SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How he doubled from $500k to $1m Last 12 months selling Data as a Service
30 Jan 2023
Chapter 1: What valuation challenges do companies face today?
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Massive DH.com, big consumer brands pay him for data.
It's data as a service. He was doing $40,000 a month a year ago, now doing $83,000 a month, just broke a million dollar run rate, which is great. But what I love is he's done this bootstrapped with a team of seven. So pretty high revenue per employee. You know, he may be by the business at 10 million, 15 million today, but again, totally bootstrapped. We'll see what happens next.
Hey folks, my guest today is Gianluca Ruggiero. He is a global innovation and marketing expert with more than 20 years of working and consulting for Fortune 500 companies across five continents. After five years of working on proprietary AI technology, he launched Massive in 2019 to help companies launch successful products in today's hyper-competitive markets.
The URL, if you want to follow along, is MassiveDH, that's D as in dog, H as in hog, dot com. All right, Gianluca, you ready to take us to the top?
Hi, how you doing, everybody?
We are all doing well. So tell us, what are your customers paying you for? Sorry, say that again? What are your customers paying you for? What do you do?
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Chapter 2: How does MassiveDH help companies with product strategy?
Wow. How many folks are full-time today?
Three people in the engineering, and we are like seven people right now, but we are very much scattered. We have two offices, but basically they're empty because our CFO is out of Paris, our SDR is in Chicago, the chief revenue officer is in Germany. It's just the way we built... I am very happy with the team that I built and a lot of talent.
But we didn't decide, okay, this is going to be the office today. Now, the office, I'm here right now in Connecticut. So we serve mostly US market because it's the most dynamic and responsive. But still, when it comes to talent, we have a very...
So Gianluca, just to cut to the chase here, though, you don't necessarily have a unique data set nobody else can get. Your IP is really how you process public data to organize it and then use it to do analysis.
Correct.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So your IP is process IP. It's not some secret data source only you have access to.
Correct. Yeah.
It's process IP. I see. And why has no one else thought about running the same process?
Well, I think it's because it's very difficult to put together competence in marketing strategy and AI for transformation. And during my... career, I was lucky enough to put together these two things. One thing that I noticed from typical Silicon Valley data as a service company is that they don't know very well the marketing, the market they're targeting to.
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Chapter 3: What factors influence the pricing of data as a service?
I don't know, actually.
Good answer. Leave yourself some negotiation room. All right. On that note, though, Gianluca, let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book?
I know the title in Italian. It's a book from, oh my God, I don't remember. Anyway, let's put it this way.
We'll skip it. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
Uh, no, my former, my first CEO, uh, who's not working anymore back in Unilever, Umberto Rondani, he was a total genius. Uh, and, uh, I still looking for something as a genius as he was.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?
Oh, um, um, well, we currently use, uh, I drive, but I am looking, I'm exploring a lot. So I don't have an answer, but I'm very excited about many things that are coming up with AI.
Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
Yeah, eight, eight hours.
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