ContactOut 

ContactOut is the leading recruitment intelligence tool used by 30% of the Fortune 500. Our users include Microsoft, Apple, MERC, and Bank of America. ContactOut adds a powerful overlay on top of LinkedIn profiles that displays phone numbers, email addresses, and social media profiles.

Partner

ArchiveSocial

ArchiveSocial helps government agencies across the United States, from small towns and cities to the United States Department of Justice and the White House, manage social media as a public record.

Account Executive

Sales Development Representative

Windsor Circle, Inc.

Mastered Salesforce CRM, Salesloft Cadence, eTail Insights, Hub Spot, GoTo Meeting, Zoom Meeting and Google Apps from a sales perspective. Responsible for 100 calls and 250 activities a week. Learned account based sales development methodology. Familiar with spin selling and The Challenger Sale. In first month selling, booked six discovery calls from cold calls. Turned four of those calls into qualified opportunities. Moved a $13k deal from intro to decision making in 3 weeks in September. Built a pipeline of $75k for October. Loved the rush that comes the moment someone picks up a cold call.

Redwood Interactive

Optimized online Facebook and Youtube ad campaigns based on key client metrics. Generated daily reports from Facebook Power Editor and Google Analytics data. Developed an understanding of online social media campaigns while executing an award-winning social campaign for Organic Valley.

Media Analyst

Office of the Public Advocate for the City of New York

As a public service fellow, I drafted amicus curiae brief advocating for the fair application of New York City’s Human Rights Law to Limited English Proficient New Yorkers.  I also prepared Article 78 Mandamus motions for the production of records to the Public Advocate.  I researched potential enforcement actions against New York City’s Housing Preservation and Development department.

Fellow

Fordham Law School

Student

Lincoln Square Legal Services

Drafted amicus curiae brief advocating for the consistent application of evidence rules in consumer debt cases on appeal to New York State Appellate Division First Term. Represented consumer clients in litigation in Staten Island and Manhattan Civil Court, including mechanic’s lien, insurance coverage and consumer fraud. Provided per diem representation to consumer defendants in Manhattan Civil Court. Negotiated and drafted a settlement for a client in a contentious consumer complaint.

Clinic Student

Hoge and Gameros, L.L.P.

Prepared evidence exhibits for trials in State and Federal Court. Drafted motions for summary judgment for State Court trials
Reviewed client internal email in advance of discovery production request for contract arbitration and related litigation. Participated in client intake interviews with the firm’s managing partner.

Summer Associate

Samsung Engineering

Reviewed legal terms in Engineer, Procure and Construct Contracts, including terms of supervision, liability and the scope of the contract and changed to Plain English for non-lawyer use by Engineers. Compared contracts, memoranda of understanding and non-disclosure agreements to determine and assess deviation from company’s standard terms and conditions.

Legal Associate

City Year

Managed a team of nine Corps Members at P.S. 112, an elementary school, in Long Island City, Queens, New York.  Organized and developed all aspects of each team member’s service, from daily schedule to personal development goals.  Interfaced weekly with school administrators and teachers on goals and plans of the team.  Completed monthly progress reports on the team’s progress to their goals.  Planned and managed the media outreach for a 1,200+ person Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service in East New York, Brooklyn.  Managed a five-person committee that planned and developed the service projects for a 230+ person Day of Service in Long Island City

Team Leader

Worked 50-hour weeks at P.S. 112 as an AmeriCorps volunteer, running in-school and after-school programs.  Wrote and taught daily reading lessons in the classroom and service learning lessons for the after-school program.  Sought input from and collaboration with a diverse group of fellow corps members, school partners and students.  Built relationships with administrators and teachers that served as the foundation for a successful transition to a leadership role in the school the following year

Corps Member

I am a partner at ContactOut, helping businesses find contact information for recruiting and sales targets.

Mat Thomas

Roman Hipp

Building BetterContact | Helping early-stage B2B SaaS companies with insights & ready-to-use templates

Currently building BetterContact, a B2B SaaS that aggregates various data sources to find and verify any email and mobile phone number.

Growth Co-Founder

🎉 BetterContact officially partnered with Instantly.ai (we just went live!)

This is an especially exciting partnership for us because:
- we have a large joint customer base
- we ourselves are users for over 2 years now
- we’re getting along with the Instantly team very well

The big news for our users now:

You can now find emails from +20 premium data providers bundled in a single provider, directly inside one of the leading cold email sequencers.

The best thing:

They're verified and scored through 4 layers.
If they're invalid/have a low score, there will be 0 charge!

We've been in close contact with the Instantly team for a good while now, and really enjoy working together - kudos to the team for making it happen. 

Big things ahead in 2026!

Building BetterContact | Helping B2B companies win outbound through more and better contact data

Every "Find Contacts at Company" API is broken, because too often, the data is outdated. The person simply doesn’t work at that company anymore, or the job title just isn't the right one.

That’s why at BetterContact, we spent the last 8 months fixing it.

The result is the most advanced waterfall “Search People at Company” API endpoint, because:

1. It aggregates data from multiple sources (waterfall) - like we do with our enrichment waterfall + AI-powered web crawling & graph expansion

2. To ensure quality, AI Agents verify things like (in real-time):
- Does this person actually work there?
- Is this really their job title?
- Are they still based in that country?

The best thing: it doesn’t cost anything to source the leads, just the typical email/mobile phone enrichment rates apply (only charges if it’s triple-verified).

We’re opening up the endpoint to the people that comment, before we publicly release it soon.

The guide shows you how to easily set up the API.
(for Clay users, it also includes a template you can just use)

📩 Comment “Live” and I’ll send you the full setup step-by-step.
(And yes, you can use it today)

This is the allbound engine I used to bootstrap BetterContact to a 7-figure ARR SaaS - running 100% of sales and marketing myself with an inbound-led outbound motion.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 1: Gathering Intelligence

The best way I’ve found to truly understand my ICP’s pain points and how they design their workflows is by having real 1:1 conversations with them.

This gives me deep visibility into their exact use cases, while also helping me stay sharp on industry trends and competitor strategies.

This is what I’m using for that:

Call recordings & transcripts: Fathom.ai
Reddit keyword alarms: F5Bot
LinkedIn keyword alarms: Trigify.io

I automatically connect with ICP leads through HeyReach.io, and make sure to track their posts & activity through Breakcold.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 2: CREATE RELEVANT CONTENT

Those conversations directly fuel the ICP-relevant content I publish on LinkedIn.

When I have less skin in the game (i.e. fewer real customer and prospect conversations) the quality of my content drops fast.

That’s why STEP 1 underpins every step that comes after.


𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 3: TRACK ENGAGEMENT

I track profile views, post engagement, and other key signals using Teamfluence™.

This lets me spot people who might be interested in giving our solution a try.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 4: QUALIFY ENGAGEMENT

The engagers are being sent to Clay to qualify & enrich the leads.
(currently also evaluating tools like nRev, BitScale, Baseloop, and Genesy for that)

ZenRows for scraping, GPT o4-mini for ICP-fit scoring, and BuiltWith (occasionally) for technographics and integration angles.

For qualified leads (ICP Tier 1 & 2) I’m enriching the email address with BetterContact, and ICP Tier 1 leads also with mobile numbers.

GPT o4-mini to write personalized email copy.

𝐒𝐓𝐄𝐏 5: OUTREACH

My next step is reaching out to the different ICP levels.

The structure & cadence is the same (3 touches), but if there is no reply for ICP Tier 1’s, I try my best to call them. 

For that, I’m using BetterContact to find the mobile number, and Aircall to dial (depending on geography).

Something we recently added is Masterinbox.com to centralize all of our LinkedIn/email messaging (big helper there).

Outreach responses, from highly enthusiastic to openly annoyed, are a huge feedback loop for refining my understanding of the market and my ICP. 

Those insights, in turn, fuel better content, and the cycle repeats.

Would love any feedback on this process, or tool suggestions to make it more efficient 👇

Last week, a VP Sales at a Fortune 500 got personally offended after I told him we wouldn’t build a new feature into BetterContact for them to get onboarded.

Honestly, it was quite hard. Part of me wasn’t even sure if it was the right thing to do.

But looking back, I'm proud - it was the only right thing to do.

Because I knew: They’re currently not our ICP.

Sure, it’s tempting to say yes to a shiny logo like that.

But we've done this too many times in the past.

And ultimately, it always ends up in building the wrong product, for the wrong people, with the wrong priorities.

As our inbound requests increase significantly month-over-month, I'm sure there will be many more of those shiny temptations.

And every time, it's all abount reminding myself (albeit it's *really* hard):
Focus > FOMO

2025 has been a rollercoaster for BetterContact: $1.9M+ ARR in churn, 21% MoM growth, DDoS attacks, and much more. Here are some of our biggest fails and wins.

THE FAILS:

- $1.91M ARR churn (with >28% monthly subscriber churn spikes)
- Our best developer needed to leave due to personal reasons (we onboarded a new one though)
- Burned >$84k on features we couldn’t launch (things like a Sales Navigator extension)
- We still face occasional DDoS attacks which are very resource-intensive to defend against
- Major downtimes in Q1/Q2 that led to big customers churning

THE WINS:

- We kept innovating as first-movers (launched first waterfall lead finder)
- First in-person event co-hosted (Clay x BetterContact Christmas Party)
- Big accuracy boosts, especially with new partnerships like Trestle on the mobile phone side
- First time churn below 10% (currently at 8.2%!)
- Still very lean team with high EBITDA margins 
- We reached full data compliance with GDPR, CCPA, etc.
- Big new partnerships (Clay, Instantly, and a lot of other exciting ones I’ll share more about soon)
- No downtimes in Q4 (we struggled a lot with them in Q1/Q2)

In 2026, we’re doubling down on our mission: finding every discoverable email/mobile number, and thus enabling meaningful, mutually beneficial B2B connections.

Also, a big focus will be on improving & distributing our waterfall lead finder (we already get strong traction there).

Most importantly, we’ll do our best to stay laser-focused on building what our users actually want (and not chasing shiny objects or requests that won’t truly benefit them). 

Excited for the new year!

Six months ago, one of our biggest customer churned from BetterContact.

And honestly (kind of tough to say as the founder): I get why.

Back then:
↳ the UI was scrappy
↳ each enrichment took >5 minutes
↳ we had plenty of bugs and regular downtimes

Fast forward to today, we got this message 👇

“keep building, loving the product”

What makes this so great for us though isn’t the positive feedback itself.

It’s the person that it came from.

It's someone who left our platform when things weren’t good enough back then - and came back a month ago after we rethought and rebuilt the whole product.

Every improvement over the last six months came from moments like those early frustrations from our users. 

Still plenty to do, but moments like this remind me why the grind is worth it!

In the last 12 months, BetterContact grew primarily inbound, driving thousands of demos & signups by word of mouth. 3 weeks ago, we started cold calling again - and I forgot how crazy powerful it is.

The reason why we are picking up dialling again is:
1. AI makes everyone sound the same - but the phone is still where real human nuance can win
2. Our own data sourcing & enrichment is a competitive advantage

Up until now, our growth engine has been primarily inbound (word of mouth). 

But now we want to 10× what’s already working organically by layering cold calling back on top.

Below is a screenshot of our first campaign which went nuts.

65% connect rate (never seen that before - our big focus on mobile validation & scoring inside BetterContact seems to be paying off big time).

Based on those results, it would honestly be silly to *not* triple down on calling (we might put some open positions out there soon).

Are you currently picking up the phone? 👇

How to book a demo with billion-dollar CROs (this worked two timed for me in 2025):

→ build a data company
→ cold call them on their mobile
→ they reply a bit surprised: “I never get cold called - how did you find this number?”
→ they add: “…we actually need this for our sales team”
→ meeting booked

I never expected to get attention *this* way for BetterContact, but not complaining!

“We just launched the most accurate lead database”. And still, it thinks I’m working at my cold company. This is the reason why many outbound set ups are broken (and what we did about it) 

The big problem with these databases is the following:

They only periodically scrape platforms like LinkedIn, and as they need to scrape 10’s of millions of profiles regularly, there is a significant data loss.

Scraping timeouts & omitting data points on purpose to be more efficient (LinkedIn gets better and better at preventing that at scale).

And if someone changed jobs recently, tools like Apollo still have their old info, rendering these prospects useless for your list building.

That’s the reason why 8 months ago, we wanted to fix that at BetterContact (primarily because it was the most requested feature by far).

Based on our +250 beta testers (just quoting some users here):

“It worked very well, especially compared to what the legacy databases can do”
“I’m annoyed with Apollo’s shi*** data. This is a game-changer”
“Definitely the freshest people search API I used so far”

Because this is what our waterfall API does differently:

We waterfall databases in order to solve the issue of the coverage.

And to solve for quality/accuracy, we use AI Agents to crawl the web in order to verify that the person *actually* works at that company/has that job title/lives in that country.

We already have it realeased in the app, and next week we’ll release the API publicly. Keen on every feedback!

taplio

The Battle

Mat Thomas

Roman Hipp

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taplio

The Battle

Mat Thomas

Roman Hipp

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Roman Hipp's LinkedIn Performance

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