The dealmaking world looked very different in 2014 when the earliest glimmers of what would become Sourcescrub began to take shape. The company formally emerged in 2015 with the industry’s first deal-centric database of bootstrapped company sources. Before the end of the year, Sourcescrub had 25 customers and turned a profit — and a lot of heads.
Ten years, four offices around the world, over 700 customers, 220,000 sources, and 16 million deeply profiled companies later, Sourcescrub continues to grow by pursuing the same vision —to unlock the future of private markets through data-driven clarity and insights that lead to innovation, growth, and prosperity.
As we begin year 11, we sat down with Sourcescrub co-founders, Tyler Fair and Prescott Nasser, for a discussion about where we’ve been, where we’re going, and the most significant milestones along the way.
Sourcescrub: Tell us the Sourcescrub origin story.
Tyler Fair: I’d spent a decade sourcing businesses for private equity, and most of them were bootstrapped SaaS businesses. I built relationships with these founders and I talked to them about how they did it, and a lot of times they would tell me it was easy. So having those conversations instilled a level of confidence in me, and I got an entrepreneurial itch.
Then in early 2014, the success of info services companies like Zoominfo, operating then as Discoverorg, and Pitchbook, was unfolding which got me interested in the category. Data sources for bootstrapped businesses didn’t exist at the time, so an idea for a sourcing database started to take shape.
Around that same time I got married. My wife’s father passed away after a three-month battle with cancer. The family was struggling financially. I wanted to help, and I felt like I had the idea and the skills to do it.
That prompted me to reach out to Prescott. At first, he wasn’t available because he was already working on building technologies for a few former schoolmates and colleagues. After a bit of time and cajoling, he agreed to consult with me, and after workshopping Sourcescrub for a couple of months, he was in as my co-founder.
Prescott Nasser: I met Tyler in middle school, which was in the early 90s with the start of the web. I was into emerging technology, so I built websites. I like to help people build things, and that’s how I’ve collected the different jobs and projects I’ve been a part of. I was already building three other products at the time!
But there were two things that made me commit. One was the firm that Tyler was working for at the time, Serent Capital, agreeing to be our first customer. So I knew we had product-market fit and some revenue. And the second was that we agreed to raise a couple bucks from our family to hire an engineer, so it wasn’t just going to be me engineering, because I hate working alone.
I also liked that Tyler was working his ass off while we built that initial product. He was in spreadsheets essentially acting as our product and had to be constantly available. It showed me that he isn’t the type of person who just throws out an idea and then disappears. He was already signing customers, not just sitting around waiting for me to deliver which helped keep me motivated.
S: What was the vision for Sourcescrub when you got started?
Tyler: The founding thesis was that the only way dealmakers find targets that are private or bootstrapped and not actively seeking investment is by processing lists. Those lists fell into many of the same categories we still have in the product today: conferences, award lists, buyer’s guides, and market maps. Dealmakers were either hiring full-time people, interns, or off-shore help scrub these lists, which was all highly inefficient. Although our approaches have broadened and matured a lot since then, the goal remains largely the same — for our platform to fuel and streamline direct sourcing.
Prescott: We started outsourcing the research efforts using sites like Upwork, but Tyler was still doing all the QA, all the dispatch, all the communication, etc. And then in mid-2015, we established our off-shore data operations team in the Philippines to centralize and scale the research and fulfill our contracted demand. This same team is still a major part of our data operations and quality assurance efforts today.
S: Sourcescrub was bootstrapped for the first five years. What made you decide to go that route versus raising capital?
Tyler: I felt strongly that we needed to start building, rather than spend time raising money. We also didn’t want to answer to investors, despite them being our customers. Finally, I had spent a decade interviewing bootstrapped founders on how they built their businesses, and I knew if they could do it without raising money, we could do it, too. My advice to founders is always to bootstrap if you can, but it really depends on what your business plan is.
You shouldn't start a business if you don't have some experience, and with that experience should come the ability to create a little bit of a nest egg. So if you've got a little bit of a nest egg, why give away a bunch of equity for a year's worth of salary before you start generating enough money to pay yourself one? Save money by moving in with your parents. Don't go on vacations if you can’t afford it. Make some short-term sacrifices. It’s worth it.
If you're starting a business, it’s not an 8 to 5 Monday through Friday job — it's 24/7. You have to be fully dedicated. And when you bootstrap, it forces you into that kind of focus. Besides just a way to save money, it also forces you to channel all your effort and energy and attention into the business you’re building.
S: Sourcescrub received its first outside investment from Mainsail Partners in 2019. How did you decide it was time to raise that money?
Tyler: We got to the point where there was a lot of key-person risk in the business between Prescott and me. Obviously we felt like everything was on our shoulders, but we also felt that we had accomplished what we wanted to with the initial growth of the business.
Coming from a firm that is known for being incredibly supportive of the founders they back, I had seen firsthand just how much leverage a good firm can provide you as operators, and it felt like we were at the point where we needed that. And on a personal note, I had a kid and was living in a two-bedroom founder apartment, and it seemed like the right time to take some chips off the table.
S: No company stays in business for ten years without having some near-death experiences. Do any come to mind for you, and how did you manage through them?
Tyler: Well, DataFox raised $5 million about three months after we started. And then about fifteen months later they raised another even bigger round. They had a way bigger reach than we did, given their budgets. But in competitive situations, we were able to tell customers why we were better and more committed to their cause.
Prescott: I don’t remember any experiences feeling “near death,” but there were probably two years where it felt like every decision we made was really important. We had a lot of fun in those early years because of the close partnerships with our customers. A lot of, “If we build this feature, will you sign a deal?” We were constantly rejiggering our roadmap to accommodate those types of feature-adds because we needed to get the deals in. It helped us build a great product because people had a lot of good ideas, but it was hectic.
We were always nervous about DataFox because they had so much more money than us. When they got taken out by Oracle, we held our breath for a minute because no one knew for sure what exactly Oracle’s game plan was. But within six months we started getting calls from everybody we had lost to DataFox. It was fantastic, but it could have been a disastrous moment for us if Oracle had made different decisions.
S: That has to be one of the proudest moments you’ve had at Sourcescrub. What are some other memorable moments from the last ten years?
Prescott: I think the Mainsail investment is one of them. We had worked really hard and it was fun to see a number on the value we had created. They came inbound to us that summer in 2019. David Farsai, who has known Tyler forever, came to us and said they wanted to invest, and it worked out well timing-wise for all the reasons Tyler talked about previously. We were able to make it happen quickly.
I don't know about Tyler, but I had kind of lost track of our valuation in the building of the product and company, and wasn't thinking about the original value. I was just enjoying myself, but that moment led me to look back and think about our original expectations, and it was pretty exciting. I’ve got a photo or two of us when we closed that deal.
Tyler: It was definitely a low when COVID hit. We had always set goals and hit them and to be knocked off course by a global pandemic was selfishly like, “What the hell!?” But then to come out the other side of COVID having grown 3x in eighteen months — the ability to keep the team humming in a remote environment was definitely a proud accomplishment.
S: If you could offer other owners and operators advice based on what you’ve learned over the last ten years at Sourcescrub, what would it be?
Prescott: In the beginning culture is/was primarily driven by us as founders - our work ethic, our leaning in helping everyone / coaching.
As we grew, it had to be more intentional, we hired leaders, we hired excellent people who were easy for us as founders to work with and they performed well, but that didn't scale from those people to other team members.
Sourcescrub has grown and you two have done a lot over the last ten years — what’s next?
Tyler: I want Sourcescrub to disrupt the market again and again.
Prescott: I agree with Tyler — we disrupted the industry ten years ago, and I want to continue to set a tone that challenges the team to keep evolving. At this point in my career I also measure success by my ability to help the people who have helped build Sourcescrub continue to succeed. It’s important for me to give back.
Whether you’re a new Sourcescrub customer or have been with us since the beginning, thank you. We can’t wait to see what the next decade brings! And if you haven’t tried Sourcescrub, what are you waiting for? Let’s talk.
