How Dreamdata.io CEO Ole Dallerup grew 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 that by saying okay look we'll keep that out of the package um we don't have to discuss that so so there's a lot about I think pricing is a lot about of course like extracting value from a customer super important creating something that that experience as fair from both sides everybody can understand the pricing and um yeah yeah so so that's definitely there and so when you look at the monthly plans the upsells the add-ons what's the average customer paying per year these days um so the the grand total is sort of in the mid 20s okay but that's like you say like okay you got some people paying nothing uh and you got some people paying plus 100 so so there's a there's a big spread there if we just take mid 20s 25 Grand a year times 120 customers it puts you about a 3 million run rate today yeah that's roughly there and where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate run rate so we did roughly 100% year-year growth okay well so one you finished last year you know middle last year you're at like a 1.5 million run rate something like that yeah that's great and what would you attribute most of that growth to expansion into historical accounts or adding brand new accounts together all together it's a mix definitely but we are growing a lot on on the new bu side for sure that's great so what's the plan this year what do you hope to grow this year so we're we're hoping to keep that growth pace of around 100% year on-year growth so that's the target for us um we have sort of significant goals around sort of expanding upwards in the market we I think we started with a scalable product and which is like one philosophy so you start with something that's super scalable and then you go Enterprise later some people start an ENT Enterprise makes it kind of hard to go uh super scalable we we feel so now we are putting a lot of effort into Enterprise if you see the features set we we have added a lot of what you call like Enterprise Readiness features and to be able to serve those customers yeah I mean that was one of my comments coming into this right is if I didn't know what your Revenue was and I only looked at your pricing page I mean the complexity on your pricing pce suggests to me and looks a lot more like a 30 or $40 million AR company so like you're way sort of ahead of the curve there how do you manage your org chart in terms of complexity around all these pricing options relative to sort of your stage day 120 customers 3 million AR I think we on the pricing side we made a conscious decision when we founded the company that we would care a lot about pricing because it is one of the like big sort of underutilized levers in in a SAS company and one of the things we decided from the get-go was hey we'll be structured around it and we want to be a company that changes price you know we want to be able to repackage and that means that we from the get-go have had structure pricing so what you want to avoid the situation where you look at your customer base and basically you got 120 customers and they on 120 different price plans because that creates like um a lot of um no predictability in terms of what happens when I change pricing so we've always been super structured um we are like we we I would say our price Model is sort of semiu but underneath it we have a price calculator we don't publish it but everybody is priced with the same mechanic so we know exactly how people are priced um and that creates transparency but yeah I mean it is pricing is complex but you know we we're engineering types I guess yep yep how many folks are full-time on the team today uh total team is 45 people 45 and are you guys still burning cash today each month are you profitable no I think like the math there is like not profitable okay how what are you comfortable with comfortable burning 30 grand a month 100 Grand a month more yeah so 30 is fine uh at the moment I think we came out of um so 2023 was a rough year in s for everybody um we still grew really well but it was sort of for us apart from it being maybe you we grew well we would have liked to have grown more but it was also a year of sort of scaling the orc and now the next like this year and first half of next year is sort of about making Revenue you catch up with the or size y um double double the next two years and we'll be at roughly yeah we're about out of time but just but just to summarize you're burning right now about 30 grand a month you burned maybe more last year but you're work you're hiring ahead of growth and you hope to get closer profitability end of this year into next yeah yeah exactly how how much of the four million seed Ron from 2020 do you still have on the bank uh nothing okay no no we raised since then oh you did how much have you raised since then uh so we raised 7 million series a in um what's that early like late 22 early 23 oh okay great what can I ask what valuation that was that that was the Heyday those were the big rounds yeah I think we were no it wasn't that great it was kind of a little bit so when things were slowing down a bit um yeah so we were I'm not I'm not 30 30 30 million 40 yeah that range there yeah okay so I mean you sold something like 15 16% of the company yeah so I think in total we're at that like roughly 50% of ofip for the founding team and that's great well that means you have some of the seven million left so you've got plenty of Runway yeah yeah yeah all right let's wrap up here Lars with the famous five number one your favorite book oh my favorite book yeah I haven't read it yet but Mighty Kagen came out with a new book but before that it would be love to like I'm a big fan of Marty Ken who's like product management Guru that's probably the most influential book uh for me in number two is there a CEO you're following or studying CEO I'm following oh you can say none none yeah know number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business my favorite online tool for building the business I think like okay I'm going to be a bit selfish here I love our own product we don't besides your own besides your own besides our own I'm a big hopspot fan I think it's just a marvelous tool I'll super happy with that number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night what hours of sleep sleep sleep uh yeah six to six to eight okay and situation married single kids uh married lots of kids two kids still or you got another one uh three three kids now congratulations that's exciting um and how old are you what four do you have a birthday 40 years old 41 me uh 53 oh you're you're 53 is that right you're 53 today yeah yeah okay take me back to when you were 20 what something you wish you knew back then when I was 20 what sorry what was the question something you wish you knew uh wish I knew um yeah it's fun doing a startup I would have done it earlier guys there you have it 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 a last year closed a 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 the 3 million run rate today up to 6 million by the end of the year as they compete and the B2B marketing SAS and most importantly we just organizing your data in the marketing or space with a complete uh and very clear pricing plan our's today in the $2,000 per month range 25 Grand per year cost 120 paying customers LS thanks for taking us to the top thanks say then

Introduction hey folks my guest today is ali dollar up he's a customer-centric and data-driven technology leader passionate about putting technology to use to deliver real impact he's now the cto and co-founder of dream data dot io a revenue attribution and data platform ali are you ready to take us to the top yeah i am looking forward all right so who's buying this product right now so behind it is uh well three tech people we just like enjoy data and kind of solving problems for customers who's buying it right now who are your customers oh so sorry our customers are typically b2b companies uh in the sas space often they are vc backed and at least they are growing fast and what are they paying you for specifically is it just revenue attribution mainly uh so um half is probably paying us for revenue attribution half is paying us for a data platform getting more insight into their customers where attribution can be part of it but as much it's getting the full overview of their customers doing and you have some big customers dixon's been on the show i know they're growing very fast uh you also have some other uh big b2b companies like georgia's using you so you're clearly onto something here when did you guys or what are these what are companies like these paying you an average per month to use the technology so customers pay us i mean it depends of course of size so but they the range is typically between six thousand dollars annually and up to fifty a hundred thousand dollars okay but what would a sweet spot be maybe ten thousand bucks a year uh that's in the low end it's uh okay our average average is around uh 18 000. okay so so you guys are then high min market and moving into enterprise then yes exactly okay now were you always there tell me about your first customer when did you guys launch the business no so we were of course not always there our first business was a kind of a telco but uh they were half says half a telco business um a very local business in denmark um someone we knew in our network uh and the ceo was very interested in this kind of space and and this type of problem um and we were also very early we didn't i don't think we had a crisp clear vision of kind of the problems we want to solve so the first product or the first prototype i would more call it was uh well quite far from what we do what year was that ollie that was in 18 2018 okay and so that was your first customer Currently serving 30 customers you've pivoted since then how many customers do you work with now today now we have around 30 customers 3-0 yes okay and how much is it is it is it no touch or are you putting services on the back end as well so it's uh mostly no touch um so we our customers connect their data sources uh salesforce hubspot the paid media and the tracking scripts into kind of our product and that's self-service if you want um and then where it's often a conversation between us and the customers it depends a little bit on the complexity of a customer's business but sometimes we need to a little bit of customization when we talk about the business outcomes what is the what what are they measuring what is success for them um what is in marketing qualified lead what's the sales qualified lead sometimes that's straightforward modeled out from salesforce and opportunities and sometimes we need to go in and do a little bit of uh if else uh kind of logic yeah and and tell me about how you've capitalized the business are you guys bootstrapped or have you raised Raised so we raised two rounds now [Music] and going fast into racing our c series a next year when did you raise the first round in 18 2018 and how much was that for that was uh a little bit less than a million dollars and why did you guys need that capital why couldn't you bootstrap i think like personal we don't have necessarily kind of much cash could we have kind of bootstrapped and kind of built the product ourselves i think in theory we could we believe we could have moved faster and so when we talk about raising money i don't think we talked so much about um our conversation was not so much whether to do it or not it was more what would it benefit us to get more cash how could we go faster how could we build uh what would we need cash for to kind of make a better product for our customers i think that has been more our focus than understanding to raise raise cash or not and originally they actually so last our ceo and i we left a company called trustpilot and actually more or less when we walked out the door we were offered in the area of the same amount of cash we raised but at that time we turned that offer down not because it wasn't a good offer necessarily but because we were not ready to spend the money we didn't have a clear how are we going to spend this money understood so you raised a million in 2018 and then you did another round as well when was that and how much was that four uh that was in the summer of uh 2020. and here we raised four million dollars okay and what did you spend or what was your thesis at least where were you going to spend that money on so here at this point we have now so the first time we raised we had a prototype and so the money would go into building a small team and building a product and start kind of getting solid proof that this was the right thing to do now the next money we raised was to start building us kind of proving that we could build a solid business okay we could build a predictable revenue that we could find the idle customer profile that we could scale so that when we move into the next phase that we could hire a bunch of salespeople and kind of repeat it over and over again of course there's also a lot of product development going into that so we needed to figure out kind of where any features we needed to cover to do this uh and today i think we are called we would call ourselves kind of feature complete on brand new attribution um at least very close to uh so we needed to cover that as well yeah and and so you raised four million seed and you mentioned you're thinking about raising now how much are you looking to raise now uh so that plan is not ready yet uh i think right now we are focusing and drilling down into just delivering the product the best or the most awesome product we can with the team we have and closing customers so that's our focus right now so we don't necessarily focus on so much on kind of how much you want to raise how did you or if i take the 30 customers you gave me earlier times the average annual of 80 000. that would mean you're doing about 200 000 a month right now on revenue or 2.4 million dollar run rate is that about right uh that's a little bit high but uh yeah but i mean we still have 60 days left in the year do you guys think you can break 2.4 million by the end of the year no we won't break that okay um [Music] so that's a little high so if you're not doing like 200 grand a month maybe you're doing something more like 150 grand a month today uh so we uh uh i'm sorry um you gave me two numbers earlier you said 30 customers and an average acv of 80 000. if i multiply those it's 2.4 million but you're saying it's a little below that i'm just trying to understand how far off we are sure sure sure um i'll just find the numbers i love it he's doing math live i can see the white glow on his screen on his face from his computer screen this is great so i actually log into old product to see this kind of stuff eat your own dog food right yeah sure and we can always kind of fail so um [Music] let's see here um so so the 18 000 was annual recurring uh annual price right um Monthly recurring revenue so so roughly our uh annual recurring revenue is in the 500 000 error okay guys you're doing 500 000 a year right now on nar yeah so i guess what's wrong so hold on you said you had 30 paid customers yeah so 30 30 paying customers and 18 thousand average one eight or eight zero one eight ah that's the error that's uh my poor inclusion that was my fault that was my fault okay got it that makes i'm going these numbers are way off what am i missing now i understand yeah no yes right so so that's the kind of spot we are and yeah um yep that makes sense so so got it and so if you're doing about call it um you know 10 uh or about 500 000 on run rate right now where were you about a year ago do you remember um no but i again about a year ago we were um [Music] at probably more like a hundred thousand uh yeah so do you do you guys think you'll have your first million dollar year next year for sure yeah i mean that that we have to hit yeah next yeah if if not then yeah yeah are you and your co-founder you said there's two of you guys right we had three oh three of you did you split did you split equity evenly at the beginning or no uh no we didn't uh so das and i started the business a little bit before the third quarter founder joined so we didn't spam completely i see so it's like 40 40 20 something like that yeah something like that i see well the reason i ask is obviously as you raise capital you're all getting diluted right so when you guys did your four million seed uh last year what valuation did you raise that at uh so that's numbers i don't have in the head we we kind of dilute it again that's back to i think there's two things when we focused on raising money it's not so much the dilution except we focus more on building a healthy company and making the company attractive for both employees and investors and so if we dilute too fast too early it's not attractive by by employees to join for equity now it's attractive for investors to kind of join because it become maybe less attractive to keep employees and and founders around of course i mean this is standard this is just stuff though right i mean exactly most people on their seat round are selling 20 of the business did you guys sell about the same amount yeah yeah so we every round is it has been between i think 14 and and 20 for us yeah got it so so that seed was then something around a 20 million dollar post money valuation in that range definitely yeah so we are not special in that way where are you where are you and so i assume you guys are hiring engineers now tell me a little bit more about the team and how many engineers and what those engineers are working on product wise moving forward yeah sure so we um the indian team is what are we now we are six seven engineers plus me we're looking for to hire a couple more so to go to nine right now and then of course i have to raise money much more right now the focus is building so being completely feature complete on attribution so we have a couple of lacking features one is content attribution being able to really drill into the content and kind of show our customers what content is driving a strong revenue for you and then we're looking into doing a few things on the application so customers can drill more deep into the data which is real particularly around filters adding more kind of complexity there we're doing a lot of things to the data model and have been doing a lot of things so it's easy for customers to access the data raw um our infrastructure has built a lot on a data warehouse called bigquery and we've always been able to export the data to that but now we are adding support to the customers that are using snowflake or maybe uh amazon redshift can also get their data down and ollie there's eight engineers how many are the full team [Music] we're 20. 20 people very cool and then talk to me a little bit about about churn do you guys have any turn uh so yes so we had some tune [Music] i think this has also been part of the journey we've had particularly since the last funding round but we started focusing uh and going into a journey of finding what is the icp customer for us and as part of that we kind of focused on a more narrow cost type of customer and some of the customers there was maybe more the early customers that didn't um got it this is yeah yeah so when you look at historical the past 12 months what is net dollar retention over the past 12 months would you say no that i don't know that's something i would have is it below 100 that's probably the case yes because if we look at kind of a year so we i think the less than nine months we really kind of kicked the kind of icp customer so if we look at the customers we kind of signed a year ago and filter back they were the less idle customers for us yep yeah make sense good stuff ollie let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book so my favorite business book is a book business book maybe yeah well team geeks it's a book what's it called team geeks yeah it's a book written by a few people from google uh or former probably uh talking about how kind of business people can talk better with engineers or engineers can talk with the business people um yeah it's quite old actually um yeah very cool number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh not particularly number three what's your favorite online tool for building dream data it's a tool called data form data what data form data phone phone yeah so it's like it's a competitor to dbt it's now owned by google number four how many hours of sleep to get every uh night five and six five and six and what's your situation married single kids uh married and kids how many kiddos two nice okay and how old are you i'm 39 39 last question what's something that you wish you knew when you were 20 good question uh that yes that school is not everything guys there you have it dreamdata.com revenue recognition they've got 30 customers today doing 500 000 bucks a year in terms of run rate up from 100 000 a year just a year ago they raised about five million dollars to date as they look to scale driving into these enterprise accounts team at 20 right now eight folks again building deeper tools to help content teams and other teams understand what is driving revenue and what's not ollie thanks for taking us to the top thank you one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya