How Astronomer CEO Tim Brunk grew 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 go after big companies you know so during that accelerator we ended up deciding to Pivot towards you know helping big companies with a similar problem and it turns out like the big companies actually have the same sort of challenge that the smaller companies do getting tool data to analytics except their their their tools are different you know they're trying to get data from sap and get it into Oracle and you know various big system type stuff um and so yeah so we we basically that's what our when we decided to stop really focusing on startups that didn't have much money and uh what was your how we start ramping Revenue R if you go back and look at 2015 what was your first year Revenue do you remember zero okay it was zero and then what did you do in 2016 yeah uh we we ended the year at a 600k AR run rate so we went from zero to 600 yeah yeah it was a pretty good year so that means that means like in December 20 2016 you guys had passed 50 Grand in in monthly recurring Revenue that's right yeah very cool um okay so let me f go back for a second at Team size where are you at now we are 25 oh nice where are you based uh here in ciny yeah uh uh there's just a few people that are remote but yeah most everybody's here okay and funding have you raised Capital two yeah two million y um over over the course of about two years um and by the way when I say we started on May of 2015 that's the night that's the day of the pivot so we kind of uh reborn on that day so technically it was about two years if you included the the previous uh Vision so you raised 2 million what does that mean you did a one what was your last round what size uh 1.1 million um yeah yeah no no it was it was a convertible note so we've actually done like four rounds of notes which is this shocking to this is a trend I'm seeing you know I talk to a CEO every day Ry this is something's happening because there are so many people doing note after note after note in the millions of dollars yeah I know well it's it's um well you know obviously like the people who do price grounds are really like to do those price grounds are all moving up Market you know the old a is a b now and or I'm sorry the old B is an a now and and so yeah I think a lot of the earlier stage investors don't like to price things so it's very you yeah we've got this this intercreditor agreement between the four rounds of of notes and so um I think we we started with like a kiss sort of note then we did the safe then we did a real kiss and then we did this other round so it's a yeah it's pretty it's pretty wild and you know luckily we try to keep all the terms pretty um congruent through all guys I we won't get into the specific terms of all those but you can just Google safe and kiss and and raising capital and they'll pop up with the standard template so you can research those um by fast fora so you're doing I imagine you're probably somewhere around 55 60,000 bucks in Mr here in January 2017 right yeah yeah actually that's about right we're we we have a huge um Bubble of uh deals that are that we we're trying to get done before the end of last year but you know December happened and that's never good uh so You' got an arpo of six grand per month about 10 customers right now no we're actually we're actually we've cut 20 customers so uh yeah average revenue historically is around 3K a month got it interesting okay cool um what about churn has anyone left you uh one one customer so our CH our we've got a net negative churn of 48% right now so uh it's pretty awesome uh you know we basically have a land and expand sort of a strategy so if a customer's like hey I just need this little thing done we'll say sure how much money you want to give us for it and we we take that money and then we eventually try to work them into our our standard deal as their use cases expand so um sort of our strategy and it's been working out really great explain what you mean to me when you say you're net negative 48 so um two a third of our revenue is is from expansion revenue of our current Revenue so um yeah if you think about um uh you know 100% of the original deal and then we now have 148% revenue from uh you know from the original contract from those customers that makes sense if there was a bucket and you took all of ry's initial customers and put it in that bucket that bucket would grow 140% even even even considering the leaks from the original original signups is that right Ry that's exactly right got it and then you've got additional month- of month growth on top of that that new customers you're adding yeah that's right yeah so we add new customers you know um and we're about to like I said add about a bunch of new ones here in the first part of the year and probably double our Revenue uh in the next six or eight weeks what's it costing you to acquire customers uh we we actually just started here in in 2017 to to spend any money on customer acquisition um everything's been referral and um out outbound uh up till now what a lot of people that listen to the show are are thinking about the same turning on paid stuff how do you decide where to start and how much uh start small like we're starting very small um how Small's number it's interesting like uh I think our I think our first month's budget was 600 bucks you know we just really what I I told our marketing guys said we have a marketing guy down I said I want I want to see retargeting I want to see I keep seeing all these retargeting ads happening I'm like it's got to be effective you know so uh just just enough to get retargeting up and running for us okay so maybe too early to have obviously obviously a CAC and same thing probably with LTV right yeah I mean the our math on that is based on not not a ton of data but you know we we what data we've done is we see like a payback period of around N9 months based on our current data which means the the the you know so our we we consider our CAC you know the cost of our sales and marketing team uh the the labor at this point so um we factor that into the deals so your if your payback perod is nine months then your arpo three grand per month so you're saying your your CAC is somewhere around 27 Grand right now yeah that might be true I I don't know you have to I to check that that's just what your Excel sheet says yeah okay then that's true no no no no that's what you're I'm saying in your model that's what you've put in there as a placeholder nine months yeah I'd have to check yeah yeah nine months nine months payback that's all I know uh and it's and we dropped it down to around six months and then we doubled our growth team size which threw more cost in there but now it's creeping back down again so from went from yeah go ahead no no I don't want to cut you off go ahead no I say we we started around 12 months then we got down to about six months and then we doubled the team size we're it went back up to 12 and now we're back down to nine again so so that's a fully weighted payback period that includes salaries of employees including paid spend all that jazz um Ry when did you when was that last round of funding when did you do it uh August August last year okay you got PL you got plenty of Runway no we don't actually so are you raising no yeah we're raising we we we burned we decided to burn the pile as fast as we can uh in a in a responsible way but yeah that's you know when you get to 25 people the burn you know I think our burn our net our gross Burns around 200 okay so we're burning net 150 right now so yeah a million doesn't last too long when you're doing that um and guys we it's it's R we get CEOs that are as open and transparent as R which I appreciate so let's use this to learn for a second so what that gross burn basically means kind of you know cash going out is basically 200 Grand per month what do you mean Ry when you say gross burn is 200 and net is 150 yeah so you know our Revenue being around 50k a month offsets 200,000 yeah yeah so got it you guys all follow that hopefully so so $150,000 is living his BB&T account each month so a million bucks last you call it you know eight months N9 months that's right awesome what and we're right around what are you raising Ry uh so there's a new new idea called the post seed round I don't know if you've heard that concept uh talks Bullpen Capital uh sort of uses that lingo but um basically we're doing a three to five million dollar um round that is not a seat extension round it's a it's a it's an U it's um it's a it's more money than we raised initially and uh it's it's a it's essentially the old a you know so you raise three you're talking three million three to five three to five interesting and what give me a Range what kind of valuation are you trying to aim for that's a great question whatever we can get it at to be honest is it's uh you know the um uh great advice you know is is think about your your share price instead of your percent ownership and you know if we can get this round done our share price our the value of our Equity Rises and and our our the odds of us living uh goes up but uh at this point like you know A's are tough um still so we don't really want to bump our valuation up too much so it's we're going to just listen to what the offers are and and not be too greedy on that so we have some some head some head room for the next round so you're okay if it's a little I mean a little more dilutive than usual right uh as long as as long as the value is increasing right yeah I mean we're we're pumped about building a big company uh I'm pretty I'm personally pretty generous with equity and I always have been with my companies um so you know like if you're going to be you know generous um you're given up a bunch but at the same time you have a bunch of co-owners with you so it's um you know I think it's worthwhile more people on the boat's a good thing like I told you guys at the top of this episode I have amazing data and you guys know from my interview style I love data but what I love more than data is making it actionable via beautiful dashboards that I can view on my phone on my TVs in my living room or even on my laptop as I'm traveling and the company that I use to create these dashboards which pulls in data from my lips in backend my Google analytics backend Salesforce and other data sources is called clipfolio you can see an example executive dashboard or my social media Command Center or my web metrics dashboard at Nathan la.com analytics that's Nathan la.com analytics and you can try it there for free for 3 months it's clipfolio you can try it free for 3 months everybody else has to pay so you get it free for 3 months Allan's a good friend he's the CEO of the company he came on the show I said I love your product can I feature it so Nathan la.com analytics go check it out now guys I get asked all the time Nathan you host all these interviews hundreds of them per month how do you do them efficiently and guys the answer is simple people always agree to my calendar backtack meetings I batch my interviews to stay very efficient and the way that I do it is I use a tool called Acuity scheduling at Nathan lat.com [Music] schedu and the reason I use them is very simple they keep my noshow rate very low because they send out reminders about when the interview or the meeting is coming up and also they make it very easy to schedule time right I don't have to go back and forth VI email 10,000 times with people I'm trying to meet with okay at Nathan lea.com schedu helps me so much and by the way look I like have so many meetings I'm the best in meetings okay I do them back toback very very efficient you guys know me many people say I'm the most efficient they've ever seen okay so I use the tool it's so efficient and by the way I got Gavin I said Gavin he's the CEO I said I want a great deal for my people he said Nathan well most people get a 14-day trial isn't that great I said no he's given us a 45-day free trial at Nathan la.com schedu that's not going to stay up forever so go get it now Nathan lat.com all right R let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book oh geez I would have to say is um Seven Habits of Highly Effective People a business book I don't know course that's a good one all right let's call a business book then yeah number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh yeah there's uh Morton um from x. I'm pretty pretty hot on the whole AI we've got some AI ideas for ourselves and uh I don't know if you've seen x. a it helps set meetings um it's pretty cool so I'm I kind of I'm pretty impressed by what he's built so far good number uh three what's your favorite online tool like a cue scheduling favorite online tool I would say right now for us is um uh gosh what's it called hold on what's this thing called uh it's so I'm so used to it fabricator have you heard of fabricator yeah it's basically um uh it's a I don't know where it came out it's basically has uh we use it for Wiki we use it for internal tickets it has project management it has um some sort of uh things like that but it basically is our call our inonet if I was going to use an old school term um and so yeah our company you know we're we're on the wiki kick and we all kind of try to keep all of all of our processes and everything all documented there fabricator it's kind of a it's an open source tool that you can tailor for your internal team number four yes or no do you get eight hours of sleep every night no absolutely not rarely and what's your situation married only if I sleep in yeah I'm married with three children and yeah I I know it's tough how old are you no I I'll I am 44 okay and what were we gonna say I cut you off y so no I was gonna say I go to bed at uh 12 or 1 or two and and get up as late as I possibly can each day before someone forces me to get up so last question Ry take us back 24 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew oh man uh I would have to say gosh 20 years I so I did I did start entrepreneurship pretty early but I would say to be to be bold to be confident I think confidence is um uh pretty tough to do when you're that young uh but if you can figure that out early enough uh it's it works wonders there guys have it from Ry Walker founder and CEO of astronomer doio be bolder have a bit more confidence again launched and really pivoted back in 2015 at Collision did about 600 Grand or $600,000 annual run rate uh uh in that first year now up over $660,000 in monthly recurring Revenue serving over uh 20 customers again onboarding onto their data platform that helps folks really understand what's going on inside those channels uh combination of human plus machines they've raised 2 million bucks looking to raise another 3 to 5 million here in the uh near future Ry thank you for taking us to the top well thanks if you enjoyed ride today go back and listen to monish yesterday of data signs they've raised $5.4 million and he's giving loan to Indian credit borrowers at one half the rate that money sharks do he's targeting a 22% ir and way less basis points it would mean the world to me if you guys got any value from this episode if you would go leave a review on iTunes right now and then subscribe you know I hustle like heck to get these episodes out every freaking day for you guys and trust me I love it I would do it with no listeners but boy oh boy it makes my day and it makes my team's day when we see great reviews and get your feedback so thanks so much top dribe I love giving away free money I feel like o we're giving away cars and I have something special for you today how many of you have heard our super sharp guests talk about success they've had with Facebook and Google ads well all of you listening right now yes if you're listening you get $100 in free AdWords here's how you get it okay again thanks for listening get the free $100 from Google right when you sign up with my website post provider post gator go sign up now to get your free money hostgator.com Nathan again that's hostgator.com Nathan [Music]