Why we left HubSpot data for permits
A short founding story about quitting enriched lists and learning to listen to public records instead.
I spent eight years selling physical security before I started Blacksmith. For most of those years my workflow looked the same as everyone else's. Pull a list out of a paid database. Cut it by industry and size. Hand the rows to a BDR. Wait. The list was always too big, the cut was always too coarse, and the BDR always asked the same question two weeks in. What is the reason any of these people should pick up the phone today.
It is a fair question. The honest answer was usually that there was no reason. The list was just a list. So we invented reasons. We invented quarter ends and renewal cycles and weather events and trade-show season. We pretended the database held a signal it did not actually hold.
The day I stopped pretending
In May of 2024 I was working an account in Chandler, Arizona. A 180,000 square foot distribution facility. The deal had been on my pipeline for fourteen months. I had run every play I knew. Then a sales engineer I respect mentioned, almost in passing, that the company had filed an expansion permit in early March. Two months before I had even put them on the list. Two months I could have been first in the door.
I went home that night and pulled the public permit database for the same county. Forty seven new industrial filings in the previous ninety days, all of them larger than 50,000 square feet. I had touched three. The other forty four had gone to whichever integrator happened to be in the right relationship at the right time.
“The buying signal had been there the whole time. I just was not looking at it. Nobody in our category was looking at it.”
What we decided to build
Blacksmith started that summer with one rule. We would only count things that happened in the real world. A permit filing. A leadership change. A funding round. A news mention of a specific budget line item. If a data point did not correspond to an event that actually occurred, we would not put it in the system.
- Permits and zoning filings from every county we could reach, refreshed nightly
- Leadership changes pulled from SEC filings, press releases, and verified LinkedIn moves
- Funding and expansion news from regulatory and trade press, deduplicated against our existing accounts
- Insurance and OSHA actions when public, since they create predictable budget motions
The thing the customers told us next
The first ten integrators we showed it to all said the same sentence. Some version of, this is the list I have been trying to build for years out of newspaper clippings. That sentence is why I quit my job. Lists are easy to buy. Reasons are hard to assemble. The whole company exists to assemble reasons.
If you have a list problem and an attention problem at the same time, the fix is not a bigger list. The fix is fewer rows you are willing to actually defend.
If this resonated, it'll feel familiar in the product.
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