Summary: How can you drive fast growth with B2B marketing?<br> In this interview, you’ll hear from Jim Fowler, founder of <a href="https://www.owler.com/">Owler</a>, on what he’s learned to grow fast. Owler – a free competitive intelligence platform – went from 0 to over 500,000 users. And they’re on pace to exceed a million users by the end of this year.<br> I first met Fowler when he was the co-founder of the cloud-based contact management platform Jigsaw, which he sold to Salesforce.com for $175 million (now Data.com).<br> Writers Note: The transcript has was edited for publication.<br> Brian: Jim, tell us about your organization. <br> Jim: Sure, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be on the show. Owler is a competitive intelligence platform. All business professionals use it, but our biggest participants are sales and marketing folks that really need to keep their finger on the pulse of their competitive grasps. That means their competitors, their customers, their prospects, their partners, etc.<br> The general trend here is there’s just so much information out there. Our goal with Owler is to become a must-use tool that gives a lot of very crisp information that people can absorb. That’s the key thing that we’re a tool that helps people outsmart their competition of the competitive intelligence platform.<br> Brian: Your brand name is derived from your last name, right?<br> Jim: One of my marketers came up to me as we were naming the company, and we were looking at a bunch of different names like Jigsaw. I love that name. I mean, it’s a simple word putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Yeah, it worked great. That was a high bar to get over. She came to me and went, “Fowler, I’ve got the perfect name for our company: Owler.” I laughed and said, “Yeah, haha. Funny.” I thought she was joking. She’s like, “No, I’m serious. First of all, it’s five letters. Number two is that owl, wisdom, and people will be able to spell it. Most people aren’t going to associate it with your last name, which is true.” You’re more astute than most, Brian.<br> I was embarrassed by it at first, but now I love it. Of course, we have a cool little owl. By the way, the Owl’s name is Jim, so Jimf Owler. Any of your listeners are users of Owler, and I imagine there are thousands. They’ll be familiar with our owl that we call Jimpf.<br> After you sold Jigsaw to Salesforce.com, why didn’t you decide to ride off into the sunset? <br> What inspired you to start Owler?<br> Well, that is a great question. I can tell you they’re a few times along this path that I’ve wondered that same thing. Startups are not easy. I equate a startup with a bag of problems. There’s just a bunch of issues to solve. You know, I was still a pretty young guy. Jigsaw was a great acquisition. It was a $175-million-dollar acquisition at that time. By far and away, the largest Salesforce has ever done. Now, that’s pocket change for those guys. They’re doing massive stuff.<br> I think that you realize that you don’t really do it for the money, especially once you’ve had an exit. You realize that the creation, the ability to go out and make something out of nothing and create a company that employs many people, but more importantly, build products that people love. I mean, that’s what gives me a charge. I’m really pleased.<br> At Owler, we’ve doubled our user base over the last ninety days to 500,000 active users. We’re going to blow past a million active users on those things by the end of the year. We’re starting to look at ten million, which is about one-tenth the size of LinkedIn. That becomes a globally important company. I think that’s what really drives founders because you want to … It’s like being a chef. You want to cook food that people love,
