1. First buy data from ASL. Instead of 4.5M, buy as many as you can, like 40M, the entire 15-24 population if they got it. Apparently at ~$100K/~5M, this is only like $1M.
2. Do your own aggressive email/marketing outreach to these people.
3. If you can get 10% response rate, that's 4M customers right there.
4. Sell to JPM for $175M.
I need to get into the lead generation business.
You can't get anywhere near a 10% click rate with random leads like that.
The reason companies like this are sought after is the idea that their users are warm leads with an existing relationship with the brand. People who have (supposedly) gone out of their way to sign up for something are several orders of magnitude more likely to engage with e-mails compared to e-mailing them randomly from an unknown brand.
To quote the relevant bit:
> JPMC reached out via email to a random sample of the list Frank provided – approximately 400,000 purported customers of Frank – with offers to open Chase checking or savings accounts. Of those 400,000, only 103 even clicked through to Frank’s website.
So a clickthrough rate of 0.026%.
Good luck getting anything close to 10% when you're starting with a cold, and possibly partially trash, dataset.
JPMC wasn't just attempting to buy a large email list. Notably, they were also attempting to buy _future expected email list subscribers_.
In theory, if JPMC buys the entire company and then lets the company keep running, they'd expect the list to keep growing over time at a rate similar to whatever Frank's user growth graphs indicated.
They also, I assume, believed they were acquiring a group of people with expertise in marketing to this segment since, well, if you have a warm list of 4M people, that means you also have the abilities to build such a list, which is valuable as well.
I'm not going to try and estimate what percentage of the price was what, but I'll point out there's more to it than just the raw size of the email list at the time of the deal since JPMC didn't _just_ buy an email list and nothing else.
Matt Levine (as always) is documented, clear and adds a little touch of humour.
Reminded me some quote I read about how some many "scale" business are in the junkyard because the creator thought even if only 1% succeed, forgot that there is a success rate below 1%. ZERO.
> 133. While Javice was working with the Data Science Professor in early August 2021, Amar contacted ASL to obtain the ASL List containing student data for 4.5 million college students.
> 136. Amar continued to correspond with ASL over the following days. Through this additional correspondence, Amar learned that ASL could sell Frank a list of data for 4.5 million college students for a cost of $105,000.
So basically they knew they would eventually be found out, so they just elected to buy the 4.5 million contacts for $105K from ASL.
> 149. Ultimately, Javice presented to the Data Science Professor the ASL List of 4.5 million college students and told him that she wanted to "augment" that list. Upon information and belief, Javice represented to the Data Science Professor that the 4.5 million college students on the list were actual Frank accounts. Javice directed the Data Science professor to find a company that could "augment" the list with additional information, including phone numbers, dates of birth, and email addresses.
This data apparently wasn't complete enough, so they then got the original "Data Science Professor" to try to enrich it through commercial sources. Hilarious, the two companies he explores are Emformion and...Acxiom! This freaked them out, so they told him not to tell Acxiom who he was working for. Which they didn't buy. So they only got 1.9M of the 4.5M email addresses matched through Emformion. And things unraveled from there, as they eventually were asked to provide the original list and of course they didn't have it, or anything close to it. Etc etc