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 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 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 raise 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 valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path 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 evaluation 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 now that we understand what the company is today give us the back story here when'd you launch the business yeah uh launch the business back in 2020 um or right before the pandemic uh so initially the stages of acquiring customers and everything else was a little bit more uh tenuous 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...