Author: Roq X (Page 1 of 2)

Visiting Local Brevery Loo-Blah-Nah!🍻

October 25, 2024 / Roq X

Since we’re a default remote first company majority of us work most of the time from home.

That is why we have monthly informal “meetups” as we call them so that we get some much needed face time 😅.

This month we’ve visited local brevery that gets its name from Slovenia’s capital Ljubljana, pronounced “Loo-Blah-Nah” 🐉.

We’ve learned how the beer gets made and a fact or two.

One of the two facts we’ve learned: India Pale Ale beer (IPA) got its name from the British colonial era. When Brits were taking their Pale Ale beer to India it very often turned bad due to long travels. So they’ve learned to add more hops and alcohol to it to last the long journey on the ships. And that is why it’s called IPA.

How the beer gets made:

1. Malting: Barley is soaked, germinated, and dried to produce malt. Slovenia does not produce it locally so the visited brevery imports it from Germany.

2. Mashing: Malt is mixed with hot water, converting starches to sugars, forming wort. It was explained to us this is basically “sweet water”.

3. Boiling: Wort is boiled, and hops are added for bitterness and aroma.

4. Fermentation: Yeast is added to the cooled wort, converting sugars to alcohol and CO₂. Each of the steps till now takes place in a different stainless steel barrels. No air should get in these barrels otherwise the beer gets bad.

Interesting fact #2: **Per the 500 galons (2000 liters)** of beer being made some
1,000 pounds (500kg) of Barley is needed and **only some 10 pounds (5kg) of hops.**

5. Conditioning: Beer is aged to develop flavors. In our case the guy said it takes some 3-4 weeks for the beer to develop.

As the beer develops our evening also developed quite nicely with every new type of beer we tried along the evening 😅. Cheers! 🍻

Partnering up with Clay :)

September 3, 2024 / Roq X

As PredictLeads partnered up with clay.com it seemed only natural to then go work with clay in the literal sense.

As much as we try it’s really challenging for all of us to look at the camera at the same time 😀

Jokes aside, it was an interesting coincidence though not planned to happen :). Eva booked us for a nice evening of working with clay (literally).

When working with clay to create a finished ceramic product, two primary steps are needed when heating / firing the clay:

There were also two types of “tables” we were working at. This was the “Pottery Mill”.

Bisque Firing (First Firing): The purpose is to transform the raw clay into a hard ceramic state. This firing removes moisture from the clay and drives out organic materials. The temperature for bisque firing in our case was 950°C (1,750°F).
Glaze Firing (Second Firing): After bisque firing, the piece is coated with glaze, a glass-like coating that provides a smooth, glossy finish. The glazed piece is then subjected to a second firing, known as glaze firing. This firing melts the glaze and forms a glassy, non-porous surface on the ceramic piece. In our case Glaze firing temperature was 1,250°C (2,345°F).

We’re still waiting for the clay shop to go through these two steps and we can’t wait to see what we produced :).

Cheers, PredictLeads

Hiring intent data during pandemic

May 28, 2020 / Roq X

PredictLeads took the data for 5000 US based companies from different sectors and aggregated hiring intent data for each of the sectors. Our goal was to review how hiring intent correlates with pandemic consequences.

US states started pandemic lockdowns on March 19th and by mid April 90% of US population were under some form of lockdown.

Below we share three industries and how they were affected by Covid19 during this period and after.

For the IT industry our data shows downward trajectory of active job openings started on March 25th. On this day 20,000 job openings were slashed from the IT industry.

They were further decreased by nearly 130,000 job openings till May 28th 2020.

March

US unemployment rate rose from 3.8% to 4.5% in March. During last week of March 47,000 jobs were cut per PredictLeads data. In March the total number of job openings in the IT industry decreased by 6.8%.

April

US unemployment further rose in April to a record high of 14.4% during which 70,000 additional job openings were delisted in the IT industry alone – a staggering 12.8% decrease.

May

Data shows 51,000 job openings were removed in May (1st-28th). If there would be linear correlation between job listings and unemployment rate, this would suggest unemployment rate will further increase to ~21% by the end of Month of May. Up till now this means a 10.1% decrease in listed job openings.

Information Technology – eg. software & services, computer hardware, IT services …

Similar trends are seen for the Consumer Discretionary and Industrials industries as seen from below two graphs.

Consumer Discretionary – non essential goods eg. leisure products, entertainment, sporting, restaurants …

Industrials – finished products that can be used for construction and manufacturing industry

Covid19 definitely has a big impact on Hiring Intent.

If you’d like to get more detailed data on anything Hiring related please check out our APIs at https://docs.predictleads.com or contact us at founders@predictleads.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Roq

Introducing Key Customer Data

April 16, 2020 / Roq X

PredictLeads now provides four main datasets. News Events, Hiring Intent, Technologies and Key Customer data.

Key Customer data is our newest addition. As the name implies it provides key customer data for a given company. Eg. who are their customers, partners, sponsors, vendors, investors etc. We’re able to get this data by searching through news articles, blogs, case-studies pages, testimonials, “Our customer” sections and more.

We go as far as to use image recognition to connect a logo on a given website to a domain name it belongs to.

Key Customer data is served via clean APIs, with same structure as our other three endpoints. We follow best practices from jsonapi.org.

Besides using APIs data can also be provided via Flat Files or Webhooks.

If you’re interested in checking it out simply sign up here: https://predictleads.com/sign_up and you’ll find an API key in the settings.

Documentation for the Key Customer data can be found here: https://predictleads.com/docs/#connections

For more details please reach out to founders@predictleads.com and we’ll be happy to help!

Cheers, Roq

Native Salesforce App

August 31, 2019 / Roq X

We’re excited to share we’ve started working on a much requested native Salesforce app and plan to launch it on Saleforce AppExchange in November 2019.

It will include enriching your target accounts with Job Openings data, News Events data, Technologies data and Business Connections (partners, clients, vendors …).

It will include functionality our Discovery endpoint provides. It will allow you to perform searches like:

show me all the companies that use Slack and have signed Inc. 5000 clients in the past month
show companies that are hiring for Marketing and are already working with one of our clients
show companies that launched mobile apps and received funding in the past year
show companies that will expand offices to Tampa, Florida in 2020

Above questions are just some of the questions we received from prospects who wanted to use our data but since they did not have engineers available who would integrate with our API endpoints the conversations stopped there.

As questions pilled up over the months and years we now decided it is finally time to start integrating with platforms like Salesforce AppExchange. Soon other platforms will follow.

If you’re interested in knowing more or are wondering if we can help you answer your business questions please contact us at founders@predictleads.com.

Finding Top performing Companies

October 1, 2018 / Roq X

We’re working with many data driven teams – VCs, Corporate VCs, sales professionals and innovation departments.

Our aim is to provide data that helps them:

enrich known companies -> to enable scoring and prioritization.
discover up and coming challengers -> to not miss out on new market trends.

For the #1: goal is to find data that is indicative of a company performance. Currently we track and provide data on Hiring Intent, Events from news, Business Connections and Technographics. Each dataset covers a wide variety of data points and is available via clean APIs – https://predictleads.com/docs/enrich.

For the #2: goal is to find new up and coming challengers. These are companies that we’re seeing for the first time having expansion signals. For example hiring via Hacker News, expanding Offices, receiving Awards, signing new high value clients … and many more. You can find them under Discover endpoints: https://predictleads.com/docs/#discover.

We’re working extensively on increasing our match rates and having historic capabilities. Currently we track over 17 million companies and have performance data from 2015 onwards.

Often our clients try to find indicators of how well a company will be doing in the future. This is no easy task. One needs to first have accurate and complete data and secondly enough historic data points to make any kind of projections. The game is especially patience ridden for data driven VCs and CVCs. Startups easily need 5+ years to become successful and/or make an exit. So this is the timeframe data driven companies are bound to – to validate their prediction models. Which is quite a long wait time to train the models and iterate. Now one could train the models on past company trajectories and past exists. But often not all data points are available to do that.

So it is a long haul game we’re playing here. And the name of the game is patience. But since history has proved time and again that subjects with more knowledge, data and insight perform better than those with less we’re confident the results will be worth the efforts we’re putting in now.

If you’re interested into how we could provide value to your organization please contact us via one of the contact forms here https://predictleads.com.

Looking forward! Roq

PredictLeads Top 10 teams StartupBootcamp

PredictLeads selected as one of top 10 Teams to participate in StartupBootcamp 18′ program!

January 29, 2018 / Roq X

PredictLeads joins Startupbootcamp Commerce, the leading global startup accelerator based in Netherlands. We will take part in its 2018 program in Amsterdam along with 9 other international startups.

We were first selected as one of the top twenty companies out of 600+ that applied. We attended Final Startupbootcamp Selection Days on 16th and 17th of January. Went through a vigorous screening and evaluation process in front of over a hundred mentors and partners at Startupbootcamp and were finally selected as one of the top 10 teams!

PredictLeads will now go through an intense 3-month acceleration program of workshops, one-to-one sessions and events in Amsterdam, starting off on 19th of February and ending with the Demo Day in front of hundreds of startup and tech influencers, mentors, partners, and investors on 17th of May 2018. They will be mentored by a network of entrepreneurs, top executives, and investors, and will have access to leading commerce companies in the Netherlands to validate and scale further. We will receive free office space, €15K seed money and support from Startupbootcamp partners, such as Amazon, Cisco, Ahold Delhaize, PwC, America Today and Rabobank, as well as over €500.000 in partners service and access to a network of Angels and VCs internationally for potential further investment opportunities.

We’re really excited to be given this opportunity. During the 3 month program our main goal is to use immense SBC business network to find new clients. We’ll be focusing on B2B companies that leverage Company Intelligence data in their products or services. We want to establish ourselves as the market leader in providing actionable Company Intelligence data to other vendors. Let’s do this!

About Startupbootcamp

Founded in 2010, Startupbootcamp is an award-winning global network of industry-focused accelerator programs. With 20+ programs in Europe, Asia, North & South America, MENA & Africa, selected startups gain access to the most relevant mentors, partners, and investors in their industry.

Leveraging Hiring Intent

October 11, 2017 / Roq X

When companies are hiring for categories such as Marketing, Sales, Financing … companies are normally in good shape to invest in new solutions that would aid them in these areas. So if you’re trying to find a segment of companies that would fit your product? Don’t overlook the hiring intent data!

Hiring intent indicates first off if a company is in good shape and in buying mode. If they are hiring for many positions this is a good sign they are in position to spend money. Specific job titles / job categories indicate what kind of area they are currently investing in. Are they hiring for SDRs, HR managers, iOS developers, Support agents … ? Each of these indicate they might be in need of a new HR system, TalkDesk software, offshore dev, Sales enablement software, Marketing analytics system …

Inside a job description one can also find expertise companies are searching for like: Content Marketing, Lead Nurturing, eCommerce Dev, …

Job openings also include information about what kind of techniques a company is exercising. For example on could find keywords such as: Kanban, Scrum, Metrics Driven, Customer Success, Social Media, Sales Prospecting … and can help identify more forward thinking prospects that are more open to new solutions.

Inevitably job openings also include location. So if you would analyze a large company with many subsidiaries one could identify which regions they are currently investing in. Do they have 27 jobs open for an office in Hong Kong and 1 position open in France? Are they hiring for 12 SDRs in Utah and have 5 jobs open in New York -> this can help focus your efforts to promote your solution to the right subsidiary.

One of the good indicators is also job type. Is company offering Full-time, Part-time job or a Remote job possibility? For example your solution provides outsourced blog writing. Companies searching for part-time blog writers with a possibility of a remote work should prove to be a great fit. Thanks to job opening data you are able to figure this out and spend more time with highly qualified prospects.

You can combine hiring intent with other technographic data ie.: find companies using SalesForce, HubSpot, Tableau, AutoCad … & at the same time hiring for Marketing. These combinations can prove to be really powerful & help you pin point the target segment with laser like accuracy.

Happy selling!

Cheers, Roq

Segment leads via different data sets

February 7, 2017 / Roq X

We’re proud to announce our newly developed system for uncovering and segmenting leads. You can take advantage of the following segments to create perfectly tailored lead lists.

Segment by companies that are:

hiring for specific talent (dev, marketing, sales, …)
use specific products: Saleforce, Oracle, SAP …
Companies that promote different forward-thinking methodologies: agile development, data driven development, are into content marketing, customer success, prospecting …
experienced specific events recently: launched products, received funding, expanded offices, invested into assets, developed new apps, relocated headquarters, made leadership changes…
led by key contacts you want to target (CTO, CMO, co-founders …)

Lead list segmentation

Why is all this important? Because now you can generate much more personalised emails and unearth prospects through lead activities that were hard to automatically track before. We use natural language processing and machine learning to unearth the above found data. Data is nicely structured and you could go ahead and not just pick companies that had leadership changes, but only those that changed CTOs or you could define what kind of products companies you are targeting they have launched: mobile, web, payments …

Your picked audience will be super targeted and your messaging very tailored. Meaning you’ll send less spam and more emails to the companies that would truly benefit from using your product. Which sales should be all about. Selling to those companies that need your products most and thus saving everyone lots of time with badly targeted leads.

As Max Altschuler points out in his book Hacking Sales you can segment companies or lead lists by criteria such as firmographic data (location, num of employees, revenue …) and with tools like Datanyze also segment these lists by technologies.

PredictLeads adds new dimension to this kind of segmentation. With tracking events found on blogs, news sites and job openings using sophisticated machine learning algorithms, we allow you to target companies on a very granular basis.

For sure you won’t be able to produce lead lists that are tens of thousands of prospects long. But this is exactly the point … These are your spear accounts as Jason Lemkin puts it. The leads of high value and big ROI. We don’t recommend adding them to fully automated drip campaigns but rather using supervised and tailored messaging to each of these accounts. The benefits will be well worth it.

Happy selling! 🙂

Roq

API for receiving fresh company events available

June 12, 2016 / Roq X

As Steli Efti would say, hello sales nation! 🙂

We’re proudly announcing that our API for receiving fresh categorised company events is now available!

To dig right in … a company called Logicworks launched a new product. In this case our API would return you the following:

“labels”:”new-offering”, “organisation”:”Logicworks”, “subject”:”Cloud Security Automation Framework ”, “published_at”:”June 8, 2016”, “date”:”June 8, 2016”, “url”:”http://www.logicworks.net/news/2016/logicworks-launches-cloud-security-automation-framework-aws”.

Another example … at Digital Ocean a leadership change has happened. Our API would return the name and position to which this person was appointed to.

“labels”:”leadership-change”, “organisation”:”Digital Ocean”, “person”:”Julia Austin”, “job-title”:”CTO”, “published_at”: “June 7, 2016”; “date”: “June 7, 2016”, “url”:”http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160607005536/en/DigitalOcean-Hires-Julia-Austin-CTO-Lead-Engineering”

iProspect received an award, our API system would give you information on the name of the received award:

“labels”:”award”, “organisation”:”iProspect”, “subject”:”Best use of data and analytics in real-time for a search campaign”, “published_at”: “June 2, 2016”; “date”: “June 2, 2016”, “url”:”http://www.indiantelevision.com/mam/marketing/mam/iprospect-earns-a-silver-medal-at-2016-ames-awards-160602″

Qadium just received funding, our API would also let you know which round they’re at and how much they have raised:

“labels”:”funding”, “organisation”:”Qadium”, “subject”:”Series A”, “amount”:”20,000,000″, “published_at”: “June 6, 2016”; “date”: “June 6, 2016”, “url”:”http://www.finsmes.com/2016/06/internet-sensing-company-qadium-closes-20m-series-a-funding.html”

There are a few more events like the ones above that we can bubble up for you such as: “expansion” and “partnership”.

We hope that with this kind of information you’ll be able to generate even more personalised products. If you’re interested in trying out our beta version, send us an email at roq@predictleads.com.

Happy selling! Roq