How Dreamdata.io Reached $500K ARR with 30 Customers in 2021 (Interview with CTO Ole Dallerup)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Ole Dallerup. 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 dreamdata.io, a revenue attribution and data platform. Ole, you ready to take us to the top?

Ole Dallerup

00:15>> Yeah. I am. Looking forward.

Who Is Buying Dreamdata

Nathan Latka

00:16Alright. So who's buying this product right now?

Ole Dallerup

00:20>> So behind it is, well, three tech people. We just, like, enjoy data and kind of solving problems for customers.

Nathan Latka

00:30Who's buying it right now? Who are your customers?

Ole Dallerup

00:32>> Oh, so sorry. Our customers are typically B2B companies in the SaaS space. Often, they are VC backed, and at least they're growing fast.

What Customers Pay For

Nathan Latka

00:46Mhmm. And what are they paying you for specifically? Is it just revenue attribution mainly?

Ole Dallerup

00:52>> So half is probably paying us for revenue attribution. Half is paying us for data platform, getting more insight into their customers, where attribution can be part of it, but as much as getting the full overview of their customers'journey.

Nathan Latka

01:10Mhmm. And you have some big customers. Dixa has been on the show. I know they're growing very fast. You also have some other big B2B SaaS companies like Gorgias using you. So you're you're clearly onto something here. When did you guys or what are these what are companies like these paying you on average per month to use the technology?

Pricing and Average Contract Value

Ole Dallerup

01:25>> So customers pay us I mean, it depends, of course, of size and so, but the range is typically between $6,000 annually and up to $50,000, $100,000.

Nathan Latka

01:38Okay. But what would a sweet spot be? Maybe $10,000 a year?

Ole Dallerup

01:42>> That's in the low end. That's the Okay. Our average average is around 18,000.

Nathan Latka

01:48Okay. So so you guys are then high mid market and moving into enterprise then?

Ole Dallerup

01:52>> Yes. Exactly.

First Customer and Company Origins

Nathan Latka

01:53Okay. Now were you always there? Tell me about your first customer. When did you guys launch the business?

Ole Dallerup

01:59>> No. So we were, of course, not always there. Our first business was

02:07>> kind of a telco, but they were half SaaS, half telco business,

02:15>> a very local business in Denmark,

02:19>> someone we knew in our network, and the CEO was very interested in this kind of space and this type of problem. And we were also very early. I don't think we had a crisp, clear vision of kind of the problems we wanted to solve. So the first product or the first prototype, I would more call it, was, well, quite far from what we do.

Nathan Latka

02:46What year was that, Ole?

Ole Dallerup

02:48>> That was in '18.

Nathan Latka

02:492018. Okay.

02:51And so that was your first customer. You've pivoted since then. How many customers do you work with now today?

Ole Dallerup

02:56>> Now we have around 30 customers.

Nathan Latka

02:59Three zero?

Ole Dallerup

03:00>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

03:01Okay. And how much is it? Is it is it no touch, or are you putting services on the back end as well?

Current Customer Count

Ole Dallerup

03:07>> So it's mostly no touch. So we our customers connect their data sources, their Salesforce, HubSpot, paid media, and the tracking scripts into kind of our product, and that's self-service, if you want. 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 are they measuring? What is

03:45>> success for them?

03:49>> What is a marketing qualified lead? What's a 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 if else kind of logic, yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:05Mhmm. And tell me about how you capitalize the business. Are you guys bootstrapped, or have you raised?

Funding History and Capitalization

Ole Dallerup

04:11>> So we raised two rounds down

04:15>> and going fast into raising our series A next year.

Nathan Latka

04:21When did you raise the first round?

Ole Dallerup

04:24>> In '18.

Nathan Latka

04:262018. And how much was that for?

Ole Dallerup

04:29>> That was

04:33>> a little bit less than a million dollars.

Nathan Latka

04:35And why did you guys need that capital? Why couldn't you bootstrap?

Ole Dallerup

04:39>> I think, like, personally, 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 talk so much about

05:01>> our conversation was not so much whether

05:05>> to do it or not. It was more what would benefit us to get more cash? How could we go faster? How could we build 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 whether Understood. To raise cash or not. Originally, they actually so Lars, our CEO, and I, we left a company called Trustpilot, and actually, more or less, when we walked

05:41>> 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 gonna spend this money.

Nathan Latka

06:00Understood. So you raised 1,000,000 in 2018, and then you did another round as well. When was that, and how much was that that for?

Seed Round Details and Use of Funds

Ole Dallerup

06:07>> That was in the summer of two thousand and twenty,

06:12>> and here we raised $4,000,000.

Nathan Latka

06:14Okay. And what did you spend, or what was your thesis at least? Where were you gonna spend that money on?

Ole Dallerup

06:19>> 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 proving that we could build a solid business, that we could build predictable revenue, that we could find the ideal customer profile, that

06:50>> 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

07:11>> kind of were there any features we needed to cover to do this? And today, I think we would call ourselves kind of feature compete on revenue attribution, at least very close to.

07:25>> So we needed to cover that as well. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

07:27Mhmm. And and so you raised 4,000,000 seed, and you mentioned you're thinking about raising now. How much are you looking to raise now?

Ole Dallerup

07:35>> So that plan is not ready yet. I think right now we are focusing and drilling down into just delivering the

07:45>> most awesome product we can with the team we have and closing customers. That's our focus right now. So we don't necessarily focus so much on kind of how much we want to raise.

Nathan Latka

07:58If 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 $2,400,000 run rate. Is that about right?

Ole Dallerup

08:13>> That's a little bit high, but sure. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

08:16But, I mean, you we still have sixty days left in the year. Do guys think you can break 2,400,000 by the end of the year?

Ole Dallerup

08:22>> No. We won't break that.

Nathan Latka

08:24Okay. So that's a little high. So if you're not doing, like, $200 a month, maybe you're doing something more like a $150 a month today?

Ole Dallerup

08:34>> So we are

Nathan Latka

08:37sorry. You gave me two numbers earlier. You said 30 customers and an average ACV of 80,000. If I multiply those, it's 2,400,000, but you're saying it's a little below that. I'm just trying to understand how far off we are.

Calculating ARR Live

Ole Dallerup

08:49>> Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. I'll just find the numbers.

Nathan Latka

08:53I love it. He's doing math live. I can see the white glow on his on his face from his computer screen. This is this is great.

Ole Dallerup

08:59>> So I actually log in to our own product to see this kind of stuff.

Nathan Latka

09:04Eat your own dog food. Right?

Ole Dallerup

09:06>> Yeah, sure. And we can always kind of feel

09:14>> So

09:17>> let's see here.

Nathan Latka

09:22So the 18,000 was annual price, right?

Ole Dallerup

09:26>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

09:27So roughly, our annual recurring revenue is in the 500,000 area.

09:35Okay. Got it. So you're doing $500,000 a year right now in ARR?

Ole Dallerup

09:40>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:41So I guess what's wrong so hold on. You said you had 30 paid customers?

Ole Dallerup

09:46>> Yeah. So thirty thirty paying customers and 18,000 average.

Nathan Latka

09:51One eight or eight zero?

Ole Dallerup

09:53>> One eight.

Nathan Latka

09:54Ah, that's the error. The error. That's my poor English

Ole Dallerup

10:00>> That was my fault. That was my fault.

Nathan Latka

10:01Okay. Got it. That makes I'm going, these numbers are way off. What am I missing?

Ole Dallerup

10:05>> Now I understand.

10:06>> No. Yes. Right? So so that's the kind of spot we are. Yeah.

Revenue a Year Ago and Growth

Nathan Latka

10:12Yep. That makes sense. So so got it. And so if you're doing about, call it, you know, 10 or about 500,000 on run rate right now, where were you about a year ago? Do remember?

Ole Dallerup

10:25>> No. But I again,

10:30>> about a year ago, we were

10:35>> at

10:38>> probably more like a 100,000.

Nathan Latka

10:43>> Yeah.

10:43So do you guys think you'll have your first million dollar year next year?

Path to First Million Dollar Year

Ole Dallerup

10:47>> For sure. I mean, that that we have to hit the next year. If if not, then yeah.

10:54>> Not Then Yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:55Ole, are you and your cofounder? You said there's two of you guys. Right?

Ole Dallerup

11:00>> We are three.

Nathan Latka

11:01Oh, three of you. Did you split did you split equity evenly at the beginning or no?

Ole Dallerup

11:06>> No. We didn't. So Lars and I started the business a little bit before the cofounder joined.

Nathan Latka

11:14Mhmm.

Ole Dallerup

11:14>> So we didn't split completely. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:17I see. So it's like forty, forty, 20, something like that?

Ole Dallerup

11:21>> Yeah. Something like that.

Nathan Latka

11:22It's I see. Yeah. Well, the reason I ask is because obviously, as you raise capital, you're all getting diluted. Right? So when you guys did your 4,000,000 seed last year, what valuation did you raise that at?

Equity Split Among Co-Founders

Ole Dallerup

11:33>> So that's numbers I don't have in head. We kind of diluted. Again, that's back to I think there's two things when we are 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 for either employees to join for equity, nor it's attractive for investors to kind of

12:07>> join because it becomes maybe less attractive to keep employees and founders around.

Nathan Latka

12:14Of course. Mean, is standard stuff, though, right? Mean, most people in their seed round are selling 20% of the business. Do you guys sell about the same amount?

Ole Dallerup

12:23>> Yeah. Yeah. So we every round has been between, I think, 14, 20% plus.

Nathan Latka

12:29Yeah. Got it. So so that seed was then something around a $20,000,000 post money valuation in that range?

Ole Dallerup

12:34>> Yeah.

12:35>> Definitely. Yeah. So so we we are not special in that way. No.

Engineering Team and Product Roadmap

Nathan Latka

12:38Where are you where are you in 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.

Ole Dallerup

12:46>> Yeah. Sure. So we the engineering team is what are we now? We are

12:54>> six, seven engineers, plus me. We're looking to hire a couple more, so to go to nine right now, and then, of course, after we 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 strong revenue for you.

13:30>> And then we are looking into doing a few things on the application so customers can drill more deep into the data, which is 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 that it's easier for customers to access the data raw.

13:53>> Our infrastructure is 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 so that customers that are using Snowflake or maybe Amazon Redshift can also get their data down.

Nathan Latka

14:10And, Ole, there's eight engineers. How many are on the full team?

Ole Dallerup

14:13>> We have 20.

Churn and Net Dollar Retention

Nathan Latka

14:1420 people. Very cool. And then talk to me a little bit about churn. Do you guys have any churn?

Ole Dallerup

14:20>> So, yes. So we had some churn. I think this has also been part of the journey we've had, particularly since the last funding round, where we started focusing 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 type of customer, and some of the customers, there was maybe more early customers that didn't

Nathan Latka

14:50fit Yeah. Got it.

Ole Dallerup

14:51>> This is yeah. They tried Yeah.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

14:53When so when you look at historical the past twelve months, what is net dollar retention over the past twelve months, would you say?

Ole Dallerup

15:01>> No. That I don't know. That's something I would have to do.

Nathan Latka

15:05Is it below 100%?

Ole Dallerup

15:08>> That's probably the case, yes, because if we look at kind of a year, so 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 ideal customers for us.

Nathan Latka

15:33Yep. Yep. Makes sense. Good stuff, Ole. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?

Ole Dallerup

15:40>> So my favorite business book is

15:44>> a book business book, maybe. Yeah. Well, Team Geek. It's a

Nathan Latka

15:49book What's it called?

Ole Dallerup

15:50>> Team Geeks?

15:51>> Yeah. It's a book written by a few people from Google, or former probably,

15:59>> talking about how kind of business people can talk better with engineers, or engineers can talk with business people. Yeah. It's quite old, actually.

Nathan Latka

16:08Yeah. Very cool. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Ole Dallerup

16:14>> Not particularly.

Nathan Latka

16:15Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Dreamdata?

Ole Dallerup

16:19>> It's a tool called Dataform.

Nathan Latka

16:21Data what?

Ole Dallerup

16:22>> Dataform. Dataform.

16:24>> So it's a it form. Yeah. So it's like a it's a competitor to dbt. It's now owned by Google. But yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:32Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Ole Dallerup

16:35>> Between five and six.

Nathan Latka

16:37Five and six. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Ole Dallerup

16:41>> Married and kids.

Nathan Latka

16:42How many kiddos?

Ole Dallerup

16:44>> Two.

Nathan Latka

16:45Nice. Okay. And how old are you?

Ole Dallerup

16:48>> I'm 39.

16:49>> 39.

Nathan Latka

16:50Last question. What's something that you wish you knew when you were 20?

Ole Dallerup

16:57>> Good question.

17:02>> That

17:04>> yes. That school is not everything.

Nathan Latka

17:09Guys, there you have it. Dreamdata.com revenue recognition. They've got 30 customers today doing $500,000 a year in terms of run rate, up from a $100,000 a year just a year ago. They've raised about $5,000,000 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. Ole, thanks for taking us to

17:30the top.

Ole Dallerup

17:31>> Thank you.

Nathan Latka

17:34One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM

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