Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to From the Ground Up, the podcast where we delve deep into the inspiring stories of entrepreneurs and their journey to build successful startups. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and in each episode, I sit down with the founders to learn about their experiences, the challenges they faced, the lessons they've learned, and the insights they've gained while turning their dreams into reality. I'm excited to have with us today Gil Allouche, founder of Metadata.io. Gil, welcome to the show.
Gil Allouche: Thank you Jake, great to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So just a little bit about Gil. Gil is a startup founder. He was a software engineer who was a marketer and then discovered some problems in the process of marketing. Uh he's got an MBA, he's got a lot of background in general in business. He spent his early career running a marketing UBI data startup, the GM spot, Spotfire, silver head of marketing at Karmasphere, and VP of Marketing at Qubole. In these roles, he was amazed at how repetitive and time consuming it was to get actual work done. His day was filled with tasks that could be easily automated. He founded Metadata in 2015 to build the first marketing OS that automates repetitive marketing tasks and has grown it into a must-have tech for revenue focused B2B marketers. We're going to talk a lot about your company here uh Gil. But before we do that, want to learn more about you. Take us back a little bit. Where are you from, where'd you grow up?
Gil Allouche: I'm originally from Israel. I grew up in in a town called Netanya, uh. Yeah I was into computers from early on, you know. I had a computer, you know... I didn't grow up with uh with lots of money. But one thing that my parents definitely invested in was computers. They saw that I am, I have an affinity to it. I started programming probably the age of seven, eight years old. I wrote my first line of code in GW-BASIC. I totally got hooked with the idea and the, the activity of creation. In order to do a bunch of things like that for an hour, and then like you run it. And I think the first thing I did, the first program I ever made was um a math teaching game for kids. I remember there was like a Pac-Man that came up when you started and I was just like amazed by it. And it grew into building computer games and and hacking and some other things like that.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it, great.
Gil Allouche: The first company I worked for was an Israeli startup, and understood really quickly: understand the problem, find a solution, and grind and work hard. So uh...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Now you, you're from Israel originally. Um what, what led you to, and how did you get to the States? What was your focus on on coming here?
Gil Allouche: Yeah, always wanted to come to the US. Um never been until I moved for graduate school, but I always knew. I don't know why, maybe it's a previous life, maybe it's just a lot of Hollywood movies, and I used to like Westerns a lot. Um, so I, I pretty much set my heart into moving to the US. I remember I think after the army, I went to um an MBA information day. And I was the youngest person there. They were talking about just like making endless money and doing all these cool jobs and, in all around the world. And I was just fascinated by it. No one took me seriously about... legitimately 21 years old, didn't know much. But um I remember I was hooked and I told myself, "I'm gonna do this." And I built together a plan. For the multi-year plan I had, I still have the folders in my computer. And it was basically like step one, two, three. You know, how do I make it, I get to the US? How do I do the GMAT, I do the graduate school, find an internship, all that stuff. And uh slowly, but by slowly, with a lot of luck, God's supervision, and hustle uh I, I found myself in the US. I went to Babson College. It's an entrepreneurship school in Boston. As I mentioned, I've never been to the US, so I only brought like a week's worth of summer clothes. Didn't even know what Massachusetts or East Coast means. But that was a little bit of a challenge for, for their, for the next few months. But yeah, that was uh, that's how I found myself in the US with the hope... the dream was to start a company. And in order to do that, I needed to school my-, educate myself for the MBA in entrepreneurship, find a job, learn how to work in [an] American environment, and then with that experience, start a company. So that's what I ended up doing.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, going from a worker to, or employee to entrepreneur is, is always a, a nice transition and we're going to dive into that just a little bit. I want to go back um to you having grown up in a different country and then coming here. What was your very first job as a kid growing up, if you can recall? Legal or illegal, either one. The very first one you recall where you were actually taking a product or service...
Gil Allouche: Yeah, well the first job I had was selling firecrackers. So I have a French citizenship as well. And every time we go to France, I loved playing with firecrackers, and they would end up buying them for really cheap, kind of wholesale in, in France. And usually my brother would supply... it would be like my virgin capital, he'll give me some money and I would buy them. And then I would go back to Israel. Of course, no one cared. This is like you know, pre, pre-terrorist attacks and crazy uh security regulations if you will. And uh so I could just like you know take everything... my backpack or my, my duffel bag is just legitimately like full of, full of stuff. And uh, no problem, I'll bring that to Israel. And then I would start selling it to the classmates. And there were some classmates that were part of my class, what kind of rich kids for lack of better definition, and they would happily buy that from me. And I would probably sell it for anything between 10 to 20x the, the cost.
And whatever leftovers I had, I would go to the stores that sell firecrackers and uh tell the sales... you know, ask the salesperson if they have firecrackers. Of course he'll tell you no, because it was illegal. And I would tell him, "I have something to sell to you." And then I would open my own bag and they would buy whatever leftover merchandise I had for not, it's not 20x, it would probably buy it for like four or five x. Still good money. And then I would keep about 20% of it I would keep for myself, and the rest of it I would give to my investor uh as, as a you know, my brother as an additional... That was the first job I've ever had.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's great. Innovation for sure, and providing something... sometimes you got to break the rules to make something happen. Which is you know, I think part of the DNA for a lot of founders, to try and figure out how you can disrupt. Uh but that's great. Um when, when was it that you felt like being an entrepreneur was in your sort of the, in your future?
Gil Allouche: Um I think that... I don't know if... I think the first time that I talked about it was when I was 13 years old. I remember walking down the street with a friend, telling him that I'm going to start a company just like Bill Gates. And he was laughing at me and telling me that they pretty much have to start from like really early and blah blah blah. But I already knew back then, um I also recognized that the usual path is not going to work for me. I'm not, I'm not going to be able to be a good employee for a long time. I don't get along really well in systems, essentially, with lots of rules and policies. I don't like having a ceiling you know, I like to work insane and, and get very insane returns you know. Um and you're not able to do that through the regular job.
So those two things I think converged for me. And I realized during, probably the end of 13, 14 that I have a good talent for computers, and I know how to create something from nothing. I can put you know, days just like sit down, just create something for days, and I'm gonna have a nice product that's gonna be of value later. Um and that I like working for myself, that's another big piece of it. I didn't know anyone who worked for themselves. Besides, when I started working for myself you know, firecrackers was like a small pilot of it, but I actually had a computer fixing business when I was 14. And again I was being paid in dollars in Israel, and uh and I was just like shocked by the experience you know. Like I can just sit somewhere and fix a computer, which is really easy, and after 3 hours I have a few hundred dollars in my pockets, which is insane. And so those, those experiences led me to, to want to do it. And then it was just a matter of how do I do it, because I didn't know anyone who did it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. Sometimes it's, you have a model that you can follow. Your parents or someone that you know, and [they] become you know, a mentor to you. But it sounds like you're able to do it on your own and understand the freedom that you can get when you do build your own company. I'm a founder of a few different companies myself, and there's a lot of tasks and a lot of things you have to build and create and solve. But you also get a lot of freedom if you do it the right way, which is something that we kind of see in a lot of people we talk to in their path. And really ultimately what is, what is they want? You created the company you have today, Metadata.io, to solve a problem. For the listeners out there that aren't marketers, for the listeners out there that want to know what you do. What is it in the landscape of marketing and technology that Metadata.io does in the, in today's market, and who does it serve?
Gil Allouche: I'm going to answer your question in just one second. You said something that, that maybe made me uh maybe take you on... it's freedom. I think freedom is the number one reason that I'm a founder. That, that is a trait that, if that's something that is extremely important um to me at least. And so I think it was right on that you, that you mentioned that. Um what is the problem Metadata solves? Metadata is here to essentially remove all the technical, repetitive, mundane tasks that exist in B2B marketing. So in B2B marketing, people who go into marketing uh usually have creative backgrounds, communications backgrounds. They want to... their dream is to be like Don Draper or, or Peggy Olson from, from Mad Men. You know, they want to be going around you know sipping on whiskey and coming up with cool ideas and seeing their billboard on, on Times Square.
And what actually happened especially in B2B marketing is that people wake up in the middle of the night and they have to update a thousand rows on the spreadsheet with different UTM tags because something broken in, in their digital advertising uh attribution. And I found, because I worked as a marketer (so I you know, I spent my first piece of career as an engineer, and then I, I did my MBA, and then I spent some time in marketing) and I realized that my ability to be technical, to write code, SQL, to use APIs, and automate a lot of my tasks is a great advantage. And it actually became my job, I was automating everything. Uh but for the vast majority of marketers, they don't know how to do it and they hate it too. They don't like doing it you know, they didn't sign up for that. Um and so in Metadata I identified that this is a big need. And the technologies are only becoming greater and greater, more complex, more technologies. The marketing stack is huge you know, it has sometimes 30, 40 different applications in it.
And I wanted to build an operating system for the marketer. I wanted to build a home for the B2B marketer. So they, they can go and plug in everything they have. From the data vendors they have, the advertising channels, their Salesforce, their marketing automation, everything they have, plug it into one place. And instead of having to log into 40 different, different things every day, essentially have like a command and control kind of suite where they can just focus on what they need to do. You need to build pipeline? Let me operate seven of your technologies in a certain way to build your pipeline. You need to build the brand? You need to tell a new story? You need to run an experiment? Let, let you focus on the cool stuff. On like, "okay, what's my campaign idea? What's the content? The strategy behind it? Who am I trying to, to convey the message to?" And don't worry about all the tech. Never mind the mundane tasks. Don't worry about logging into different channels and setting up you know hundreds of campaigns and attribution and UTM tags and A/B testing everything and coming up with different variations for the text. Like don't worry about any of that stuff. The computer will, will do that for you so you can focus on the, on the good stuff.
And most importantly, uh with our, with what we built, you can run... the computer can run like 10,000 campaigns and fine-tune into the 100 that give you the best results. Versus as a team of humans, even if you have 100 people, it's impossible to track 10,000 campaigns day in, day out for revenue results. You might, you may have to track them for three months, if you're [tracking for] three months. And so there are some things that we're doing more than just to focus people on the right things, we're doing things that give them 100x execution power. And that's, that's the core essence of Metadata. Being able to execute a hundred times faster, 100 times stronger without having to hire 100 people, agency, or team to do it for you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well that's great. Sounds like a dream. Uh you know, if you talk about companies that are small or starting or, or larger organizations and they already have a marketing team. What's the, how long would it take them to get your product in, in-house, utilizing and start to see some benefits from it?
Gil Allouche: Um, integrating Metadata doesn't take long. It's OAuth. Um but you still have to get permission and help and collaboration from your marketing ops and revenue ops. So I would say probably best case scenario one day you're fully implemented. Worst case probably two weeks, three weeks uh to get everything connected. You can have your first campaign, or I would say 100 campaigns right, it doesn't matter. Like you can run your first uh campaign that has 100 experiments. And once everything is connected (you don't want to set it up before it's connected because then you don't see all the information, you can do the full optimization), but once everything is connected you can get the first campaign up and running. Some of our customers, um within the first month already they start seeing um leads flowing in. Now depending on your sales cycle, you will see the pipeline following it uh, or not right after. But I would say within the first month... our aim is within the first 90 days to already show you the ROI. Meaning within 90 days, within three months, you should already see clearly that we're, we're cutting your customer acquisition cost by a material like 20, 30, 40%. You should be able to start seeing predictability on your pipeline. Like if you spend a hundred thousand you're gonna get this much pipeline, like let's say a three million dollar pipeline. If you spend 200 you may see 10 or 8. And you should be able to already start seeing at least a trajectory of those trends earlier on, especially with middle to large size companies.
Smaller companies, if it's really small, I tell them do not use Metadata. Like if your spend is less than 20 grand a month in, in marketing programs, you should just spend the entire 20 grand on the channel. It's like if you have ten thousand dollars for investment, do not pay [an] investment manager to manage your ten thousand. Just like figure out how to invest it yourself. If you have a million, two million, yes this is a good time to probably start looking at a professional that will need to wake up in the morning, go to sleep at night and all they do is optimize your, your money. That, that makes sense. If you're a smaller company you can use a small piece of our product called MetaMatch, which is an audience targeting tool. It essentially guarantees that every dollar that you spend on the channel natively only goes to the right company that you want to target, and only the right people within those companies. So you don't target, you don't advertise to the secretary, unless that's your target market. And you don't advertise to the, to the other folks in the company that are not relevant. You literally only focus on like three or four people within a company. And you can spend a lot, a lot more money on those people because you're so focused. That's the tool we, we offer to the startups.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Um I read a little about that tool. I believe if you have like 800 million contacts or pieces of data in your database for that, is that correct?
Gil Allouche: Yeah, I think we have 1.5 billion profiles. But some of them would be multiple profiles for the same person. So for 800 million sounds, sounds about right.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So if I'm a startup out there and I want to market and create more demand for my product or service and I utilize that part of your offering, it's going to give me the exact type of profiles that I want to target, and then be able to launch a campaign. And if I use more of your platform, I'm assuming it will help automate not just the mundane tasks, but also drive out the cost of what it's going to take me to really connect with and really understand what's working, what's not working from a testing perspective, and really focus on those campaigns that are going to generate potential conversion to revenue. Is that correct?
Gil Allouche: And that's, that's super accurate. If you're a startup then this, then, then the targeting mechanism you'll be able to apply the same as a B2B right? We're focused purely B2B. So if you're a B2B agency or marketer for a B2B company, really the only tools you have to target is LinkedIn and AdWords, and Google AdWords. But now imagine having the same power that LinkedIn allows you to have, but on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube. Because now the targeting is done in Metadata. And then the audience that you can, you can slice (and I see audience based on the usual firmographics you know the company size, revenue etc.), but you can also use buyer intent signals: what are they Googling right now? You can use it based on technologies they're using: are they using AWS Elastic MapReduce or they're using Cloudera on the backend? Things that you can find out by yourself, you have to do the data collection for it. So you have all of these different ways to segment your total addressable market. And then those segments you can preview it. And then those segments will be waiting for you at a different channel. And so that's the first piece of startups.
And for the bigger companies exactly right. Optimized for revenue. The channels are always going to optimize for you to spend more money on the channel. You know Facebook cares about you spending more money on Facebook. And so if you want to truly optimize for revenue, you have to be agnostic to the channel, and the campaign type, and the creative, and the content. You have to share less about the pieces of the marketing mix and all... and what you need to care about is the combination and then the outcome. Let's say you run two different campaigns. One of them is generating 100 leads and one opportunity. And one of them is generating one lead and one opportunity. You are more likely if you're a vanity metrics marketer to go with 100 leads because it looks a lot better. Cooler reporting. You know you're like, "Okay maybe the other 99 will convert later." But if you're like, if you really understand that there is a full closed loop and you're optimizing based on revenue and you have all the data, you're probably gonna go to, to the experiment that is actually yielding more revenue at the end of the day. And nothing else matters. And so that, that's what optimization gives you. It's kind of like gaming the system, where you can use all the possible channels that are available, all the campaign types that are available, all the types of audiences, and you can try out all the creatives and content that you can possibly think of.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Wow, that's incredible. I gotta sign up for your platform and try it out. Um, in terms of your company, you raised 57 million dollars. You're scaling out. You're based... are you based out of Silicon Valley? Where are you located, or Colorado or...?
Gil Allouche: Not anymore really, no. Fully remote at this point. We're, we have about 100 people in about 20 different countries. Super remote company, fully remote kind of...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay cool, wow that's great. In terms of the, the... a use case. Tell me about a company you've worked with. I think I read Zoom, but share with me if, if that's accurate or not. A use case of a company that's a well-branded company that we would all know, and what you did for them if you can share specifics.
Gil Allouche: Yeah, Zoom is one of the companies, Zoom Communications is one of the companies we work with. Um I mean really the, the use case is very common across them. So let's think about a company like Zoom. They already have a crazy brand, right? They don't really need help with demand generation. Everyone who's ever thinking about communicating via video, the sure thing they're thinking about is Zoom. Uh Eric did a wonderful job right? And uh, and so when we talked to them they're like, "We don't really need help with demand generation." So the person who brought us in said, "That's true. Where we do need the help is our target accounts. It's one thing for us to get, you know, we have like thousands of signups coming in every day and we know how to convert X percent of that, of those signups into, into accounts. But what about our list of 10,000 named accounts?" You have a list of 10,000 companies that they want to go after, that they know when they sign one of those companies it's like a half a million dollar contract, $250,000 contract.
And so to get to those particular individuals within particular companies, they want to work a much more sophisticated operation. They want to work a multi-channel where you don't know it, but you're a part of a program. You wake up in the morning, you go on TikTok, and you're going to see an ad. And based on your reaction to the ad (ignore it, or, or lean into it), if you got into it... even if you didn't sign up, now we know the content is interesting. Now you're going to see the content on Instagram, and Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Google, on YouTube. And guess what, now you know the brand, you're gonna start seeing emails coming in, on LinkedIn, on email. And so orchestrating those type of campaigns uh where, as you progress as a consumer, you start getting different messaging. Like let's say you now go to the website. Now we know it. Now you're going to start seeing different messages, different creatives. You're going to kind of go through a flow.
Uh that is the kind of work we do with companies like Zoom, where they want to orchestrate this somewhat complex um user journey, customer journey, or prospect journey. And they want to automate all of it. They don't want to decide... and they don't know which creative out of the 10 creatives are going to work the best. And we'll tell them, "Look, you change the color from blue to red, 3% surge in conversion. You make the text instead of 50 characters, 32... well, you know, it's very accurate right? Like we have the exact number, then we have correlation to revenue." You can tell them, "Hey, let me show you the creative that gets you the highest ACV for the lowest CAC." We have it, we have all the data. And so we can say, "This particular creative is giving you the highest return. Now you go and create 20 more campaigns in 20 different channels uh to, to clone this success."
Um that's the kind of work that we do. So, so the companies get a marketing program that is fully automated, so they don't have to spend time executing and auditing those campaigns and monitoring them. And they don't have to spend time in eliminating 90% of them that don't yield a positive ROI. And then they also learn throughout the process what works, what doesn't work. And they can apply those learnings to sales, to product marketing, to their branding, [and a] million other things. And those two you know, the story and the pipeline are the two things the CMO, the CEO of usually care about. And they get both.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Yeah, you know with the breakthroughs of AI and machine learning and the technologies it sounds like you're already using in your platform, but it's becoming much more aware now to the, the consumer across really the world, um there's the, the, the question is: what technologies are going to replace a job? And one view of that is they're not going to replace a lot of jobs, they're actually going to help those that are doing a job do their job better and focus on the areas that they can improve. So the people that will be displaced might be the people that are not using AI tools, versus um being replaced just because AI is replacing them. How, what's your, or how do you view OpenAI and ChatGPT in AI, in the AI world, versus kind of what you have, how you use AI?
Gil Allouche: Yeah, so we use AI in multiple ways. We use AI when it makes sense. I don't use AI for the sake of using AI, if you've probably heard this before. So for example, for optimizing campaigns we found heuristics... we even, we tried a neural network, it was too early. Uh you don't really know why something happened and you can backtrack it. So we, we found heuristics machine learning to be the most effective ways of optimizing campaigns, making decisions. Like imagine the Metadata platform takes a million of actions every day. Uh imagine it's like uh, it's like an army of imagination managers. It's like saying, "Yes, yes, no, you know, add budget here. Replace the, the call to action here. Change the color, change the audience." And so it takes all these actions. In order to take action, instead of flood your consumer with recommendations and analysis, you have to use AI. Because you have to get, to get to a confidence rate that is high enough to say, "Hey, I'm betting on AI to make better decisions than I do." So we use AI for that.
In terms of how I think about the, the trend in general, like that's a trillion dollar question. I am personally not worried about AI by itself. Where the concern comes is that the human use of AI... humans are much more to be concerned with than AI. AI by itself is objective. I think um you know, take, protect what I'm saying with a grain of salt of course. There are much, much bigger experts than I. But I think that AI by itself is not, not concerning. Um it can do in many ways things that humans uh, things that humans can't do. It has a much faster decision-making uh you know, it's more objective, so on and so forth. It's just the use of it.
And so to dive into your particular question, people who are afraid of AI are people afraid of change. And so if you are doing marketing work for example and you are, you find you know, you're the kind of person who prefers... for, for the sake of job security, you'll make your job complicated. You take pride in having, doing all the technical repetitive mundane tasks till 3:00 a.m. in the morning. And you don't want to simplify your work, you don't want to focus on the things that are actually happy, you know, make you feel more creative and happy. You're going to be stuck, because the trend is happening. And eventually your job, your expertise is going to be commodity. If you're the marketer... the kind of marketers, we have hundreds of those who grew their career with Metadata. They saw the opportunity. We have like about 30 customers invested in the company, we have about 20 employees who are former customers. Those are the early adopters. They see AI as the next, the next stage, and they bet on it early on. Some of them became VPs of Marketing and CMOs because they 10, 20x their, their outcome by using AI uh, and saved their time you know. They became happier because instead of working 70 hour weeks, they worked 40. And so I think if you're, if you're cool with change and you're adapting to change, you're going to ride the wave of AI. You know, a truck driver and you work for one of the autonomous trucks, you're going to ride that success. You're going to be one of those first tens of thousands of drivers who taught AI how to drive. Guess what, you're set for life. You're going to be successful. If you're afraid and you're going to, and say like, "no, never in my lifetime," then yeah, in your lifetime probably you'll be out of a job because a robot is going to drive safer, and doesn't have to do like you know four Red Bulls an hour to, to stay awake. That's, that's in a long story how, how I see uh how I see AI and the progression of it.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love that. Ride that wave of innovation uh and you can succeed with, with all the rhetoric in the market going on about it. I personally believe it's super beneficial. We use it in a lot of ways in our own industry, in our own business. So I can, I always gravitate towards innovation around things that make our jobs easier, and especially the repetitive stuff. Uh in terms of your company today, are you uh... you said you're remote. Um is the majority of your employee base in the US?
Gil Allouche: No, majority there are already not in the US. It used to be like 80/20, now I think, I think it's like 40% in the US and 60% in other countries. Um so yeah, that's, that's the breakdown.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So you're truly global. That's great. Where do you, is a customer base mainly in the US or you also have international clients?
Gil Allouche: We have international clients. I would say our customer base is US, Canada, Europe, and Israel, just because a lot of B2B tech is there.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yep, got it, great. There's uh sounds like a lot of growth ahead for your type of product. What's on the roadmap in terms of innovation? Sounds like you've already innovated a ton and you're optimizing what you've built. What's the, what's on the roadmap for what comes next for your company?
Gil Allouche: There are a few things that I'm super excited about that are coming up. Uh one is Generative AI. So we already have generative AI in the platform. Meaning some of the blockers sometimes for people to run 100 campaigns is that they have to put the time into creating text variations, content, and images to experiment to it. Guess what, Metadata now, it offers that you can start creating variations automatically. We trained our model based on years of, of running those campaigns. So it will actually automatically create uh content for you, like tags, taglines and, and text variations etc., and later on creatives um automatically, so you don't have to do that kind of work.
The second piece that I'm super excited about are playbooks. Sometimes marketers don't know what to do with this monster called Metadata. In fact you, you know, if you're like uh, if you're like a supermarketer, like a power user of B2B marketing, Metadata for you is like a playground. You can do everything. You have all these powerful tools you know, go in there and make some damage. You know, positive damage. But as uh you know, as a more junior marketer you're going to be overwhelmed to hell. You don't know what to do with it. And some of the things that we're implementing right [now] are playbooks. Essentially we worked with our best customers and best marketers and innovators to create a blueprint, exact step-by-step, of some multi-channel uh approach. Like you know, how do you automatically personalize your homepage and your website based on a customer versus prospect, a particular customer, larger one to smaller one, particular industry, so on, so forth, depending where they came from? So all of these best practices we're coding into playbooks, and tried to say instructions that you can follow with the platform.
And the next stage, which is coming now, are actual coded playbooks. You're going to answer a few questions, we're going to analyze everything about your business. You're going to click execute, and 90% of the campaign is written for you. You have to fill in the blanks, and you execute, and you know that this campaign worked for 700 marketers before you. So you're essentially, like with SAP. If you remember back in the days, [a] company that installed SAP also got the best logistics best practices with it. Well, I guess it's a, it's kind of a legacy software now so it's debatable. But that was the idea. You get a piece of software and you get the best practices from the industry together with it. Same with Metadata. You get this powerful machine, but you also get the template and the best practices ingrained in it so that your work is streamlined and the time to market is you know, is shortened by 90%.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Ah, that's incredible. I love that playbook idea, and we actually have a few of those in, in-house as well. What, um, if you look at your, your company today, and as the leader of the company, um do you see yourself um... what's the, what's the, what's the goal? What do you really want for this company? Are you looking to go public at some point? You're looking to exit? Like what's the long-term view of this company if, if anybody wants to join your company, what is it they're looking to get into?
Gil Allouche: Yeah, I get that question from every, any new prospect right. And the answer, the honest answer is: well first of all, I didn't know what I didn't know when I started it. The only example I had was someone who built a company and sold it for like 20 million and took a piece of that and you know, and basically exited after like four or five years. That was how I planned for Metadata. That was my dream for me today. That was my best-case scenario. And when I achieved that uh valuation and revenue, I realized that was a mistake, that I was thinking extremely small. And I'm building something so complicated with such a big promise, I better at least give it a shot of actually achieving its value and its dream.
And so now, now my goal is to realize that dream. Really be the number one player, be a HubSpot kind of custom- kind of company, being the leader, leading the category of marketing operating system. Um in, in Metadata to be the first, one of the first three things that a B2B company buys, you know. It's like Salesforce, HubSpot, then Metadata in the same, in the same breath. I want to get to at the very least 100 million in, in ARR. We're not there. Uh we have more work to do, and sustainable company to that. Um so that we have optional, optionality. Uh I used to be really excited, I guess that's like the you know like hitting the gong in the NASDAQ is like the dream. Um they don't tell you about is that, is the year of regulation, all the things you cannot do once you're [a] public company. So I don't know how excited I am about that. I'm not sure. Maybe, maybe not. But I think as long as we get to our revenue goal and we're a sustainable company, meaning profitable, hyper growth, um you know multi-million revenue in ARR. The choice is ours. We can be a Palantir kind of company, like private and making sure tons of money. We can be a public company like Zoom Info, make a great amount of money. Or we can exit into a strategic. If [a] strategic can, can take you know, we can, we can build in a strategic company that is large and acts and, and realizes our dream and gets them to the market like 10 times faster because they already have 400,000 companies that is our TAM, then uh then maybe that's the best option. And I'm not sure, but it's one of those three.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. That's great. What can you share with uh inspire or inspire other entrepreneurs that are out there that are thinking about maybe building a, a company or a product in today's market?
Gil Allouche: Um I would say first of all, start. That's the most important thing. Don't overthink, just like get started. If you're working full-time, you want to start a company, resign today. Be a consultant to your existing boss tomorrow. Uh this, whatever mistakes you're gonna go through, you're gonna make, gonna make them anyway, which is a big part of them, so just make them earlier. Uh that's something that I wish I did even myself. Uh just make a mistake earlier and, and get started earlier.
And the second one, especially in today's economy, forget for a second about all the TechCrunch articles about what VCs are telling you to do. Think about building a company that is sustainable. Like stay true to your values. If you think that you raise 2 million and people are telling you to spend those 2 million within a year and a half because that's what everyone else is doing, you can question that and push back. Uh if you want to wait a little bit before you start working on sales because you think your product is broken, work on your product. Don't overwork it, like don't wait until it's perfect, you need to be embarrassed by your product when you release it, otherwise it's too late. But, but listen to your instinct and uh and don't necessarily follow the rules that everyone else is doing. The whole idea of being an entrepreneur is that you have freedom. You can do whatever you, my language, you can do. And so go and do it, you know, and use your, your freedom and your power to actually go and, and create your own path. Because maybe that's going to be the new path for everyone else.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love that. Well you've shared a lot with us here today Gil. I love the platform you created. If someone wants to find you or find your company to explore or learn more about how you do it, where should they go?
Gil Allouche: Go to metadata.io. We have a free trial, you can get started, benefit from it, get some value and it's low cost. And you can, you can uh you can continue with it if you, if you see the value. And then the second thing, if you want to contact, you want to ask any questions about entrepreneurship, it's gil@metadata.io. Always love talking to founders.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Perfect. Gil, thanks so much today for joining, appreciate it. Look forward to catching up with you in the future as you continue to scale. And we'll catch up with all our listeners on the next episode. Have a good one.
Gil Allouche: Thanks for coming. Thank you Jack, thank you.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Before we wrap up I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that are joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market and they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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