So we decided to do something atypical and publish a list of the types of things we’d like to acquire and why. It offers some visibility into our playbook so we were a bit reticent to do this for fear of competitors copying us. We then read a great quote by Jeff Bezos which changed our mind.
“If we can keep our competitors focused on us while we stay focused on the customer, ultimately we’ll turn out all right.”
So with that bit of angst/preamble out of the way, here are the types of things we’re looking to acquire as of June 2016. We will add to this over time.
Acquisition interest #1 – Vertical media / niche B2B media
When we boil down what has worked for us, it comes down to two things:
- We have an amazing research team that develops content that generates a lot of interest in CB Insights
- That research gets people to try out an amazing product (sign up for a free trial)
Recently, we’ve been going from a more general research strategy to one that is more industry or vertical specific. The results have been amazing for us. We started with insurance tech, then launched auto tech and have several others in the works.
Each of these verticals has their own newsletters with thousands of subscribers that, in very short order, include senior executives from all the big players in both industries. And they are helping us grow quickly.
But building these verticals up takes time.
As a result, we are interested in getting there quicker by acquiring vertical media sites which are focused on a very specific industry or topic and whose readership is largely B2B. For vertical media sites, we are looking for a few things:
- The site should be covering technology or emerging industry trends within the space
- A team with deep domain expertise and intense passion for the space
- A highly engaged readership. The readership need not be big (although that is of course nice), but the content/research must be great.
If this resembles you, we’d love to hear from you.
Of course, a fair question you should probably ask yourself is “Why would CB Insights be a good home for us?”
Here is what we bring to the table.
A better way to monetize – Most vertical media are reliant on advertising or events revenue as their primary sources of revenue. Of course, many are also doing native advertising and paid reports. We offer a better way to monetize a B2B audience through subscriptions to CB Insights. These subscriptions start at $20k and increasingly are in the six-figures per annum with extremely high annual retention. Our only “ads” are what can be thought of as ‘house ads’, i.e. they are suggestions to sign up for the CB Insights platform. You’ll see examples of these house ads to the right of this post or at the bottom which encourage you to sign up for a free trial. An example is below.
The reality is that there is massive gap between how we can monetize 10,000 or 100,000 readers on thoughtful content/research with our subscriptions than what traditional ad units can offer. This arbitrage is big and offers you a much better way to monetize.
The ability to focus on your content – Because we can monetize content better, it will allow you to focus on what you do best – great research and writing, increasing domain knowledge, building relationships in the industry, etc. You’ll never think about Facebook’s algorithm again.
Our growth team is phenomenal at finding new ways to get increased exposure on content via newsletters, webinars, podcasts, reports, whitepapers and more which we can provide.
In addition, we have data that can open up new types of content opportunities. And with that data comes a team of data scientists, analysts and graphic designers who can help you find new interesting content angles and ways to present that data.
Exposure & influence at highest level – Through the CB Insights newsletter with 167,000+ subscribers (and which is growing by 1300 per week), we reach:
- SVP level+ executives at the entire global 5000 including almost 100 publicly traded company CEOs
- Partners at every VC firm worth knowing
- Journalists at all the leading newspapers and blogs (our press page is testament to this)
- Executive of tomorrow’s big companies (yes – those much talked about unicorns)
In other words, we can get your writing in front of people who won’t just read it but who are in a position to use it to make major strategic decisions.
The screenshot below from our press page highlights the number of press mentions our data has received in the world’s most respected publications.
Acquisition interest #2 – Vertical newsletters
While newsletters might often go hand & glove with vertical media categories outlined in #1, we do know of a few newsletter-only companies so wanted to call this out separately. The criteria we look for and the reasons a vertical newsletter would benefit under the CB Insights umbrella are largely the same as for vertical media / niche B2B detailed above.
We will look for a highly engaged readership in these cases and prioritize seniority of readership as much as size. In other words, a newsletter that reaches Chief Strategy Officers and Heads of Strategy with just a few thousand subscribers could be as interesting as a more general tech / industry trend conference which reaches 100k.
Acquisition interest #3 – Proprietary data
We are building software that uses data to predict technology trends. Our customers use insights into tech trends to do a few things:
- Predict the next market they should enter
- Predict the industries of tomorrow
- Predict their next M&A target
- Predict competitor strategy and likely moves
- Predict their next investment
- Predict the S&P 500 of tomorrow
If you have data that you believe is instructive in understanding technology trends, we’d love to talk. A few important things that we look at when evaluating datasets.
- Ownership / Chain of custody – You must own the data. Data which is scraped / crawled is fine but it must not be obtained in any way that is in violation of anyone else.
- “Supply chain risk” – If the dataset relies on a 3rd party, that is generally less interesting to us. For example, data that derives insights extracted from Twitter or Instagram or Facebook as examples would be less interesting to us as the rules to accessing those platforms can, do and will change.
- Hard to get is good – If the data obtained requires digging into PDFs or is extracted from obscure documents or is submitted by organizations directly, we love that. If it’s a dataset available online which is dirty and which you’ve cleaned, this is a good thing.
- Applicability – We are interested in datasets that are broadly useful in predicting technology trends and helping with any of the use cases above as well as datasets that are more vertically specific, i.e. data for healthcare or retail or financial services as examples.
Again, a fair question you should probably ask yourself is “Why would CB Insights be a good home for us?”
Here is what we bring to the table.
- A software platform to plug your data into – It is straightforward for us to integrate new datasets into CB Insights. The platform was created to be able to do this easily.
- A better way to monetize – We’re a premium provider in the market because of the quality of our product and our data. We can very effectively monetize great data.
- A research and dataviz team to promote the data – Our ability to tell stories with the data is a distinctive capability of CB Insights. Of course, our newsletter serves as a bullhorn to create awareness of new data as well.
Acquisition interest #4 – Teams
If the idea of using data and probability to predict technology trends is of interest to you, we are interested in hiring teams of 2-8 people with engineering, machine learning and data science backgrounds.
That’s our wishlist for now. As it evolves/changes, we’ll update this post.
If you are part of a company that fits the bill or if you know a company or team that would be a great fit, we’d love to chat.