How Dreamdata.io CEO Ole Dallerup grew Dreamdata.io to $3M revenue and 120 customers in 2024.

dream data. i.com uh launched many years ago broke $3 million run rate today up from 1.5 million just a year ago they also beginning of last year closed to 7 million series a round company and employees still own about 50% of the company they're burning about 30 grand a month right now but plenty of Runway they've hired a team of 45 they're hiring ahead of Revenue obviously trying to grow into that Revenue figure in their cost structure over the next 12 to 18 months hoping to double a 3 million run rate today up to 6 million by the end of the year as they compete in the B2B marketing SAS and most importantly just organizing your data in the marketing order space with a complete uh and very clear pricing plan arpus today in the $2 per month range 25 Grand per year cost 120 paying customers hey folks if we haven't met yet my name is Nathan ladka I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies thank you so much for that after the book I launched this show and went went on to create founder path.com I raised a large fund to do non-dilutive deals with B2B software Founders so far we've invested in over 400 software Founders totaling $150 million here in 2024 we're doing three to four New Deals per week so if you're looking for Capital and don't want to give up Equity go sign up at founder path.com for free to get your offer all right let's jump into the interview hey folks my guest today is LS gagal he is a ux Pioneer turned product person turned entrepreneur he's now building a company called dream.com which is B2B customer data activation LS you're ready to take us to the top hey Nathan great great to be here I'm excited for you to be here so look one of the things When I Was preparing for this I look at your website and it says quote B2B marketing connected to Pipeline and revenue there are so many companies in the space they say they use Ai and machine learning and they're going to beat Zoom info and then you never know who's real and who's legit and they all buy each other's data how are you different yeah I think that's a very good question so I think fundamentally there's a lot of uh mtech companies out there and SAS companies out there in in in the SAS space for sure like everybody probably knows the 10,000 logo um graphic from Scott Brinker um I think fundamentally like all those products exist for good reasons like we all want to serve our customers well we all want to automate our go to market we all want to you know deliver on self-service enable people to buy without talking too much to sales and like each of these products are purchas to to run those efficient processing to be data driven but fundamentally like what happens is every time you add a new product you add a new data Silo so every time you add a product you create a new space for your customer data to live and our goal isort is to solve that so not just create another data Silo but actually like get all the data out of the different products build one unified idea about what the customer Journey looks like and then with that you can start seeing things like what's the impact of marketing on r revenue or this campaign how did that impact my revenue or I want to Target my top customers now you have all the data in one space now you built a great product at trust pilot we used that company we're very happy with trust pilot you vpf product there you kick this off this company off in 2018 and I remember you told me in our episode from 2021 uh you split Equity uh there's three co-founders you kept 40 OA kept 40 and the third co-founder had another 20 um so that that adds up to 80 and then you sold I think four you raised a $4 million seed round out of 20 million valuation so you sold another 20% there to investors is that all accurate yeah more or less I think we've raised some money since then and and sort of on Equity we are roughly like the founder and and founder and and um staff is is at about 50% now that's great well so so give me an update because when we last spoke in 2021 you know covid times Etc you were at about 30 you were at about 30 customers you had broken I think a half million of AR of Revenue where how has the product change sense then and are you charging more or less than you were back then I think we're charging both more and less so product is more scalable now so we have free product we had a free product back then as well free product is now uh bigger and more useful for for for free customers we have um a cheap version of the product which is reasonably priced although we also have like um startup program but then what that what's that price uh that so the startup price would start at like 5K the free is is zero 5K per year yeah and then what's your largest customer paying today total ACV on that customer account um our largest customer is sort of on on the other side of six digits now okay so over 100k a year yeah yeah yeah and how do you get them to expand from free to 5K per year to 100K per year what's the upsell mechanism is it number of contacts or something else yeah so that's not the same customer so I think the free customers would T like most often would be smaller businesses whereas a large customer paying north of 100K would would be like an Enterprise customer and know I understand that what what I'm asking so look one of the things I think trust pilot did very well because it worked on me right is you guys would carve out like every single thing extra I wanted was always more money like if I wanted a certain widget more money premium version of the widget more money and before you know what I'm paying bucks a month for a review tool plugin so I assume you took some of this over here I mean when I look at your pricing page you've got like nine bullets under every single one of these things and then you also give yourself in your AES the ability to upsell based off numerical values like number of years user activity history seats included and mtus of those three which are the most powerful upsell mechanism for you I I would say it's the packages themselves so it's the feature sets the feature sets are more or less aligned with different sizes of businesses so we we have add-ons and like typically would we package it so that we have an add-on from a larger package and a smaller package in case somebody needs it but usually like an Enterprise customer fit in the Enterprise plan I guess let me let me ask this differently someone paying you 600 bucks a month on your team plan which which usage limit are they most likely to hit the quickest 10 seats or 30,000 mtus oh the mtus got definitely yeah yeah so the seed metric makes sense in some very specific use cases with which is why we price on it but um the the major driver there is the uh the mgus like monthly track users which is basically data sort of proxy how did you how did you make decisions on things like putting the avoid ad blockers feature in the business plan versus keeping the B2B web analytics in the free plan I mean how do you decide on all these things so I think that like in a free plan you need a reasonable um unit economic so you need sort of a you need to be super careful about cost of course if you're giving the product away for free so there's a lot of thinking around like how do we maintain a reasonable cost on that product uh so that's a key thing right and then course we want to keep each product package needs to have a meaningful feature set that's useful so that people love using it but especially on a free plan you want to make sure that there is something to buy like there are things that you would like to know like okay what happened like I can look two months back in time B2B sales cycle are often significantly longer than two months you want to look further back right so there's always like you say there's always an upsell yep yep and so how many remember we had 30 back in 2021 how many customers are on the platform today paid only so yeah we 120 paid and roughly like 600 free customers that's great so I guess the next question I have for you um because you have one of the more sophisticated pricing Pages I've seen whenever I see a pricing page this sophisticated I go okay they really understand where they're adding value because you also not only decide what utility based metrics St sell against mtus monthly tracked users you also make decisions around which product features are on each bucket but you also then have to decide what do you want to actually keep out of all of the plans and sell them as a separate add-on Al together like content performance or return on investment report how do you make that decision why is content analytics an add-on and not included in one of the packages I think one of the one of the key things that like if you want to have something as an add-on you need to make sure that the base package makes sense and often we'll see like that the add-on feature is something that is not relevant for everybody I think this is a way of avoiding a situation where you sort of you're charging let's say 25k for the product and people go like but oh I don't use this thing I want I want a discount so you you avoid...