How Mozart Data CEO Peter Fishman grew Mozart Data to $2.9M revenue and 90 customers in 2024.

guys Pete Fishman mozartdata.com they've got big customers like modern treasury called almost 100 customers paying on average 1800 bucks a month they're pushing a two million run rate today in a really good position they close to 15 million dollar series a last year at pushing call at somewhere around 100 million dollar valuation and they're pretty Scrappy about it they didn't go hire 100 people there are 25 folks full-time today taking a disciplined approach to growth we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Pete Fishman he's a CEO and co-founder of Mozart data he's over a decade of running data and data adjacent teams at startups in a variety of Industries including gaming social HR and benefits real estate and many others when he realized he was building the same thing at every company said man I got to build a modern data stack that anybody can use and that's why he launched mozartdata.com Pete you ready to take us to the top ready to do it all right who's using you these days is there any customer you can talk about in a use case you know sure I would say that um obviously we we love highlighting our you know our big customers so you know we've we've got uh you know a few unicorns that are using us I love you know obviously giving shout outs to a company like modern treasury who's been one of our like longest uh supporters how do they use you everybody knows modern treasury that's a good example yeah you know come on Treasury uses this as as their core data infrastructure so uh they have an incredible uh data science team data analysts um even folks that sort of work as data Engineers but they sort of focus on organizing structuring their data so they could you know build insights and reports and sort of uh monitor those for the company rather than sort of spend most their time um you know doing the data sort of plumbing and data infra work that's really become uh wrote and and commonplace for many of these companies and when we spoke back in December of 2021 you told me your pricing model was based off compute and number of rows is that still the case there have you changed your pricing model um we have not changed our pricing model we are still planning on not Reinventing the wheel on that front there's many many great data companies out there um and we want to copy essentially the the Norms that they've put into the industry so we want to price in a very standard and transparent way uh but one big difference that that those companies don't do versus US is that we bundle those things so many of those companies charge on compute which or charge on rows we charge on effectively the bundle of compute and rows they get you on both it's a pain in the butt because you'll need a one a bunch of one and not a lot of the other but you got to pay for both sort of thing right that's right so we have a singular currency so you can be sort of fungible between those two right so some companies they have just giant often like these are b2c companies that are tracking many many things have you know a bunch of rows but maybe they're not doing as heavy or complex joints on top of them or sometimes you have B2B companies that have very valuable rows so each row represents a lot of money or potential Revenue but then maybe they're so they're bringing in very few to their warehouse but maybe they're doing a lot of analysis of each and every customer very cool and talk to me about growth and usage you said customers on average are paying about 1800 bucks a month two years ago where are you at today actually that number is pretty flat for for two reasons one our largest customers have expanded so you know we've actually set new records uh last month and the previous month where uh you know our our sort of biggest usage-based customers that are that are paying us you know uh you know north of six figures um but we've also brought on board a lot of sort of more early stage companies and we sort of introduced more new pricing that is much more early stage friendly um so the the net of those two sort of balance out on our ACV fair fair do you have your first million dollar account yet uh we don't have a seven figure account but um but we are uh yeah I will you'll be one of the first to know uh when that happens and but you know there are a lot of companies that do spend a lot of in on Data infrastructure obviously many companies that spend seven figures um we obviously Target the smbs and you would be surprised at how quickly you know consumption goes up once they start seeing value in data oh 100 okay so about flat there um you launched business in 2020 you told me you came on I think it was last year that I think this is right you guys did a 15 million series a right last year that's correct yes talk to me about that was that before was the market already crashing at the point or did you get that in right before things started going a little Haywire I I like to think of it as like Indiana Jones where like it just sneaks in as like the door is like sort of uh coming down you know I don't I don't I don't think we you know we we raised uh at the start of uh 2022 so not the world's best time but but in hindsight basically yes the world's effectively best time yeah so uh you know I would say I would say that um obviously we raised a great round at a great time which means that we have a long Runway so we are trying to still have a pretty forward-looking perspective you know obviously not that we see you know an end to a Runway but I think we also do want to be responsible um you know this is not uh my first rodeo and I and I've seen companies that have you know kind of used their Runway poorly so we want to be pretty intentional about what we're trying to do oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and was that series a pretty standard most folks are selling call it 10 15 of the company in their series days back then were you sort of in that same range yeah exactly so um so you're pushing you're pushing then a six figure out sorry a seven sorry a nine figure valuation and over 100 million um that would be obviously if it were 15 15 million on 15 would be uh would be 100 million so yeah I think uh you know obviously uh you know valuations and fundraising and quantity of capital available um were uh you know we're obviously very different uh in 2021 but I guess I not to play on this but the reason I asked that question is there's a lot of folks that did great rounds last year at really high uh multiples I forget if I think you're at like two or three million and run rate when you did that which is like a 40 or 50x multiple uh right right something like that oh no we were we were actually uh actually just south...