How 8Base CEO Albert Santalo grew 8Base to $3.1M revenue and 1.2K customers in 2024.

hey guys recording this here on what is it friday the 19th maybe you're seeing this on monday at the latest but want to let you know we are almost sold out for founder comp sorry founder 500 in austin texas here in about a week uh it's gonna be an amazing event 500 b2b sas founders i'm looking at the attendee list there's almost um there's almost 60 founders with more than six seven million bucks in arr it's an incredible group of group there's over uh there's over a hundred over 150 with more than a million uh more than a million revenue it's an incredible group you don't want to miss it uh grab your hotel grab your flight grab a ticket right now i'll put the link in the bio um in the description here on youtube and i think there's only about three tickets left okay about three tickets left i'd love to see you guys there don't be bashful grab your ticket now hey folks my guest today is albert santolo he's a computer scientist and internet entrepreneur with experience in high growth venture-backed technology companies he's now building a low-code development platform called 8-base recently made a nice pivot uh and looking forward to catching up today albert you're ready to take us to the top absolutely great to see you nathan great to see you too so my gosh first off this is a very competitive space there's a ton of free tools how are you positioning yourself yeah i mean look it's it's uh it's competitive and it's not i mean if you look at the real competition is people building things from scratch so you know i would say in some areas yeah there's there's been solutions that have come out and made a difference but there's still a lot of green field opportunity here i'd say we're in the first or second inning still yep now you when we last spoke uh this would have been back um in early 2021 actually you told me you know your largest customer was 240 000 bucks a year you know you had 1200 customers paying 100 bucks a month on average you're doing about 1.5 million in total arr um and you i believe you were basically bootstrapped outside of a small seed round how have things changed oh my god there's been a lot of change so so at the time we had you know a base has always had the intention of being full stack low code but we had essentially half the product stood up so we started with the back end we had a back end as a service product and we had a professional services offering that would help people use that back end and so part of our bootstrapping and dog fooding strategy was to bring services to the table do large engagements that implement a base while we were building out the rest of the product so that rest of the product which is all the front end tools is now in the market uh in the process of all this we raise venture capital uh so we closed the 10.6 million dollar round uh earlier this year and you know we're in the process of shifting the business model so taking the services side of what we do and instead of us doing it ourselves creating an ecosystem of external providers that do it on behalf of our customers we've already got you know a seed you know a bunch of those in place and we're building out more and then really focusing our efforts on product led growth so really implementing a product like growth flywheel and then a b2b sales uh effort that goes on top of that what's that mean plg flywheel what's the free plan look like and if so where's where do people run into the paywall on the free plan how do you decide what activation metric to use yeah and and so the paywall that's up right now is only for the back end so the the front end tools are still free we are going to combine that so that it's full stack pricing uh in the next few months but for now we just want adoption of the front end tools and so the free plan is pretty ample but the way the way to think about it is it's going to give you a base level of back-end capacity on aws it's going to let you try out almost literally store it an amount of storage or something storage and computing capacity primarily um yeah so it's the full-blown all of it available through a through an api that exposes the back end so if you're just using eight base for the back end you'll have the ability to use our free tier with ample capacity if you're using the full stack uh the paywall will really start there with with the deploy button so we'll we'll use a reverse trial where you get put into our professional plan for the first 14 days and then you'll can you you'll convert off of that so you'll be able to use the deploy button for 14 days uh hopefully fall in love with the tool and after that you'll begin to pay at 25 a month you're using some interesting positioning words on your website you know things like the best not just the best way to build like applications the best way to build javascript applications um and there's you know i you know niching down in a hyper-competitive space can really work so why javascript applications and what are other examples of how you're trying to focus on a specific niche that's it's interesting that you call it a niche and i love that because it's actually the biggest niche there is so if you think about low code tools in general they've all made people learn a new language visual language combination of visual and scripting languages whatever what we're trying to say is when you get into eight base you should already know what to do if you're a javascript developer of which there are about 14 million in the world so it's the largest pool of developers you know around a language in the world so if you're a customer think about the benefits of using a low-code tool that also brings with it uh fungibility from the developer side rather than train up developers on our stack at a high price point oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview talk to me a little bit about um go to market in sort of the non-traditional sense you have a base academy which i believe is new a lot of founders struggle with content especially a formal academy program where there's coaches coming in there's recordings happening and how do you get eyeballs on it so how have you structured this academy and is it working yeah academy is a great resource and you know we're we're probably in the third inning of building that out most of the emphasis on academy has been on the back end so far so what you're going to see come online is the the front end tools as well plus you know non-technical resource type education as well because when you're using eight base you have to be at least quasi-technical but there'll be resources around non-technical people and how to access our ecosystem to uh to get to get what they need built this can be a very specific question but i think a lot of people like this people love programmatic seo where you can sort of do one thing record a youtube video then it goes out...