Frog Capital is a European “scale-up investor” focusing on purpose-driven software businesses that have achieved product market fit and are ready for significant growth. Founded in 2008, Frog offers growth capital as well as operational support through its Scale-Up Methodology and expert investment team.
As Principal at Frog Capital, Konstantin Koenig focuses largely on finding exciting early-stage opportunities that match the firm’s investment criteria. As the market grew increasingly competitive, he noticed that Frog’s current data provider wasn’t delivering the breadth and depth of private company coverage he needed.
“Not only are there more VCs out there competing for companies’ attention, but software is also an extremely big, broad space that requires firms to find their niche,” says Konstantin. “We needed a tool that enabled us to sharpen our sourcing engine and find promising opportunities earlier than anyone else.” It was also important for this new solution to work well with the firm’s existing technology.
After considering a handful of data providers, Frog chose Sourcescrub’s deal sourcing platform because of the millions of deep, private company profiles it provides. “Sourcescrub offers more information about more companies than any other tool out there — especially for private, bootstrapped companies,” says Konstantin.
Konstantin is able to quickly filter through the thousands of sources where these companies appear to build outreach lists of ideal targets using Frog’s unique investment criteria. This includes employee growth over time, a revenue proxy data signal that’s difficult to accurately track but Sourcescrub provides. He uses a similar approach to evaluate and rank relevant companies in other VC funds’ portfolios.
The team also leverages Sourcescrub for conference planning. “Every year we attend this massive trade show in Munich,” Konstantin shares. “It used to take my team hours upon hours to comb through the attendee list on the conference app and research each individual company. Now Sourcescrub gives me a short list of attendees that most closely match our investment criteria in just a few minutes.”
Identifying which outreach targets, VC portfolio companies, and conference attendees already exist in Frog’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform, Affinity, is easy thanks to Sourcescrub’s robust, pre-built integration. New leads are automatically passed from Sourcescrub to Affinity and consistently updated with the latest information over time. “Sourcescrub’s Google Chrome extension is also amazing for quickly researching companies and adding them to Affinity on an ad-hoc basis during important phone calls,” says Konstantin.
Konstantin and his team at Frog are now able to see the full universe of private companies and relevant possibilities with Sourcescrub, resulting in a 50% increase in deal flow. “I know we were missing out on deals before Sourcescrub, simply because we had no way of knowing many of these niche, private companies even existed,” says Konstantin. “With Sourcescrub, I feel confident that I’m seeing all the opportunities, and the increase in deal flow is evidence of that.”
Thanks to Sourcescrub this deal flow is also more consistent and predictable. Opportunistic inbound networking once accounted for 75% of the deals in Frog’s pipeline, with direct sourcing making up the other 25%. Since implementing Sourcescrub, directly sourced pipeline contribution has doubled to 50%.
“Sourcescrub has delivered incredible operational efficiency gains,” tells Konstantin. “We’re working at the same capacity, but we’re seeing significantly more deals. That’s because I no longer have to do things like type company data into Affinity or manually scrub conference lists.” He estimates that conference planning efficiency has increased by 80%, leaving him more time to focus on connecting with the right companies and closing deals.
“Sourcescrub was the missing piece of our tech stack, and now that we found it I can’t imagine my job without it,” he says. “VC competition and software markets are only growing, and I know that Sourcescrub will continue to play a vital role in Frog’s ability to stand out and get ahead.”
