Why You're Missing Out On Your Biggest Growth Channel And What To Do About It with Tom Coburn, CEO of Jebbit

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tom Coburn, founder of Jebbit, to discuss his journey from a college startup to a successful enterprise SaaS company. What struck me most was how Jebbit's growth wasn't driven by traditional outbound sales or marketing, it was powered by their customers becoming their biggest advocates.

The story begins with a pivot. Tom and his team started with a website for college students to earn money by engaging with brands. While they reached $1M in revenue, they realized this wasn't the scalable tech company they envisioned. After raising their Series A, they made the bold decision to pivot to surveys / quizzes and focus entirely on enterprise customers, specifically in retail, travel, and CPG.

One of their most brilliant early strategies was creating a CMO advisory board. They recruited recently retired CMOs from Fortune 500 companies, gave them equity, and leveraged their networks to get meetings with active CMOs. This helped them land their first major enterprise clients.

But what really accelerated their growth was something organic: their champions changing jobs. As Tom explained: "What really became our biggest thing was customer referrals or marketers just leaving a big company and going to another one... We broke into entirely new verticals because someone left a P&G and went to like a Merck or a Pfizer and brought us there. And now we have Pharma, or left and went to the NFL or the NBA."

This created a powerful domino effect. In their peak growth years, 30% of new bookings came from customers bringing Jebbit to their new companies. The key? Delivering exceptional value and building strong relationships. As Tom put it, "Do really good work for them and get them bought in on our product. And then when they go to another company, they bring us there."

Their success with Procter & Gamble particularly showcased the importance of being enterprise-ready. When P&G came knocking through Pilot 44, Jebbit had spent years preparing for enterprise customers. "Thankfully by the time Pilot 44 reached out to us and P&G was interested in capturing first-party data, we'd had two, maybe even three years under our belt of really being an enterprise-first company," Tom shared. This preparation meant they could meet P&G's stringent requirements, and once they became a global approved vendor, it opened doors throughout the CPG industry.

Another fascinating insight was their approach to sales team autonomy. Rather than enforcing rigid scripts and processes, they encouraged creativity and initiative. Tom explained, "We would give people training, obviously, and we would give them the high-level points to make about Jebbit and we'd give them the best customer stories, but we never did scripts... I think we benefited a lot from giving people autonomy and supporting them on trying new things."

The story culminated in Jebbit's merger with BlueConic in 2024, a move that had been part of their vision since 2017. As Tom noted, they had always seen Jebbit as "a really awesome feature to be added to more what I would say like core infrastructure in marketing."

From startup pivot to successful exit, Jebbit's journey shows that sometimes the best growth strategy isn't about cold calling or marketing campaigns—it's about building something so valuable that your customers can't imagine working without it.

Want to hear more insights from Tom about building advisory boards, scaling sales teams, and navigating the enterprise software landscape? Listen to our full conversation above.