Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Ben Dowling, the founder of IP Info, a web service that provides IP address data for thousands of businesses and developers.
In 2014, Ben was writing code for a project at work and found himself wasting a lot of time looking up information about IP addresses.
So he built a simple API to help make his life easier.
He also posted about it on Stack Overflow, so.
So other developers might also save some time.
And his API turned out to be quite popular.
So a year later he added a paid plan and he was blown away when someone signed up for a $50 a month plan.
Ben continued working his day job and slowly added new customers to his side project.
Two years later, his API was generating over $100,000 a year.
And that's when he finally quit his job and started working full time on his business.
He figured that without any distractions, his company would grow even faster.
But instead of growing faster, his business actually stopped growing for some time.
It didn't make much sense, and Ben struggled to get the business growing for a while.
He also made some fundamental mistakes along the way.
For example, he allowed people to use his API without ever signing up.
While that made it easy for people to use his product, he couldn't even market to them or even contact them to tell them about an outage.
Today, his API project has grown into a multimillion dollar SaaS company with a team of 15 people.
The API handles 40 billion requests a month, and its customers include companies like T Mobile, Apple, and Demandbase.
In this interview, we explore how Ben grew his business, why it stopped growing when he went full time, and how he overcame some of the critical mistakes that he made along the way.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben Dowling (02:38.000)
Thanks, Omar.
Omer (02:39.200)
So do you have a quote, something that inspires or motivates you or just gets you out of bed that you can share with us?
Ben Dowling (02:44.110)
Yeah, absolutely.
One of my favorite quotes is from Admiral Grace Hopper, who was a pretty fascinating and inspiring woman.
And her quote is, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, which I really like.
Omer (02:54.590)
Yeah, love that one.
So for people who don't know about IP info, tell us, what does the business do, who is it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?
Ben Dowling (03:06.750)
Yeah, absolutely.
So we produce IP address Metadata.
So one of our big data sets is IP geolocation.
So you give us an IP address and we'll tell you where it is.
This someone in San Francisco, is this someone in London?
We have a bunch of different data sets as well.
IP to company, IP carrier detection, IP privacy detection.
So we'll tell you if an IP address is a, is a VPN or a proxy service.
Most of our customers consume our data through our API.
Our API does about 40 billion API requests a month though we also have a bunch of customers that download the data, whether that's to use in their own in house data pipelines within their products and services.
And there's lots of different customer segments and lots of different use cases.
We have lots of customers in the cybersecurity industry that will use us for event enrichment and for threat investigation.
Lots of web personalization.
So if you visit a website, it might give you a different message if you're in Seattle versus if you're in London.
That could be a user visible thing or that could be something behind the scenes, just tracking where the user's from so you can send more targeted marketing messages and lots of ad tech and lots of other interesting use cases.
But the piece that we focus on is, is really creating the best, most comprehensive and accurate data around IP addresses.
And so whatever that context might be for the customer's use case, we focus on making sure that data is really great and really easy to access.
Omer (04:21.920)
And you have like 100,000 customers today, both businesses and developers.
The business is bootstrapped.
What's the size of the team?
Ben Dowling (04:32.160)
Team is currently 15 people and we're all over the globe.
So we've got a fully remote team.
We were fully remote from the start pre Covid and will continue to be, which that used to be different now, I guess most businesses are currently.
But yeah, we've been remote, fully distributed from the start.
We've got people all over the world in all sorts of different time zones.
Omer (04:50.100)
Okay, and where are you in terms of revenue?
How big is the business?
Ben Dowling (04:53.300)
So the business has been growing.
We grew 50% last year on track to grow more than that this year.
And you were doing multiple millions in revenue per year.
Omer (05:01.220)
Okay, so let's talk about where this idea came from.
Most people don't wake up one day and say, oh, I'm going to help people figure out how to use IP addresses better.
So where did this idea come from?
Ben Dowling (05:17.070)
Yeah, that's right.
And so that's not how it happened for me either.
So I had been using IP Geolocation data in various projects and it was just a pain to set up.
The data was available, but it was really hard to access.
You had to download files and upload them on servers and you remember to update them.
And it was just a pain.
I'd done this four or five times, four or five different side projects, and it just came to do a new one and I thought, hey, there's got to be a better way, right?
Instead of doing this on a new server, I can just set it up in one centralized way and create an API so that all my different projects can just call that API.
And there's just one server where I have to manage this and maintain this instead of a bunch of different places.
And then I posted about it on Stack Overflow.
There's some questions that were like, hey, how can I easily get an IP address?
Or how can I easily get geolocation data?
And all the answers at the time like, hey, you got to go and download all this stuff and jump through these hoops.
And I thought, oh, wow, you know, the way that I've done it is a much simpler solution.
And so I kind of went in and answered some questions and said, you know, another option here is just to call my API.
It's free, it's easy to use.
I thought it could be a good way to save, you know, that some developers could save some time.
And it quite quickly got some traction and people started using it in their projects and you kind of evolved from there.
Omer (06:29.020)
So what did you build it for?
You had a full time job at the time?
Ben Dowling (06:32.780)
Yeah, had a full time job at the time.
So yeah, this was just, you know, just help me with side projects.
I thought it'd be useful, I thought it'd be interesting.
And as it started getting traction, it kind of kind of pulled me more towards it and was interesting solving similar problems.
Right.
And so it's like, okay, we download some geolocation data and people come to us and say, hey, this is great.
Can I also get, you know, the isp?
And so spent more and more time, you know, looking into how can we get additional data sets that can help people that are kind of already using our API.
Omer (06:59.190)
Yeah, I mean, I don't know a lot about the whole sort of geolocation business, but one thing I always experienced in the past whenever I worked on any project where there was some sort of geolocation component was that it was really challenging to get accurate information from an IP address.
So I'm curious like how you as a kind of solo Developer part time came up with something that other people wanted to use and found it reliable or accurate enough.
Ben Dowling (07:36.950)
Yeah, absolutely.
That piece came much later.
Right.
So initially the thing that we were offering was a really reliable API that was simple to use versus having to go and download the data.
And so we were just using third party data that, as you say, not great data.
But our kind of proposition wasn't, hey, geolocation data is any better.
It's just, it's much simpler way to kind of pull up geolocation data.
And then the feedback we started getting was exactly what you've just raised, right?
Hey, your data kind of sucks, right?
Like, you know, you're saying, I'm in Seattle, but I'm actually in San Francisco.
How did you get this so wrong?
And initially we're like, hey, it's not our data, right?
Go report this to a third party.
We provide the call API.
We know the data kind of sucks, but that's just kind of the state of things.
But over time we got more and more and more of this feedback.
As our popularity grow, we'd have more eyes on our data and more people reporting stuff to us.
And then it became, okay, well, can we make this data better?
Are we stuck with this third party data?
Is this just the state of things and sort of evolved the kind of focus to just be, okay, yeah, it's third party data, but we make it really easy to access.
We can actually make much, much better data.
Right.
And today we've got a team of data engineers and data scientists working on this.
And that's one of our main focuses, is not just making it really easy to access over the API, but also having really, really great data.
Right.
And so that's been a focus of, yeah, let's not just make it easy to use, let's also make sure the data is great.
Omer (09:01.500)
Awesome.
Okay, so I want to kind of get in more into how you sort of started and sort of turned this, this tool into a business.
Before we do that, I think it's probably worthwhile just kind of sharing with our audience just a little bit about your background.
So there's some, there's some context here.
So initially you were working for a company in England that was acquired by Facebook.
So why don't you just tell us a little bit about kind of that journey in terms of what you were doing before you launched IB Info?
Ben Dowling (09:32.420)
Sure, yeah.
So yeah, and I worked at various startups in London and then we were working on an Android photo sharing app at the time that was having some Moderate success.
It was the very early days of Android apps and of Android really in general.
And then Instagram came out on Android and was better than us and was growing faster than us.
And so we were able to, the team was able to figure out a nice off landing at Facebook and the whole team moved out to California.
That was very exciting.
This is my first time ever to America.
I flew out and you had to an interview at Facebook and a bunch of different places and that was kind of a whirlwind, whirlwind week.
And then my wife was, I think she was seven months pregnant with our second child at the time and she.
That was a few months later when we actually moved to America and she flew out and landed in America for the first time.
She'd been here pregnant with a two year old baby.
So that was a whirlwind time.
Yeah, that was an adventure, but that was a lot of fun.
I had a couple of years at Facebook, enjoyed that.
Worked on the Ads Integrity team.
So, you know, trying to stop bad ads and payment fraud around ads and, you know, blocking malicious advertisers and, you know, getting to see some, some really interesting, you know, behind the scenes stuff on both sides.
Right.
How to block this sort of malicious behavior, but also, you know, sort of the scammy things that people are trying to promote and push.
Had an interesting time there.
And it's while I was there that, you know, I'd always been kind of working on side projects, you know, just fun hobbyist things just to, you know, sharpen my dev skills and you know, just sort of as a hobby, but just sort of launched this as a side project as an API.
And then I left Facebook after a couple of years.
I'd got my green card and then I went and was CTO at Calm, the guided meditation app, for a couple of years and got that to a point that they had a really solid engineering team and that was really starting to take off.
And in parallel, IP Info had been kind of taking off as well.
And so it felt like kind of a natural inflection point after a couple of years at Calm to kind of go and shift and work on IP Info full time.
Omer (11:28.560)
Okay, so you launched the first version of IP info around 2014, which is sort of around the time that you were sort of moving from Facebook to Calm and you didn't start charging for the product until 2015 and then went full time around 2016.
Ben Dowling (11:50.640)
Yeah.
Omer (11:50.960)
Right.
Ben Dowling (11:51.040)
At the end of 2016.
Omer (11:52.160)
Yeah.
So tell us sort of a little bit more about that.
So that you've got this tool up and running, you've posted it on stack overflow that first year.
Ben Dowling (11:59.900)
This was.
Omer (12:01.100)
There was no intention to run a business or turn it into a business, was there?
Ben Dowling (12:04.860)
It was just.
Omer (12:05.740)
You were putting it out there.
Ben Dowling (12:07.420)
No, absolutely not.
Yeah.
I mean, I thought it could just be something that would save me some time, right?
And then I thought, hey, you know, let's open this up to, to other developers that, that may help them save some time.
I thought, you know, they might use it on personal blogs, on side projects.
You know, I really didn't see, see there being an opportunity for commercial usage because this was something that I just sort of initially set up over the weekend, right?
And it's like, hey, I'm going to set this up, I'll spend a weekend on it and it might save me a couple of days effort every six months or something.
And if I can help some other people save some effort, that's great.
And the goal was just this really simple API.
I think what happened quite quickly was that people, it wasn't just hobbyist developers using it, and there were a whole bunch of those.
There were people, companies actually using it.
Right.
And I thought that was interesting.
And it wasn't because they couldn't set this up.
It was just because in big organizations it's hard to get developer resources.
They're busy on other projects, then they've got to go and provision a server.
And so there's all these kind of overheads and costs with getting something set up.
And other times it might be a product manager, just sign up and say, hey, I can just put this on the company credit card, I'm good to go, don't have to worry about it again, whether it's just for internal tooling or for anything.
And so there was a lot, it turned out I wasn't just solving a pain point for me and fellow hobbyist developers.
This was a pain point for people in general, right?
They just really want to get really simple geolocation data really easily.
And there's a bunch of hoops that to jump through before.
Not just the hoops I was aware of as a developer with like, okay, I got to download this and set this up.
You know, people at corporations got to jump through even more hoops, right?
They got to go and get it to sign off for a new server or they got to rope in some developers to set this up and they got a maintenance plan for the server that's running it.
And so you're just saying, hey, you know it's two lines of code.
That's all you need to do.
You don't need to worry about it kind of really resonated.
Omer (13:49.280)
Okay, so, so year one, you've got the product out there, it's, it's a free API, anybody can use it.
And you're just telling people on Stack Overflow about this.
Was this just like a couple of posts or were you actually actively going back into Stack Overflow at the time?
In that first year?
Ben Dowling (14:10.080)
Yeah, I.
Initially, it was, initially there was like there was no plan for Stack Overflow to be, say, a growth channel.
Right.
Which is what it eventually became.
You know, I was, I was just an active member of the Stack Overflow community anyway.
Right.
You know, I just spend some time on there looking for interesting questions to answer.
You know, I post my own questions when I ran into issues and so it was just a great resource and so I would, I can't remember if I'd originally seen the question like how to get, you know, geolocation or whatever, or if I kind of stumbled across a question.
But you know, I found a couple of questions to answer, right?
Where it's like, oh, there are a bunch of hoops are going to jump through.
And I just said, hey, I've launched this API, IP info, here's the three lines of code or whatever to do it in php, here's the response it gives you, here's how to parse it, Spend some time giving a detailed answer.
And I think I did that on a handful of posts and they very quickly got upvoted and very quickly started sending us a lot of traffic.
Those answers ended up being the top voted answers.
And so then I became more conscious, okay, this could be a way to attract new users.
And so at that point, spent a lot of time, often in batches, but would say, okay, well, let's find other questions where people might be asking for similar things.
And that ended up being kind of a long tail, right?
Once you've answered the first five, they get the most traffic and the most eyeballs.
But there were ways that you could find other related ones, right?
So people would say, how can I get geolocation in JavaScript?
Or how can I get geolocation in PHP?
Or how can I get geolocation In WordPress?
And so then I would go through and try and answer most of those and then I would run out those questions.
But it ended actually being a good way to kind of work out how to evolve the product because I would find sort of related questions and so I think maybe in the very first version of IP Info, we didn't return the IP address, we would just return the location.
But there were questions like, how do I get an IP address in JavaScript?
And so in the browser there's no way to get the user's IP address.
And so it's like, oh, this is a field we could easily add, right?
And then that could be applicable to this question and similar questions, how do I get the user's ISP in JavaScript?
And so it's like, oh, well, let's go figure out a way that we can collect that information, let's add it to the API and then we can kind of go back to Stack Overflow and answer not just that question, but there'll be a whole host of questions that may say, how do I do that in PHP, JavaScript, et cetera.
And so it was kind of identifying what are the next sort of set of questions, making sure that our product supports that.
Sometimes it already did, sometimes it didn't, and I'd need to go and kind of add an enhancement and then going through and kind of answering all those questions.
Omer (16:37.750)
So a year later you introduced the paid plan.
What happened?
Ben Dowling (16:41.830)
Yeah, so I was somewhat reluctant to add paid plans.
I thought, this is a call free service.
And I had more and more people using it and I was getting server alerts that, hey, your server's at its limits.
And so you upgraded the server a few times and these are still, I think $20 or $40 a month servers.
So it wasn't a huge expense.
But I thought, this is really interesting that not only are people using not only a lot of people using it, I could see that some users were using it a lot.
There was one IP address, whatever, that's making a million requests a day.
And so I thought, wow, I kind of assume that Norm would make maybe more than a thousand requests a day.
If there are people out there making millions of requests a day, maybe they pay.
And so my wife's like, just go, just go launch some pay plans.
And I was like, well, I'm not sure.
It's a bunch of work and I don't know if anybody's really going to pay.
And so just decided to launch pay plans and picked a bunch of different price points with somewhat arbitrary request limit.
To me, that was obvious that the price would be based on the amount of requests.
And so I would keep it free below 1,000 requests, which is kind of what I assumed the highest volume of requests would be.
And then layered on paid plans on top of that.
And so I think it was 50 bucks a month for I think it was 10,000 requests.
And these were daily limits at this point for ten thousand requests.
There's a hundred dollar plan for fifty thousand requests.
And the plans went up to a maximum of a $200 plan.
And they were somewhat arbitrarily chosen limits.
But I thought those sort of price plans would give me a good sense of how much would people be willing to pay.
And very, very quickly, people started paying.
And not just hobbyist developers, but I had some big companies sign up and pay for even the $200 account.
I think within the first couple weeks, had a sign up for the $200 account, which I just, I thought that might be there to help anchor for some of the other prices.
But people started paying and then I was like, wow, I need to add a $400 plan.
And then I think I had the $600 plan as well.
I think we ended up getting one sign up for $600.
Right.
And so, okay, like now it's like I seem to be reaching the limit of what we've got here.
But yeah, I was kind of surprised that very, very quickly people started signing up and signing up for all the various plans.
It wasn't just that everybody was on the smallest plans.
Omer (18:48.180)
So how much revenue were you doing in that second year?
Where did you get to once you launched the paid plan?
Ben Dowling (18:54.290)
I can't remember where we got to at the end of the second year, but I do remember it happened very quickly because I remember being very excited.
Within, say, the first month, we're doing a few hundred dollars in revenue.
And then I think in the second month, maybe it was a few hundred more.
But very quickly it got to say it was one or two thousand.
And I remember that time thinking, well, this is really exciting.
This is a side project that's making some money.
This is really cool.
And it kind of kept doubling, and the doublings got quicker.
Right.
And so I think I remember when we hit Maybe it was $4,000 a month, and maybe that had taken a couple months, and I think it was like less than a week later, we hit $5,000 a month.
That was when I got really excited, right?
Like, okay, you can kind of see the kind of trajectory that this is taking now.
Omer (19:36.190)
And so you went full time in 2016, at the end of 2016, how much was the business making then?
Ben Dowling (19:44.200)
At that point, it was making.
It was making more than my salary.
So I think it was making a few hundred thousand dollars a year.
And at that point I'd been just working on it part time.
And at that point I was getting more and more sort of.
I mean, for the longest time I wasn't sure if this is, hey, this is going to be a great side project, right.
I don't know if this is actually a business that can sustain me full time, let alone a team.
Right.
And have me the opportunity might be.
And so I think it was kind of clear by the end of 2016, it was getting clearer and clearer throughout 2016 that this kind of did have legs as a real business.
Right.
There were more and more sort of larger customers that were really happy with the service, that were talking to us about other things we could help them with.
You were seeing growing demand and also more demand, just not just in terms of leads and science, but sort of growing demand in terms of people were okay with the service, but there's a bunch of other things they wanted.
Right.
And so it probably could have just been like, hey, here's what the service does.
Not going to invest in it.
It can just be this side project.
But it was clear there's an opportunity to do a lot more.
Right.
So I talked about some of the things around, oh, the location data sucks and you're starting to work on some of those things.
It's like, okay, if we really nail this, then this can be much more than just a simple API that is really useful and saves a bunch of time for a bunch of people.
But there's really opportunity to have an impact that's much bigger than that.
Omer (21:08.650)
So before you went full time, did you have any.
Had you hired any help full time or part time or was it just you doing everything?
Ben Dowling (21:15.770)
It was mostly me.
There were a few points where I had.
Yeah, before I went full time, I had.
Throughout 2016, I brought in a couple of contractors, mostly part time and mostly ad hoc.
I brought in some contractors to help with specific projects.
So I've been working on some data pipelines by then, and there are a bunch of pieces that were slow.
And so you hire contractors, just say, hey, look, I've got this slow piece of my data pipeline.
Here's the input, here's the desired output.
Maybe it takes 30 minutes to run right now.
Can you go create new utility that's quicker?
And we'd sort of hire people on ad hoc project basis like that.
And there was sort of no interaction, right.
I'd say, here's the input, here's desired output.
A month later, I'd say, hey, here's, here's a way to do it quickly and pay per project.
And then the support load was getting really high as well.
I was commuting up from Mountain View to San Francisco at the time and would answer some support emails on the Caltrain on the way up.
But it got to the point where by the time I got in San Francisco, I still hadn't answered all the emails.
And then after work on the train home, I still hadn't got through all the emails.
And so it's like they were building up and building up.
And so at that point as well, I got someone to help with doing some of the support, taking on some of the support loads.
Omer (22:27.830)
So in addition to using Stack Overflow and obviously just having a free API that people talk about, one developer will tell another developer and sort of just going through word of mouth, you were also starting to get traffic through SEO.
Was that something deliberate that you'd done to kind of focus on SEOs in a channel, or was it just something you just started to see happening and the site getting organic traffic?
Ben Dowling (22:54.210)
Yeah, that was really deliberate.
So it was definitely deliberate.
So I think from the very first version of the website, created static content pages for every IP address.
And so that wasn't necessarily the goal, wasn't necessarily to be like a growth channel for leads.
It was just like, hey, I want to create useful content around IP addresses.
It makes sense to have web pages that demonstrate that, right?
And so I that was kind of going back to the free mindset of giving away the free API.
It's like, hey, I could just create useful pages for IP addresses.
And part of the initial problem I solved was making it easy to access this not just through an API, but as a web page where you could just go and look up an IP address and we could say, hey, this is an IP address in Seattle.
An API is a great way to get that.
But just kind of browsing a web page would be another good way to do that.
And there were sort of no web pages that just sort of had that information on that I was able to find at the time.
So I thought, hey, this is just a useful thing to do.
It's not much extra work.
And so right from the start, we had, if you go to ipinfo IO, any random IP address we had a full page that would say, this is the IP address, here's the isp, basically just a visual display of what we had in the API.
And so those pages started getting indexed.
And so then people would Google an IP address and find our page.
And so that drove a lot of traffic to our website and still does.
I think we're at this point, you're probably the top result in Google for a lot of IP addresses and a lot of.
A lot of ISP names and things like that.
But it's sort of a mixed bag.
So it's been a good channel in a lot of ways.
It gets us a lot of traffic, gets us awareness of our product.
It also kind of creates a lot of support load from some really strange things.
We get to see a lot of strange things in our support queue.
And so there are some that make sense.
People will say, hey, my Xbox stopped working.
Can you fix it?
And we're like, what?
But then it turns out if you get an Xbox and there's a problem with your Internet, you get to see an error on your screen with IP address.
And so people just go to Google, you know, they type in that IP address, not knowing that that's an IP address, assume it's an error code or something and, you know, land on our webpage and then just shoot off support requests.
That's funny.
So we get things like that, you know, every time.
Yeah, every time that, like, say, like, Telegram's blocked in Iran or whatever country gets blocked in, I think in the client, it pops up an error with an IP address.
And so people will Google that.
They'll land on our IP address page and they'll just hit contact.
And so you're with, like, every time there's sort of a big event with some IP addresses that lots of people are seeing, we get a big flood of support requests saying, hey, can you fix my telegram?
And you have to say, oh, sorry, that's not really us.
We're someone else.
We get lots of interesting law enforcement requests, people saying, hey, we've seen you hacking us from this IP address.
And we have to explain that's not our IP address.
That's just a page that we have details on we can help you with.
One of our data sets is abuse contact information.
So here's the actual details for the person you should be contacting if you've seen abuse from this IP address.
But that's not actually us.
So there's a lot of noise that comes from kind of having these popular IP pages.
But we definitely have had customers that have discovered this that way and have landed customers through that channel.
So it's a mixed bag.
It generates a lot of traffic for us, it brings us some customers, but it creates a lot of noise as well.
Omer (26:09.220)
Okay, so the start of 2017 you are now full time working on the business.
How long did it take you to get to your first million in ARR?
Ben Dowling (26:21.270)
I think that took a while.
So that kind of, it felt like it took an eternity and then it sort of kind of creeped up on me.
That was the focus for a while, right?
It's like, hey, I'm full time on this now, right?
I've been doing this 10 to 20 hours a week.
I can kind of roll up my sleeves, really dive into it.
I've got no distractions.
This is going to grow much quicker now.
Everything's going to move faster.
And what was kind of disappointing was everything sort of slowed down.
That was really interesting and really frustrating because it's like, wow, I'm putting all this extra effort in and it's kind of not apparent in the numbers.
I think doing it part time actually really helped to be ultra focused, right.
And so in the, in the early days I hadn't built out any account dashboards, I hadn't built out anything.
You know, if a user wanted to update their credit card, they would have to email me and I would create a one time link that would send them to Stripe and they could update it.
You know, they would.
And if they people had questions about their request volumes, they would shoot me an email, I'd put it from the database and send it back to them.
And so it was really bare bones.
All the focus was on building out, making the API really reliable and fast, making sure that all the data was in the exact right format that people wanted.
And it's kind of delivering on the core value proposition.
But there was this sort of big backlog of things that people obviously wanted like, okay, I need to go and change my account password or I need to update my credit card without having to go through an email support.
And when you've got 10 or 100 users, that's doable through support, but that's not going to hold up later.
And so then I had to go and build out this whole backlog of things that we were just missing that kind of didn't help with the core value proposition, right?
The things that kind of people just assume you have like account dashboards and user management and all these things and cleaning up our pricing and improving our rate, limiting all these things that I thought, hey, I can go fix this now.
And spent, you know, they took a lot of effort but didn't kind of really result in a change in trajectory in the business.
And so, you know, the focus had been for a long time, hey, let's get to a million.
Let's get to a million.
Was busy focusing and then we sort of really shot past it.
And I think you, I remember checking the metrics one month, it's like, oh, wow, we kind of blew past that and that.
So it was, that was exciting, but I also kind of missed it.
Omer (28:30.600)
So why do you think that happened?
That you're now working full time on the business, you clearly focus now on growing.
What was not helping you grow?
Was it you just working on the wrong things or something else?
Ben Dowling (28:49.760)
I think because when I could only do it 10 or 20 hours a week, right, I had to be laser focused on like, what is it that's actually kind of useful, right?
What's, what's delivering value.
And then when I'm like, oh, hey, you know, I've got unlimited time to work on this now.
There's a bunch of things that you want to get done and that in reality you need to get done.
Right.
But they're not actually kind of directly related to driving the business value.
And at the time I wanted to do it, I was doing pretty much everything myself.
By then, me saying, okay, right, I'm going to go build out the account dashboard and do all these other things that needed to get done.
It kind of takes the focus off.
Okay, well what about actually growing the business and things?
And so I think there's an element of that and I think somewhat initially I'm like, hey, I can kind of do all this by myself and let's kind of wait until I really need to get other people and I'd rather kind of hire more slowly.
And I think that's true.
But I think that in that, that initial, okay, it's going from me, from doing 10 to 20 hours a week to me full time, that should be enough to cover everything.
It probably wasn't right.
There's, there's probably a whole big backlog of things to do and it would really help to, to, you know, bring another engineer on sooner to be like, hey, you can kind of pick up all these things that are important to do but that aren't going to drive the business.
Or on the flip side, you'll hire someone to kind of help focus and grow the business.
And you know, maybe it was get a sales guy in earlier to kind of help out and focus on that while I'm kind of building out all these important things, but that weren't driving the business.
Omer (30:07.340)
When did you hire your first full time employee?
Ben Dowling (30:09.900)
My first full time employee I think was early 2018.
So for pretty much all of 2017 it was just me full time.
I brought in a few contractors during that time and some part time people.
But the first full time was in early 2018.
Omer (30:29.250)
Now there was a couple of things that I thought were interesting about the kind of the growth story here.
When you were like today a big part of your business comes from enterprise companies, right?
So anyone goes to IP info website, they'll see logos like Dell and CBS and Xerox and the list goes on.
But when you were working full time and you started getting contacted by people who wanted to talk about an enterprise plan, you didn't initially see that as an opportunity.
It was more like a distraction.
So tell us, tell us a little bit more about what was happening there.
Ben Dowling (31:12.770)
Yeah, I actually found it really frustrating.
You know, this was a small side project that was for fellow developers like me.
Right.
This was just something that was going to save developers some time.
I wanted it all to be self serve.
I built the pricing page and I started to get some emails from people saying, hey, I would love to jump on a sales call with you and get a demo or learn more about how you could help us on our project.
And I would email back and say no, all the details you need on the pricing page kind of go away and leave me alone.
Was the vibes I was sending out.
It's like, I'm busy at work, I'm going to be on a train later, I haven't got time to talk to you.
And what I didn't appreciate until actually took some of those calls from some persistent people or probably after I'd seen a bunch of these come in and there must be something here.
My expectation was, hey, there's a $50 plan on the website.
Everything you need to know about that $50 plan is on the website.
Why do we even need a phone call, right?
Like the documentation's there, the pricing's there, what more could you need to speak to me about?
And you're perhaps just wasting my time and time that I don't have.
Right.
With a full time job and doing this side project.
But I think what I totally underestimated was how important those conversations could be to basically land interesting large customers that have sometimes completed custom requirements.
Sometimes they were just on a fishing expedition and could say, hey look, we have this really interesting large scale thing we're working on and we're looking for people that can help and what's on your website won't help us at all.
But we're just trying to see if you can help.
And sometimes the answer would be no, I know nothing about this.
We're not a fit.
And.
But a bunch of really, really interesting projects came out of those conversations and you a bunch of things that have made it to products today.
And also what I hadn't appreciated is that more often than not, those customers are more than happy to pay a lot more than a $50 self service plan, but they just need a lot more in return.
Right.
They need to go on yearly billing and to jump on calls and give them support contracts and they need to know that, hey, is this service can be around in a couple of years if it goes down, is there someone I can call?
Are you a rep company?
Are you improving over time?
And all reasonable things to want to know.
And they just have very different risk profile and all that kind of stuff.
And so initially I'm like, hey, you're just kind of wasting my time.
But it turned out that obviously those calls ended up being really important for growing the business and the product roadmap and all that good stuff.
Omer (33:47.050)
Yeah, I mean, there might be some enterprise customers who will come to a website and sign up and put a credit card in, but that's just the nature of enterprise sales, right.
That people don't always want to do that.
They want to figure out what's actually going on, is this the right product for me?
And talking to somebody and then sort of figuring out that way whether this is a good fit or getting a demo.
I guess it's just the understanding how enterprise sales happen and then what you need to do as a business to sort of, you know, fit into that.
Ben Dowling (34:26.560)
So yeah.
Omer (34:28.160)
At what point did you, did you start taking this seriously for the enterprise sales?
Ben Dowling (34:32.840)
I think, and I see this a lot with, I guess, developers on Twitter with similar products.
Right.
And they say, and this was exactly my attitude at the time, right?
Like, oh, you know, I've got this really demanding enterprise customer that wants me to jump through all these hoops and just like, hey, the $50 plans on the website, that's all you need to know, right?
What else could you want?
You're just kind of sort of wasting my time.
I think what I didn't appreciate, and people in similar situations that appreciate your enterprise are more than happy to pay for all this additional stuff, right.
And they have the expectation that they will pay.
And so I think going into it, like, I figured that out slowly over time after a bunch of these calls.
Right.
You know, I'd say, well, you know, okay, yeah, you're asking For a bunch of stuff.
I can probably figure it out, but it's going to be a ton of work.
You know, I'm not sure if we can do this for 50 bucks a month.
Right.
They'd be like, of course not.
Right.
Like.
Like that's not our expectation at all.
We're more than happy to pay lots for you.
Right.
We have this.
We have this big budget for it, and you'd be like, oh, wow, okay, I'd love to go do this work for you and take a bunch more of these calls.
And so I think that is if you're coming from a developer background where you kind of reluctantly pay for software and you think kind of $50 is a lot to pay, which it is, Right.
As a hobbyist developer.
But coming from the enterprise side, if they're like, hey, I've got this huge project that needs something like what you've got, this may help our business generate tens of millions of dollars of additional revenue.
Right.
You know, I probably got a team of five people that are all highly paid spending a month figuring out what the best solution is.
Right.
And so, you know, the kind of the numbers are involved and that the kind of, the whole framing of it is very, very different from selling something to 50 developers.
And so I think that that is, you know, when you're expecting to sell 50 bucks, it seems like a huge headache and a kind of distraction.
But I think understanding that's not the expectation from their side of tool, and you get really useful information on a real problem they're trying to solve.
It's not just like, oh, hey, yeah, I can kind of go do personalization on my blog.
It's understanding what it is that's driving value for big enterprises that have big budgets and real problems to solve and where your product can add real leverage for them.
Omer (36:36.330)
Yeah, I agree.
So the other interesting thing you told me about, that I want to talk about is that even though you'd introduce the paid plans and people were signing up, you'd made the free plan, like, super easy to use.
In fact, probably too easy because people didn't even have to sign up or anything.
They could just start using it, which was great for a developer, but from your point of view, there was no way for you to even communicate with these people or tell them about what was going on or tell them about the paid plans.
So what kind of problems did that create for you when you introduced the paid plans?
Ben Dowling (37:16.500)
Yeah, so that, that was, I mean, and that was initially part of the whole pitch, right.
Of IPM for.
It's like, it's so simple.
You don't even need to sign up.
You don't get any developer tokens, right?
You just kind of hit this API endpoint and you get all the data.
And that was, you know, that was kind of key.
But then later on that caused a bunch of problems.
And so one of the issues was, you know, as we launch paid plans, we had no way to reach out to all the free users and say, hey, by the way, we offer pay plans and then later we offer different services that you could find useful in terms of.
For marketing, we generate all this demand.
We had lots of people that loved offering API that would have been great potential candidates to be customers for other offerings that we had no way to reach out to.
It took us several years before we said, okay, you can now sign up for a free plan.
There wasn't even a way to do that unless you were paying us.
We had no way to capture email and no way for a user to give us an email.
So we kind of missed out on a bunch of early users there.
But I mean, it also caused problems for users, right?
So anybody that was.
If you were on the free plan, when you were just testing things out, there was no way for you to kind of naturally transition over to a paid plan.
Later you'd have to go and make some changes to switch to a paid plan.
And so we had users that were on the free plan that would hit a limit and things would break for them, right?
So once you hit the limit, we send an error code.
And there seemed to be lots of developers that, you know, even big organizations that were just sort of copying pasting our answers from Stack Overflow, pasting it on really highly trafficked websites and hitting the rate limit.
And there were some big websites that were throwing errors because they were calling our API and hitting errors.
And we wanted to help them.
We want to try to reach out to them and say, hey, love that you're using your API, but you're only getting geolocation information for the first thousand users a day.
And then you're kind of breaking your website, right?
You should really come sign up for a paid plan.
And then everything would work really nicely.
We had no one to contact.
And so, you know, the very early days, I spent a bunch of time, you know, trying to find engineers, all these sort of big websites on Twitter and reach out to them or, you know, try and find contact details in whois.
And a lot of the time they would say, oh, sorry, you know, that was Some junior developer, when I finally track someone down, oh, sorry.
Some junior developer copied and pasted this code of Stack Overflow.
We're going to delete.
Turned out that it wasn't a good use of my time.
I was spending all this time telling the website was broken and they would just say, oh, thanks for the heads up, I'm going to go delete the code.
And so yeah, having the email address capture not only helped us be able to reach out to users and say, hey, we've launched this great new feature also as a way to kind of get in touch with users like, hey, you're approaching your rate limits, you might want to make some changes.
And also on education pieces, right, like, hey, you've got this set up.
Are you, are you aware of our rate limits?
Right.
Are you aware that this kind of developed for smaller websites on this free plan?
Right.
If you're kind of calling this on a high traffic website, here are the pay plans and you know, here's I kind of get in touch with us if you need any help.
Omer (40:16.420)
When did you actually start asking people to sign up for a free plan?
Ben Dowling (40:21.060)
Probably some point in 2018, I will say it's still optional.
Right.
So the very first time that we, we did it, we launched it and it was an option.
You can still call it our unauthenticated API.
It is somewhat deprecated, it's sort of feature frozen.
We keep iterating and adding to the free API.
The unauthenticated one still exists.
We still think it's really important to support all the users that we've had all this time.
But yeah, the recommended plan of action now is you sign up for your API token, you can get started on the free plan and then we'll keep you informed on as you approach any limits or anything like that.
Omer (40:56.850)
So at least for the first four years of the product, people could come and use it and there was no way for you to communicate with them.
Ben Dowling (41:05.170)
Yeah, no way at all.
Which was tough.
Omer (41:07.330)
Yeah, pretty challenging.
All right.
And then sort of beyond what we talked about, sort of Stack Overflow, having a free API, SEO, what have you been doing in the last two, three years to keep growing the business?
Are those still the main channels or as your sort of marketing evolved and you're doing more outbound sales or something like that?
Ben Dowling (41:29.910)
Yeah, we tried a bunch of different stuff.
So we had the very early success with Stack Overflow.
Yes, having the free API obviously helped.
Right.
And so that got a lot of developers just found it really easy to use and would tell their friends and they would even go and answer Stack Overflow questions or they would create sort of libraries and stuff.
So that definitely helped.
Once sort of Stack Overflow had sort of plateaued in the fact that we kind of answered all the questions, right, we were kind of the top answer for all those results.
We were for SEO, we were there for all the IP address terms.
We kind of went into a little bit of a haphazard mode of, okay, how do we find the next Stack Overflow?
Right.
And try finding some questions on Quora, Trying various different things.
And we sort of never found another Stack Overflow.
Right.
And I think the what we went through a period just being haphazard.
I early on tried an outbound sales guy to just send some emails and see if that would help with business.
Didn't really help.
Try doing some content marketing.
You hired an agency to just write some content, but all of these things without any kind of strategy or plan, right?
It's just like, oh, hey, writing on Stack Overflow worked really well.
Why don't we just write some content?
Why don't we just email some people and see if they might want to buy without sort of saying, okay, what is it we should be writing?
Who is it we should be reaching out to?
And so we tried a bunch of different things.
None of it didn't work really, but none of it sort of had any sort of inflection point, right?
It's kind of like, well, this sort of does something, but isn't the same effect of whether we write on Stack Overflow or not.
And so, yeah, we tried a bunch of different things.
And in aggregate, a bunch of stuff has worked.
There's a bunch of things we said, hey, this doesn't work well enough to bother investing in it.
A bunch of things that we've done done that have been good at bringing customers and that I think are good things to do.
So one thing was creating a bunch of SDKs, a bunch of programming libraries.
And that kind of really aligns with our goal of making it really easy to get at this data, making it really easy to use, but also means that it's really easy for developers to find us.
They may not be on Stack Overflow, they may not be googling for IP addresses, but if they're in their library, whatever program language they're using, they may just search for IP geolocation library or whatever it might be and you will be there and hopefully the easiest way for them to get set up.
And so it makes it easier for the developer it also is another channel for us to get in front of the developer.
One interesting thing that has been working really well lately for us is a bunch of data marketplaces.
So we've sort of evolved from just having everyone consume our data through the API to selling the data that's behind the API, making that available in various different data marketplaces.
You know, Snowflake have this big data marketplace now.
One thing we've, we've had a lot of success with is optimizing our data for Snowflake.
And so, you know, anybody that's, that's got their own data within Snowflake, they've gotten a bunch of IP addresses.
You know, an API is not a good fit there.
There's no way to kind of core API from Snowflake and they've got, you know, huge big data sets.
We've optimized all our data for, for Snowflake and so they can very easily enrich all the data with our data there.
And that's something that we see as a way to expand in the future as well as, you know, different data marketplaces and making our data really easily accessible from wherever the user wants it.
Omer (44:41.610)
Yeah, love it.
It's a really interesting story and we've talked about some of those sort of mistakes or lessons you learned along the way in terms of maybe paying attention more to enterprise customers sooner or maybe getting people to sign up for the free plan.
But beyond that, is there anything else you wish you'd done differently?
Ben Dowling (45:08.340)
Yeah, I guess the things we covered are the main things.
Right?
I guess I wish I would have spoke to customers sooner or been.
You're kind of open minded about that and that was tricky in retrospect.
Right.
Because I was busy at the time.
But I think you're talking to customers more, making more time for that is always useful because initially, hey, there's a small API for developers.
I'll talk to a couple of customers.
Okay.
There's actually this, a bunch of problems out there that we can kind of help with that they're looking for a solution that doesn't really exist yet or there isn't a good one.
And so I think talking to customers more, but I think being aware that talking to customers is important, that ties into the email thing, right.
Initially it's like, hey, we don't want to talk to customers, we don't want to email them, they don't want to get emails from us.
And kind of setting that up.
So it's just much easier to kind of have two way communication actually became a problem later as well when we kind of launched some new products and services and even of those users that we kind of captured emails from, we kind of hadn't set it up where they expected to have a dialogue with us.
So then we're trying to reach out to them and say, hey, we've got this new product or service and they're less receptive to that message than they would have been if we're trying to open up that dialogue sooner.
Omer (46:17.430)
Yeah, that's some great insights.
And like they say everyone's a genius in hindsight, but.
But I think it's always good to reflect on these things.
So we should wrap up going to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready to go?
Ben Dowling (46:35.890)
Sure.
Omer (46:36.130)
Okay.
Ben Dowling (46:36.610)
Yep.
Omer (46:37.130)
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Ben Dowling (46:40.010)
Done is better than perfect.
Omer (46:42.010)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Ben Dowling (46:44.970)
How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis is a really successful British entrepreneur, or was before he passed away not too long ago.
But it's really great, sort of unvarnished, raw advice.
Kind of feels like kind of taking you on his wing and giving you his private advice that, you know, it's kind of advice that you don't really read elsewhere.
So it's a really great book.
Omer (47:03.460)
Yeah, I love that book and I think the title is a bit misleading.
Like people might think it's one of those books.
Okay, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?
Ben Dowling (47:14.180)
Resourcefulness.
Omer (47:15.540)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Ben Dowling (47:19.320)
Yeah, well I mean as a habit would be to do lists.
I kind of write them down on post it notes all over the place.
But as a tool, I love using workflowy.com for that.
I can just tap down notes on my mobile or a laptop and just kind of sync all my to do list together.
Omer (47:33.000)
Yeah, I'm a workflow user as well, so I love that.
Awesome.
What's the new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?
Ben Dowling (47:39.560)
I mean I am all in on IP info so I think if I had any more time I'd probably dedicate some more.
I'd split it between more time on IP info and more time with my family.
So yeah, I don't have beyond that.
I haven't got any kind of crazy ideas ideas up my sleeve.
Omer (47:51.860)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Ben Dowling (47:54.740)
I make a really, really Great pasta bake.
I don't do much cooking.
My wife is an amazing cook.
But I have perfected a pasta bake, and so I'm really good at that.
Omer (48:04.500)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Ben Dowling (48:08.180)
Hiking.
So I absolutely love hiking.
I spend a lot of my time sat at my desk, hunched over my computer.
And at the weekends, I love to get outside, get some fresh air, spend some quality time with the family, and go on a really great hike.
Omer (48:19.810)
And that's not a surprise for me, because when I was researching for this interview, nearly every photo I found of you was hiking somewhere.
Yeah.
Ben Dowling (48:28.610)
Yeah.
I mean, the only pictures you kind of take me out hiking or hunched over a laptop.
So I think the hiking ones are better shots.
Awesome.
Omer (48:36.930)
All right, so if people want to find out more about IP Info, they can go to IP Info IO and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Ben Dowling (48:46.880)
Our Twitter account is ipinfoio on Twitter.
My personal Twitter account is Codeaholic.
C O D E R H O L I C. And you're more than happy for people to email me as well.
I'm Benipinfo I.O.
Omer (48:57.680)
awesome.
Ben, thank you so much for joining me, and I wish you and the team the best of success and enjoy this lovely weather that we're having in the Seattle area at the moment, for sure.
Ben Dowling (49:10.400)
Yeah.
Awesome.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it.
Omer (49:12.200)
All the best.
Cheers.
