How Shipyard App CEO Blake Burch grew Shipyard App to $144K revenue and 30 customers in 2023.

shipyardapp.com is a SAS that helps you move data between Snowflake and Google Sheets they got launched in 2020 doing 12 000 a month today in Revenue 12 people on the team totally bootstrapped which we love as Blake scales down here in Austin Texas hey folks my guest today is Blake Bert she's the co-founder and CEO of Shipyard the quickest way for data teams to launch monitor and share workflows formerly is the head of data for PMG digital agency he led end-to-end data strategy for Brands like OpenTable Travelocity Sephora and GAP scaling marketing efforts through algorithms and automation Blake you ready to take us to the top yeah absolutely all right so Shipyard a low code data workflow automation give us a customer story how's someone using you today yeah so uh customers ultimately end up using us for like three main purposes they're trying to move data between various systems that they have on hand they're trying to set up an example like two what two systems yeah so it could be from your database like snowflake to Google Sheets it could be something from like Amazon S3 to uh Google drive or something else like that we build out hundreds of Integrations with various tools that people use so that they can easily move that data but it's more than just uh moving data that's what people typically use this for initially but they might set up like data alerts so that they can know in slack or an email if something's gone wrong with their data or maybe if there's like particular customers in their sales file that they need to look at and then we also have people using us for things like deploying machine learning models and evaluating the data scoring leads scoring internal customers and and that sort of thing so we're a wide net orchestration platform that allows people to mix and match low code and uh their own code together in order to solve these sort of problems with data you get this all the time in my audience will be wondering if I'm going to ask people are going to say oh this feels like mulesoft or zapier is this Enterprise app here with alerts yeah so the way that we sometimes sell ourselves is that we're a zapier for data um zapier and other tools they focus a lot on if this and that logic they do things that are very specific for one row and reacting to it for us it's more about the bulk data processing and so being able to handle gigabytes to terabytes of data and process and move that data between systems and those other tools just aren't quite built for for that sort of like process and we wanted to make sure that we could bring a best-in-class tool specifically for data professionals to be able to do their jobs more effectively that makes sense I can't wait to hear how you price this what's the average customer paying per month and do you tie it to number of calls or usage or seed based or product upsells how do you price yeah so right now our median amount per customer is going to be about 400 um in general the way that we priced yeah per month um and that's something where we're pricing uh totally based on usage uh so it's it's a mix of user seats plus like the runtime that people actively have in the application itself so for us it's a very sticky product where people come in and they're usually not leaving you got to quantify that when you say sticky how how low is churn uh churn is about one percent we're not seeing people leave very often that's monthly or annually uh monthly okay and that's gross or net uh gross gross do you have upsells uh we do have upsells within the product itself so um it's something where um like there are additional abilities to like extend how much access you have to logs or Version Control do you get API access and things like that um and we're working towards figuring out how to enhance uh like security measures and things like that because for the larger customers they are typically wanting um they are typically wanting additional features like audit logging the ability to control MFA single sign-on and good stuff like that so how would you rate yourself on your your sales team's ability to upgrade historical accounts today can they upsell more than 12 to make up for the 12 churn annually yeah so um uh currently um we're not as focused on like upselling uh the clients as much internally um a lot of it for us is still a new customer acquisition and for us it's also um more about making sure that people are having the right sort of experience so they are continuing to use the product and growing it that way and we do see ourselves naturally scaling without necessarily needing a internal sales motion for people that have already signed up for the uh application have you quantify that can you look for people that sign up a year ago and say they naturally up sold because their usage increased uh sorry can you repeat that yeah can you quantify your expansion Revenue that's no touch because people signed up a year ago their natural usage increased and then they obviously pay you more because of that so upsell revenue is three percent or expansion was four percent yeah so generally what we're seeing on our side is um that people are growing their usage by about like 10 to 15 uh roughly on a monthly basis um so they're continuing to grow things uh that way is that directly correlate to more revenue for you your expanding accounts 10 monthly yes that does that's crazy Bill Blake you're on average like you're expanding accounts 10 or those are your outliers they they are expending by 10 but the thing is we start very uh low in terms of pricing um uh for us it's more about being able to get people in the door being able to solve problems and so the 10 is going to be minuscule at the lower levels it does slow down of course uh as um some of the customers are growing at like higher and higher rates of course for anything that is dealing with Cloud usage or runtime people are actively trying to figure out how do we like scale back the usage as much as possible but if I'm more use cases it still ends up growing 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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as people didn't want to try out anything but it gave us a good amount of time to make sure that we could hone in Focus uh and that we could um and build the best products once we knew that things were going to come out uh on the other side much better were you quitting PMG or where were you like where did you experience this problem we have a very unique kind of uh back story where uh we were solving a lot of problems at PMG um with internal technology um where we were doing things like automating bids automating budgets ad creation um turning things on and off based on inventory files and stuff like that and uh we were templatizing this to be able to run it across all of the like Fortune a thousand clients that PMG worked with and we realized that there were much larger use cases than just the marketing side for all the data and the automation that we were putting in place and so Shipyard is actually the uh like child product of something that was built at PMG we ended up splitting things off um and spinning the technology out on its own to focus on a totally different sort of uh ICP of your typical data engineer analytics engineer and everything else there because we felt like with the massive amount of growth in the data ecosystem that was something that we wanted to make sure we could capitalize on and help those teams be able to build workflows more effectively a couple years from now you sell for 500 million bucks and PMG goes wait that was that Blake guy that worked during a PMG on that code that he didn't spun out we own a chunk of that let's send them a letter right now since we just read the Wall Street Journal article and make sure we get our 10 cut yeah um so they they do have a um a stake in the company can't disclose uh specifically what that is um but we're part of now a larger parent company called momentum it was internally grown but it is multiple different sister companies that are in the data technology and marketing space what's momentum's website momentum.com oh interesting is this sponsored by PMG it's like their startup their Venture lab sort of uh yeah it is it is something um it's less specifically PMG it's now its own um uh separate entity um but it is multiple different sister companies um that are all operating under one uh umbrella oh yeah this is Cody um search Discovery oh interesting okay okay interesting so how does I mean do you still feel like a Founder though like do you own the majority Equity of the company or are you just basically like a paid CEO that you know makes a lot of money but only owns five percent yeah I definitely still feel uh like a Founder um I'm not like too subject to various like regulations on uh their side in fact um it's something where there's a lot of operational Freedom um still to uh to be able to maneuver however you need that's nice that's nice okay so you get going in 2020 when did you tell me the story of your first customer yeah um honestly our first customer was totally organic um it was something where we had all the website content out there um and uh were able to solve a very specific problem it was a consultant for um a company called a rental wheel um they uh help people uh like get Spinners or different wheels for uh their cars um he just needed a quick solution to be able to uh get something up and running for their team um and that was our first customer and they are still a customer today um so that's something we're again the land that explains Spain approach worked that consultant is no longer there but the company is still using us to automate their data workflows that's awesome that's awesome okay so how many current customers today yeah um So currently uh we have about 1600 uh users of the platform and we have about 30 um paying customers on our side right now so and I guess tell me how you think about that do you spend a lot of time thinking about 1600 or 30 conversion rate yeah um so we don't think about it some of those uh customers like we we look at usage internally to try and verify which people are using us the most that are going to be like a high sales opportunity sometimes it's for like little one-off projects um ultimately uh like as a product that has kind of a freemium model our purpose behind that is that a lot of our competition in the data orchestration space is actually open source software that is trying to sell cloud-hosted Solutions and so when you can use those things for free and do a proof of concept that way we want to make sure that we're Equitable as people are trying to do proof of Concepts so um the conversion right there is something that we're still actively working on figuring out how to increase even more Blake can I take the 30 customers times the 400 RP you mentioned earlier it would put you around 12 Grand a month in mrr uh that would be roughly correct now okay that's great and so and then where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth uh I do not know that number off the top of my head well it's probably going to be a very large growth number because you're just getting going but I mean did you have any customers in July of 2022 uh yes we do okay so you had you were post Revenue at that point yes we were okay so first dollars of Revenue then like I'm what I'm trying to get here how much time did you spend developing this before your first customer did you go all the way through 2020 with no customers it was pretty much an entire year of development and so even though it was an internal piece of technology man those things get so tied to like the existing business that you're trying to figure out how do we separate this how do you have usability because it used to just be a page with a bunch of forms slapped on top of it those things won't fly in the market so yeah that's interesting okay and how have you capitalize the business as a bootstrapper have you raised uh it is entirely bootstraps oh I love that so no money from PMG when you spun out sorry um there is money directly from PMG but no investment from like uh Adventure capital or anything else I see I see um did PMG structure that as like hey here's the precede round of X and we get preferential turn since you're spinning it out uh not not exactly like that it's a it's less of a like direct upfront model for the financing and uh because it's under the momentum umbrella um it's kind of handful and finance that way I see I see interesting does momentum take equity in the in the child companies uh it depends um I can't disclose like the exact uh parts of that but yeah um it it can vary there well like can my listeners apply to be become part of momentum like they could YC or these other firms okay no so it's just it's a holding company with Google Facebook Amazon Adobe Domo Salesforce and Microsoft has the partners and it's invite only correct interesting um okay does the do you have a do you think of an advantage by being part of momentum and if so what is it I think the biggest uh Advantage is being able to have the like Leverage and knowledge of uh larger companies to help support you through things like in our case security is a uh big aspect so I'm trying to make sure that we have the backing of a strong legal team that's able to work through issues and being able to have all the right things in place from a uh like security framework perspective of socktube um and the gdpr um for stock two uh we used uh Weaver for the audit Weaver interesting Well why'd you use Weber over like Banta uh Weaver um that's uh it was just the auditing firm that we used um we didn't have an existing technology in place uh to help put together all the materials um for the audit um however we are actively uh in talks with some of those tools in order to be able to help accelerate the framework growth you did it the hard way you did it all manual we did it the hard way initially oh my gosh I can't imagine okay that's a lot of times a startup CEO is spent on like very boring data collection stuff yep uh okay well you did it you knocked it out it's great all right let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite Business book uh it's it's gonna be I think the five dysfunctions of a team um yep if I'm getting that title correct yeah that's a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh uh not really I've always had kind of a weird thing where I don't necessarily like modeling what I do after others it's trying to make sure that we can carve our own paths so number three what's your favorite online tool for building Shipyard um a great question I I'm probably going to say webflow um uh I've used it since the very beginning for building out the marketing pages and being able to scale out Pages for new Integrations and blueprints and solutions has been super helpful for us and it's still great to this day would you credit a lot of your SEO success to your ability to quickly launch these integration landing pages which you feature in your footer absolutely um it's definitely helped us scale quite a bit and it's become one of our like key strategies in terms of customer acquisition how many how many total are on the team today full time uh 12 people okay interesting all right uh number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night uh maybe like six and a half seven try to get as much as I can yeah yeah what's your situation married single kids married any kids no kids right now all right and how old are you uh 30. last question Blake take us back to when you were 20. what's something you wish you knew uh that it's a journey um that uh nothing's going to just like happen super quickly nothing is going to work out exactly the way you want um but really most of the experiences that you have are all about like rolling with a bunches trying to figure out how you can make the most of what you have and don't try and uh like rush into things or expect immediate results things take time so guys shipyardapp.com is a SAS that helps you move data between Snowflake and Google Sheets uh they got launched in 2020 doing 12 000 a month today in Revenue 12 people on the team totally bootstrapped which we love as Blake scales down here in Austin Texas Blake thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks so much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 p.m Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell 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