SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How Journy Got First Paying Customer, Raised $450k Seed Round
03 Dec 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hans, what's the number? How many connected accounts?
Yeah, there are a few accounts onboarding and one paying customer.
Chapter 2: How did Journy secure its first paying customer?
Hey, we love that. You shouldn't be shy to share that. Everyone has to start at zero. 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. Hey folks, my guest today is Hans Ott.
He's a software engineer with a strong interest in domain-driven design and functional programming. Deeply in love with clean code and he'll do anything to motivate other developers to leave the campground cleaner. As they say, he's now building journey.io. That's with no E. Helping you better manage customer data across all your teams. Hans, are you ready to take us to the top?
Yes, yes. So Journey.io is a customer data platform. We're especially focused on the B2B. So we basically collect data from all kinds of sources. And then we create unified customer profiles of users and accounts within your product. And then you can use this data to calculate which customers are healthy and which kind of stage they are. Are they qualified for your product?
Have they tried out this feature, this feature? And then basically try to detect churn and then sync all this data back to all the tools you are already using, like your CRM, like HubSpot, for example, or Intercom for chatting with your customers. And so we want to share all that data, all build this intelligence in one place and share these results. this knowledge to all the tools you're using.
You can add really interesting elements to each of our customers' profiles. For example, tell me which ones have a healthy score, who's gone through the onboarding, what they pay, who needs attention, things like that. One of the things that you're able to give feedback on is, is the onboarding done or not? How are you able to give other software companies that kind of intelligence?
Do they have to install a journey JavaScript on their site?
Yeah, there are a couple of ways you can do it, but a lot of organizations are using Segment already. Do you know that?
Yep.
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Chapter 3: What is the purpose of Journy.io as a customer data platform?
So I think we have a great pricing at this moment. But of course, we still have to test and play with this, of course.
Who do you compete with directly?
um we compete with like a number of um i think customer success tools like uh there is vitalia or sales machine i don't know if you know them um so a couple of products that are but they are really focused on on the customer success side and and we want to take it broader than that and also focus on on the sales because
If you have a customer onboarding, some customers try the right features and then your sales can focus on the right customers. Because if you have a long list of customers you need to call, you want to prioritize and sort them by their adoption score or whatever.
When did you write the first line of code for Journey?
I think it was like almost two years ago, I think. But we were still, my co-founder and I were still having other jobs. And so it was kind of a side project. And then at some point we decided, okay, we want to take this further, work on it full time. And then we found the seeding and then did things.
Oh, did you raise a seed round of capital? Yes, yes. How much did you guys raise?
$450,000.
Was that last year? It was like in February, I think. Okay, of this year? Yeah. Okay. And did you raise that on sort of a cap or a note or a price round?
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Chapter 4: How does Journy integrate with existing tools like Segment?
It doesn't look like much from the outside, but there are a lot of things that you need to solve and like identity resolution and all those kinds of things, basically.
But there's, I mean, what you're kind of, what you just said is you want to build a great tool. You have to raise money. I can tell you there's a lot of great founders that do not raise money. They pre-sell the idea and they fund themselves and keep all the equity. Why didn't you go that path? Does anyone either you or your co-founder sell? Are you salesperson?
Yeah, he was more the commercial minded person, but he was also a programmer in his early days. So he knows a lot about the technical stuff as well.
How many folks are on the team now today? Just the both of you?
No, we're with five full-time people working on a product. And then we have some other very talented students who are also like entrepreneurs working for us. And so, yeah, we're doing it with that team.
If we're being conservative and say five full-time people at very small salaries, right? You're spending 20, 30, 40,000 bucks a month on headcount annually that burns through all of your seed money, right? Does that make you nervous? And how do you manage burn?
Well, we're very confident. We don't worry about that part. Of course, there's always some worrying, I guess. That's normal. But we're seeing the space and it's growing. And it's a really cool place, like market to be in. And so... We're not that scared that we're going to run out of money eventually. So we just want to focus on building that product and finding customers and making them happy.
And then it will come.
What do you know? You mentioned you have four people on pilots right now. What activation metrics do you know that they need to hit in order to increase the likelihood they start paying?
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