Case Study
How a PLG Company Finds Enterprise Buyers Hidden in 20M+ Sign-Ups With Crustdata
Company
A PLG Software Company
use case
Sign-Up Enrichment
company overview
This company builds a widely adopted developer tool with 20M+ self-serve users. Their GTM motion depends on identifying which individual users work at large companies and converting those accounts into enterprise deals, with custom onboarding, dedicated sales support, and customer success for high-value accounts.
scale
20M+ users, 30K-40K new sign-ups per day
The company grows through self-serve adoption: users sign up, use the product, and expand usage across their teams. But the sign-up form captures only a name and an email, leaving the GTM team with no structured data about who these users are professionally. Enterprise buyers pass through the product every day without sales ever knowing.
The sign-up form collects a name and an email. No company, no title, no role.
Roughly 60% of sign-ups use personal email addresses like Gmail or Yahoo, while only 30% register with a business email. Even business email users have no structured company or role data attached
Without a company field or IP-based enrichment, the GTM team cannot associate any user with an employer, team size, or industry
With 20M+ users in the database, millions of records are invisible to B2B sales because no enrichment vendor the company had tried could resolve personal emails to professional profiles at scale
"70% of our inbound MQLs come in with non-resolved personal emails." - VP of Revenue
The company's revenue depends on prosumer-to-enterprise conversion: identifying power users at large companies and converting them into enterprise deals with custom onboarding, sales support, and customer success.
Without enrichment, the team cannot distinguish a developer on a free plan from an engineering lead at a Fortune 500 company. Both sign up the same way and look identical in the CRM
Enterprise accounts that warranted custom onboarding and dedicated support received the same generic self-serve experience as solo users, costing the company enterprise revenue every week
The gap was in professional context: who does this person work for, how large is the company, and does this account qualify for a sales motion. Product usage data showed who was active, but not who they worked for
At 30,000 to 40,000 new sign-ups per day and tens of millions of historical records needing backfill, this was not a problem solvable through batch tools or manual workflows.
The company ran a custom data warehouse with scheduled enrichment jobs, but no provider in the stack could resolve personal emails to work profiles at the throughput required
Tools like Clay worked for small-batch enrichment but broke down at PLG scale, where tens of thousands of records needed processing daily and millions more sat in a backlog. Existing integrations relied on brittle webhook workarounds that failed at volume
The company was building a multi-provider enrichment waterfall and needed each provider to offer modular, atomic API endpoints that slot into specific pipeline positions rather than requiring a consolidated custom integration
Precision was as important as throughput. A false positive, enriching a solo hobbyist as an enterprise engineer, would corrupt the sales pipeline and waste rep capacity. Most providers the company evaluated prioritized coverage breadth over match accuracy, the wrong tradeoff for a pipeline where false positives directly cost sales time
Crustdata gave the company the enrichment infrastructure their PLG-to-enterprise motion required: personal email resolution, high-precision matching, and modular API architecture that processes tens of thousands of sign-ups per day without manual intervention.
The People Enrichment API resolves personal email addresses to full professional profiles, including current employer, title, seniority, and work history. The 60% of sign-ups that were previously invisible to sales now have structured company and role data attached
Enrichment runs programmatically on every new sign-up as part of the internal data warehouse pipeline, processing 30,000 to 40,000 records per day for new sign-ups and handling historical backfill across tens of millions of existing user records
The Company Enrichment API adds 250+ company-level datapoints per matched account, including headcount, engineering team size, funding stage, and growth signals, giving the GTM team the firmographic context needed to score and route each sign-up
The company calls multiple enrichment providers in sequence and selects the highest-confidence result for each record. Crustdata's atomic API endpoints, separate calls for person enrichment, company enrichment, and individual data dimensions, slot directly into specific positions in the waterfall without requiring a bundled custom endpoint
This architecture means the company controls exactly which data dimensions come from which provider, optimizing for match rate and precision across the full pipeline rather than depending on a single vendor for every field
The direct request-response API model integrates into the existing data warehouse and scheduled job infrastructure, with no manual CSV workflows, no webhook workarounds, and no batch delays between sign-up and enrichment
Crustdata returns no result rather than a low-confidence match, which aligns with the team's requirement that bad data never enters the enterprise sales pipeline. Every enriched record that reaches sales has been matched with high confidence
The precision-first approach means reps spend their time on accounts that are genuinely enterprise-qualified rather than chasing false positives generated by vendors that prioritize returning a result for every query
As the enrichment pipeline matures, the team tunes routing rules based on enrichment output: sign-ups from companies above headcount or funding thresholds route to sales with full context and receive custom onboarding and dedicated support, while smaller accounts continue through self-serve
The company's GTM motion shifted from treating every sign-up identically to identifying and activating enterprise accounts at the moment of sign-up, with measurable impact across revenue conversion, operational efficiency, and data infrastructure cost.
The company closed twice as many enterprise accounts after deploying sign-up enrichment, because sales now reaches buyers who previously churned through self-serve without ever being identified
Enterprise buyers who qualify for custom onboarding, dedicated sales support, and customer success now receive that experience from day one, instead of falling through a generic self-serve flow
Each enterprise account identified and converted represents significant annual contract value, which means every week of sign-ups enriched translates directly into pipeline the sales team can work
The ops and data team no longer manages CSV exports, manual uploads, or brittle webhook integrations. Enrichment runs automatically as part of the data warehouse pipeline on every new sign-up
Hours per week previously spent on data plumbing and troubleshooting batch failures are reclaimed for activation work: building routing logic, tuning PQL scoring, and optimizing the self-serve to enterprise handoff
Historical backfill that would have taken months of manual batch processing runs programmatically through the same API pipeline, compressing a multi-quarter project into a continuous automated process
Vendors that required per-seat licensing, manual workflows, or lacked the throughput for PLG-scale enrichment were replaced by an API that integrates directly into the internal data warehouse. The company pays for enrichment volume consumed instead of licensed seats
One API handles person enrichment, company enrichment, and the personal email resolution that no previous vendor in the stack could deliver at this scale, reducing the number of vendor contracts, integrations, and support relationships the team maintains
The cost savings from vendor consolidation funded further investment in the internal enrichment pipeline, turning a recurring data subscription expense into infrastructure that compounds as the user base grows