One thing that’s bugged me quite a bit over the years is looking for the revenues of a specific company, only to find wildly different amounts in Google search results.
Here’s a perfect example of what I mean:
This isn’t some cherry-picked example, but something I’ll notice for almost every single company I check the revenue of.
Now of course, I get it: When companies are private we’re reliant on government filings, private connections, interviews or just educated guesses to know how much money they’re generating.
That said, the swings here are crazy: That’s $1.6M to $29.7M in four search results. One of those numbers is 1,756% bigger than the other.
It’s especially frustrating when I know ZoomInfo is very inaccurate, and I believe Rocketreach has a deal to use their data (as you can see in the screenshot) so we always get multiple search results with the wrong information.
And of course, there are so many more sites sharing these differing revenue figures.
A Respectful Disclaimer
It’s very motivating to me to see such huge companies that have been built online, and I’m never going to hate on anyone for trying to create something great.
It’s also motivating to me that there are very large and successful companies in an industry I personally operate in (or wish to operate in). It’s inspiring.
I have absolutely nothing against Crunchbase and Zoominfo, and have actually been a Crunchbase customer a few times over the years.
I simply wanted to use this section to highlight where they’ll be better than us (far more companies) and where we want to be better (fresher, more accurate revenues for digital-first startups).
A reason Gaps exists, if you will.
Here’s One of Our Gaps in the Market: A Focus on Getting Accurate Revenues for Fewer Companies
One thing we’ll never be able to compete with Zoominfo (public company) and Crunchbase (estimated to have raised $100M) on is the size of their database.
With thousands of employees and many years as a headstart, that’s a given. But I also don’t want us to compete.
Our focus is solely on digital-first startups and companies that are on the path to generating most of their revenue from the internet.
We’ll cover Nerdwallet over Nokia, Monday.com over Maersk and Hubspot over Hewlett Packard.
So when the likes of Zoominfo have a page on ConvertKit:
I want to stand out by:
- Already knowing they’ve changed their name to Kit (and their domain, too)
- Not classifying them as a CRM
- Having more recent revenue figures
ConvertKit rebranded more than a month ago, and more than six months ago they reported surpassing $40M in ARR ($11M more than Zoominfo reports).
As I wrote above, I say this all as respectfully as possible, but I also want to make it clear what’s important to us. We want to have accurate numbers, and if they’re not accurate, we’ll be quick to update them.
As another example, we can see they report revenue of $1M-$5M per year for a company like Hyperping, an uptime monitoring SaaS.
Knowing they share their revenue public, we can see they’re on track to generate around €157,000 ($170,000 USD) in revenue for 2024.
With respect to Crunchbase, they aren’t as explicit in stating revenue numbers like Zoominfo or Rocketreach, thought they do make their estimations pretty clear.
I think it’s fair to assume that when you see a company in two lists promoting the same estimated revenue, that’s the revenue Crunchbase thinks the company is generating:
Our own data first had Proxify generating $22M per year, which was verified by the Financial Times, and then at €45M per year, verified by EU Startups who had the CEO speaking at their event.
While it’s obviously not their fault and not something we’re trying to change, they currently rank second in Google for “Proxify revenue”.
Similarly, you could go to a Crunchbase listing on a travel business like Mr & Mrs Smith and see it’s in two lists for generating less than $10M per year. In our travel report, we have them noted as generating around $162M per year.
I can give more examples, but I hope the point were trying to make is clear.
We have huge respect for anyone reporting on this topic, but we simply want to solve our own frustrations by staying on top of the revenue numbers for digital-first startups.
We’ll do our best to make that happen.
Thank you so much for being here!
