, we started talking to our existing customers, to potential customers, and pretty much anyone nice enough to talk to us. We also had to figure out a way to test our ideas, without spending any real cash. 

What we came up with was a pretty simple hack.

We’d put up a simple landing page with two things: A value proposition, and a “sign up” button. E.g. “Face yoga on demand, for $12/month subscription - sign up below”. When they signed up, they’d be told that they were in a waiting list, and they would receive an invite when the product was ready. This way we didn’t have to build an actual product - just a landing page. 

We needed to attract users to validate these product ideas. This was much harder. We could buy some traffic on google, but again - no money. However, there was a loophole. Google gives you $75 in credits for each new google account. So in theory, if you create 100 accounts, you have $7500 of ad spend on google for free. This is something which I will neither confirm nor deny, that we ever did 😉

And that’s how it started. One of the products we experimented with was called RocketReach. 

The google ads were worded:

RocketReach - a look-alike modeling tool that will help you turn your first 5 customers into your next 100 customers.

This product beat out all the other ideas. We had a winner...and also - we had a ready list of potential leads that we could convert to paying customers. That was the genesis of what RocketReach is today. It evolved over time and we realized that most of our users cared much more about contact discovery rather than the look-alike models.

Ask and you shall receive

Around Feb 2016, we decided to focus more on the contact discovery piece. We still had no money. We tried a bunch of tactics/hacks to get traffic. A few of them worked. 

There were 3 key things that happened next which laid the foundation for the amazing growth which would follow soon after.

Quora was an awesome place for us to find customers when we first started out. One of our employees started answering questions on Quora, which started driving traffic to our site, which slowly turned into paid users.  

One of those new users was part of 500 Startups. We ended up doing a partnership with 500 Startups, where RocketReach was offered to every 500 Startups portfolio company. This was a pivotal moment as we signed up some amazingly useful and influential customers.

One of those customers, unbeknownst to us, “hunted” us on Product Hunt. We got a bunch of upvotes from there, and became a top 10 Product of the day. (Which was awesome!!) But, unfortunately, we were simply not prepared for that kind of traffic, and our site actually went down for a few hours.

That day we signed up around 20K users, and never looked back.

And we’re not slowing down anytime soon! With exciting new features on the horizon you won’t want to miss what comes next for RocketReach! So stay tuned for more updates, best practices, and tricks of the trade that got us to where we are today. Till next time.

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Welcome to our new RocketReach.co Blog - Quindar!

You may be asking yourself, why Quindar? Well, if you aren’t familiar with the term - let us explain. 

Quindar Tones were high pitched beeps that you'd hear on voice communications during space missions such as Apollo 11.

#Nerdery ahead: There were two beeps - one called an “intro” (@2575 Hz)  and a lower pitched “outro” (@2475 Hz). And as the name suggests, the beeps would be used to mark the beginning and end of a transmission. Voice Communications during Apollo functioned somewhat like a super-long-distance walkie talkie, except instead of saying “hello” and “over and out”, you’d send the “intro” and “outro” beeps.

You can even hear them on the Apollo 11 moonwalk video, as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin hoist the U.S flag on the moon:

That’s pretty cool, but where does RocketReach come in to play here?

Well, Amit’s first engineering job was with a company called InMarsat which makes satellites used for voice and data communications. If you've ever made a phone call from a cruise ship, that call went through an InMarSat Satellite.

That experience is behind the genesis of the name RocketReach, and also behind our pretty unhealthy obsession with early space exploration tech.

So Quindar, we think, is a pretty good name for a RocketReach.co blog - our channel to communicate with the world. 

Space talk aside, we will also be posting lots of helpful tips and tricks for prospecting smarter and faster, so stay tuned- there’s much more to come!

PS: We think the fact that the Apollo team was able to put humans on the moon, at a time when computers, less powerful than your phone would take up an entire room, is a truly remarkable achievement. For information on supporting efforts to restore the historic Houston Space Center (as in “Houston we have a problem”) to it’s former glory, please visit this link.

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Coming Soon..

to a 2-dimensional earth near you …