How Databuddy CEO Carola Canavesio grew Databuddy to $634K revenue with a 4 person team in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is carola calavesio she is the founder co-founder of a company called data buddy and they're growing fast and one of the things that they're focused on uh is really helping uh folks uh on the machine learning side of business they found the company in 2020 before that she was born in the family of entrepreneurs started young selling ads for her local yearbook and then spent 12 years in johnson and johnson at sales marketing sales management before moving to the software business for a machine learning startup again started data buddy with our co-founder in august of 2020. carla you ready to take us to the top yes let's go for it all right so what does the product do yeah so it helps business and financial controllers minimize the time they spend gathering data for their reports okay and there's a machine learning element component to this item at the moment no at the moment the machine learning could be an aspect than a feature that we add in the future i think the machine learning was more in my past that the machine learning software used to sell but um now it's around searching and filtering and extracting data from multiple data sources and what sorts of data sources are you relying on mostly so you know um our customers need data from their erps they need local file data they might need data from apis it could be you know it could be forex data it could be weather data it just depends on the sector okay but where i mean are they attaching these data sources to your platform via an api what apis have you built out no so you would is that's right we connect that's something that we could do or they can actually do it themselves of course every api would have to be built specifically for that industry and at a certain point you just have the api ready to connect it um but you know in terms of connecting to the erp it's pretty simple you have a few keys you know keys and passwords that you need to connect and that's it which erp i guess what i'm asking is when you look at your current user base which erp right are you mostly getting pulling data from yeah at the moment you know uh we are talking to customers we're um probably gonna have the next couple of a pile of customers dropping next couple of weeks and months it does not matter nathan so it could be a sap hana it could be oracle it doesn't matter what uh um so it's for any erp okay doesn't it matter i mean you have limited development resources and all of them have different apis you have to build api integrations for so it does matter because you have to prioritize your api roadmap yeah i think i think it will actually depend on the customers we have you know so if if it depends on the order of the customers i think it doesn't really so whoever is the first second third fourth you know customer then we will develop with them initially so it will be a slow development in terms of um uh we need to have a base of erps initially that will probably take a while but once you have that base then it's very easy to roll out to other customers so you're in this beautiful moment where you're pre-revenue you've got some folks that you're learning from no one's paying yet what are you talking about how you built your wait list and what you're learning from your wait list yeah so um we find that this particular group is actually very happy to talk to us so i've interviewed personally about 60 controllers so far and it's been a combination of connections through the incubator we're in as well as directly linked connecting with them on linkedin and then calling them um and they've been extremely generous with their time and uh it's been very reassuring because the problem that we see comes up 100 of the time so on linkedin when you're figuring to reach out to you're searching for the word the job title controller what niche what space how do you narrow down doesn't matter okay so just the word controller yeah and then you know the titles vary you know so it could be usually usually find that group controllers and senior controllers have um more have authority to kind of you know decide to look for a solution and also um might have a greater overview of their back end and that way you know they understand the issue that we're discussing have you guys wrote any code for the product yet and if so what year did you write that first line of code yeah yeah yeah so my co-founder is about 70 of the mvp finished if you can ever say anything is finished but uh he's 70 of the way there and and so you launched he started writing code last year or this year so probably around december okay got it so so coding in sort of 20 20 70 percent of the week well it was really december so almost like 21 yeah yeah fair fair and so how are you know you guys have gone five months here with no revenue this is a this is the the crossing the chasm moment for an entrepreneur you sort of quit safety you jump into your own thing and the big question is how do you pay your bills during these sorts of months where you're ramping up how are you managing that as a founder no no we're just uh using our savings at the moment we are both full-time doing this full-time and uh and so um yeah it's uh tricky times but we're very committed we believe that there's a need um and we think that we are hopefully on the cusp of signing up the first few pilot customers how did you get yourself mentally in a spot five six months ago to quit whatever you're doing and go to this full time in other words were you like okay i have x months of savings saved in the bank or how did you do the risk mitigation yeah i think it's a very good question and i think that um so we were almost uh pushed in the situation in the sense that i wasn't i've been on furlough since april i live in a country where um they're very very generous with the with the furlough and which country are you in norway okay yeah and i think that put me in a situation where i wasn't in a rush to look for anything else because i really liked the company i was working for but i was also always interested in starting my own thing um and then my co-founder had just finished a um an incubator and had decided not to join any of the groups and therefore at that time we were both looking for the next thing to do and and so i think it was you know i wish i could say that it was enforced but it was probably you know combination of factors put together that was the right you know just was the right moment and so how does furlough work once you're furloughed the government in norway still pays you money every month and you're sort of living off that plus your savings yeah i wonder if there's gonna be a pattern post code but i wonder if there's gonna be a lot of people in your shoes that got laid off they have got revenue coming from the government for unemployment or furloughing and so they say you know what let's launch our own business i i i think so i there's a there's definitely been a spike of startups in the last period and i know this because you know the the government um gives grants small grants for for startups in norway and um they had to change their policies because they just couldn't cope with the inflow of of applications last year and there's also a very big focus here because you know it's an oil company a country so there was a big focus on oil and gas and of course they're trying to get the com you know the population to look at other sectors to grow yep yep now what do you anticipate charging when you do start asking for money for this how do you think you'll structure it yeah so i think i really like pricing and i think that there's a lot of we all like pricing we all like money no no i say no no as in i like i like the idea of having an innovative way of pricing sorry that's what i meant and i think and i think um initially i think maybe at the very beginning you have to go pretty standard and you know go for per seat per amount of maybe connections uh per maybe for amount of x and data that you extract um so i i see a kind of a per user about 150 dollars per month for the super super user and then maybe something like 20 to 30 dollars for the normal user um but as i said i think i think this will be evolve in the next six months as soon as we can test the market no i'm recording this in april if i have you on in a couple months in december of 2021 how many customers do you hope to have by then you know so when we if you'd asked me this question in december of 2020 i would have said it'd be great to have three pilot customers and then kind of launch properly having really done really good q and a with those pilot customers in q4 with their the interest we've seen so far i'm kind of almost hoping 12 you know 12 customers 150 bucks a month so maybe two three i think the reality is i think that we will not be able to charge the first few pilot customers for a first few months because the they will really help us develop the product so i think that starting to charge will will be probably happening in q4 realistically so i think that you know you want to start from probably q4 up to queue for the year after to understand how much the...