How journy.io CEO Hans Ott grew journy.io to $961 revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is hans ott he's a software engineer with a strong interest in domain driven design and functional programming deeply in love with clean cloud and he'll do anything to motivate other developers to leave the campground cleaner as they say he's now building journey dot io that's with no e helping you better manage customer data across all your teams hans are you ready to take us to the top yes yes so journey.i o is a customer data platform we're especially focused on the b2b so we basically collect data from all kinds of sources and then we create like unified customer profiles of users and accounts within your product we and then you can use this data to calculate like which customers are healthy and which kind of stage they are are they qualified for your product like have they tried out this feature this feature and then basically try to detect churn and then sync all this data back to all the tools you are already using like your crm like hubspot for example or intercom for chatting with your customers and so we want to share all that data i'll build this intelligence in one place and share this uh this knowledge to all the tools you're using you can add a really interesting elements to each of our customers profiles for example tell me which ones have a healthy score who's gone through the onboarding what they pay who needs attention things like that one of the things that you're able to give feedback on is is the onboarding done or not how are you able to give other software companies that kind of intelligence do they have to install a journey javascript on their site yeah there are a couple of ways you can do it but a lot of organizations are using segment already do you know that yep yeah so they send already there all their data all their analytics to segment and we are basically like a destination so you can immediately like with a few clicks you can attach all your analytics data to us and then we receive this and build these so someone so someone listening who wants to use journey would attach their segment account to journey and that's how you're rating their customers that's that's the fastest way but of course we also have our own apis and sdks that you can use to integrate or to send your analytics data to us how many companies have connected their analytics to you [Music] well um we're still like in in the in an early phase in that regard so we spend a lot of time trying to think uh we we originally started as a like an attribution platform so which channels and campaigns bring you the most and best customers but we pivoted it to this customer data platform and so that took a while and to to build like all these things and and get it like there is a lot of technical stuff involved and so it took a lot a long time to to build this uh great platform and so there are a lot of moving parts like you have you need to have this segment destination you need what's the number how many connected accounts yeah there are a few accounts on boarding so and one paying customer hey we love that you shouldn't be shy to share that everyone has to start at zero okay so so you have one paying customer and how many connected accounts you said uh so and there are a couple of accounts on boarding right now yeah okay trying out the or integration and what is the one paying how much are they paying uh well um they are um not paying um i think i i don't know the number by ex um not exactly but they're they they don't leverage like all the features that we have right now and we're trying to push that of course that they use all kinds of features they didn't integrate their product yet but so i i think they are paying 100 euros okay so about 120 us dollars per uh per month which is great the reason i ask is this is like a magical moment every founder has to go through is what pricing do you launch with and obviously you're going to experiment a ton over the next you know many months but why did you pick this price point to start yeah so it's based on the number of contacts that you have because for every contact we have to keep recalculating things and so forth and so um so it's based on on the amount of contacts and you can play with a slider on our website to see what kind of price you would pay um so and and how so it scales with your customer base basically yeah yep so 20 000 contacts would be about a thousand euros per month what's the math behind this is it just a ratio you're applying well it's it's uh we looked at other people who are in this space and and compared with our pricing um and we're actually um a lot cheaper than most um platforms out there so i think we have a great pricing at this moon but of course we still have to test and and and and play with is of course who do you compete with directly um we compete with like a number of um i think customer success tools like uh there's fitalia or sales machine i don't know if you know them um so a couple of uh products that are but they are really focused on on the customer success side and and we want to take it broader than that and also focus on on the sales because if you have a customer on boarding they um some customers try try the right features and then your sales can focus on on the right customers because if you have a long list of customers you need to call you want to prioritize and sort them by um their their adoption score or whatever when did you write the first line of when did you write the first line of code for journey i think it was like almost two years ago i think um but we were still my co-founder and i um were still having other jobs and so um it was kind of a side project and then at some point we decided okay we want to take us further work or not full time and then we've we found the seeding and then um did things uh so did you did you raise a seed round of capital yes yes how much did you guys raise uh 450 thousands was that last year uh it was like in in february i think okay of this year yeah okay and did you raise it on on sort of a cap or a price drop a note or a priced round um well i i'm um i don't know if i can share these details um was was there a valuation attached or was there a cap on it like was it debt a convertible note it was a gap oh i see i see so obviously driving evaluation when your pre-revenue is all about your ability to tell a really good story about what you could build the value you could create so what valuation did you end up raising the 450 000 at um i i don't know these exactly actually um yeah because my my co-founder is more focused on this part but i i don't know the exacts about it it's been it's been a while since i looked at these things well hans i mean sorry is it i mean i imagine someone listening when i was gonna go wait a second this is the co-founder of a company they raised capital and this guy doesn't know how much of the company he sold in the round he doesn't know the valuation that would be like one of the main things that every early stage founder would make sure they're focused on is minimizing delusion um well um since we we didn't um how do you say this uh well i i don't know if i can share these these things well how much of the company do you own let's just talk about your own stuff well i i i don't want to share this knowledge either okay how many did you find this yourself or how many co-founders do you have well we're with two co-founders and so uh we we started the company on ourselves and then we we found the seat and did you guys just agree at the beginning just split it right down the middle or did one of you guys take more because you were investing your own money or leaving a bigger job or something like that well it's it's um very well it's very even i would say mm-hmm and and why is that well you know sometimes people don't split evenly sometimes just put it evenly but why did you guys decide on even well we think we're both in this uh journey together so it's important that we're we're both as even invested in in this project um and so that's super important that we can trust each other and that we are willing to fight both for for the same reason um why do you have to i mean this doesn't sound like a huge technical problem you're connecting basically to a segment api feed and then making it look pretty with these customer cards why did you have to go raise capital and sell equity to get this going why couldn't you use you know a little bit of savings or pre-sell some customers because there are like a lot of moving parts and um you're syncing to crms and you don't want to mess up any data because often these systems don't have any um backup systems or some companies use but often like your crm has only this one uh version and then you can go roll back and so you don't want to mess up this data and so we're really focused on on building a great platform and there are a lot of moving parts in it you have to build these great apis that you can use in your product the developer experience has to be good and so we needed a lot of functionality to come it doesn't...