Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Welcome to UpYourStack Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature interviews with some of our favorite software companies who've either built their apps on HubSpot or have integrated with HubSpot to help get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

And today I have Brian from ZeroBounce and I've been waiting for this conversation because we've been using ZeroBounce for as long as I can remember. ZeroBounce was in our toolkit and definitely helped us get to that next level. So Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Minick, ZeroBounce: Thank you. No, I'm excited to be here today. Thank you for your support over years and hope to share some great information today.

Noah: Awesome. Well, Brian let's start off with one, your role. What do you do at ZeroBounce? And then two for the audience who may not be familiar with ZeroBounce, what does ZeroBounce do?

Brian Minick, ZeroBounce: Yeah. So I'm Brian Minick. I'm the chief operating officer. I've been at ZeroBounce for six years, just past inception. So it was there, but not well known. Let's put it that way. Software was running. I helped over bit or oversee and build up our support team, our sales team, and the operations of the general business.

We've been doing we started in, in email validation. That's where we started. And we have, in my opinion, I don't want to say perfected it, but we've done a great job there and really built a robust product. And now we're also into kind of the deliverability world and a suite of tools from, email, inbox, testing, email, warmup, scoring, all these kinds of different tools that are basically able to help such a wide variety of people from salespeople to marketers, to the tech people, to the security team.

And it's really exciting for me cause I just love tech and I've been in it my whole life. So to. Once again, because this is not my first time, get a tech company off the ground and grow pretty big is very exciting for me. So I'm excited to be here and share it with you today.

Noah: Yeah. And Brian, so why did ZeroBounce come about? Or how did it even come about in the first place? Obviously it's necessary. But why start this or why have the why did it get started in the first

Brian: Yeah. So our CEO is is a serial entrepreneur and had a big data set that this was probably back in 2016, had a big data set that he wanted to get validated. And when he went out to the marketplace talk to them, there was no confidence as to what happens with that data. Yeah. What's the privacy of that data?

What's the security of that data? How are you, if I'm going to hand you my, let's just call it, my grail, it's my database of customers or potential customers or whatever you want to call it, how are you going to, what are you doing with that data? How are you taking it? And there was no confidence whatsoever that it wouldn't be reused, resold, shared.

And so turned into, well, I'll figure out how to validate it myself. That turned into, Oh, my gosh, let's build a company. And here we are with those kind of building blocks as a starting point is the security privacy of people's data. It's so important to us. It's so built into the kind of our culture on.

Of course, we're building a very robust platform. But behind all of that from day zero really is security and privacy of customer data.

Noah: Yeah. So that's fascinating. So it really is. It's a common entrepreneur story, especially for our listeners who tend to tune into the show if it was trying to solve a problem for yourself. And around validating that data. You mentioned stuff about privacy. You mentioned if the customer comes to you, what are they often looking for?

What's that driver to say? Okay, I need ZeroBounce today. And I know what we were doing back in 2016. That's Roughly when we got started, roughly when I came across you guys in that kind of time period, when you guys were getting going, I was like, this is awesome.  But what do you see nowadays from the types of customers and the problems you're solving for them?

Brian: Yeah, I'm seeing a kind of a few different personas of people that are really showing and expressing interest or gauging how they could utilize it, which is, of course, it's the email marketers wanting to have great deliverability, low bounce rates were not. We have the ability to detect people that are known to mark you a spam so we can reduce and mitigate risk there.

So the email marketers love us. Mhm. The sales teams love us because they're getting data from God knows where. And we cleaned it all up for him, make sure it's in a better spot because these providers are selling quantity and we turn that into quality of the list. And then lastly, which is near and dear to my heart is the the tech stack people.

So the developers who want real time validation on signup forms want to reduce risk, fraud, bots, these types of things. So we can protect those signup forms and also enrich for email marketers, cleanse for salespeople. It really, the end cases and use cases are almost endless because what we have found and I'm told the email marketing is going away or email is going away.

No way. This is the unique identifier for what feels like a hundred percent of businesses that I know is email address. And if that email address is bad, the whole record is toast. And for a lot of people. We're solving a core problem by making sure the email address that they have 

Noah: funny you mentioned that email is not going anywhere. I don't know about you, but my emails open up all the time. It's the one way that I do check it. And maybe people are using ZeroBounce right now to get into my inbox from time to time validating what it is. So what have you seen as a key tractions for growth?

Like what, what's causing, or are you, and you've expanded quite a bit. And I think Brian tell me that story of when you started to where you are today and how did that traction really occur for you?

Brian: When I started back in, six years ago, we had, I believe it was eight or 10 employees. I was either employee number eight or number 10. I really don't remember. We didn't have the employee IDs. Like I heard that was a really cool thing that that happened in Apple. But anyway today we're coming up and breaking the corner of 90 employees.

And so that's incredibly hard to do by the way. And on the operation side, communication is always the biggest challenge here, but the growth's coming from really everywhere. It's, half of our staff is on the technical teams. They're managing the product, they're building the platform, they're maintaining everything.

It's a ton of moving parts, network engineers, everything, you name it. And of course support. So we're 24 7 support. We have been that way since day one. We've been 24 7 support. The only company doing that and still doing it, by the way and actually we just did a kind of a company retreat and my support team is at the happy hour.

On their laptops still working, by the way, so we really were. We were real people and we were heavily invested into our customers. We just feel that if we do the best we can for you that they will support us. And quite honestly, that's what's been happening.

Noah: And I feel that story aligns with I believe it was Rackspace where they used to have horrible support and the founder realized, let's make this super easy. Always pick up the phone, no matter who's calling, they should not have to wait 24 hours for someone to get back to them, but just immediate.

And do you credit a lot of that support as a reason why people have been such loyal fans for ZeroBounce all over these years?

Brian: it's so we have a few foundations, which is privacy and accuracy. Is that one that I was talking about? Support is definitely another one speed. A lot of it also has to go to speed. So speed of the product, of course, is one thing, but speed back to the customer is super important. And so I would put all of these together are somewhat of a blend of reasons that we've been able to push through, but truth is also a hell of a team. You need good people on your side that love it as much as you do. And that's what we've been able to build here. So tons of employees have been here since almost day one with me. And we're just watching this whole thing grow.

Noah: Is there like a concentration of customers either geographically or industry focused or is it really just all over the place?

Brian: It's definitely all over the place. A lot of business will come from from us. We have a lot of people on the sales side ton of HubSpot users, by the way, we have deep integrations to HubSpot and we love that software. But yeah, no, it's coming from all over. And. We did not think this was for anybody, but an email marketer, by the way, we had no concept that a salesperson would want this tool.

And by the way, I think that's important to listen to what's going on in the marketplace around your product. What are they actually saying? And it's not just email marketers. Like I said, it's the tech people. 

We have very large companies are protecting their signup forms because they're getting maliciously attacked for free trials, for example, think of some of these huge companies out there. I'm not going to name them, but we know who we go to watch TV from and all these other things with these free trials. What does it take? It's an email address to get that. Right. And so how easy is that to abuse?

Noah: Oh, that is a very good point. So essentially, you're helping it so they don't necessarily start getting trapped in spam as well by emailing people who are not real.

Brian: Yeah. So we're trying to, clean up a lot of their kind of systems and we just tap all these different areas, which quite honestly, these cases came to us. Well, this is my problem. Can you help solve? And I was like, yeah, we actually can.

Noah: yeah. So if you're a marketer and you're getting a lot of leads out there through your forms and you want to make sure they're real before you just start sending out these automated campaigns to be able to verify that first. How fast does that happen? That verification? Yeah. And maybe we'll, I would like to get a little bit more into what you've done in the Hotspot ecosystem around the integrations.

But what does that look like for them?

Brian: Yeah. So we actually directly integrate with HubSpot forms. We give you a little piece of code to add right after the form code on your page, your landing page or wherever it is. And in real time, while the users typing, by the way we're making API calls to our service to see if that email address exists.

And if it doesn't, we'll block the submission while the user is still there. We're catching typos and suggesting typo fixes, which is huge for mobile, by the way mobile traffic is through the roof. Auto correct is still not there on emails, by the way. Hello, Apple. Hello, Android, like kind of a layup here.

Give me a way to easily interject my contact information, but. Typos coming from these type of forms on mobile are huge. And, think about that experience. If you are, if you collect that bad email, you're immediately sent into a bounce because your automations kick in. And then secondly, the user thinks you don't know what you're doing as a business because have you ever admitted you typoed your email on a form?

Of course not.

Noah: you had no idea.

Brian: never done that, right? We've never done this. This isn't me, my fault. This is your fault. And so it actually even gives you a bad kind of reputation. Meaning they didn't get that coupon code for you or the white paper or whatever they were expecting by giving you the email and they're waiting for it.

So that's another kind of big thing that we can help. Make sure the emails that are going into your ecosystem are marketable contacts. That's really the key. It has to be a marketable contact.

Noah: Yeah. Wow. The number of use cases just skyrocket again. I remember you from the standpoint of like the email marketer who just wants to verify the data before we send out that email. But if you are an organization who's getting millions of. Form fills or leads coming in. And you can ruin your reputation real fast if you have all the, even temp 5 percent of typos, 3 percent of typos.

Can start getting you in that spam block right there. So one of the, one of the big questions I also have is like, how do you differentiate from competitors? There's other people who do this, but what do you do? That's different, better than those competitors in your opinion.

Brian: Yeah, there's quite, there's, without being ignorant, there's quite a few things. One of them is obviously on the security. That's that day zero kind of concept. We're the only company that's SOC two type two ISO 2701 HIPAA compliant. So we're able to manage healthcare data. GDPR, CCPA, you name the certifications and the whole industry is chasing us, by the way.

Secondly is going to be around our ability to deeply integrate based on our team size. So while other people are not really investing in people some of them have, two, four, six, eight employees. And we're coming up here on 90, probably be at a hundred plus by Q1 in next year, these are people focused on building our product.

These are people focused on building integration so deep into HubSpot that you never have to leave HubSpot to do the work. And we're just taking things to a whole nother level. And then lastly, to not affect anything on validation, to not have any sort of Compromise to keep pushing the business forward.

We have totally different dedicated people building additional tools like email, warmup, DMARC monitoring, all these kinds of other suite of products that all these people need, but we refuse to sacrifice on quality or anything on the validation side. So that's also part of the growth is these people coming in, building additional products to create a deliverability suite.

Noah: Well, let's talk a little bit more about HubSpot because you said something to the effect that you may not even have to leave HubSpot to use this product. Talk to me about what you're building inside HubSpot. What's that looking like these days? And how are people leveraging it?

Brian: yeah. So on the HubSpot side, one of the common things we saw, and we were just at the InBiome conference, which was awesome. It was so exciting to see a bunch of people there and HubSpot employees. But the common denominator is the data in their HubSpot accounts are full of who knows what, right?

So there's some good, there's some bad. There's, oh, my sales team Is it uploading all this data? I don't have a clue where it's coming from. And so what we recognized was this. We need to be able to clean the data at the point of entry. So that's the forms and on any imports were automatically validating the data.

And so that's obviously very powerful. And then secondly, all the data is displayed in HubSpot under the records. So if you want to do your automated workflows, for example, your email churns next week. We'll catch that. And when, before you, your automation hits, you would pull them out of the automation because the validation status is no longer good.

And so that's the power of being deeply integrated versus CSV transfers back and forth, which yes, will do the job. But it's not how you scale your business without thinking about all the details. And so what we've done is basically be able to put it in a sense where every 90 days, 30 days, you configure it.

We're very big into letting you have control. You can run through the whole database again. So all new contacts. Every 90 days run through the whole thing again. The HubSpot forms it, it really, it doesn't matter how you want to do it. And that's just HubSpot, by the way, we have our own platform, but this is just what we would do within HubSpot and some of the other kind of major CRMs.

But HubSpot in particular, kudos to them. They give you the power to do that. And so we took advantage of it as a software company.

Noah: Do you notice and I guess in my question for you is are you seeing the traction gain rapidly within the hotspot ecosystem or is this something that is very much an education on the marketplace where people are unaware that one ZeroBounce exists to be able to do this or unaware that this is even a problem of really the data decay.

And I think that's one of the words that people tend to use and throw around a lot. And I'm not mistaken, it's almost like a third or 40 percent of your data decays every year that's in your system. And then it starts clogging it up because if you're a hub spot. user or company and you have not yet marked that data as a non marketing contact, you're being charged for that.

And I imagine with your software, what you just described to me now is what you can go ahead and do is automatically that data balances or isn't good. You can then label that as a non marketing contact and then save you money.

Brian: Yep.

Noah: Are you seeing these type of clients? Are they, again, is it, are you educating them on this or are they already coming aware of Hey, I have a problem and you're solving this for me?

Brian: Yeah. I think from all the conversations I'm having with the HubSpot users, there is definitely the knowledge of the problem that my data is a mess. That is a common theme. Every single person seemed to tell me no one was proud of like my data so clean and it's perfect. What they said was like, I do my best and I'm like holding ropes down to make sure this thing doesn't fly away.

But what most people don't realize is that email validation Is the solution to the cleanup of that data. It is not just going to D duping, by the way, that's. That's so simple. We do that for free. We don't. That's not us. That's not a service. That's an Excel function, right? And so it's mainly the problem that people are aware of is the clutter, the mess, the what do I do?

And so email validation is the solution to the problem, which is really data cleanup. So yes, I do think people are very aware that they have a lot of problems there, especially when the sales teams get involved. They love to just 

Noah: yeah.

Brian: throw data at it throw quantity at it. And, we come in at least trim it down to quality.

That's super important for many reasons.

Noah: Is there a size database if you're like, hey, listen Mr. and Mrs. Customer, you have minimum 20, 000. By all means, you should be leveraging ZeroBounce in this case. Do you differentiate it? Do you delineate it where it goes from a nice to have to a must have? Or is it always a must have? Does it even matter how much data you

Brian: Yeah. To me, it's a must have. And the reason I also say that is because we love the small startup guys, by the way. This is us, by the way, just because we have a bigger brand today does not mean we forgot where we came from. We utilized freemium type services all the time to help build the product, not the product, but build the process, build the tools.

Offer support, phone systems, right? We offer a freemium service as well for these people trying to get off the ground, cost you absolutely nothing. You can use the HubSpot integration, including the forms integration. We don't want to limit anybody that's against like our mindset.

It's use it. So no, whether you have a hundred emails in your database. And by the way, I've validated billions of emails for people. So there's no one too big. There's no one too small. And another concept here, which is very interesting. There's no geographic boundary email is email. And so we really service literally left to right, up and down.

Geographically, there's no boundaries as well on what we're able to do. And so it doesn't matter who you are. You really should be doing this. You're talking about the quality of your customer side or your customer database or your prospect database, whatever. Whatever it is, the quality of that, in my opinion, can't be on the, they can't be up for discussion if it should be good or not.

It's imperative.

Noah: So I think one of the things that always inhibits people from adopting technology is to worry about the time, the effort, the setup and all the pieces involved. What does this look like to implement ZeroBounce both in the forms and on the workflows and in HubSpot in general?

Brian: Yeah. So to get it into the CRM system itself, it's actually super simple. You would go into our platform and just connect your account so we can get the first connection going. You would configure if there's a schedule you wanted that automated kind of validation to take place And then the rest of the magic is all done in hub spot and it's controlled in hub spot So setup time.

I mean you're talking I'm a systems guy, and I'm biased here, and I've been configuring systems my whole life. If I'm doing it, I'm done in 15 minutes. We're validating in HubSpot in 15 minutes. If I'm going into the workflows, it's just a simple fork in the workflow, and email address is valid. And so that side, to me, super simple.

On the forms, biggest roadblock here is having access to the form code that you already have up there. You have to give that to your software guy, your development guy. But we're talking about a copy paste. There's nothing to write. It's a copy paste, put it on the page. It's going to work by itself.

Noah: So we're seeing, I think HubSpot has over 200, 000 customers in their ecosystem. What type of traction have you seen? I'm not sure if you can share numbers. Are we talking hundreds of companies now using ZeroBounce, thousands of companies, tens of thousands? Like how well known is it and how well adopted have you guys seen so far?

Brian: Yeah. The growth on the ZeroBounce side, we are coming up on 400, 000 customers on the platform. Yeah. And that is, that's not easy to do and not easy to manage them, not easy to service them. And so it's also part of the growth and people we're very big into people help people. People build relationships with people not necessarily robots or attendants.

And we're going to staff to support people not serve up automation on everything. But on the HubSpot side, gosh, I don't know. I think we have a couple thousand installs on it. Most people weren't even aware of it, that you could be that deeply integrated. They were just doing CSV passing.

And so hopefully with some more education on, letting people know this stuff is also out there, we'll see some increased adoption. And I really don't care if you're a small guy and you're a startup, by all means, please take advantage of this stuff. They're at your disposal and can really benefit you.

Noah: And this is on a usage model pricing model. So essentially it's like you give the you give away the free foundation and essentially as you use it, you pay for it. So to your point, it's very affordable and there's really no excuse why you're not using it.

Brian: Yeah. Yeah.

Noah: I'm telling all listeners there's no excuse not to use zero pounds for your organization.

It can save you a lot of heartache by getting your emails, spam blocked or some other block because you were sending it to the wrong people. 

What does the future look like for ZeroBounce? It's incredible. The stuff you built over the years. I'm just learning stuff and I've been a fan of you for so many years, but what does the future look like and how does AI fit into that?

Brian: Yeah. So interesting you ask, because while we don't love AI as far as managing our customer support, for example, that's a route we're not going to take, we are have a team of people with 22 people dedicated to an AI system that we are building. And so I can't give you all the details, but I can definitely say things are definitely coming.

So we do believe AI is super powerful to help you analyze things. It's super powerful to help you Maybe give you ideas, a path, a plan. There's lots of great stuff we can do there. And so we're definitely baking it into the platform in the sense of Hey, maybe this list and you give us your profile or your persona, what your use cases are, we might suggest patterns.

What will be the most effective way for you to deliver that type of mail. So that's maybe a peek into some of it but that's just touching, touching the surface there on where we're going with it. But AI is super powerful. It's just for us. We're not going to replace the people. What we're going to do is give people all of the ability to create and craft with context.

That's, I think, the difference is we can give like quick context towards what you're doing because we see what you're doing in the platform, where you are.

Noah: And so I love that approach. Part of it is like AI should really be there to support. Augment assist make things better, faster and easier. And it sounds like that's exactly what you're working on internally for the organization because it'd be almost foolish not to play around with a it's at that point in time, like we know it's gonna be able to help out these customers.

Brian, your growth from employee eight Nine or 10 to 90. What advice do you have for other organizations that are scaling like this and how to scale like this?

Brian: Yeah, so one of the key things that I love to share, and I'm I actually get very excited to share this, so I'm happy to share. This is a key component of success in my opinion and how we've gotten here. It is not the one thing that, there's no magic bullet. 

Okay, like I told you, right, we had no clue salespeople would even be interested in ZeroBounce.

There's no magic bullet. What we've done and what I recommend people do is look for small wins and look and be okay with failure.

We have failed.

I cannot tell you how many times I failed. But I don't care. We don't care. That's our company culture. We encourage failure because how can you succeed if you do not fail that were firm believers on this.

And so the concept and what we've been able to turn this into to operationalizes. 

It's not one thing. It is the sum of all these small things that do work. When they compound and then those compound and then those compound, that's how you start to explode on the business side.

And we're definitely seeing it and quite honestly, thank you to our customers, right? These, we cannot do it without you, but with, we have no contracts, by the way, zero contracts. We don't lock people into anything. And this is a Testament towards we're doing a good job and we're making impacts to people's workflows, to their, marketing, we're giving them ROI, which is why we were built in the first place.

That's the key. Give your customers. We'll give back.

Noah: That's fantastic advice. I always think of like the spokes in the wheel and to your comment earlier about just, it's not one thing. It's several spokes in that wheel and just consistently making improvements periodically. Going right back through it from the beginning. Maybe you did this way and then six months later you come back to and say, is there a better way of doing that?

I think that's great advice cause I think everyone's looking for that silver bullet. Saying, how can I just have a silver bullet to scale this business? It's just being a good operator.

Brian: Sure. And it's, I get the concept by the way. You, like that, that, that light bulb goes off. This is it. This is what's going to take me to the next level. And I've had those moments. We've implemented them and failed miserably. Fine. Again, we tried it. So I'm with you guys. Try stuff. But I will tell you that 1% ers are not given enough credit.

The one percenters that's moving the needle, when those sum and compound, that's, now it's a 10 percenter. Now it's a 20 percenter. Next year, it's a 28 percenter. And these type of things will really help build, you need to create a snowball effect. That's how I think about it. Create a snowball effect, and start to move this thing down the hill, and it will start to come with you.

Noah: it's compounding interest. No different like in making your systems better. Each little bit starts adding up to it in the end. Brian, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. ZeroBounce is such an amazing product out there. If you're a HubSpot customer, I know there's a lot of you out there at this point.

This is something you need to add to your product mix, and they've made it so simple and so easy to sign up where there's no commitment, as you said earlier, other than just using the product, and this will keep you out of those spam filters by accidentally sending out so many bad emails amongst all of the amazing products you have and capabilities.

Brian, if people like to learn more about you and more about ZeroBounce, how do they find that out?

Brian: Yeah if you're interested about ZeroBounce, just check out our website, zerobounce. net. If anyone wants to connect with me, LinkedIn is the best one. Just search for me. There is another Brian Minick, by the way, and he's a a banker. So don't go to the bank, come to the software guy. And feel free to reach out to me.

I will engage with you. I will respond to you. I will give you guidance. If people that want to learn things, I'm happy to educate. I'm very big in that. That's people did that for me. And so I would love to be able to give that back to people. So feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Noah: Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining the show and sharing all this amazing information. I hope as you as listeners, you're able to take away something from today and apply it to your own organization. And really that wraps it up again, UpYourStack. We interview software companies. You've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoy.

​