Gil Allouche is the Co-founder and CEO of Metadata, a company with patented technology that combines predictive scoring and programmatic advertising to deliver a predictable pipeline of opt-in lead-qualified leads for B2B enterprises. Metadata’s customers include Cisco, UserVoice, Mulesoft, Salesforce, Infoblox, and Aerospike. Gil is a software engineer turned data-driven growth marketer who founded the company to make demand generation easy for non-technical marketers.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [03:11] Gil Allouche talks about Metadata and what it does
- [07:08] How Gil funded Metadata in the startup phase
- [10:38] Firing Metadata’s biggest client
- [14:49] The evolution of Metadata’s product
- [19:31] The customer success stories
- [25:22] The ideal Metadata client profile
- [28:21] Lessons Gil learned from Israeli Defense Forces that he brings to running the company
In this episode…
As a B2B marketer, are you trying to free yourself from mundane tasks so you can focus on doing the work that matters the most? How can you do so and spend more time on the big things like strategy, creativity, and driving revenue?
After doing marketing for three B2B companies, Gil Allouche discovered he was dealing with too many manual and repetitive tasks. As a software engineer turned data-driven growth marketer, he started looking for ways to drive more revenue without getting bogged down by all the manual work. He shares his journey of building a platform to automate repetitive marketing tasks to give marketers time to focus on revenue-generating activities.
In this inspiring episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz welcomes Gil Allouche, Co-founder and CEO of Metadata, to discuss ways to automate your marketing. Gil talks about Metadata and what it does, the evolution of its product, customer success stories, and its ideal client profile.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
- “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on Inspired Insider
- “Pipedrive: Brain Surgery, Married, & Moved Company from Estonia to U.S. All at Once – with Urmas Purde [Inspiration]” on Inspired Insider
- “The Impact of Automation and Email Marketing with Tom Kulzer Founder of AWeber” on Inspired Insider
- “[SaaS Series] Tips To Thrive in the SaaS Space With Sujan Patel” on Inspired Insider
- “[Israel Business Series] The Unstoppable Startup : Mastering Israel’s Secret Rules of Chutzpah with Uri Adoni” on Inspired Insider
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:01
You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.
Jeremy Weisz 0:23
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I’ve Gil Allouche of metadata.io. Gil before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes, people should check out. This is kind of part of the SaaS genre. You could check out the one I did with the founder of Zapier, Wade Foster, that was interesting how they’ve grown their company. PipeDrive actually really interesting. I think when I interviewed them, Gil, they were 10,000 customers, I think they over 100,000 now. Founder of AWeber Thom was really good and Mailshake Sujan Patel talked about how they’re actually acquiring SaaS companies. And I think they right now this like 70,000 customers. And this is also part of the Israel leader series. Gil really cut his teeth as a software engineer at some companies in Israel, and so you could check out the ones he did with Luis Navone, one of the founding engineers at Mobileye, they were actually acquired by Intel for over $15 billion. And Uri Adoni, who’s a partner who is a partner of Jerusalem Venture Partners for 12 years and the author of The Unstoppable Startup check out that and other episodes on inspiredinsider.com and this episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast. So we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do strategy, accountability, and full easy button execution. We call ourselves the magic elves that make everything happen in the background. For me, Gil, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people and companies I most admire and share with the world where they’re working on. So you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions go to rise25.com. So Gil Allouche is founder and CEO of metadata.io. It’s an AI-autonomous marketing company. He started back in 2015. As I mentioned before, he’s a software engineer turn data-driven growth marketer, their company helps to make demand generation easy for non-technical marketers in a nutshell. But Metadata and he’s going to explain more is a patented technology that combines predictive scoring and programmatic advertising to deliver a predictable pipeline of opt in lead qualified leads for b2b enterprises. Now, some of their past customers include customers, people, you’ve heard of Cisco user voice, Salesforce, Aerospike, and many others. So Gil, thanks for joining me.
Gil Allouche 3:04
Great to be here. Thank you, and great list of companies that you’ve had on your podcast.
Jeremy Weisz 3:08
Talk about metadata.io, and what you do.
Gil Allouche 3:11
Yeah. So, I was working as a software engineer, as you mentioned, I worked in robotics, I worked in the financial services sector. I always wanted to touch the business side and not just build the product. And so when I moved to the US to do my MBA, I spent almost a decade running marketing for three b2b SaaS companies. And I found out quickly, that my skills, my technical skills, and my programming skills are very useful in the b2b performance marketing world, because at the end of the day, unlike B to C, where it’s more like Don Draper, madmen kind of world, in B2B, your job first and foremost, is to build predictable pipeline for your sales counterpart. It’s a very different game. If you do that, right, you have a seat at the table, if you don’t, and usually people can’t, they move on to their next gig after a year and a half. And so I was very successful in my job, thankfully, to those skills, and I found myself essentially programming my way through it, I found myself building a framework for experimentation. I didn’t have a knack for, oh, I’m gonna run this campaign or this tagline or this picture, I have no idea. This is not my interests, area of interest or area of genius. And so the way I was about to solve it is by running experimentation, I find experimentation to be scientifically proven method to find the best result. And so I quickly understood with my total addressable market, what is the universe of experiments I need to run and then I let the computer run it for me. It worked out in three companies, all three of them were required to the extent where I wanted to make myself a commodity. I found that there are many people like me, as small maybe group of software engineers don’t turn marketers And I had to choose what I want to be a consultant and build a consultancy around this or can actually get myself out of a job by building a technology that can do everything that I can do and better. And that’s essentially what I built. You, right? We started in 2015. And the first three years was just building IP, we build a little bit of a monster in b2b marketing, usually thought of smoke and mirrors a nice UI for not a lot of technology in there. But given that I’m an engineer, I fell into the classic trap, and I just started building this crazy monster. The tears motivate experimentation, AI heuristics, a nice database of one and a half billion business profiles. And we launched around 2019. And yeah, we grew quite significantly since then. And I, we’re also expanding, we started with demand generation, because as I mentioned, that is the most important thing, if you solve that in b2b, you build pipeline for sales, you have carte blanche to do to figure out everything else. If you don’t, then you don’t. And so we started there, we build this execution platform. We have five patterns we’re working on to others right now. But throughout the years, we started talking about our real vision, which is the marketing operating system for B2B marketers, we want to take over any type of operation that has technical, repetitive, mundane tasks and take over those technical, repetitive mundane tasks. So attribution is part of that. Best practices in this in the sense of playbook, so a marketer who may not know what to do? Get a template gets a playbook in the system, and personalization, you know, how do we bring the consumer experience into B2B? When you’re buying a dishwasher, you don’t have to read a white paper or talk to a sales before? So why do you have to do the same in a b2b setting? So we’re trying to really revolutionize the space with this technology? And that’s what we’re up to.
Jeremy Weisz 6:53
Gil, the early days funding the company? Did you fund that with investment? Did you fund it with customers? How’d you fund the initial days? Because it sounds like when you started it, and when you kind of released the version? There’s a couple of years in there.
Gil Allouche 7:08
Absolutely. So the answer is yes, all of the above. So when I just started, I basically, I started the consultancy, so 2015 was actually a consultancy, I was a consultant, and a performance marketing consultant. And in order to build this, I had to do a lot of the technical, repetitive, mundane tasks. And I wanted to have a larger sample set than three customers that I would have three businesses that I worked in. And so I had about 20 customers. And I use the money that I earned from marketing, which was quite significant, to go and invest it fully into a product. So actually programmed part of it myself, I had another developer called Ilya, I think he was in Poland, if I’m not mistaken. And he and I did pair programming for quite some time build the MVP. I then joined 500 startups and ALCHEMIST that gave us a little bit of funding, are we talking about 100k plus, and mostly taught me how to raise money. And then we raised our seed funding in 2016. In 2016, we raised I think, 1.4, if I’m not mistaken, and that gave us enough runway to build a product, and then start doing sales and really iterate to understand who are we selling to? Who should we not sell to the price? Sale cycles on so forth?
Jeremy Weisz 8:27
Curious, there’s companies that go the bootstrap route, and just fuel it through customer acquisition, there’s companies that raise money, what was the conscious decision why you went the raise money route? Because it seemed like you had a bunch of customers that you are acquiring from the consulting that you’re moving into the platform?
Gil Allouche 8:49
Totally, he’s a great question. And I went through this myself. So a few things. First one is I wanted to maintain competitive advantage. And if I was to build it with the revenues that are brought in from consulting, I would build it slower. It’ll take me a lot longer to build it. And my fear was that someone else will figure this out and start building this in parallel to me, which, as of today hasn’t happened. The second part. So I don’t know if that was the right assessment or not, but that actually never happened. The second part is, in which the main part is I did not want to get distracted, I noticed that my 20 customers liked my work, and wanted me to do more and more things that have nothing to do with performance marketing, which is all I wanted to focus on. They want me to do many other things, you know, like lead scoring and building campaigns and, and do like marketing Strategy. And I’m like, This is not what I’m here for. Also the kinds of customers that came even through word of mouth were so diverse. That was also not my interest. I wanted to specifically work with b2b tech companies b2b, it could be healthcare tech could be financial services, all kinds, but it should be complex sales process high ACV. So I was pretty clear about who I want to serve. And, and have the consultancy essentially was a distraction. That said, I admire companies who can bootstrap to be honest, there’s a lot of huge, huge benefits if you can do that. I was really set for it not with the first business, but who knows, maybe in the future, I think I may take I mean, that will be that. That could be cool.
Jeremy Weisz 10:24
Yeah, I was doing some research, Gil. And at one point, I love to fill in where this falls in the timeline. You talked about firing your biggest customer? Oh, yes. What happened there?
Gil Allouche 10:38
So here’s a great example for distraction. So we had a customer, I won’t mention the name, but we had a customer that I think the average deal for us was about 40k, from a customer back then a 30k. From not even 30k maybe this customer was paying us $230,000. So it was, I think something like 20% of our ARR something ridiculous, like maybe 15%. It was a fairly early, I think it was something around 2019. I want to say something like that. 2019, maybe middle of it that night didn’t be the end of 19. And that customer was we learned so much from that customer, I should say right, everything that you can complain about things, but everything happens for a reason. So that customer taught me a million things about myself about the business about distraction, about a lot about me revenue, distribution about risk. But one of the things that I realized is that at some point, we were not anymore metadata building this demand generation platform for b2b companies were metadata, building anything for one customer, and it was paying us a lot of money. And it came about that my employees started being burning out. They were mistreated sometimes by that customer didn’t have a lot of leverage. And I found myself making the wrong decision, one after the other. And so my revenue leader back then Olivier, actually, he shouldn’t get a lot of the credit here, because we had a conversation about it. And he was like, we should be letting them go. And I was like, yeah, I’ve been thinking about before. I was like, let’s do it, it’s gonna be shit, but we just went and you know, we went ahead and did it. It was terrible. But let me tell you, it took us I think, left…
Jeremy Weisz 12:33
It is a very tough decision. I mean, what in some ways, it’s an easy decision, in some ways is a tough decision. Right?
Gil Allouche 12:39
It was more tough than easy, because the revenue really dropped after that, and then logo that they could leverage for many other customers was gone. The cool thing had happened at that was surprised that it took us less than two quarters to recover that revenue, because they suddenly we had all these resources back, and we could do all these things. And so totally a great decision. And I learned a lot from it even earlier this week, we have a customer that is using a lot of resources, not very flexible, kind of isolating, and so on, so forth. And the team is kind of suffering from it. And they asked, like, should we renew at all costs? And I’m like, no, if this is not a good customer, it’s okay to say bye, you know, respectfully, part ways just like event, a customer parts away with a vendor, of course, he will try to fix it, you try to amend it on the fourth will do everything possible. But if it’s not a match, I think it’s healthy to part with.