The fastest way to lose a build-it-yourself team is to sell them something they could build. CustomerOS is exactly that: Jonty co-founded it with Matt, who patented mobile identification and sold fraud detection to most of the big US banks. They had every reason to build their own visitor identification, and the skill to do it. Instead, they run Radar. We spoke to Jonty to find out how a company that trusts almost no one’s data ended up trusting ours.
So before we get into the Snitcher of it all — what’s CustomerOS actually built to do?
We turn every hidden touchpoint into first-party intent, score leads against your ICP in real time and set the next best action to close. Your reps focus only on high-fit, high-intent prospects. Where Snitcher fits in is it augments our lead flow by uncovering hidden deals I’d otherwise miss, most importantly the long-tail stuff — smaller companies off the beaten track who actually have intent.
“We don’t care that Stripe or Salesforce is on your website, we care that you find the right person looking to buy at the right time.”
You’ve got strong feelings about outbound. Where does that come from?
Because you pollute your pipeline, and pollution of channels is real now that you can automate pretty much anything. LinkedIn’s gone to shit. Email was gone a year or two ago. Having intent data means you can be really precise. So instead of spending tens of thousands a month on a sales automation platform, you can spend it on salespeople who actually do smart things with the data.
“If you’re sending thousands of emails, you’re doing it wrong.”
You talk a lot about not wasting your reps’ time. What does that actually look like day to day?
A lot of the companies we work with know at least 50% of their sales time is wasted chasing leads that will never convert, because they just don’t know who they are until they engage. Then you’ve got the sunk-cost thing: I’ve already spent two hours on the email and the second call, even though the data says “they will never buy.” I’d rather kill that early and let you focus twice as much time on the ones that will convert now.
Addressing the elephant in the room — you were fully planning to build this yourself. What pulled you off that?
We were making a build-versus-buy decision, because this is core. We were going to buy the data and build the lookup table ourselves, since getting the data is the hardest part. Everyone we looked at before Snitcher, we had a lot of issues with, and that’s what drove us towards building.
“Snitcher was the first partner we felt comfortable with to actually provide that data.”
What were the other providers getting wrong?
There’s lots of incorrect and stale data, mostly from the US-centric providers — and when you’re talking about intent, freshness really matters. The other one for us was GDPR compliance. A lot of American companies get worried about GDPR in what is a smaller market for them, so they just shut it off rather than going after it.
You skipped our tracker entirely and went server-side. Talk us through that decision.
We just used the IP-to-company lookup on our server side. Not having to embed it in our tracker is good, because we want to do our own data processing, our own caching and build out our own database. Especially when you’re prototyping, you don’t want random bits of code you don’t know what they do, so first-party data is really important to us.
“We don’t like being a product of what we’re using.”
You clearly don’t buy the whole person-level tracking thing. Why not?
We don’t believe in user-level data, because the users on websites usually aren’t the buyers. In the larger companies we sell to, the sale happens at a higher level. And if someone’s in a WeWork they’re sharing an IP with a hundred different companies, so it’s completely useless.
You were global-first from day one — was coverage outside the US a dealbreaker?
We’re YC-backed, so we naturally sell to a lot of US tech companies. The US is bread and butter for this kind of software. Europe’s a harder sales cycle, but if you can make it work in Europe you can usually make it work anywhere. We’ve always been global-first and we dogfood our own software, so European and ultimately global coverage is important.
Okay, give me the goods — what’s Radar actually giving you?
Radar’s found us ~10,000 ICP-fit companies in six months. After our own processing, roughly one in 20 is ready to buy right now and that filtering is the most valuable. Anyone can give you more names but the point is killing the ones that’ll never convert so my reps only touch the accounts that close.
“Being able to take that many Snitcher leads and filter it down to actually ready to buy, that’s the whole point.”
Last one — anything else you want to snitch on?
The best-performing companies will move back to a first-party model. Everyone focused on SEO, then everyone started buying data from 6sense and the rest, but I think it swings back to owning your data and your own customer experience. Every company should teach their customers how to build what they have, and let people make their own decision. First-party data is really important to us. We’re not trying to run some dark marketplace selling competitors’ data to one another.
We’re a team that builds fraud systems for banks. We looked at building this ourselves and then didn’t. That should tell you something.
