NC IDEA announced its Fall 2014 grant winners on December 8, 2014. This piece is part of a series of stories on the five winners.


The day Eric Boggs applied for an NC IDEA grant, he also wrote and posted the job description for his first engineering hire at RevBoss. He hoped the grant would let him hire a smoking gun to help build a scalable software product.
The first part of the plan is working—today, Boggs won one of five grants awarded by the Durham-based foundation this Fall. The second part requires the right set of skills to speedily tackle a long list of projects aimed to develop RevBoss into a sales lead generation SaaS offering for customers.
ExitEvent founder Joe Procopio first reported on RevBoss in December 2013, a year after Boggs left his second startup, the now-defunct social media management software provider Argyle Social (the first was Bronto, where he was the first hire). Boggs’s plan was to build a services consultancy to help convert website visitors to customers, likely using software, but he wasn’t entirely sure how it’d all play out and if he’d have a scalable business model. Last month, Procopio interviewed Boggs again to find out how the plan is working.
Turns out, the software Boggs and Co. (pictured above; he’s holding his young daughter) built to find and qualify email addresses for their own lead generation purposes is also valuable to others. Here’s how Procopio described the software, now called RevBot: “RevBot is deceptively simple. It runs through a number of combinations of first and last name until it gets a hit and can also check the name against social networks to find a match. The match rate has been consistently hovering around 50-60%, and they’ve verified tens of thousands of prospects through RevBot.”

Boggs pairs it up with consulting to help about 20 (mostly startup) customers, so far, make smarter sales and marketing decisions. NC IDEA will be the first outside funds into the business, and Boggs isn’t looking for any more yet.
“We will continue to focus on taking care of our customers and growing a profitable business,” he told me. “If we build a great business, the fundraising stuff will take care of itself.”