After spending 5 months on FindChampions, finding strong Co-Founders and getting into YC, I pivoted from FindChampions. I could not build an exciting enough long term vision for myself.
The company does continue under a different name and raised $5m from Lightspeed, Hubspot and YC.
Apart from former customers who are open to buying again, the industry has really failed on intent signals. 6Sense, Bombora, Apollo Intent are all bogus…ie extremely low quality data.
The fundamental flaw is that intent signals can only be gathered from online data - web-clicks, downloads, IP tracking etc.
But highest quality data is offline.
Internal company chatter. Imagine if we could look into a company’s Slack, to find team discussions talking about new tech to try or evaluate. GOLD.
That is why sales people have jobs - they take prospects out to dinner, show up on-site and do all the gymnastics to get offline data.
This happened to most lead-gen and prospecting tool. (e.g Outreach).
These tools give early-adopters an advantage (e.g. Outreach let AEs send thousands of email every day). But then everyone adopts it (Outreach grew FAST!). And then everything becomes spam (too many emails being sent/received).
This cycle took 10 years - economy was good, new innovative products were being launched in all sectors, people were flush with money to spend. Outreach, Gong, Salesloft benefitted.
The current/next cycle for these types of products, I believe, will be much shorter.
Companies will adopt novel lead-gen really fast (like FindChampions), and the advantage will erode quickly (2-5 years). Customers also have less patience for spam now. Gmail/Outlook are also revising their email T&Cs.