How Objectbox CEO Vivien Dollinger grew Objectbox to $688.4K revenue and 150K customers in 2024.

hello everybody my guest today is vivian dullinger she is the co-founder and ceo of object box with 15 years scaling and leading teams in in the mobile and games industry again now enabling edge computing via object box.i o vivian you're ready to take us to the top sure okay tell us about object box what's the company doing what's the revenue model are you pure play sas so um object box enables edge computing with a super fast on-device database and synchronization solution for mobile and iot and the assets the size model okay and help me understand what segment you're serving are these small businesses mid-market enterprise okay so it depends and that makes it a little difficult we have two sectors so one is mobile and one is iot and those are like totally different and mobile can actually be anyone it can be any small freelance developer up to bigger companies i must admit we don't always have a very good uh view of who is using us because you can download the database for free on github in iot that's a little different so we are tackling the field differently because large b2b clients they have different needs they want a licensing model with an sla so this is more the b2b enterprise sales and those it would be more mid-sized clients we are currently targeting okay when you look at it over the past 12 months and kind of just talk about total company size would you say the iot product is the largest one or is it the mobile or your sync okay so this depends um we're pretty early in in many respects so um we started out on android so we have the most traction on android and in the mobile space the last summer we strategically decided to move earlier into iot instead of prioritizing sync because we saw the field was evolving super fast and we wanted to have a foothold when the market gains traction so we are only starting b2b sales in iot like intel or we started in the last couple of months um yeah so we're pretty early yeah so let's focus on the android mobile use case give an example of a customer using you and how they're using you okay so um as i said for many people we don't know who it is i have a couple of examples um because they reached out to us let's do this for example yeah call app as an example so it's an app with more than 20 million installs and they decided to use object box very early on shortly after release and as you know like the database really um well it's it's the heart of your app really so you must trust uh the provider really to um to be reliable and they decided to test us very early on and benchmarked us against other solutions and because we were the fastest and they really do need to speak they decided to use object box name one or two other people they benchmarked you against uh okay so in this case i know they benchmarked us against sqlite and realm spell it seek s-q-l-i-t-e and realm s-r-e-a-l-m database okay okay so um but i i must say because i know you're very focused on numbers we are pre-revenue which means the database first of all is free to use and in the app space really we are aiming for monetizing with the synchronization and in the iot space it's a little different because as i explained b2b customers that are future and give guarantees to their customers they want a license and a um so so when did you launch the company the first line of code was written in what year summer of 2015. okay so if your pre-revenue today how have you you know paid the bills put food on your table up to date have you raised a bunch of capital yes so first of all um i think for the first two years we basically funded ourselves and and then we um raised a seat round that was last last last spring we finally raised the sea ground and before we went to texas london okay so how much total have you raised to date uh around two million dollars okay about two million and how long will that get you through in other words when do you think you'll go raise another round of funding so um i want to close my next round next summer okay so raising next round and that will obviously be will that be your first priced equity around or was the 2 million priced i don't know it was an equity round yes okay so this next round next summer of summer 2020 will be kind of your series b [Music] no series eight it'll be your series a okay two million yes but uh i think it's in in germany rounds tend to be equity-based i see and what what do you think you'll target next summer will you raise four or five ten minutes you just don't know yet we really don't know yet it's too early we're not yet raising we are very much focused on building a customer base and our revenue how aggressive are you being on burns so are we talking you're burning 10 grand a month or 100 grand a month or more uh okay so it's uh and on average in the last six months it was about 50k per month okay that's not bad and is that mainly on head count yes okay what's the team size today how many folks so eight people really and then we tend to have um interns on top usually yep that's that's pretty typical so eight folks burning 50 000 a month looking to continue to scale and grow help me understand how you got your first hundred users how are you driving your user base up before you introduce pricing okay so um we haven't introduced pricing yet really not like officially only a two p2p clients we are talking to athletes um so the first so okay we we went out and released it on github and we had the first time that users on there okay so released on get released on github in 2015 no so we had an early alpha i think in 2015 and the year later better but um i'm talking about 1.0 because before the 1.0 we didn't recommend productive use so when was that 2017 2018 when did github start yes that was september 2017. okay so you launch it on github but just because you launch on github doesn't mean you're going to get new users people have to find you so how did you make sure people found you um okay so be launched to at a conference we usually typically go to it's the droid con berlin um it's an android conference but we have quite a large um github account already because before object box markers specifically did a couple of open source libraries and um they they are still used by more than 35 of the world's top 500 apps on google play and it includes twitter vibe and snapchat and so when we release something on github we tend to get some attention okay so your co-founder basically had a a lot of essentially followers or users on github already from earlier open source projects yes that's right and so how many downloads today of the project okay downloads we don't track downloads we only track during build time so let's like after download when people really start building something and we have more than 150 000 developers that um started using object box and they've built more than 20 000 apps okay that's great um and so when you do think about launching pricing where will the paywall show up when you think about launching your pricing how will you show it in the ui ah that's a very good question um so the synchronization we are currently talking taking early alpha signups we just presented our alpha version at the droidcon i think two weeks ago and um it's very efficient i think um we are yeah we are getting already a lot of interest on that and um we will actually be doing this pretty manually at the start so we are not investing heavily on a uh perfect process um but um we'll just have a sign up page and then give people the access and um an according invoice so very very um yeah what's your goal how much in terms of the end of the year this year in 2019 how much revenue would you like to have what's your goal okay so i'm like really we so basically what's important for us is to to make revenue and to show we and keep that revenue and increase it right but um i would be aiming for into the direction of 40k 40km okay so you have about six months to add 40 000 a new month through recurring revenue yes and do you think that'll come from a lot of customers paying a little or a few customers paying a lot yeah that's basically um so we are talking to a lot of b2b potential clients in the iot space and that's a totally different model right and it's already the database and not just synchronization so um yes i believe it will come from few few customers um paying a lot yeah a lot yeah very good all right vivian let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um [Music] venture deals number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah uh well i'm following basically microsoft and nutella i think what they did is super great number two what's your favorite online tool for building your company github number four how many hours of sleep to get every night eight and situation married single kids married and my daughter's five oh very good and do you mind me asking how old you are just turned 41 okay very good 41 years young all right last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew um just you know if you have a great idea uh yeah yeah you want to build a business go all in because like we come from a history marcus and i doing um starting business on the side and um trying to financing um with client projects typical services and um yeah in retrospect that...