SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
1521 iPaaS Company DBSync Passes $2.1m ARR Bootstrapped
23 Sep 2019
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
They're doing about 175 grand per month today. That's up about 60% year over year. They're serving 700 customers and kind of the database and really DB, they call it DB sync space, really tied directly to Salesforce, especially as they started now scaling out into NetSuite integrations and many other integrations as well to get all your apps talking with each other.
They've got about 100, sorry, they go about 55 people based in remote locations, totally bootstrapped, which I love. and healthy economics, less than 10% revenue churn per year, two to three month payback period as he continues to scale the company.
Chapter 2: What is DBSync and what services does it offer?
Hello, everyone. My guest today is Rajiv Gupta. He has extensive experience with application architecture and on-demand computing and over 16 years starting and growing tech companies. In 2002, he co-founded Avankia, which was one of the first companies incubated by Salesforce.
That enterprise gave raise to DBSync, a data management platform that provides a wide range of functionalities, including integration, backup, and archiving. Rajiv, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes. Okay. So DBSync, first question, is it a pure play SaaS company?
Yes, it is a pure play SaaS company. We are in the iPaaS and cloud data application space.
That's great. Okay. Yeah. So give us an example of how a customer is using you.
If you're a Salesforce.com customer and you want to integrate your Salesforce with your accounting system, be it QuickBooks, Great Plains, or any other systems, you're likely going to call us. We integrate sales being completed into invoicing and payments getting received. Anything you think about cloud data and to other applications, we do those.
And how do people pay you on average? Is it kind of annual contracts only, monthly?
Yes, we do annual contracts. We do annual contracts, and it's basically $200 a month, and it goes up to $1,000 a month. So a wide range based on what services you're looking for.
What would you say is a fair average in terms of ACV? Is it about $200 per month, so $2,400 a year?
It's about $500 to $600 a month.
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Chapter 3: How did Rajeev Gupta's background influence DBSync's creation?
And put this on a timeline for us. So it sounds like you got pretty active at Salesforce. You launched this in 2007?
Yes. So early days, we bootstrapped that all the way. So we launched the The first version got launched in 2007, and then that was a desktop-only version. We rebranded the company and reset it up in 2009, and that's when the SaaS, the iPaaS got launched.
I see. And what have you been able to scale to today in terms of total customers on the platform? So yeah, about 700 plus. 700. Okay, that's great. So fairly healthy. And I want to dive more into kind of how you're growing in this space, where you see the space going. But first, I mean, can I take seven? Well, no, you said ARPU was about 500 bucks a month, right? Right. Yeah.
So that would put your, if I take 700 times 500 bucks a month on average, what you guys are about 350 grand a month right now in revenue, something like that?
Less than that. Okay.
Yeah.
Which of those numbers is wrong? The 700 customer count or the 500 average?
500, that's the recent. You're gonna likely look at whatever has happened from 2009 to.
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Chapter 4: What is the customer base and revenue growth of DBSync?
So if you were to average that, we'll be more like
you can have it as um 250 okay so that by the way that's that's pretty typical to start off cheap and then kind of increase price over time so 250 as an average across your 700 customers that puts your revenue more about 170 grand a month is that right yeah okay yeah and give us a sense of growth so a year ago in october of 2017 what were you doing per month
So last year we have grown about 63%.
Okay, so call it maybe about 110 grand a month about a year ago? Yeah. That's great. And help us understand the story here. So where's the growth coming from? New product lines, customers paying more or just new customers altogether?
Yeah.
It's new customers, customer adding stuff. So they've just had two connectors. Now they're having three and four and five.
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Chapter 5: How does DBSync integrate with Salesforce and other platforms?
That's where the growth is going from $250 to more like $500, $600. So we're having a lot better retention rate now.
So what's your retention rate today?
Again, we don't disclose those numbers, but it's improved by 7% of last year.
Okay. I mean, churn is like the critical number in a SaaS company. Can you give me some insight into what your churn is and how you manage it and how you've improved it?
It depends. The classical way to think about churn is we have a wide spectrum of customers. We have very small customers and very large customers. We don't lose them. It's like more like 97% retention rate. But small customers on industry average is about 2% a month. So that's 24. We are around about that percent on the smaller side.
Okay. But if you ignore customer size, and this is why people look at revenue churn instead of logo churn. So if you look at your revenue churn across your entire base per year, what is that?
So we are about, you know, again, we don't disclose it. Um, I would say a range if you want. Yeah. So it's going to be about, you know, 13 to 20%.
13 to 20. Yeah. Okay.
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Chapter 6: What pricing model does DBSync use for its services?
So if you're, you know, if you're turning 13 to 20% of your, of your revenue per year, sorry, the customers, that's the customers.
Yeah, I get it. And that doesn't quite correlate with their revenue. Revenue churn is less than 10%.
Okay, yeah, that's what I was asking because, I mean, by the way, I don't know why, this is why revenue churn was invented. It was to make up for differences in customers that have much different ARPUs because usually higher ACV accounts you keep, right, in terms of a logo basis and churn on a logo basis is much higher for low ARPUs. So this is why people measure revenue churn.
So your revenue churn is only, call it 10% per year is what you're saying. Less than 10%. Less than 10% per year. That's great. And when people are churning, why are they churning?
Any integration company, if they just have two points of integration and we drop one point, like they're signing off from Salesforce or Microsoft or outgoing QuickBooks into new systems, that's when the churn comes in. So that's where we see, especially in the smaller, the larger segment, we don't see that much churn at all.
And can you help me understand more about kind of your team today and the breakdown between sales and engineering?
Sorry, your voice was breaking. Can you ask me that question again?
What's your total team size today?
Oh, we are 55 folks.
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