How Shipyard App Hit $12K Monthly Revenue with 30 Customers and 1% Gross Churn (Interview with CEO Blake Burch)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Shipyardapp.com is a SaaS that helps you move data between Snowflake and Google Sheets. They got launched in 2020 doing $12,000 a month today in revenue. 12 people on the team, totally bootstrapped, which we love as Blake scales down here in Austin, Texas. Hey, folks. My guest today is Blake Burch. He's the cofounder and CEO of Shipyard, the quickest way for data teams to launch, monitor, and share workflows. Formerly, he's the head of data for PMG Digital

00:23Agency. He led end to end data strategy for brands like OpenTable, Travelocity, Sephora, and Gap, scaling marketing efforts through algorithms and automation. Blake, you ready to take us to the top?

Blake Burch

00:33>> Yeah. Absolutely.

What Shipyard Does: Customer Use Cases

Nathan Latka

00:34Alright. So, shipyard, a low code data workflow automation. Give us a customer story. How's someone using you today?

Blake Burch

00:41>> Yeah. So, customers, ultimately end up using us for, like, three main purposes. They're trying to move data between various systems that they have on hand. They're trying to set up

Nathan Latka

00:49data example, like, two what what two systems?

Blake Burch

00:52>> Yeah. So it could be from your database like Snowflake to Google Sheets. It could be something from, like, Amazon s three to Google Drive or something else like that. We build out hundreds of integrations with various tools that people use so that they can easily move that data. But it's more than just moving data. That's what people typically use us for initially, but they might set up, like, data alerts so that they can know in Slack

01:16>> or an email if something's gone wrong with their data or maybe if there's, like, particular customers in their sales file that they need to look at. And then we also have people using us for things like deploying machine learning models and evaluating the data, scoring leads, scoring internal customers, and and that sort of thing. So we're a wide net orchestration platform that allows people to mix and match low code and, their own code together in order

01:42>> to solve these sort of problems with data.

Nathan Latka

01:44You get this all the time, my audience will be wondering it. So I'm gonna ask people are gonna say, oh, this feels like MuleSoft or Zapier. Is this enterprise Zapier with alerts?

Zapier for Data: Positioning and Differentiation

Blake Burch

01:50>> Yeah. So the way that we sometimes sell ourselves is that we're a Zapier for data. Zapier and other tools, they focus a lot on if this and that logic. They do things that are very specific for one row and reacting to it. For us, it's more about bulk data processing. So being able to handle gigabytes to terabytes of data and process and move that data between systems. And those other tools just aren't quite built for that

02:15>> sort of, like, process, and we wanted to make sure that we could bring a best in class tool specifically for data professionals to be able to do their jobs more effectively.

Nathan Latka

02:22That makes ton I can't wait to hear how you price this. What's the average customer paying per month? And do you tie it to number of calls or usage or seat based or product upsells? How do you price?

Pricing Model and ARPU

Blake Burch

02:31>> Yeah. So right now, our median amount per customer is gonna be about 400. General, the way that we price, yeah, per month. And that's something where we're pricing totally based on usage. So it's it's a mix of user seats plus, like, the runtime that people actively have in the application itself. So for us, it's a very sticky product where people come in, and they're usually not leaving.

Nathan Latka

02:56Hold on, Blake. You gotta quantify that. When you say sticky, how how how low is churn?

Churn, Stickiness, and Upsells

Blake Burch

03:01>> Churn is about 1%. We're not seeing people leave very often

Nathan Latka

03:05at all. Monthly or annually? Monthly. Okay. And that's gross or net? Gross. Gross. Do you have upsells?

Blake Burch

03:14>> We do have upsells within the product itself. So it it's something where, like, there are additional abilities to, like, extend how much access you have to logs or version control. You get API access and things like that. And we're working towards figuring out how to enhance, like, security measures and things like that because for the larger customers, they are typically wanting, they are typically wanting additional features like audit logging, the ability to control MFA, single sign

03:43>> on, and good stuff like that.

Nathan Latka

03:44So How would you rate yourself on your your sales team's ability to upgrade historical accounts today? Can they upsell more than 12% to make up for the 12% churn annually?

Blake Burch

03:53>> Yeah. So,

03:56>> currently, we're not as focused on, like, upselling, the the clients as much internally. A lot of it for us is still, new customer acquisition. And for us, it's also, more about making sure that people are having the right sort of experience so they are continuing to use the product and growing it that way. We do see ourselves naturally scaling without necessarily needing a internal, sales motion for people that have already signed up for the, application.

Nathan Latka

04:20Have you quantified that? Can you look for people that signed up a year ago and say they naturally upsold because their usage increased?

Blake Burch

04:26>> Sorry.

Nathan Latka

04:27Can you repeat that?

Blake Burch

04:28>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:29Can you quantify your expansion revenue? That's no touch because people signed up a year ago, their natural usage increased, and then they obviously pay you more because of that.

Blake Burch

04:35>> So upsell revenue is 3% or expansion was 4%.

04:38>> Yeah. So, generally, what we're seeing on our side is, that people are growing their usage by about, like, 10 to 15%, roughly on a monthly basis. So they're continuing to grow things, that way.

Nathan Latka

04:49Does that directly correlate to more revenue for you?

Blake Burch

04:52>> You're expanding accounts 10% monthly?

04:55>> Yes. That does.

Nathan Latka

04:56That's crazy, Bill Blake.

Blake Burch

04:57>> You're you're on average, like, you're expanding accounts 10%, or those are your outliers?

05:02>> They they they are expanding by 10%. But the thing is we start very low in terms of pricing. For us, it's more about being able to get people in the door, being able to solve problems. And so the 10% is gonna be minuscule at the lower levels. It does slow down, of course, as, some of the customers are growing at, like, higher and higher rates. Of course, for anything that is dealing with cloud usage or runtime,

05:22>> people are actively trying to figure out how do we, like, scale back the usage as much as possible. But if I'm more use cases, it still ends up growing.

Nathan Latka

05:30Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

05:53your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna

06:17get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation. Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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,

Blake Burch

06:30>> Right? So

Nathan Latka

06:31the 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, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter

06:55by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than

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07:45go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform.

Blake Burch

07:51>> I hope to see you there.

Nathan Latka

07:52Alright. Let's jump back into the interview. Now that we understand what the company is today, give us the backstory here. When'd launch the business?

Founding Story and PMG Origins

Blake Burch

07:58>> Yeah. Launched the business back in 2020, right before the pandemic. So initially, the stages of acquiring customers and everything else was a little bit more, tenuous as people didn't wanna try out anything, but it gave us a good amount of time to make sure that we could hone in focus, and that we could, build the best products, once we knew that things were gonna come out, on the other side much better.

Nathan Latka

08:22Were you quitting PMG, or or or where were you like, why where did you experience this problem?

Blake Burch

08:27>> We have a very unique kinda, backstory where, we were solving a lot of problems at PMG, with internal technology, where we were doing things like automating bids, automating budgets, ad creation, turning things on and off based on inventory files and stuff like that. And we were templatizing this to be able to run it across all of the, like, fortune a thousand clients that at PMG worked with. And we realized that there were much larger use cases

08:52>> than just the marketing side, for all the data and the automation that we were putting in place. And so Shipyard is actually the, like, child product of something that was built at PMG. We ended up splitting things off and spinning the technology out on its own to focus on a totally different sort of ICP of your typical data engineer, analytics engineer, and everything else there because we felt like with the massive amount of growth in the

09:17>> data ecosystem, that was something that we wanted to make sure we could capitalize on and help those teams, be able to build workflows more effectively.

Nathan Latka

09:24A couple years from now, you sell for $500,000,000 and PMG goes, wait. That was that Blake guy that worked, during a PMG on that code that he then spun out. We own a chunk of that. Let's send him a letter right now since we just read the Wall Street Journal article and make sure we get our 10% cut. Yeah.

Blake Burch

09:39>> So they they do have a, a stake in the company. Can't disclose, specifically what that is, but we're part of now a larger, parent company called Momentum. It was internally grown, but it is multiple different sister companies that are in the data technology and, marketing space.

Nathan Latka

09:57What's Momentum's website?

Blake Burch

09:59>> Momentum.com.

Nathan Latka

10:00Oh, interesting. Is this sponsored by PMG? It's like their startup their venture lab sort of?

Blake Burch

10:06>> Yeah. It is it is something, it's less specifically PMG. It's now its own, separate entity, but it is multiple different sister companies and they're all operating under one umbrella. Oh, yeah. This is Coddy Search Discovery. Oh, interesting. Okay. Okay. Interesting. So how does I mean, do you still feel

Nathan Latka

10:26like a founder, though? Like, do you own the majority equity of the company, or are you just basically like a paid CEO that, you know, makes a lot of money but only owns 5%?

Blake Burch

10:33>> Yeah. I I definitely still feel like a founder. I'm not, like, too subject to various, like, regulations on their side. In fact, it's something where there's a lot of operational freedom still to to be able to maneuver however you need.

Nathan Latka

10:47That's nice. That's nice. Okay.

10:49So you get going in 2020. When did you tell me the story of your first customer.

First Customer: Rental Wheel

Blake Burch

10:52>> Yeah. Honestly, our first customer was totally organic. It was something where we had all the website content out there and were able to solve a very specific problem. It was a consultant for a company called Rental Wheel. They help people, like, get spinners or different wheels for, their cars. He just needed a quick solution to be able to, get something up and running for their team. And that was our first customer, and they are still a

11:20>> customer today. So, that's something where, again, the land that explain, expand approach worked. That consultant is no longer there, but the company is still using us to automate their data workflows.

Nathan Latka

11:30That's awesome. That's awesome.

11:32Okay. So how many current customers today?

Current Customer Count and Freemium Model

Blake Burch

11:34>> Yeah. So currently, we have about 1,600 users of the platform. We have about 30 paying customers on our side right now. So and

Nathan Latka

11:44I guess tell me how you think about that. Do you spend a lot of time thinking about 1,600 to 30 conversion rate?

Blake Burch

11:48>> Yeah. So we don't think about it. Some of those customers, like, we we look at usage internally to try and verify which people are using us the most that are gonna be, like, a high, sales opportunity. Sometimes it's for, like, little one off projects. Ultimately, like, as a product that has kind of a freemium model, our purpose behind that is that a lot of our competition in the data orchestration space is actually open source software that

12:12>> is trying to sell cloud hosted solutions. And so when you can use those things for free and do a proof of concept that way, we wanna make sure that we're equitable as people are trying to do proof of concepts. So the conversion rate there is, something that we're still actively, working on, figuring out how to increase even more. Blake, can I

Nathan Latka

12:29take the 30 customers times the $400 ARPU you mentioned earlier? It would put you around $12 a month in MRR?

Revenue and MRR Calculation

Blake Burch

12:36>> That would be roughly correct. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:38Okay. That's great. And so and then where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth?

Blake Burch

12:42>> I do not know that number off the top of my head.

Nathan Latka

12:45Well, it it it's probably gonna be a very large growth number because you're just getting going. But, I mean, it could did you have any customers in July 2022?

Blake Burch

12:53>> Yes. We did. Okay.

Nathan Latka

12:55So you had you were post revenue at that point?

Blake Burch

12:56>> Yes. We were.

Nathan Latka

12:57Okay. So first dollars of revenue then like, I'm what I'm trying to get here, how much time did you spend developing this before your first customer? Did you go all the way through 2020 with no customers?

Blake Burch

13:05>> It was pretty much an entire year of development. And so even though it was an internal piece of technology, man, those things get so tied to, like, the existing business that you're trying to figure out how do we separate this, how do you have usability because it used to just be a page with a bunch of forms slapped on top of it. Those things won't fly in the market. So

Nathan Latka

13:22Yep. Yep. That's interesting. Okay. And how have you capitalized the business? Is it bootstrapped or have you raised?

Bootstrapped and Momentum Parent Company

Blake Burch

13:27>> It is entirely bootstrapped. Oh, I

Nathan Latka

13:30love that. So no money from PMG when you spun out?

Blake Burch

13:32>> Sorry. There is money directly from PMG, but no investment from, like, venture capital or anything else like that.

Nathan Latka

13:39I see. I see. Did PMG structure that as like, hey. Here's the pre seed round of x, and we get preferential terms since you're spinning it out?

Blake Burch

13:48>> Not not exactly like that. It's a it's less of a, like, direct upfront model, for the financing. And, because it's under the Momentum umbrella, it's it's kinda handled in finance that way. I see.

Nathan Latka

14:01I see. Interesting. Does Momentum take equity in the in the child companies?

Blake Burch

14:06>> It depends. I can't disclose, like, the exact parts of that, but, yeah, it it can vary there.

Nathan Latka

14:15Well, like, can my listeners apply to be part become part of Momentum like they could YC or these other firms? Okay. No. So it's just it's a holding company with Google, Facebook, Amazon, Adobe, Domo, Salesforce, and Microsoft as the partners, and it's invite only.

Blake Burch

14:28>> Correct.

Nathan Latka

14:29Interesting. Okay. Does the do you have an do you think you have an advantage by being part of Momentum? And if so, what is it? I think

Blake Burch

14:37>> the biggest, advantage is being able to have the, like, leverage and knowledge of larger companies to help support you through things like, in our case, security is a big aspect. So I'm trying to make sure that we have the backing of a strong legal team that's able to work through issues, being able to have all the right things in place from a, like, security framework perspective of SOC two and GDPR and CCPA.

Advantages of the Momentum Umbrella

Blake Burch

15:04SOC two?

15:04>> For SOC two, we used Weaver for the audit.

Nathan Latka

15:08Weaver. Interesting. Well, why'd you use Weaver over, like, Vanta?

Blake Burch

15:12>> Weaver, that's it was just the auditing firm that we used. We didn't have an existing technology in place, to help put together all the materials, for the audit. However, we are, actively, in talks with some of those tools in order to be able to help accelerate the framework growth in

Nathan Latka

15:28our side. You did it the hard way. You did it all manual.

Blake Burch

15:31>> We did it the hard way initially. Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:32My gosh. I can't imagine. Okay. That's a lot of time as a startup CEO spent on, like, very boring data collection stuff.

Blake Burch

15:38>> Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:39Okay. Well, you did it. You knocked it out. That's great. Alright. Let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Blake Burch

15:46>> It's it's gotta be, I think, the five dysfunctions of a team. Yep. If I'm getting that title correct.

15:51>> Yeah. That's a good one.

Nathan Latka

15:52Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Team

Blake Burch

15:56>> Not really. I've always had kind of a weird thing where I don't necessarily like modeling what I do after others. It's trying to make sure that we can carve our own path.

Nathan Latka

16:05Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building shipyard?

Blake Burch

16:12>> That's a great question. I I'm probably gonna say Webflow. I've used it since the very beginning for building out the marketing pages and being able to scale out pages for new integrations and blueprints and solutions has been super helpful for us, and it's still great to this day.

Nathan Latka

16:27Would you credit a lot of your SEO success to your ability to quickly launch these integration landing pages, which you feature in your footer?

SEO Strategy via Integration Landing Pages

Blake Burch

16:33>> Absolutely. It's definitely helped us scale quite a bit, and it's become one of our, like, key strategies in terms of customer acquisition.

Nathan Latka

16:40How many how many total are on the team today full time?

Blake Burch

16:43>> 12 people.

Nathan Latka

16:44Okay. Interesting. Alright. Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Blake Burch

16:49>> Maybe, like, six and a half, seven.

16:52What's Try

16:52>> to get as much as I can.

Nathan Latka

16:54Yeah. Yeah. What's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Blake Burch

16:58>> Married.

Nathan Latka

16:59Any kids?

Blake Burch

17:00>> No kids right now.

Nathan Latka

17:01Alright. And how old are you?

Blake Burch

17:03>> 30. Last question, Blake. Take us back to when you were 20. What's something you wish you knew?

Advice for Younger Self

Blake Burch

17:10>> That it's a journey. That nothing's going to just, like, happen super quickly. Nothing is gonna work out exactly the way you want. But, really, most of the experiences that you have are all about, like, rolling with the punches, trying to figure out how you can make the most of what you have, and don't try and, like, rush into things or expect immediate results. Things take time. So

Nathan Latka

17:31Guys, shipyardapp.com is a SaaS that helps you move data between Snowflake and Google Sheets. They got launched in 2020 doing $12,000 a month today in revenue. 12 people on the team, totally bootstrapped, which we love as Blake scales down here in Austin, Texas. Blake, thanks for taking us to the top.

Blake Burch

17:47>> Yeah. Thanks so much.

Nathan Latka

17:49One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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

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