How Databox CEO Denis Hallai grew Databox to $20.5M revenue and 1.6K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is peter caputa he is the ceo and founder of a company called databox the company is a monitoring company uh basically sorry it's a tool to monitor company performance data all in one spot really on any device peter are you ready to take us to the top i am all right so you emailed me this beautiful email before the show i know you listen so like let's just jump right to it what's what's revenue today and then let's go back and get more of the story uh we're doing a little over 91 000 mrr okay and what are people paying you for uh do you mean how much or well yeah so tell me more about the product and then tell me to rpoo got it um so the product allows companies to pull all their performance data in from other tools so we integrate out of the box with like 60 plus other tools and then you can also integrate data in a variety of other ways and once you get the data in there they can visualize it however they choose we make it pretty easy to drag and drop or choose templates based on the data sources that you connect so you can get up and running quickly and then you can set goals you can set alerts there's scorecards you can mod so you can get data coming to you the most important metrics and then also you can put on any device we have a very award-winning mobile device a mobile app that's on both the stores that you can download and use to monitor uh we also you can put data up on tvs as well and so what are people paying on average per month for this 140 bucks a month okay so how many customers are you at today 650. 50. okay and give me a sense of growth rate take me back a year how much are you doing in a month uh 23 000 um i'm sorry yeah they're on 23 000 mrr in at the end of may last year may 2017 scaled nicely so more than 3x that to date where's most the growth come from uh organic uh just doing a lot of organic marketing organic search against social just a lot of content marketing and so tell me about the team and how many of the team members are focused on those organic channels we have 20 people total uh the majority of the teams in product and then we have pretty much uh three people in each of sales marketing and service a little heavier on the service side a little lighter on the sales side so three people in marketing basically okay and what are some of these you mentioned kind of seo some other things what are what's the like the number one organic tactic they're using to driving new customers uh we do a lot of uh content sourcing we do a lot of roundup posts uh we have a lot of agency partners who write guest posts for us since we integrate with so many tools the topics that we can cover are pretty diverse so like one day we'll write about uh reducing your bounce rate in google analytics the next we'll talk about the new features and facebook ads that you should be taking how do you get the partner to take the time to write the guest blog post for your blog that's where a lot of people get stuck in this whole process they can't convince other people to take the time to write for them um well in the beginning it was a lot of personal relationships i built the channel program the agency partner program at hubspot and so i tapped a lot of agencies uh to do that um at this point we have a pretty refined process which would take me like 20 minutes to explain but we have people that are constantly reaching out on social we have a list of past contributors that we ask to contribute to new posts we always give a link back to them when they contribute and a lot of it is just very short stuff so we're only asking them to take like five minutes um to contribute to a post which then becomes you know a post with 50 contributions i see i see and do have you have you this is going to be very meta have you written a post on your post process no but i just reported a podcast yesterday with for for it that i think will get published next month give a shout out for that which podcast the entrepreneurs hq okay good we'll we'll link we'll link to that in the show notes that'll be good all right because i mean that's if you figure a way to scale that that's fantastic now quickly because you mentioned hubspot when did you leave hubspot uh 2017. so a little year and almost a half okay i mean so you were there for the ride how early were you there 2007. i was 15th employee oh yeah so you saw yeah yeah so let me ask you a question i mean yeah a lot of people would say when you go through a journey like that obviously you had equity you built some and i'm assuming a nice chunk of wealth for you for yourself it's hard for someone that just was made kind of wealthy right to then get motivated to jump in and start something new so talk to me emotionally in your brain in 2017 when you left how did you deal with the extra money and and keeping yourself balanced i always had a goal of of making money like enough money to be comfortable at least um like i literally wrote in my high school yearbook like that i wanted to make a million dollars by 30. i missed it by about 10 years but yeah and i like so and i didn't make enough from the ipo myself to like retire yeah so i needed to do something um i also knew i wanted to do a startup again i just love the part of the business where you're designing the strategy and figuring it out and that can still be relatively one person you know like and i can stay involved and all that whereas with hubspot you know it's thousands of employees now a lot of decisions were made and baked uh and i i didn't have that ability to continue to influence that so i knew i wanted that rush quickly since i i have you and you're the guy i mean what was the number one thing that i mean what was the number one leverage point you were able to execute in terms of growing the value-added reseller program at hubspot that's what you owned right yep um the agencies in like you know a decade ago to like five years ago really struggled marketing agencies really struggled with cash flow because most of their business was projects um web design projects short-term seo engagements etc and so what we did is we figured out that we could teach them to sell a set of services that they deliver on an ongoing basis under a retainer agreement and allowed them to improve their cash flow and that's really what you know attracted a lot of agencies to the program uh and allowed us to really help a lot of them grow from like guys on the dining room table to multi-million dollar agencies yeah because you really helped them with their whole business right you put together here's a template contract to use this yeah yeah we did everything from like here's what you should sell and how you should price it to here's exactly the scripts that you should use and your sales calls and the questions you should ask and and how to deliver it of course and yeah we did a lot of that stuff yep that's great okay so fast forwarding again back to data box now so was 2017 year one yeah uh no the company was founded actually in uh 20 late 2014 2015 early 2015. um they raised 3.8 million um a ceo another ceo joined about that time they were trying to sell to the enterprise that didn't work um you know the ceo actually went back to the investors to take your money back i don't know if we can make this work but the founder who's the third time around um basically took you know basically said no we're not doing that they pivoted more towards a self-service model away from enterprise and started started basically marketing to the smb um and that's around the time when we met well okay so what happened there did you buy the whole company and keep that one found or what'd you do no no we kept the whole team that was that remain that the previous founder had gotten rid of uh the go-to market team basically um parted ways to the with the go to market team which is all in the us but the majority of the product and customer support team which was in slovenia um was retained and so i joined you know it was like 12 people on the team um and they were all they're all amazing stall still with but are you i mean if i look to the cap table is it very clear that you're like a co-founder twenty thirty percent like did you get a big stake in it or or i i don't understand are you like a hired ceo or i no i got a stake okay okay i was gonna say a guy like you you could pretty much do anything after hubspot you know you might as well go do something you own a big chunk of that you also think could be a really big pie yeah i probably could now that you say it i probably could have negotiated for more but i don't know it doesn't matter right as long as you're happy right because look the difference between two or three percentage points long term doesn't really matter right okay good uh so 3.8 raised today that's all i raised the one i raised 1.1 million on a convertible note when i joined a bunch of the hubspot executives put in amounts uh one of the existing investors put more in uh and then i got two other uh funds to put...