CB Insights PDF Revenue

A story about how CB Insights started as "Chubby Brain" and had to change their name after feedback from Goldman Sachs, while making significant revenue from selling PDF reports.

"We tried to sell Chubby Brain to Goldman and they were like 'We can't use a service called Chubby Brain.' It wasn't just them being hoity-toity - they said 'Listen, at the bottom of every slide we put source for our data, and we can't put source Chubby Brain at the bottom because it kills our credibility.'

That night John and I went to a bar and decided we had to change the name, and that's when it became CB Insights.

In the beginning, we were just ground and pound. We thought '$25-100 a month would be fantastic' but Nick said 'No, no, I'm not interested in that. We're gonna price this at $12,000, $50,000, and $100,000.' I was thinking 'Hey bro, it's a PDF!'

The way we structured it was $12,000 just gets you the PDF, $50,000 gets you the PDF and a call, and $100,000 gets you the PDF, call, and anytime we hear something juicy we pick up the phone for you - and only 10 people could get that tier. Nobody bought the top package, but it was a great price anchor. A bunch of people bought the $50K and $12K packages. We made about $700,000 that first year."