How Astronomer CEO Tim Brunk grew Astronomer to $39.5M revenue and 20 customers in 2025.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per C 5 and6 million he is held on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka many of you who have met in person have seen my unbelievable dashboards that I built you know I'm an anal analytics like crazy person I love the data and I love presenting the data in beautiful dashboards that my team can use on their mobile devices their phones and TVs throughout the office now the way I do this without having to hire a big development team is at Nathan ler.com analytics it's using a company called clipfolio and I'll tell you more later on in the show how I use them it's Nathan la.com analytics all right guys I talked about this earlier but I schedule like so many meetings it would blow your mind I mean all my podcast interviews right hundreds of entreprene owners I talk to monthly I schedule and you know what I do it so efficiently I get them all to agree to my calendar so all the calls are back to back to back that means I'm not switching in between tests all day long I get them to batch so I can be very efficient it's so critical and I use a tool called Acuity scheduling to do this at Nathan la.com schedu it eliminates back and forth between me and people I'm trying to meet with it makes it very simple and most importantly they help me keep my noow rate very low because they send out reminders helps you look very professional so go to naa.com schedu to sign up and you get a great deal you know you guys know this I hit people hard I make great deals and Gavin the CEO has given us a great deal if you sign up like normal people okay on their website you only get a 14-day free trial if you use my link na.com schedu to get 45 days free okay it's the best it's free go to Nathan la.com schedu right now to sign up and I'll see you there Nathan ler here this episode 618 coming up tomorrow morning we learn from Paul trippet 37-year-old father of one and CEO of spark beat which has raised $250,000 and is now onboarding its first customers to help brick and mortar locations track customers more accurately how does he do it from a technology perspective tune in to find out good morning everybody my name is Nathan ladka and our guest today is Ry Walker he's the co-founder and CEO of astronomer doio a big data infrastructure company headquartered in Cincinnati Ohio astronomer is an angelpad batch number n company and has raised $2 million from the likes of 500 startups ciny tech ciny tech router Ventures and social starts their mission is to connect and centralize data making it super simple for anyone from business users to data SCI scientists to quickly create and monitor all of their data pipelines Ry are you ready to take us to the top I sure am very good that was a mouthful what a big problem what's what's astronomer do oh so you didn't understand any of that huh damn it no now we're basically helping companies uh figure out how to use data to benefit their business we work with later stage startups we work with some big companies too and really everyone's struggling um and well it's an opportunity I'd say is really struggling but everyone wants to figure out how to use data to to make their business better uh there are a lot of great products you know that have emerged over the past few years but um well I think like mixed panel there's amplitude in the in the in the web analytics space Google analytics is is obviously pretty dominant um but you know with the rise of data science um a lot of companies are trying to get a hold of their raw data so they can do more interesting things with it and so that's really where we come into play to help them get the raw data from all the SAS silos or you know inside companies often times there's a lot of different databases where data resides and the data scientists need it all to be together to to do their work guys uh Ry has one of my favorite websites I think I've ever seen it's like it's got it looks like a piece of art it's got like machines humans and then this big powerful machine in the background and kind of gray saturated scale it feels like a something Da Vinci put together uh yes tell us how you make money what's your business model yeah so we're a subscription uh business so we actually call it data engineering as a service is kind of the current offering um so we're building a platform out but while we're building the platform out we're basically doing this work on behalf of customers so it's sort of across between a services company and and a software company at the moment uh and so we we basically offer access to our team and our technology for one flat price you know uh six grand a month if you wanted to run on in our shared cloud or 10 grand a month if you want us to put up a private instance of the platform so that your data so that your work is all separated from other uh companies ftech companies healthcare companies might choose y yep yep so we just have our first few uh we call you know private Cloud uh Edition uh customers are just going live now um it's kind of a pain because you know you start to deal with HIPPA and and all the regulations uh but you know you have to get to that some point if you want to be a big company yeah so uh okay good so give us more of the kind of the history what year you launch the company in we launched the company in May of 2015 uh we were actually at a the Collision conference in Los Angeles or I'm sorry in Las Vegas and uh decided to Pivot it after the first day of the conference uh well we had a booth and people were coming up and talking to us and we didn't like our company it was the first time we really got out of the out of the building and talked to a lot of people at once about what we were doing and realized uh it was kind of funny I mean we just realized like we didn't quite have the passion for the problem um and decided to to step down to a different problem so we were building an analytics company similar to what mix panel and and you know some of those sort of tools do and realized like our biggest problem was um getting companies to send us the data to to run these analysis um and uh and just recognize like every other you know every other company like us must be having the same problem uh so let's go down and work on that problem Instead This is the number one pro I mean you see this a ton in the business analytics and dashboard space I'm talking about clipfolio grow.com data hero dasheroo they're number all of them the number one issue is the onboarding and actually getting users to connect data streams if they can get them to do that lifetime value almost always increases by 10x yeah yeah and so yeah so that's you know we're we're trying to help the companies get more confident at that so that they can they can use those tools like I mentioned but also you know work with it internally a lot of times so wait yeah I don't understand so what did you pivot from that was what you wor how what what are you now how' you pivot from that so so what we were was a company that wanted you to send your data to us your clickstream data you know like user clicking on your website sort of data so um that's what we needed in order for our product to to make sense and we were just doing like cohort um retention analysis and how you know showing how cohort's Revenue grow and all you know all that cool stuff um we could get customers to say yes we can get them to give us money and took us usually like four to six weeks of nagging to get the data so we basically decided like let's help these companies get data to services like the one we had and that's a a bigger more Global problem interesting okay so now kind of your customer cohorts are in marketing analytics manufacturing iot Insurance higher ed Healthcare e-commerce and AD targeting yeah interesting yeah that's good yeah was that on our website no I'm just quick okay good like yeah that's I was like a I think I was wondering if our marketing team got the new page up because we were trying to summarize all that stuff yeah that's exactly it well I I mentioned like another really important pivot we did was when we went through Angel pad which is a top accelerator our our the guy who runs that Tomas wait Ry what's the what's their model what do they put in and for what percentage uh there's 7% they get 7% common and a tiny and they put like a 50k in at um on a 4K prenote so essentially they get 7% plus a little bit extra you mean four million prenote yeah yeah four million PR cap yes interesting got it 7% 4 million cap they put in 50k imagine 6% interest and some discount yeah no it's a safe note so it's pretty yeah it's very very yeah so good deal and and great great mentorship and the big thing we like when we went into that into that accelerator we were thinking you know customers will give us like you know we'll do fremium maybe we'll get a hundred bucks a month from some of these companies and he kind of like knocked our plan off the table and said...