Online Lead-Generation Platform Jangl Leads The Way

This past March, Stephen Chen was looking for customer leads in the life insurance vertical. So Chen, the director of marketing, life and health insurance for QuinStreet, a vertical marketing firm based in California, turned to the lead-generation tool Jangl—a product from White Plains-based RevPoint Media. Chen found the two-year-old platform easy to use and customizable to his needs. Better than that, though, he was able to deliver quality leads to his clients. “Jangl has been a great complement to our current product suite and has allowed us to expand our reach,” says Chen. 

The fact that Jangl worked like a dream for Chen is no accident. Jangl is the culmination of the 15-plus years of lead acquisition and marketing experience of its two co-creators, Mike Fishman (pictured) and Steve Leavy. “All of the marketing I’ve done has been in customer acquisition,” says Fishman. “Whether it was finding new customers for Disney.com or ESPN.com, or finding new leads for GlaxoSmithKline, it’s all been customer acquisition and lead generation.”

Also contributing to the platform’s success is that Fishman has a few startups under his belt. He founded another lead-generation company called Modern Consumer in 2002. After selling that business in 2008, Fishman started RevPoint Media two years later. Though the business started as a traditional lead-generation company, Fishman soon realized that there was “a lack of a web-based toolset for businesses to acquire and distribute leads in an efficient and effective manner,” says Fishman. So to fill that void, in December 2013, Fishman and Leavy launched Jangl.

The first iteration, says Fishman, was a transparent marketplace for buyers to purchase leads from the vendors of their choice. “Soon after that, we iterated again and built a platform which would enable larger businesses to utilize the platform for their own purposes,” says Fishman. Ultimately, Jangl grew into a first-of-its-kind platform, which helps lead-generation companies conduct business more effectively than ever before. 

“They need a state-of-the-art platform to process and deliver leads to their clients. We provide intent and quality filtering as well as a full management tool for companies to manage their lead buying and selling,” Fishman explains. Jangl also empowers users to customize their experience: A user will enter specific criteria—such as price points—and the platform will generate a list of vendors from which the user can pick and choose. 

Though it hasn’t been a completely smooth sail (they’ve had to overcome a few technological glitches along the way), Jangl been an easy pitch to users. “We understand the ins and the outs of exactly the type of platform that our clients are looking for,” says Fishman. “As far as our pitch is concerned, we let the platform speak for itself.” And that platform has spoken loudly—to the tune of a 300 percent increase in revenue this year over last. 

Says the serial entrepreneur Fishman: “Being able to take something from the idea stage and execute that into a working technology has been a struggle at times, but it’s obviously something we’ve dedicated ourselves to overcoming.”