SaaS Scaling Secrets
The SaaS Scaling Secrets podcast reveals the strategies and insights behind scaling B2B SaaS companies to new heights. Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility, leads conversations with successful SaaS CEOs, exploring their challenges, triumphs, and the secrets that propelled their businesses to the next level.
SaaS Scaling Secrets
Freemium: Developer's Dream or Disaster? with Dominik Angerer, CEO of Storyblok
Guest Bio
Dominik Angerer is the CEO and Co-founder of Storyblok, a rapidly growing Headless CMS platform that empowers developers and marketers alike. With roots in the digital agency landscape, Dominik leveraged his hands-on experience to build a platform that now powers over 140,000 active projects in 130 countries. In 2022, Storyblok raised an additional $47M in capital to accelerate its global impact.
Guest Links
Dominik on Twitter
Dominik on LinkedIn
Storyblok.com
Hello and welcome to SaaS Scaling Secrets, the podcast that dives into the trenches with leaders of the best scale up B2B SaaS companies. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today, I have the privilege of interviewing Dominik Angerer. Dominik is a CEO and co founder of Storyblok, a rapidly growing headless CMS platform that empowers developers and marketers alike. With roots in the digital agency landscape, Dominik leveraged his hands on experience to build a platform that now powers over 140, 000 active projects in 130 countries. In 2022, Storyblok raised an additional 47 million in capital to accelerate its global impact. Join me as we explore Dominik's entrepreneurial journey, uncover the secrets to Storyblok's meteoric rise, and identify his innovative strategies to scale this cutting edge platform. Let's dive in. Welcome Dominik to SaaS Scaling Secrets.
Dominik Angerer:Thank you so much, Dan. I'm already looking forward to all the questions you might ask me. I've loved the previous interviews of Zesty and also Mattermost, so I'm looking forward to getting interviewed as well.
Dan Balcauski:We have a fan. I'm excited, for this interview as well, and for our listeners, I will just, note at the beginning that my excitement is in no way tempered by the head cold that I'm currently struggling with. So if my voice, or my energy levels seem a little bit different, it is because of this, sniffles that I'm currently struggling with. For folks that aren't aware of you or your journey with Storyblok, I know you started as a software developer. How did you go from that to becoming CEO of a rapidly growing B to B SaaS company?
Dominik Angerer:So, yeah, we were two founders, we're both software engineers and, Alex is just a way better software engineer. So, we then looked at, okay, who should do what? we decided that Alex will be the CTO and Chief Product Officer. And, what is left is basically just for me to keep up with. So finance, sales, marketing, over to partnerships, then into legal compliance, security, and all those things. Luckily we have grown from there quite a bit and like we started strapping and we only after about the first 1 million of ARR, we went into the VC funding kind of game. So, it was a slow progress from software engineer to that CEO kind of person.
Dan Balcauski:Well, we all have these moments in life that radically change our perspective on the world. I sometimes refer to it as your superhero transformation moment. What's your, I'm Peter Parker bit by a radioactive spider. I go to bed, I wake up in the morning and everything is different moment. What was that for you?
Dominik Angerer:For us it was like, I'm talking for Alex and for myself, it was more of like the Supervillian kind of story to be honest, because we were just so annoyed about the current status of content management at the agency back in 2015, because we just sent an email to the exclusive contract holder of like CMS that we were using at the agency. Imagine you send a bug report and the answer to the bug report is not, yeah, we'll fix it in the next like three to six months. but it's, Hey, we are shutting down the whole solution in six months. like that was literally the answer we got. And so that was the supervillain arc of us starting essentially, going into like, we're building a CMS that doesn't suck, that it's actually really nice. And, that's what we started doing from there. Essentially.
Dan Balcauski:Oh, man, that so much reminds me of Ian Tien's, response with how he started Mattermost. Cause they were, they had a very similar story. So maybe, yeah, instead of Peter Parker, maybe you're, was it Brock? whoever's Venom, I can't remember what his last name got possessed by the alien, and going around wreaking havoc. Well, I would not classify you as a super villain. Hopefully, you're doing more good in the world. I believe you're doing more good in the world than that. let me ask you, I guess you, you were in the digital agency landscape, you're a software developer, I guess, how has that influenced your leadership style as a CEO, as a leader of a rapidly growing company? Cause I imagine it's quite the change for you.
Dominik Angerer:Yeah, so in that agency, I wasn't just a software developer, at the latest point inside that agency, I was leading the service and maintenance team. So that means basically every new project that came in, be it on design, concept and first implementation was done by my co founder Alex and his team. And then once it was in production, my team took over. And then we started building additional features, land and expand inside the customer. and we were purely developers in those teams and I was leading one of them. So I had some leadership experience prior to that. I was freelancing as well, since I was really young. so there was some kind of, I know how I can sell myself, that might have helped me translate that into selling a software as a service solution. like we were selling it slightly different in the beginning. So the translation from. Being a software engineer, building projects, additional like new features of existing smaller projects to large enterprise kind of contracts, was kind of okay because The product itself grew slowly in the beginning, and as soon as we hit that first like level of okay, this is really exciting for larger corporates, for many more agencies and solution partners out there, that it was the moment when we had to actually scale and then it was fast, but luckily at that point, we were able to afford people to join that actually know what they're doing. So, it was like a really nice touch. And by now I've grown a lot, I've learned a lot, and I keep on learning, still, even today.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well, unfortunately for better or worse, when we grow, we are constantly put in situations we've never actually faced before. And so, so we're always terrible at whatever we're doing that day, because it's usually the first time we've had to solve that problem. so it is the benefit and the downside of growth at the same coin, right? I think this is a very, there's a very yin yang, moment there when you realize that. Well, look, man, before we get too further down into our conversation, for our listeners, could you just, Quickly describe what Storyblok is and what the hell Headless CMS is.
Dominik Angerer:Yes, 100%. So in the past, we used content management solutions that were bundled together with like the display layer and like design how your website actually looks like. And it was really tightly coupled. You can see that in WordPress, in Typo3, in TrueBalance and so on, where you have the real connection between your template and your database and the content in between where all the admin interface basically sits. term headless comes from basically taking an axe and cutting off that display layer. If you do that, you end up with just the admin panel, the database, and basically the admin UI. And the only connection to that head, that display layer, is a data layer, an API. So we remove everything that is about templating, about design, and think about just the core of content management, where it's only data that we provide to developers to then build websites, to build mobile applications, to build any kind of display layer. You can also call it omnichannel as the marketing people would call it, where you publish content from one system into multiple different channels. And that's idea. We have an interface where you can manage your content in a visual way. And at the end, developers can just consume the data for an API to build websites, apps, any kind of basically digital project that they want.
Dan Balcauski:Well, maybe you could help explain little bit to me because I'm a little bit of a newbie. So I run my website on WordPress. So I think I'm familiar with what you're talking about. So I've got a set of pages and posts there that I'm editing and styling and creating different layouts. So, help me understand, like, why would I want that to be headless? What is, like, what is the benefit to going and chopping the head off that axe? Because, I don't know, WordPress works pretty well for my use case. What, where, what kind of user, goes to the next step where they need something that's actually headless?
Dominik Angerer:Yeah. So for us, that moment of truth is usually at the moment where you have a larger team actually managed content from multiple locales, from multiple displays, from multiple channels. As soon as you have more complexity than just one website, or just one channel. That's the moment where Headless actually makes a lot of sense to just go with that. It also makes sense different teams working on, different locales that not just translate content, but manage content in different regions. as an example, usually, in e commerce, for example, you might have a market for Germany, you have another one for Switzerland, you have another one for Austria. I've picked those three countries because they all speak German. But it's a different Germany and Switzerland. It's a different German in Austria and in Germany as well. and you might have different ways of communicating with your audience in those regions, and you can do that with WordPress on like a smaller scale, but as soon as you actually want to go, not just a website, but you have a mobile application on your Android iOS device as well, and you want to use the same content. Managed once by one team across those different regions, then you would use a solution like ours. So it's more on the enterprise side. So upper mid market to enterprise use cases where you have larger marketing teams, larger, go to market teams, basically, individual websites, and for like blogging or anything like that. I would recommend Webflow or WordPress or something like that.
Dan Balcauski:Mmm,
Dominik Angerer:of course, if you're a developer, because that's what you definitely need. If you want to use Storyblok, you need. To have a developer that builds that like template for you, that theme that you have, like in a page builder, we are not a page builder. It sometimes feels like it, but it's not a page builder. that is something that you need to have a developer to actually build something with Storyblok. So it's more for mid markets to enterprise.
Dan Balcauski:No. Okay. That makes a lot more sense because, well, obviously I'm a much smaller business and so I don't have those, multiple localization or regional reuse concerns or use cases that you elaborated. And it reminds me back in the day when I was in corporate and I remember, What, every time there was a push from senior leadership to go into a new region, the screams of pain you'd hear from the marketing team as they realized, like, how much inflexibility there was in their content of like, Oh my God, not just localizing these pages, but the amount of like overhead of like, okay, we're just duplicating, 10, 000 pages of content, and then we've got this whole other hierarchy. And then those pages are all dynamic. And then now we've got change management across it.
Dominik Angerer:you an idea, Education First, for example, they have more than 50 languages and just for the landing pages alone that they manage for all the English schools and different like tours, Education First has more than half a million sites that they manage. Like this is the scale that some of our customers are actually working on. and That's where we actually shine. This is where you actually have a lot of benefit. we actually had Forrester calculated for us, by like talking to our customers, and they had a 582 percent return of investment after using Storyblok. That might not be true for smaller clients because like, there's like a free plan, there's like a 99 plan. there's like a monthly plans where you just add users essentially. but on enterprise side, like this is actually the place where we bring the most value.
Dan Balcauski:Interesting. Interesting. Well, I do want to pivot a little bit and look at some of the areas where, you know, you sort of grown and the company has grown and challenges you've faced along the way, I guess, given your background as a software developer, as a freelancer, in the agency landscape, what conventional wisdom, About building and scaling a B to B SaaS company. Did you just find to be absolutely wrong in your experience?
Dominik Angerer:So that you can easily just randomly pay social media a lot of money to get a lot of new customers immediately. Like,
Dan Balcauski:Oh, that doesn't work.
Dominik Angerer:at all. for us it was actually the complete opposite that worked. We wrote articles. really bare bone articles about how you can use Storyblok with different tools, with different technologies, where people then rate through the different articles and just tried it, liked it and subscribed. But none of them came from paid channels in the beginning. By now, of course they do, but at the beginning, not at all. So sitting down, explaining how you can use your product is like the way we believe it's smarter to do. Otherwise you will spend a lot of money and just... Wasting it, another waste is also connection with paid ads. you might have like, for all that are listening, Storyblok is written without the C. So it's S T O R Y B L O K and not C K. and that is like a typo. That we purposefully did because the domain was already sold, right? So, we used just a different name because it was just two developers not thinking much about it. All we wanted was a com domain, right? So, this actually costs us real money even today. so it's the small things that are really important. So, pick a name that is not a typo for Google. It will take quite a while to actually fix that.
Dan Balcauski:Oh man. I love that because, in prepping my research for this interview, I kept on spelling it wrong and so I was kicking myself thinking I was doing something wrong, but apparently pretty common, mistake that reminds me. So I spent a good amount of time at my career at a company called SolarWinds. it has nothing to do with. Solar panels or wind energy. That's one thing that people get wrong, but it's IT operations management software. And they were born in, on the web, I wouldn't say the cloud, because when I started there was all on premise software. But, thinking through what you were just talking about and sort of lessons learned with SEO, that was one of the brilliant moves of their go to market. And one of the reasons they were so successful early on. Because what you'll see companies, especially in B to B, you get these marketing teams. Who, we're, oh, we're coming out with a new product and they want to name it something fancy and sexy like Excalibur or, there's some sort of like fancy marketing name that nobody else will know what the hell happened. And SolarWinds had this genius idea. It's like, well, this thing monitors your network, so we'll call it Network Performance Monitor. This thing manages your virtual servers, so we'll call it Virtualization Manager. And everyone's like, ah, well, that's boring, but it was beautiful. Cause you're like, I need software, go into Google. I need software to monitor my network. What's the first thing that pops up? Network performance monitor, right? So all your SEO and stuff just worked for you. they also had a very good relationship with their technical buyers and were, it was very important that we were always, helping customers instead of just selling to them and the content that we, we created. But, I love those lessons learned of the, journey of SEO and the failures of paid search. Yeah, because you don't really hear that often. I guess, most of the, maybe by, Paid marketing, agency friends. maybe they won't be very happy with this episode, but we'll leave that, aside. Well, look, I think one of the interesting things about your founding story is that you and your co founder live or ever lived on separate continents. Is that correct?
Dominik Angerer:true. Yeah, 100%.
Dan Balcauski:So how did that affect your working relationship? How did that affect Storybloks culture as you guys have grown up?
Dominik Angerer:So... On our working relationship, it's actually quite nice, like I just had a chat with him for like 15 minutes, and we keep on like having those like micro syncs throughout like the week and months and for the culture, it shaped it in the way that we are fully remote, we don't have offices, even like what you see right here is just a desk in my own flat, and everybody, like we are now 240 people at Storyblok, all of us are fully remote, it's 47 countries, it's all time zones you can think of and still no office. And with no office, I really mean it, there's no rent that we are paying. There are some co working spaces where individuals are sitting. But other than that, we are fully remote because we're a software company, right? So our customers are distributed in 130 countries. So why should we have one or two locations just because I'm in Linz in Austria, and Alex is sitting in Teresopolis, which is like one and a half hours away from Rio in Brazil. this doesn't make sense for us to actually have an office there because then we need to relocate people. we thought that the best people. Most likely not like 10 to 15 kilometers away from us, but are hiding somewhere in the internet. So what we actually tried is to find them wherever they are and try to find ways to employ them. And luckily by now, like through Corona, there have been a lot of things popping up like remote. com or letsdeal or something similar. they actually allow you to do that with an employer of record kind of type of employmanship and that was really nice. And yes, we are still fully remote in the sense that Alex is living out of Rio. I'm living, still in Austria. we both were for a very short time in 2020 together in London. I'm talking about two months because we're part of an accelerator. And, other than that, fully remote.
Dan Balcauski:How has that affected 40 odd countries of employees spread around the world? How has that affected the company's culture? Have there been lessons that you've learned in terms of like, how do you sort of bring people together to make them feel like they're part of the company? Are there like remote sort of practices that you've adopted? Do you get people together in the same geographic location once or twice a year? Like, how have you guys, looked at that as you've grown the company.
Dominik Angerer:So for the very first time ever in like two weeks ago, we got everybody together in Barcelona. Before that, met, so we used Barcelona because it's the easiest when it comes to visas and so on. and we were able to have all of those, 200 amazing, individuals in one hotel, where we worked for a week to get on different things. Planned, new product ideas for the next couple of years, basically set our roadmap to some extent as well, and that was fantastic. But it was the very first time. So, no, we didn't do that yet every year or twice a year or something like that. That's not the case. We did it now for the first time after four years of having the first employee starting. Reason? Quite simple. There was COVID running around in the last couple of years, right? then the risk was quite crazy. And at the same time we were growing from two people to 240 people in like two and a half years. And you need to keep up with the hiring, right? This is like quite a challenge, also remotely, even though there's more interest of people like working remotely, but it's still tough to find the right talents. And when it comes to culture, there's one thing that every human, no matter where they are. really loves to do, or loves in general, which is, food. You won't believe it, but people in Austria eat, things the same way that people in Brazil and in India, in Japan, or in the U. S., like all of them Usually like food. And it turns out that if you have so many individuals globally distributed, you can create one of the nicest food hunting guides globally. So in Storyblok, there are different channels around like pizza or books and all those different things where Slack has been becoming our like main hub, not just for work. stuff. But also some people are just having like a chess club where they actually play chess after work or throughout like their lunchtime. And that's a completely different approach on how we look into like a remote company, because we never had an office. We never worked in an office. So it's not a hybrid. I, for example, don't believe hybrid will ever work because that's just, Hey, I'm working from home for like two or three days. That's not remote. Remote means every decision, every documentation, everything you're doing is fully remote and therefore all your processes are remote and you can check that really easily. If I ask you, okay, are you working in a remote company and your answer is yes, my first initial question would be, okay, where did you get your laptop? And if people tell me, yeah, they went to the office and got it from like the IT department, I would tell them they're not remote. They are just working home for some time. with Storyblok, you get it delivered two weeks before you start. And you have a full guide on pre onboarding, where you actually can get through the whole journey, step by step, through an onboarding tool called Savvy. Like, there's a completely different way of thinking how a company should look like and work. And, that shaped our culture, I believe in a really nice way, because now we met in person. All of them are just amazing. They are super motivated and funny enough. It didn't feel like we were just Being together for the first time, because we are still chatting on a daily basis, basically in our team meetings, in the one on one conversations that we have, and one thing, and sorry for talking that much, one thing we also started from the very early days, like literally when we were three, four people, in Austria, there's this thing called, or basically a coffee culture to some extent. it's not so much that we have great coffee in Austria, you should go to Italy for that. But what we have is, a real culture about like taking the time to drink a coffee with somebody else. So what we did is we installed a plugin in our Slack, called Donut. And Donut is scheduling virtual coffee chats with your peers, with different people in your company, fully random. 20. We started in 2017 when it was just Alex and myself, where we literally just had coffee chats randomly with anybody in the company. And it's still true today. So even today, we spend quite a lot of time, even like 30 minute chats, one on one with random people inside the company. And they also do that in different departments. And that creates this nice inter department kind of communication. And that allows for us to have like a actually quite friendly and trustworthy kind of communication. I have say we are also fully transparent. So once a week, we actually push financial data into our general Slack. So everybody's aware of where we are sending right now. So like full brutal honesty and transparency of what the business is currently doing and what is performing what not. And that's the way I believe you should run a remote company if you want to do
Dan Balcauski:No, that's fantastic. And there's so many good things that you said there. I think one of the things that stood out to me was at the very beginning of that story. You mentioned, your opinion or, you heard it here, folks. Hybrid will never work. Dominik says so. No, but I agree
Dominik Angerer:You can quote me on that, it's fine.
Dan Balcauski:it's, well, it's so difficult because when you have folks in person, you were just more likely to. let those things slide, right? you build processes and habits and behaviors around sort of what is, the, water always seeks its lowest level. And so, when there's people in person, you'd be like, Oh, well, I forgot to mention so and so this, so I'll just like stop by their desk and say it to them. which in a regular environment where everyone's constantly intermixing, you can kind of rely on that. Oh, it's just in the air. That conversation is just kind of floating around the office. But If you're hybrid, you have to remember like, well, there were three or four people in that meeting and only, I only talked to one of them and they don't know that conversation happened or is happening. And so it's easy for those processes to fall by the wayside. But if you're fully remote first, you're like, well, everything has to get documented or every, everything has to follow X process because that's the only way that anybody finds out about anything.
Dominik Angerer:Yeah, because as soon as you're remote, you're basically building two different companies and two different kind of, I would not say just cultures, but two different ways of communicating. And they hardly ever overlap. So, and I'm not talking then, hey, having two days in the office, three days in the office and two days at home, like, that is fine. But if you have people... Like in an office and a certain amount of people not being in the office whatsoever. That's the hybrid that I believe will not work. like if you should, like, you should definitely get home office days or days that you should not come to the office just for the flexibility in life that you should get in your work life. Right. But having a team in an office and a remote team on top of that. Like this kind of remote or hybrid work. This is the one I'm talking about that will never work, because you're building two different ways of communicating, two different ways of, yeah, processing things. And this will not work.
Dan Balcauski:Yeah, those things are, yeah, it's difficult to build a functioning organization once. few companies could build it twice with under the same corporate umbrella. There's always the conversation whenever when someone's like, should we have a secondary brand like Toyota and Lexus or Bosch and Black Decker? You're like, I can't see most companies successfully own and maintain one brand. So having two is a real leap of faith. I think it's very similar with your culture. So I absolutely love that point. in terms of culture, you guys were very much, very scrappy, bootstrapped, you and your co founder, doing this together and, started to grow the company, from a bootstrap perspective, but eventually took, venture capital funding, most notably a 47 million round in, 2022. I guess, what led you to seek your VC funding, anything that you've sort of learned from going into the venture capital fundraising waters?
Dominik Angerer:Yes, 100%. So one of the earliest learnings we had is that you need to be really picky about who you want to join your company. equally picky as with your leadership kind of, of level that you want to hire. has the equal amount of, influence on your culture, on your company, and the direction it will go, because they need to fully understand what you're up to. They need to fully understand where you want to go, and also the time frame that they are buying themselves into, essentially. And for example, first round that was back in 2019, 2020, we announced it. It was just a two and a half million round that we did at the time. And we got two VCs in. for that round. One of them was 3VC, where we were lucky enough to know Peter Lasinger already for like three years and he gave us a lot of really amazing advice. But finding the second one because we wanted to have two different ones, one from Austria, another one from North Austria essentially, an international one. Austria is pretty small, so it's quite important get your foot out of that as soon as also given that we are only operating like English from the beginning, even though both of us, like Alex and myself, we speak German quite well. As an Austrian, we speak Like, with dialect, but still, it's German. Anyway,
Dan Balcauski:It's much better than my German, I promise you.
Dominik Angerer:let's see, we actually, had chats with more than 50 VCs, until we found, The proper one to join us. And we found First Minute Capital, which were just a completely new fund at the time, a new seed fund. But now it's one of the best performing seed funds out there with like more than a hundred unicorn founders on their own side of lending partners. So people actually investing into that fund. and it's just amazing to have that kind of support because they really understood what we want to do. And, for example, one for like the partner that invested in us, Sam. He actually started, like, he's a financial analyst that was working at Goldman, then became principal, now partner at First Minute. He actually learned himself how to code with React, build a website with Storyblok, to understand the benefits for developers if they're using us. Like, how crazy is that? Like, that's proper commitment from somebody that... Doesn't have to do that, right? but this just showed us like, hey, they really want to understand what we are up to. And that commitment, plus the understanding of what our market looks like, where we want to head, just gave us the confidence to actually have them join. And Like, we were really specific about what we want to achieve with that money, like two and a half million were not for us to just spend it. Actually, we operated completely profitable, for the first one and a half years. We were profitable after one month of starting Storyblok. So in September, 2017, we started Storyblok and a month later we had, more than 1000 users on the platform and were profitable because it was just the two of us, right? So we didn't crazy salaries. Even today, we don't have crazy salaries, but at the time. Even less than that. and having then somebody join that understands the scrappiness and us focusing on like really finding the people we want to grow a company with, and allowing us the time and be upfront about it in the VC world. That was really important because We were able to take like more than 12, 14 months to find our leadership level, like a full leadership suit. and that not normal. You really need to be upfront about like what you want to do with the money and the timeframe. And if the timeframe says, Hey, in the next two years, then you need to be fine with that. Because if you're not upfront with all that information, you end up getting a lot of pressure on your own shoulders. And that could break the company because you're then starting to make a lot of mistakes because you're just hiring people for the sake of hiring people and that's never a smart idea
Dan Balcauski:it's been a recurring theme on the podcast. I heard a couple of different things that you said, which is one being very picky about the partners you bring into the business. that's been, expressed by multiple CEOs and I think that's very wise. and then I think the other things you talked about were being very explicit, having a plan upfront for how you're planning to use the capital and what timeframe you're planning on deploying it. it reminds me of a conversation I had, with another. CEO leader who was talking about how the sort of negotiation power balance, you've got a very good advantage when you're the prettiest girl at the dance and everyone's courting you to sort of set your terms and making sure that you're Proactively setting that up front, setting those expectations, because on the flip side, once they're on the cap table and you're reporting to them, it could be slightly the opposite. So taking advantage of that and making sure you're going in with eyes wide open. I do want to focus a little bit on what I call growth levers. I've often talked Many times about there's three main ways to grow a SaaS business acquisition, retention, and monetization. And you guys have a very interesting monetization approach. I noticed that for quite a while, you've had a freemium strategy and look, I mean, anyone who's followed me for any. Length of time. I will not go into my anti freemium rant. Sell me on why freemium has been a good idea for you. What is your approach and why have you adopted freemium for Storyblok?
Dominik Angerer:so I'm with you. Freemium is the worst idea you can ever do, like the absolute worst, except for if you're a dev tool where devs should just try it and love it. So that's the only way to convince a developer, because Alex and I, we both are developers. only way to convince us is to let us try the product and the whole scope of like the core product, where we can build something for free and only if we really want. Like to onboard new people, or if you want to start collaborating with additional people on one project. That's why I'm already convinced because I'm showing that product to somebody else. That's where I would spend money as a developer. So, It took us a while to figure that out, to be honest. But fast, what we wanted to do in the beginning was to just get feedback on the tool that we provided from different agencies, from different like people out there, right? So we didn't have a sales team, so it didn't make sense for us to just like hand out like, terms and conditions that we need to redline and go for legal, procurement, vendor registration, like the whole like thing. What we wanted is that developers try it and tell us what they hate about it so we can fix it. And, it turns out that if you have a freemium version for developers that is not just a nice trial for like seven days, but complete free version that they can scale on their own terms. That is actually really nice. So you can use Storyblok as a developer right now, completely for free. It will always be free. And in the first 14 days, you will have our highest level tier in the self service, which is our business plan included for free as well. So we have all the collaboration features. You can test it. You can see if you need them or not. And after 14 days, you can continue Storyblok completely for free. a few levels of like limits, like traffic of assets of 250 gigabyte per month of traffic that by now, like not many people like actually exceeding in the self service kind of area in like the free tier. And that's the only exception. If you're basically trying to get feedback from developers, it's a tool where you need developers to actually try it. I believe that it should always be free and it should not limit them in what they're doing on the product and when they're building something on top of it, especially. So that's the only exception. Otherwise, like if you're having like a B to C SaaS company or if you're having a B to B SaaS company that is scaling with just user seats and you don't have this like commitment from developers needed in the beginning where they actually need to build something. You should be charging for that because it actually is your time, your cost, and it's quite a lot of cost, to be
Dan Balcauski:Yeah. Well, I look Dominik, if you were in person right now I'd hug you, assuming I also wasn't sick, but, Look, I couldn't agree more. It's interesting. I didn't expect you to come as strongly with the, yeah, freemium's a terrible idea. maybe I ask you to hypothesize a little bit. why do you think it holds such a space in so many founders, CEOs, eyes of like, it's this golden, holy grail, what do you think it is,
Dominik Angerer:yeah, it's super hard to like determine what is the value, the worth of what you have built. as a software developer, like in Alex's and my case, first it was super hard to define. Okay. We are now charging money for this thing that we have started, on like night sessions over like two and a half years, for our own sake, like we had a benefit already because we are using it for our own projects and everything that was on top of that was just additional feedback for us. So we felt like we should not charge people. Of like getting feedback from them, right? Like that, that, that doesn't sound right, that we should actually charge them for using the product. So we get more feedback and optimize product for ourself. So that is like a problem, especially for software engineers that go into the SaaS, B to B, SaaS, B to C world. Because usually they also think that, Hey, everything should be free. because like the whole yeah. From, for example, open source is the best thing that you can do. we just realized that, As a headless CMS where we only provide data, you should not even think about hosting it yourself because it should just be done for you. It's just data. You should not care about it. So that's why we are not host, like having an open source version of that. and also fast, I believe, like it's really hard to monetize and like Alex and I, we couldn't, Jump over that shadow to do that. Cal. com an amazing example of where it works really well. So, Pierre has done an amazing job of doing that. Where he has this open source version, not MIT licensed of course, but an open source version where you can look into the code, you can learn from that, and then on top, you can then host it yourself if you want to. But with we have like this hosted version for you, and we tried to explain... The technicality and the data structure and how it works in our documentation as good as possible. So you can actually work with that and our SDKs are open source and everything around our product is open source. But the core product, because we believe it's part of our offering, we as a headless CMS, you should not think about installing it, retaining it, any security updates, all the pain points we had with all like WordPress with Drupal type of free hands on, they should be gone. So we believe. The hosting part is part of our own offering and that convinced us then because we had costs to actually have a freemium version that then allows us to scale for pricing.
Dan Balcauski:there's a couple of things I heard, right? So one is, know, if, if you're a developer starting a company, you've never done sales, you've never done marketing, you're like, well, how do I? How do I even go about this? I'm just trying to sell to other, other folks or just want them to, I just want feedback on my product. There's some amount of lack of confidence in, managing that, that sale or managing like, like, well, is that, is what I've really built, valuable enough to charge people for? So there's some lack confidence there.
Dominik Angerer:Yeah, the way we overcame that, is quite interesting because it was not, Alex or myself that came up with that just like this, it was, our very first investor, Peter, Lasinger from 3VC telling us, hey, how many hours do we actually save one developer a year? And when we looked into that and we basically had like the idea of like how much time we're saving in that agency and how much like it's worth for them, we realized we were saving about like 60 percent of every project timeline. So for like, let's say a 500, 000 project for like an enterprise, corporate, multilingual e commerce store, suddenly of, let's say, 250K of profit, Results in actually 60, 60 percent of that actually pro pure profit saved. so it's a lot of money, right? so what we realized is, okay, we should not just put hours into that. We should think about, okay, how much value we bring to the table for customers, if they use us. And that's the way we then started building the pricing model around And helped us to understand, okay, not how much is it worth for me. But how much time do I save? How much work do I save? How much faster are they? Like, these are the questions you need to ask yourself when you're thinking about pricing and it will help you, like, come up with a number. then you multiply that by three, and then you start discounting, because it's easier to have a higher price and discount, rather than increase prices later.
Dan Balcauski:I love that. We had a little pricing, mini masterclass, here on SaaS Scaling Secrets. Well, I, so there's so many threads of that story that I could just, spend, hours on, I think one thing is, I love the fact that your investor stepped in and pushed you on that conversation because look, we all have money. Before he invested, which was good for him, right? so, cause we all have interesting relationships with money, right? Money has so much emotional baggage and we're all, we're all irrational in different ways with money and thinking that once we all get into a business, with a bunch of irrational actors, all of a sudden the business is going to be perfectly rational. It's just an absolute fallacy.
Dominik Angerer:Yeah.
Dan Balcauski:And look, developers as engineering, rationalists as they are with their code, they still have, human biases when it comes to money and, how they look at, the work they've built. Right, because you see all the flaws. You're like, you have this roadmap in your head of what it could be, and it's not there yet, and you know where all the bugs are, and the bodies are buried, and right? This feature's missing. But when you go to that customer, that prospect, they're like, Oh my God, you know what I'm doing today? You know how much better my life will be if I use And so getting out of your own way and whether it's an investor or talking to these people who are using it and just getting that outside perspective can really be. Helpful because we just get trapped into our own psychology. Right. And that, and I mean, get outside the building, like just don't talk to your other coworkers or other leaders on your executive team because you guys are all drinking from the same Kool Aid knowing where all the bodies are buried and the products not there yet and all the problems of the business, right? That's what makes a lot of business leaders very good is we're all focused on the problems and we're all really good at like identifying and fixing problems. And so we fail to see that. That positive upside of the value. So I really love that story and getting out of your own way is beautiful. And, I absolutely agree that when I started this podcast. I, had to get a hosting platform for the podcast, files, which I didn't even know it exists, that sort of thing existed before I started a podcast. And, I'm mentioning this because much like developer tools, they had a freemium approach, which I was like, oh, that's stupid. And then I started using it, and I realized that... The rationale, and I, again, for someone who constantly rants about, the dangers of freemium, for me to go the opposite way, but there are, look, I would say it's the random exception. Why that was made sense in that case is because if you start a podcast... You've got to do all this upfront configuration. It has nothing to do with you starting a podcast. You've got to go register your podcast with Google and Spotify and Apple iTunes. and that can take weeks or, who knows? Apple's like, we may or may not get back to you ever. Like to let you know that your podcast been updated. But to do that, you have to publish one episode, so you publish a trailer. So it could be literally weeks before you're ready to actually start publishing episodes, or maybe months. And so, it makes no sense to try to monetize that new podcast host right off the bat, but they've got to have somewhere to have a file so that they can get all these other things registered. So I think it very much maps to the plight of a developer that's spending a lot of time... let's say they're using, Twilio or something for their SMS communication, know They're gonna be in development or staging for months building that feature They're not actually gonna be using it production It doesn't make sense for your go to market team your sales team their valuable time to be reissuing, free trial keys because that person's not technically in a buying cycle yet. they're still evaluating, still trying to get the value working, right? And then once their revenue starts generating, then that makes more sense to, to try to align your monetization for. So I just love that, that total arc. Man, I could talk to you all day about that and so much else. we are running, up on time. So I do want to jump and wrap up with some of our lightning round questions. Are you ready?
Dominik Angerer:Yes, definitely.
Dan Balcauski:Dominik? How do you define success?
Dominik Angerer:Oh, that's a good question. success for me, I believe, is that, the goals that you have set for yourself, are actually, done, whatever that means, like, defining done is hard enough, but, we have some goals that we set for ourself in the beginning, that we want to fulfill, and one of them is that we build a CMS that doesn't suck, and, sorry for the word, but, that, that is like the
Dan Balcauski:Oh, we could swear. doesn't
Dominik Angerer:that is like success. If we have done that, where customers stay with us forever because they like the product, then we're done. And then that is success. And to be honest, we're in a good cause. I know you like retention. So do you know that we only have one enterprise customer that ever left us since the beginning of Storyblok? And that is because they went insolvent. Everybody else is still with us from the very first day. So I believe that's success for me. If people enjoy using the product, For a long time.
Dan Balcauski:So everyone, you heard it here. Storyblok, a CMS that doesn't suck. I'm imagining that will be on the head of your, website hero page, in no time, marketing team at Storyblok. Let's get on that right now. I, that's a winning, winning slogan. Look, nobody of any level of success gets here on our own. I'm a big fan of gratitude. Has there been a close mentor or leader that's really helped you on your journey?
Dominik Angerer:Yeah, so there are hundreds of people. I don't want to go into like a Grammy kind of situation here. So I will just pick Peter Lasinger. I mentioned him multiple times now in the interview as well. And Peter gave us an advice before he invested in us, where Alex and I were still together in Linz. In a coffee, situation in an open office space. And we were thinking about, okay, let's build like this e commerce solution, the search solution and this and that, like a hundred different ideas that we had. And we started building them and Peter just casually went by and he's like, Hey, what's up guys? Everything all right? And we're like, yeah, we're thinking about doing this and that. And do it really well. And start with the one that really annoys you the most. And just having this sentence, like, burned into your head, I couldn't, we couldn't have done that without him. So, like, it's just a small thing and it sounds stupid if you think about it, because all he told us is like, hey, focus, like, that's it. But seeing it from, like, getting it from the outside, into our minds, it was like, oh yeah, you're fully right. let's fix the one thing we started, like the CMS. Let's do it first. so Peter, thanks for helping us all the way.
Dan Balcauski:Oh man, I love that advice. Well, look, if you could put anything on a billboard for other B to B SaaS CEOs coming behind you, any advice on how they could better scale their B to B SaaS companies, what would you put on that billboard?
Dominik Angerer:Yes, freemium works. No, I'm joking. I'm joking. No, I would say, get to understand your customers. Put a live chat on their website into your product. be online 24 seven and get all the feedback you get from any customers out there and build a product that they love.
Dan Balcauski:Build product that they love, and then we'll put the rest of it in small print, because that's a lot of text for a billboard, but
Dominik Angerer:Yeah, it's like, I'm not a marketing guy. I'm a software engineer, for me, it would be a slash to do, build product.
Dan Balcauski:I love it. I love it. And Freemium works. No, Freemium works, build a product they love. I absolutely enjoyed this conversation. If folks want to learn more about you, Dominik, follow you around the web or learn more about Storyblok, where can they do that?
Dominik Angerer:Definitely on Twitter or like X, however you want to call
Dan Balcauski:Whatever we're calling it these
Dominik Angerer:DomAngerer. if you can't find me, look for Storyblok without a C, on Twitter as well. You should find me somewhere there, or on LinkedIn, also regularly post on our own website. So wherever you are, this is like the best idea, Storyblok. com and similar.
Dan Balcauski:Awesome. Well, I will put those links in the show notes for listeners so they can find it and not make the same type of mistake that I made. everyone. That wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. A massive thank you to Dominik for sharing his journey, insights, and valuable tips. For our listeners, if you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes. Until next time, keep innovating, growing, and pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
