CB Insights Bootstrap Journey

A story about how Anand Sanwal built CB Insights, initially bootstrapping without salary and later rejecting acquisition offers while learning important pricing lessons.

"I didn't pay myself for the first 4 years. When we raised money, I basically took my back salary. I got married right before I started the company. I told my wife when we were dating that I don't want to work at a big company anymore and there's gonna be some lean times. She was down, so I just saved religiously.

We didn't go on vacations with friends. It was always awkward because they'd say 'Do you want to go somewhere?' and I'm like 'Oh I'm super busy' but really I just didn't have money. For the first 2 years of CB Insights, I just paid for a small team out of my pocket.

Later, someone offered $100M via DM. I said 'not interested, not looking to sell.' The email chain devolved from there where he was like 'I'm gonna build a competitor and put you out of business.'

Our first CB Insights pricing when it started was $395 a month. What we got was people who didn't know how to use data, who were a pain, who churned quickly, paid little, and were blowing us up on chat all the time for support. Then I met a management consulting firm and they said 'Can you add a couple zeros to the price? Your price looks like a joke internally, and I don't want to wait behind the guy paying $395 a month for service.' Now we're orders of magnitude higher than when we started."