Boardroom Insiders
👤 Sharon Gillenwater (Ex exec-marketing consultant. Saw sellers fumble the C-suite, then spent 14 years building the dossier they lacked.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
A searchable database of 29,000 hand-researched exec profiles that B2B sellers license for $50k-$300k a year.
Will it work? · our read
Buyable by design. No clever trick. She made it boring to buy: recurring enterprise licenses, clean books, a team that ran without her. The moat was the depth of the data, hand-built over 14 years.
01How the money moves
25 researchers hand-write deep dossiers on 29,000 execs
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B2B sales & marketing teams license annual access
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Each contract: $50k-$300k a year, renewing
02The numbers
$25M
all-cash exit (2022)
TheyGotAcqd
$5M
ARR, 5x multiple
founder
29k+
hand-built profiles
founder
Bootstrapped (about $200k friends-and-family), 28 staff. Sharon grossed about $13M personally. They Got Acquired
$5M ARR when it sold for $25M all-cash (5x) to Euromoney, Jan 2022.
03Weight class — CENTStap an axis
Control High
Owns the dataset, the brand, and direct enterprise contracts. No platform or channel dependency.
04The key move
Run it without you
Sharon handed real authority to a leadership team, hired a fractional CFO, and kept the books spotless - so Euromoney was buying a business that ran without its founder, not a job. Buyers pay full price.
fact
The counter-intuitive move
Her reward for making it run without her: the buyer didn't want her to stay, then sold the company to a PE firm nine months later.
fact
05Where the moat is
Not code - accumulated, un-scrapable depth:
29,000 deep profiles, hand-built over 14 yearsHuman research rivals can't scrape or auto-fake$50k-$300k enterprise contracts that renewTrusted inside enterprise sales teams
06How it diesmedium confidence
Copy the model without the 14-year data head start and you're a 28-person content shop with thin margins: manual research caps the profit, no proprietary depth, and a buyer sees a job, not an asset. our read
Show evidence · counter
Evidence: The 14-year head start IS the moat - and it did sell for 5x, all cash.
Counter: 28 staff on $5M ARR - labor-heavy by design; that human depth is exactly what a scraper can't copy.
07Against rivals
Bars = depth of C-suite insight. Others sell broad contact lists; Boardroom Insiders sold deep, hand-written dossiers on each exec. Rival prices are rough public estimates. our read
08Who uses it
Enterprise B2B sellersABM & field marketersC-suite recruitersStrategic account execs
★Would it work for you?
If a strategic buyer showed up, would they be buying an asset - or your job?
Boardroom Insiders was buyable because it ran without her. Build for that day one. We don't score you — you answer.
🚀Use it as a launchpada prompt for your own AI
Copy → paste into your AI → then develop it freely in the conversation.
You are a sharp, honest startup strategist. Use the proven case below as a launchpad for MY idea — help me find my own angle, not copy it.
<my_profile>
Domain I know: [your domain]
My unfair advantage (access/audience): [your edge]
Interests: [your interests]
Resources & goal: [your resources] · [your goal]
</my_profile>
<case name="Boardroom Insiders" model="data">
What it does: Boardroom Insiders licenses a searchable database of 29,000 hand-researched C-level executive profiles to enterprise B2B sales and marketing teams for $50k-$300k a year.
Why it won (moat): The moat is 14 years of human research - 29,000 deep exec dossiers a competitor cannot scrape, automate, or replicate quickly.
Weakest axis (CENTS): Every profile is written by hand, so growth requires hiring researchers rather than adding servers, which caps margins and scale.
How it could die: It dies as a copycat with no data head start: a labor-heavy content shop with thin margins that no strategic buyer wants to own.
</case>
<task>
Be a skeptical operator, not a cheerleader. No generic startup platitudes. If my angle is weak, say so plainly.
First, a reality check: markets like this mostly fail. State the honest base rate (how crowded/hard is this?) and the ONE specific thing that would have to be true for ME to be the exception — grounded in my profile above.
Then a compact table:
- Fit — does this pattern suit my edge, or fight my gap?
- Angle — my sharpest differentiation vs Boardroom Insiders (concrete, not "better UX")
- Distribution — exactly where my first 100 users come from (this is the hardest part — be specific, not "content marketing")
- Risk — its "how it dies" (above) in MY situation
Finish with one line: "The single thing to do next."
Use only the facts above; if data is thin, say so — never invent numbers.
Then stay with me and go deeper on whatever I ask — tech stack, rough cost & time, the smallest MVP to test, pricing, or timing.
</task>
✓ Copied — paste into your AI
👤Placeholders like [your domain] auto-fill from your profile — example values for now.Set up profile →
Sourcesupdated · daily
They Got Acquired: sold to Euromoney for $25MSaaS Unbound podcast: Sharon Gillenwater interviewCrunchbase: Boardroom Insiders
Revenue ($5M ARR) and price ($25M, 5x, all-cash, Jan 2022 to Euromoney/now Delinian) are founder-stated via They Got Acquired and the SaaS Unbound interview - STATED, not a filing. The 29,000+ profile count and $50k-$300k pricing are Sharon's own figures. Rival prices (ZoomInfo, LinkedIn, InsideView) are rough public estimates, flagged approximate. The 'dies' scenario is our read, not a documented failure of a twin. We never score you.