How We Bootstrapped to $5m in 5 years

founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google

founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one so i'm gonna make this really quick because like yesterday was awesome i'm not gonna teach you anything that john didn't teach you godard you know nathan or anything so what i can do i can share just our story where we what we did wrong what we did good and just like yeah talk learn share right that's why we are here okay so let me figure out how this works okay like this okay so everybody here has been talking about

data right nathan is showing you like all the data points right and then we saw g tube data data data that's great we love that we love that data is everywhere that's why we exist we exist you know companies like you enterprises small you know sas companies to actually help with data but data ecosystem has been like really hard for last couple of years when snowflake started they actually solved all of the big data issues you know no more hadoop wrangling but there is like 20 different tools you

need to use to process data into snowflake and out of snowflake and it only starts with getting data in so what we did we actually oh by the way see g2 you know we have the stars on g2 as well we love g2 right so what we did we actually you know like put it all together into end-to-end platform so you don't have to have you know 20 different tools you have one login you can get data in you can get all the connectors we have the biggest marketplace in in our space we have 1400 applications in our marketplace developed by 400

different developers you can actually you know create automations to power your data once it's in snowflake to actually run it somewhere put it in your sales force you know and just like have it where you want to have it right and last but not least you have the data science part because a lot of people you know like you get the data in you look at it like nathan did right perfect but underneath that there's a lot of machine learning models and you need to have all of those parts three parts working together so yeah that's

what we did and in this part you know like actually people who started data are geeks right they are nerds they love their ci cd pipelines they love their devops tools right like i was talking to that guy last night right and he's like yeah he's actually really smart you know he spent like hours talking to him he's smart and he likes you know he he likes code right so but then you go to business departments nobody wants to code people want to have click interfaces and in

data we see these two different personas two different worlds so what we had to do we started with code we started with apis and then we are slowly adding on interfaces for business users that was scott was saying yesterday right about small things you know like like putting together and stuff right that's what we're trying to do we are not in this for one year we actually had that plan like yesterday the guy from the credit card company was saying about 10 year

10x right plan three years then go back one year two years that's what we did you know five years ago and finally now it's materializing so what actually you get when you start using our platform well inside your company people don't do only the biggest you know like the largest use case that everybody is you know doing in the data world you unlocked all of these small use cases and that's really really cool but enough about our product i just wanted to make make sure kind of like like with

them so when when god was funny when gore i was you know like asking who did who was there in 2000 i was there i remember the you know like boom and bust oh that was hard right and when we started kebula we were like okay we don't want to take venture money when we start we don't really care about that we care you know about you know making the best product because we had an agency which was actually doing cloud migrations helping companies to go to cloud companies like red bull and then

scale it and more and more we were doing that we saw that there is one issue we were everybody was asking us to build a data platform for that integrate data right run it in amazon it's just like we were lazy because we had done it so many times right there has to be better way so we start to make automations you know internally and then in 2014 we said well let's make it into a product this should be a product not an internal tool right so we did and we're like well are we gonna raise well that would be awesome

right i was like no i don't think so because like once you race you know you you better know what you wanna do with the money right you know you have to know how to use it right in when when gorda was saying that when they were starting in 2000 they needed a million dollars to buy servers i remember that we were shipping 400 dell servers you know it was crazy you know half of them didn't come but in 2014 we did not need that you know we had paying customers you know in our in our

agency and just like start a machine well it didn't cost anything on amazon right so like well this is the great time to actually build a sas company without you know like giving too much equity away in the beginning we can achieve product market fit without you know actually getting the vc money so that's what we did and we started to scale we started to scale first couple of years by referrals you know people started to use us they started to grow their own companies right and then some of them are now now now unicorns like

like product board or aurora group in europe right and then something happened i'm gonna show you what we did wrong and and what we can learn from it so okay so a couple of lessons that we've learned when our heart when you are actually going from agency or consultancy to product first it seems contrary to it and counter-intuitive but you have to let go your you know service professional services revenue we were making so much

money doing professional services before right helping all these people they paid us dollars cash right but then when we actually wanted to do product we had to rethink that we would not be able to support everyone right so we had to actually give that money away to our partners we started to create a partner ecosystem and that's the red line which is trending down and people ask like well what does it mean like when you go and like you put your products somewhere in the client and the partner comes how much money you

make how much money they make well this is kind of like actually the table is comes from our actual client mole group when we actually started to implement there we said well our target what we want to get is let's say one right one dollar in the year one we'll actually give them discount so we'll put 1.7 per our software and we need to bring in partner how much are they going to make so we then look back at the numbers and at the first year we made

1.0.7 off of the target number we wanted but our partners made four times that money four times right and that was the money we originally had in our cash flow when we were when we were a service company now we gave it away right and it was actually one of the best one of the best decisions we made because like with that we started to make an ecosystem of partners and you know like yesterday everybody talked about it partners partners partners right partners have a great way to help

you to strengthen what you what you are doing and help you actually they are like your extended arm right so that's great but there is also a bad side about it and we made a huge mistake that's carl was saying she's a slave but she was saying yesterday when uh when when you were talking about the professional services she was like i hate them right when i see professional services i hate them well yes if you are pipedrive right which is kind of like really smb

and you are just like churning through customers but if you are doing enterprises you really want professional services and that's where we made our mistake and they cannot participate in the dip that you saw because we went to enterprise level enterprise customers and we said well let's bring those partners that we developed right like there are 50 people company 50 people company they're going to do it and no that was our big mistake and if you want to know more there's fisher my my my colleague and he's a head of

professional service he can tell you everything about the mistakes so that was that was that was a big learning so another big learning well my learning it needs to be balanced you don't want it for smbs that you can like go like that you want partners but for for enterprises yes you want professional services if you look at uipath uipath when they went public they had 47 in professional services of their recurring revenue 47 that's huge because they are enterprise

and another learning that we made is kind of like when you go to enterprise features or you want to develop new features and you are bootstrapped you don't have to pay for it that's a big learning you know there's a lot of customers who are willing to pay for it if you go you ask them you work with your customers and they say like well like our data signs up right like we went to we are working for esteban this is our you know screen form product board and what i highlighted is all the features actually attribute them to to a

customer right so what does each customer want and we have a top 10 and top 50 right and then we go to them and say well listen this is actually on our roadmap right that that 10x three years thinking right but we don't want to develop it now because we have other priorities and we don't have cash for it would you be willing to pay for it right yeah totally we would right how much well can you give us half a million up front yeah no problem

and that's how we got our data science up you know so that's a big lesson if you are bootstripping you don't have to do everything yourself right if you have a vision you have a roadmap and you have customers that you actually engage with they can pay for the development upfront we love that third lesson is and and nathan is all about it right community community community right because that's something it's hard to replicate so what we did

five four years ago we actually we actually started to work with the with the the women in tech group in czech republic which got czech id girls and we actually developed a a data girls program so it was like for all the late it was originally we thought it's going to be for small girls but then it quickly you know like went totally opposite direction and now there's been over 20 000 ladies around the world who went through that program and who actually learned how to work

with data that is so awesome because like when we go somewhere and people actually have been using us before or went through our programs they just want to use us because they know us right they know that they can get to results 10 times faster they know that because they have tried it so this is actually a quote from one of our customers rossum ai which is on the track to become another unicorn in in ammo and

one day the guy called me and was like what the [ __ ] is happening i'm like what do you what do you what do you mean i was like well we need to buy you i'm like like like a license right i'm like well you said you don't want to buy us you want to use the modern data stack and all the 22s because it feels cool and nice right he was like yeah but i've been trying to hire people as head of our data you know team and this is the fourth one who came and said well i'm

going to join you but only if you get a cable license so that's the power of community right it's hard to scale globally in the first year second year but if you go and you create your market your niche and you you can like get your mini brand like as jason lemkin says in that it's doable and this is really powerful and those couple of first years that we actually did scale we scaled through referrals right so referrals people who use those so okay before i get to numbers you know like

how are we doing now well during covet pandemic and that was where the dip comes we made two decisions we made a decision to actually open up quebec as a freemium to actually enable product load growth and second decision we made decision to go to enterprise because that's where you know all the money kind of like for us was in the beginning and they pay us a lot of money and they need us it's somehow country country intuitive i can talk about it a little more but this is

kind of like the product line growth so we started we opened up cable as a freemium last year and last year 3 000 companies actually started the blog account now it's four thousand out of those three thousand last year one thousand actually started to engage they did something connected data build pipelines you know did something out of those one thousand 1400 are using qibla to actually power their businesses as a freemium on daily daily

and monthly basis and we give them 300 minutes of platform for free that's a lot and out of those already 100 actually paid with via their credit card now those 100 we already absorbed 10. so that's the power of product growth but it would not happen without those five years you know of developing community developing partnerships and developing the product so that's really awesome and we love it by the way our clients the

the the black box that's the amount of data they actually process within our platform every month they take it from raw data into business insights and actions they give it value and meaning so next lesson or or area and nathan was now talking about them i'm so i was i'm like so sorry we didn't start you know like last year when founder spouse was actually started like that's about financials you were talking about that yesterday when we started we actually thought that

every financial instrument is evil right it's evil cash is the king right we come from europe and we come from eastern europe what you would call so like my grandma would like never take loans never never never ever right so that's what's our mentality right we started that and we're like only cash only money baby right and well yes and no as everything else it's an instrument

and you should learn how to play it you should learn how to use it and we didn't you know soon enough so if we would have known how to kind of like use it sooner we would have scaled even faster we made one great decision we hired an internal internal person uh for you know like um i was a coffee uh head hunting but internal right uh and recruiting she sits in uh seattle and she's been awesome and that that's a

real game changer ball was talking about that yesterday we did it three years ago and it was like really incredible but we made one mistake in that regard we didn't hire cfo you know fast enough you know and that's one thing i would do differently totally since like early you know once we had a product market fit we started growing our customers started recommending us i would actually hire a professional who would help us you know to actually work with financials because like today you have so many options right yes prepaid cash right you can do

short-term debt you can do you know you know like founders and family right like to help you with that but you also can do venture debt venture financing or if you are in europe you can do a lot of subsidies from european union right nobody told us about it before right and we were like subsidies that's only for bad guys well yes and no right and well so that's that's kind of like my thing if you are if you are bootstripping learn how to work with financial instruments cash is not the only financial instrument you

have okay so now what happened right well we were overexposed so remember that graph that nate is showing kind of like your exposure and you know exposure to several clients that what that that's what happened to us so first we were overexposed during the covet into hospitality and retail industry in u.s so our clients were just going bankrupt right we had a client who was who was

doing like 300 000 a year went bankrupt right a lot of the clients actually went into down sales and then started to pick up right because we actually started to take care of them and that was that was really really interesting another client was in asia and was a big financial institution and they lost 90 percent of their business within the first month of covet so that was it was kind of like and everybody says well overexposure to a couple of clients is bad well yeah

in the ideal world it is but if you again are starting and bootstrapping and kind of like somebody you know you have a client who actually pays you million dollars in advance and is aligned with your vision that is pretty awesome you can do a lot of stuff that and the bad stuff is you are overexposed so yeah we got over that we actually we actually you know reshuffled the company we went into product led growth we started you know like working differently with

enterprises and now we are growing very nicely so that's my couple of lessons you know like so like yeah work with cash bootstrap early uh you know like work with your clients and build community and always always you know change god was saying that you know the only constant we have is the change okay thanks very much thanks marvel [Applause]