How Keboola.com CEO Pavel Dolezal grew Keboola.com to $11.7M revenue and 175 customers in 2024.

founders what's going on you guys know i love in-person events and they are back the recording you're about to hear is from our most recent event where we had hundreds of founders come together share intimate details templates kpis okrs about their business and it was something special something special we'd love to meet you in person if you want to see the next live events we have coming up via our schedule the link will be down below in the description if you're listening on itunes check this out on youtube you'll see the links in the description or you can just google founder path or latka next event we'd love to see you in person in the meantime though enjoy this recording it's a good one so i'm gonna make this really quick because like yesterday was awesome i'm not gonna teach you anything that john didn't teach you godard you know nathan or anything so what i can do i can share just our story where we what we did wrong what we did good and just like yeah talk learn share right that's why we are here okay so let me figure out how this works okay like this okay so everybody here has been talking about data right nathan is showing you like all the data points right and then we saw g tube data data data that's great we love that we love that data is everywhere that's why we exist we exist you know companies like you enterprises small you know sas companies to actually help with data but data ecosystem has been like really hard for last couple of years when snowflake started they actually solved all of the big data issues you know no more hadoop wrangling but there is like 20 different tools you need to use to process data into snowflake and out of snowflake and it only starts with getting data in so what we did we actually oh by the way see g2 you know we have the stars on g2 as well we love g2 right so what we did we actually you know like put it all together into end-to-end platform so you don't have to have you know 20 different tools you have one login you can get data in you can get all the connectors we have the biggest marketplace in in our space we have 1400 applications in our marketplace developed by 400 different developers you can actually you know create automations to power your data once it's in snowflake to actually run it somewhere put it in your sales force you know and just like have it where you want to have it right and last but not least you have the data science part because a lot of people you know like you get the data in you look at it like nathan did right perfect but underneath that there's a lot of machine learning models and you need to have all of those parts three parts working together so yeah that's what we did and in this part you know like actually people who started data are geeks right they are nerds they love their ci cd pipelines they love their devops tools right like i was talking to that guy last night right and he's like yeah he's actually really smart you know he spent like hours talking to him he's smart and he likes you know he he likes code right so but then you go to business departments nobody wants to code people want to have click interfaces and in data we see these two different personas two different worlds so what we had to do we started with code we started with apis and then we are slowly adding on interfaces for business users that was scott was saying yesterday right about small things you know like like putting together and stuff right that's what we're trying to do we are not in this for one year we actually had that plan like yesterday the guy from the credit card company was saying about 10 year 10x right plan three years then go back one year two years that's what we did you know five years ago and finally now it's materializing so what actually you get when you start using our platform well inside your company people don't do only the biggest you know like the largest use case that everybody is you know doing in the data world you unlocked all of these small use cases and that's really really cool but enough about our product i just wanted to make make sure kind of like like with them so when when god was funny when gore i was you know like asking who did who was there in 2000 i was there i remember the you know like boom and bust oh that was hard right and when we started kebula we were like okay we don't want to take venture money when we start we don't really care about that we care you know about you know making the best product because we had an agency which was actually doing cloud migrations helping companies to go to cloud companies like red bull and then scale it and more and more we were doing that we saw that there is one issue we were everybody was asking us to build a data platform for that integrate data right run it in amazon it's just like we were lazy because we had done it so many times right there has to be better way so we start to make automations you know internally and then in 2014 we said well let's make it into a product this should be a product not an internal tool right so we did and we're like well are we gonna raise well that would be awesome right i was like no i don't think so because like once you race you know you you better know what you wanna do with the money right you know you have to know how to use it right in when when gorda was saying that when they were starting in 2000 they needed a million dollars to buy servers i remember that we were shipping 400 dell servers you know it was crazy you know half of them didn't come but in 2014 we did not need that you know we had paying customers you know in our in our agency and just like start a machine well it didn't cost anything on amazon right so like well this is the great time to actually build a sas company without you know like giving too much equity away in the beginning we can achieve product market fit without you know actually getting the vc money so that's what we did and we started to scale we started to scale first couple of years by referrals you know people started to use us they started to grow their own companies right and then some of them are now now now unicorns like like product board or aurora group in europe right and then something happened i'm gonna show you what we did wrong and and what we can learn from it so okay so a couple of lessons that we've learned when our heart when you are actually going from agency or consultancy to product first it seems contrary to it and counter-intuitive but you have to let go your you know service professional services revenue we were making so much money doing professional services before right helping all these people they paid us dollars cash right but then when we actually wanted to do product we had to rethink that we would not be able to support everyone right so we had to actually give that money away to our partners we started to create a partner ecosystem and that's the red line which is trending down and people ask like well what does it mean like when you go and like you put your products somewhere in the client and the partner comes how much money you make how much money they make well this is kind of like actually the table is comes from our actual client mole group when we actually started to implement there we said well our target what we want to get is let's say one right one dollar in the year one we'll actually give them discount so we'll put 1.7 per our software and we need to bring in partner how much are they going to make so we then look back at the numbers and at the first year we made 1.0.7 off of the target number we wanted but our partners made four times that money four times right and that was the money we originally had in our cash flow when we were when we were a service company now we gave it away right and it was actually one of the best one of the best decisions we made because like with that we started to make an ecosystem of partners and you know like yesterday everybody talked about it partners partners partners right partners have a great way to help you to strengthen what you what you are doing and help you actually they are like your extended arm right so that's great but there is also a bad side about it and we made a huge mistake that's carl was saying she's a slave but she was saying yesterday when uh when when you were talking about the professional services she was like i hate them right when i see professional services i hate them well yes if you are pipedrive right which is kind of like really smb and you are just like churning through customers but if you are doing enterprises you really want professional services and that's where we made our mistake and they cannot participate in the dip that you saw because we went to enterprise level enterprise customers and we said well let's bring those partners that we developed right like there are 50 people company 50 people company they're going to do it and no that was our big mistake and if you want to know more there's fisher my my my colleague and he's a head of professional service he can tell you everything about the mistakes so that was that was that was a big learning so another big learning well my learning it needs to be balanced you don't want it for smbs that you can like go like that you want partners but for for enterprises yes you want professional services if you look at...