How journy.io CEO Hans Ott grew 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 look like much from the outside but there are a lot of things that you need to solve and like identity resolution and all those kinds of things basically but there's i mean what you're kind of what you just said if you want to build a great tool you have to raise money i can tell you there's a lot of great founders that do not raise money they pre-sell the idea and they fund themselves and keep all the equity why didn't you go that path does anyone either you or your co-founder sell are you salesperson yeah um eva's uh more the the commercial minded person but he was also a programmer um in his early days so he knows a lot about the technical system as well how many folks are on the team now today just the both of you uh no we're with um five full-time people working on a product and then we have uh some other uh very talented uh students who are also like entrepreneurs working for us and so yeah we're doing it with that team if if we're being conservative and say five full-time people at very small salaries right you're spending 20 30 40 000 bucks a month on head count annually that burns through all of your seed money right does that make you nervous and how do you manage burn well we're we're very confident about we don't worry about that part of course there's always some worrying i guess um that's normal but we're seeing the space and and it's growing and it's a really cool place um yeah like market to be in and so um we're not that scared that we're going to run out of money eventually so um we just want to focus on on building that product and finding customers and making them happy and then it will come where where what do you know you mentioned you have four people on pilots right now what activation metrics do you know that they need to hit in order to increase likelihood they start paying um well i think it's like how quickly can they like integrate with our um apis are they getting the right amount of actionable knowledge about art from that from this data how do you measure that though [Music] well it's it's a of course we're using our own tool to collect data from our customers so it's so we're using our own tool and so and in that way we can also um play with our own features and and know what we have to improve but um other than that it's it's still finding like a bit that market fit and what are the the features we have to focus on and um a lot of talking with the customers and and seeing what they are interested in to know what kind of insights you want to know what kind of insights they want to sing back and so um it's still a lot of figuring out right now enhanced over the past seven days how many customers have you talked to [Music] um i um i'm i'm not sure i think about like seven or something like that and what's your process you get on zoom you ask them questions you write down what they like and say they're willing to pay for or what's the process look like yeah we we try to design like a survey that um yeah encompasses like all the the right questions like what kind of tools you use right now what kind of crm um do you like would you like to see what a which stage a customer is that it automatically um goes from this stage to another stage and so forth and so um what what they need to to push their business further and to break down those boundaries uh between like all the teams like the customer success and the sales and so forth very cool what is your guys's goal for next year what revenue do you hope you guys will hit well um i think our targets were to to have like uh 50 paying customers um and so but of course it will be more than that that we want but right now we're just focused on on on finding um the right feature sets uh and finding the right customers that can uh support that hans on that no let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh it's atomic habits james clear number two is there a ceo you're following are studying yeah i'm very a fan of nat friedman the ceo from github uh yes get i'll just say gitlab or github github number three what's your what's your favorite online tool for building the business get besides github um i think um it's you you surprised me i think it's my editor right now because i've wrote a lot of um code with it it's like bhp storm that what's in that's the name number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night eight and what's your what's your situation on are you married single kids i have a girlfriend and we have two cats oh okay how are you i'm 27 27 last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 that it's uh never too late to start learning anything like i'm very busy with music as well and so i i should have started earlier with music i kind of realized this very late and so it's never too late to start learning anything basically as long as you're passionate guys journey.i o helps you understand which customers are hot which ones need help they tidy your segmented and other data sources to tell you that they started as a side project in 2018 19 raised some seed capital in february this year 450 000 bucks and just landed their first paying customer which we love at 120 bucks a month hoping that 50 paying customers in 2022 as they look to scale with their team of five hans thank you 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 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure 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