How SaaS Content Marketing Built a 7-Figure Developer Tool

Omer (00:09.760)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host Omer Khan and this is a 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 Lucas Fittle, the founder of Ptanalyze, a tool that offers automatic insights for developers to optimize their databases and improve performance.
In 2012, after years of painstakingly manual database tuning, Lucas decided to scratch his own itch and build a tool to make database optimization easier for developers everywhere.
But this isn't one of those overnight success stories where a founder quits their job, raises money and is off to the races with a high growth startup.
Instead, for the first two years, this was just a side project that Lucas tinkered with on evenings and weekends while he continued working a full time job to pay the bills.
In 2014 he added a way to accept payments, which was the first step in transitioning to a real business.
But traction was slow and it took another year for Lucas to get the first 10 customers.
Lucas continued working part time on his business for several more years until 2019 when he finally quit his job and went full time on his business.
Today, PG Analyze is a multiple 7 figure ARR SaaS company fully bootstrapped with over 500 customers including industry leaders like Atlassian and DoorDash.
In this episode you'll learn Lucas's unconventional path to building a multiple seven figure SaaS business, proving there's a multitude of ways to build a company on your own terms.
How Lucas developed his ideal customer profile which enabled him to build a better product, differentiate his offering and create a winning content marketing strategy.
We talk about what Lucas did when a well funded and much bigger company launched a competing product and he knew that there was no way he could possibly compete in a features arms race.
And finally, we talk about how Lucas took on enterprise sales without any prior experience and the valuable lessons he's learned about sales and negotiation.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Lukas, welcome to the show.

Lukas Fittl (02:18.990)
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (02:20.670)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Lukas Fittl (02:25.810)
Yeah, I don't know if it necessarily inspires or motivates me, but it's something I think about every now and then, which is there's a saying of do things that don't scale.
And I think what's interesting is at this stage in our business we're at the point where we do need to do things that do scale and so doing things that don't scale.
I think there's an interesting question to when you shouldn't follow that quote or that advice, so to say.

Omer (02:47.170)
Okay, that's a good way to think about it.
So tell us about pganalyze.
What does the product do, who's it for, and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Lukas Fittl (02:55.860)
Sure.
So pgaanalyst is a product for optimizing Postgres databases.
So it's very specific.
So Postgres database, for those of you not familiar, is an open source database system that's very popular these days.
Right.
So if you are running a startup, very good chance that there's a postgres database backing your actual main data store.
So to say you might be using Aurora, you might be using Google's Ally DB service or Azure's database services, but ultimately that's still oftentimes postgres these days.
And so what PGAnalyst does is PGAnalyst helps people make their Postgres databases faster by providing better introspection into what's going on in the database and also providing tuning recommendations on how to for example, add missing indexes or change configuration settings.
And so ultimately our main customer in a company are data platform teams or sometimes backend engineers that struggle with essentially tuning Postgres databases or making sure databases perform well.
If they don't perform well, usually the way you would see this is a slow web request, for example.
So like applications that are struggling, that are slow, people pay way too much money for database hardware.
And so we can help essentially reduce costs and improve performance.

Omer (04:01.330)
Let's talk a little bit about, I mean this is not your first startup.
You have founded or co founded a few other companies previously.
Some did better than others, some didn't work out at all.
So just give us a little bit of an overview of your background there.

Lukas Fittl (04:19.410)
Sure, yeah.
So the quick tour is now it's what, 2023?
So I started doing these things back in 2007.
I'm an engineer by trade, so the very first thing is I didn't actually work for a startup.
I worked for a web hosting company at the very start of my career.
But then after that I co founded a startup called Soupio which was a kind of blogging networks or B2C type business that worked pretty well in terms of getting attention.
It just wasn't a good business because how do you make money with blogging networks?
So ultimately fun experience, but not a big business.
After Soupao, kind of just focusing on the main startups here.
So I tried starting something in the web hosting space where I essentially tried to improve since that was my first job.
So I was like, hey, I know a little bit about that.
And so I tried to essentially sell better hosting software to hosting companies that failed spectacularly in the sense that we didn't get a single paying customer, which was very frustrating.
So I learned a few things there.
Then as I was trying to learn better how to start companies, I got myself involved in some of what the lean startup movement at the time was trying to do.
Being iterative, trying out different ways, experimenting, worked with Ash Moria who wrote some of the books in the Lean space to create the online version of Lean Canvas, as well as a product called Usercycle.
Those were actually quite, quite fine businesses.
They had kind of strong content component essentially.
And then after that I kind of went on to join Product Hunt as an early engineer.
Product Hunt still exists today.
If you're launching your product, ProductHunt is a good choice.
And so essentially was there more on the engineering side and then kind of continued the journey, joined a company called Citus Data in the postgres space and then spent a little time at Microsoft and then left Microsoft two and a half years ago.

Omer (06:08.240)
So PG Analyze, you founded the business in 2012 and it was just something you were working on evenings and weekends for many years.
So I think you went full time, what, a few years ago on the business?

Lukas Fittl (06:22.960)
That's right, yeah.
So I think for the first again math but like seven years or so.
For the first seven years of the business I was part time.
I actually had hired people already to work full time on it before I myself went full time on it and kind of went full to minute two and a half years ago, building out a team, building out additional functionality and I think motivation there was to bootstrap the company ultimately.
So I did not want to raise funding very intentionally and so the way to do that was to be able to work on something else whilst I was working, for example, for Citus Data.
And thank you also to the founders of Citus who were very graciously accepting me working on my own business whilst working with them.

Omer (07:01.700)
Why did you decide that you wanted to bootstrap?
You didn't want to raise money?
Many founders I talked to for them, maybe it's a natural decision.
But you're based down in San Francisco where it's almost the default is going out and raising money.
So why did you decide you weren't going to take that path?

Lukas Fittl (07:22.820)
I think some of that comes I'm from Europe, originally from Austria.
And if you raise money in Austria, I mean, I don't want to talk badly about anyone necessarily, but there's just not many good investors.
You don't find many experienced investors, essentially.
And so I think I actually had raised money in the past for one of my own projects that didn't work out.
And so I was very much aware of what happens when you have disappointed angel investors, so to say I then was part of funded startups later on.
So definitely I saw the benefit of funding.
But I think for me, really, the main motivation is do I want to see that pressure to scale up the business in a way that's not really helping the business?
Do I want to have hundreds of employees just because that's what you signed up for to your investors, and then you're kind of forced to make decisions that don't really benefit the customer or benefit what you want to work on.
And so I've realized for myself that it's much more interesting to work with a small team of people on interesting problems, make good revenue, but don't force yourself to have an exit or an IPO in a certain time frame.

Omer (08:27.470)
Yeah, I talked to another founder recently who sold his first company to Google and then realized that he had this almost void, this thing that he'd been working on for years kind of just disappeared.
And he decided that the next startup that he was going to work on, he wanted to be able to do that for over a decade and he didn't want to just do aim for the quick sell.
And, and I think it's just a really an interesting perspective because we always assume, yeah, it's always about raise money, go, exit, whatever.
But there's also this component, I think, which is becoming more and more people are talking about in terms of just meaningful work and doing something that you just feel like, whether you feel like you're making a difference or just something that just gets you out of bed every day.
And there are different paths to, you know, how you go and build those companies and there's no one right way of doing that.
So give us a sense of what's the size of the business today.

Lukas Fittl (09:24.920)
So in terms of customers, we're now at a point where we're over 500 customers.
These are business customers, some of them smaller, like $5,000 annual revenue for those customers.
Some of them are larger, like more than 100k in revenue for us.
And we do in total have multiple millions of dollars in revenue.
So.
So we are generally doing quite okay we have a team of currently 8 people planning to grow to 10 probably by the end of the year.
And so generally speaking, we're just stacking the bricks every year.
We're just growing our business, making sure that we don't, of course, lose customers in a subscription model.
But generally speaking, we just have a steady stream of new people coming in, subscribing to the product.

Omer (10:06.110)
So let's talk about where the idea came from.
Like, so going Back to like 2011, 2012, how did you come up with the idea and what did you do to kind of get started?

Lukas Fittl (10:20.200)
Yeah, so the motivation for it really was I was essentially solving my own problems.
So the very first company I co founded, Supio, was actually using Postgres.
And So back in 2007, before PGA analyze, I was essentially struggling to optimize our own database.
And so I had this friend of mine who was good at database optimization.
And so essentially I was learning from him how to do this stuff.
And what I realized over the years that followed is that there was just no good way to do this without having a skilled human next to you who knows how to optimize these postgres databases.
And so the motivation back in 2012 really was not even to replace that person, but just to give them better tools, because their tools were really bad.
It was just scripts and running individual SQL queries.
They just had a lot of tedious work the they were doing.
And they weren't really adding value when doing this tedious work.
Right.
They were just trying to get the data to then interpret, how to optimize the database.
And so really the start in 2012 was just to get that initial set of data in a better way, just make it easier to see which part of the database is slow, why is it slow?
And then to have somebody who actually knows how to interpret it have better tooling.

Omer (11:27.400)
Okay, so you have the pain yourself.
How did you start with the idea?
Was this something you initially just said, I need to build something for myself to make my life easier, or was this, oh, I've got this pain.
There must be a bunch of other people out there.
Maybe there's a business idea here.

Lukas Fittl (11:47.240)
So for the first, I would say two years between 2012 and 2014, it was mainly, let's just make something that makes this better.
So I don't think there were any way to purchase a product at the time.
I remember implementing the, the credit card billing form at some point in 2014, I think.
So at that point you could actually pay for it.
But before it was literally just solving our own problems essentially.
And of the people that we knew that were using Postgres databases, okay, so

Omer (12:15.690)
2014 people can actually pay for it.
How long did it take you to get your first 10 customers?
And was it, was it kind of fairly organic or were you spending time marketing the product?
I mean, you've got this full time job, you're building this thing and trying to maintain it.
How much effort were you putting into getting the word out about it as well?

Lukas Fittl (12:40.810)
Yeah, I think definitely not enough.
I would say in hindsight, right.
I could have been more proactive about marketing at that time, but I wasn't.
I think at the time it was more like build it and they will come.
Which doesn't really work that way.
You do have to tell people that you exist.
And so I think there was some inbound, but that was really mainly out of not necessarily people I knew directly, but people that the people I knew knew.
So there was some level of basic word of mouth just from being in the tech industry and people saying, hey, you have Postgres problems, go take a look at this product.
But I think it definitely took a while.
So I don't, I can't recount exactly when we got to the first 10, but it must have been over a year, I imagine, until we put the payment form into actually having 10 customers.
One thing that I found interesting though is that I didn't know these customers.
So I think one thing that, not directly, I mean, I knew them indirectly probably, but there weren't people that I told, hey, please sign up for this.
And I have this precious business that I spent so much time on.
Please be nice to me.
I didn't do that.
I was just like, here's something that's useful.
If you find it useful yourself, then go ahead and use it.
And.
And I think that has been a very good starting point because essentially I listened to what people were saying, but it was always a little bit removed from people that I knew directly.
And I think that helped me kind of cultivate also a culture of later on, as we're talking about hundreds of customers really being more about what's the pattern we're seeing here?
What do these people actually want versus what them just being nice to me because they wanted to support my business.

Omer (14:18.270)
So how were they finding the product?
Was it just SEO?

Lukas Fittl (14:23.950)
So I remember we did some talks at user groups.
Postgres is an open source project.
And so I think, I recall I had a friend of mine who I was starting things with back then who's no longer with the company, but back then he was, I think, doing some talks at user groups.
And so I think some of that was inbound from that.
And he was also doing some consulting in the space.
So I think it might have been consulting clients or people that he knew through that as well.

Omer (14:50.330)
So 2014, people can pay for it.
You said about a year to get the first 10 customers.
How long did it take you to get to the first million in ARR?

Lukas Fittl (15:01.530)
That was a couple more years.
So I think that must have been somewhere around 2019 or 2020.
So definitely a longer time period.
And I think the big difference there, I mean, there were a couple of pricing decisions along the way, but the big difference really is starting up more of a marketing and sales engine around, I would say 2017, roughly.
And then that just accumulating over time.
That's the part where there was more proactive effort, so to say.

Omer (15:27.980)
Yeah, okay, so let's talk about that.
What did you do differently in those four or five years to improve your marketing?
Get the word out more.
It's great that people were stumbling upon the product and we're hearing about it at a talk or whatever, but that's hard to scale and grow that to hundreds of customers.
So what was the main growth channel in those years that helped you get to that first million?

Lukas Fittl (16:00.330)
Right, and I think it's essentially the same in principle and what's still true today for us, which is ultimately focused on content.
Right.
So the database space is very technical, essentially.
It's very technical to the point that you want to have deep technical content.
So if you do very high level content, like fluff pieces, they don't really work in that space because people will see through it, especially when they are actually the database administrators or the people, data platform engineers, as you would call them these days.
I think what I always, because I'm an engineer myself, I always put an emphasis on quality.
So we always were trying to say if we produce content, it actually needs to be good content.
And Manuel and our team who's working on marketing, I think was always a bit frustrated with me because I was essentially saying, no, this is not good enough.
It needs to be actual good technical content.
And so what we started doing around that time, like 2017, was really putting out more blog posts initially mainly written by myself because I felt somebody needs to do this.
And I already had other people working on engineering at the time.
But I myself wasn't.
Essentially I was the main person who could write and wants to write for marketing.
Purposes.
And so starting out with that, that I think then quickly turned also to growing a newsletter audience.
So I think if you produce content, the question is how do you make it something that actually sticks, right?
So if you have a great content piece, and for us, for example, if it's on hacker news like newsycommentation.com that's a good place for us to be in terms of getting traffic from engineers.
But then if those people don't stick around, it doesn't help as much, right?
I mean, we build our brand, but we don't actually get people that then try out the product.
And so I think it's been really important for us to also think about how do we convert to newsletter signups where we can then say, hey, here's a product and we can kind of remind people that product exists.
And that's really been, I think, the continuation of that marketing strategy.

Omer (17:52.640)
So I just googled PostgreSQL and basically, you know, first few pages all you find is what is postgres, right?
How to get started.
And I guess that's the type of content you're talking about.
That doesn't really help you a ton with your target audience.
So can you give me an example of the type of content you were creating that you feel was more successful?

Lukas Fittl (18:20.510)
I mean, I'll give you one of the most successful pieces of content that still is successful today, which is postgres has.
I'll go technical for a moment.
So postgres has different index types, right?
So there's B tree index, there's gin index, there's Gistindex, Brin, blah, blah.
So there's these different index types and they're very specific to postgres.
And so that means of course if you search for is a good term in that sense because it's specific.
And so one of the things that I wrote a couple of years ago is a blog post on postgres gin indexes.
Gin is again one index type stands for generalized inverted something tree, I think.
And so not gin, the thing that you drink, but the gin that you store data in.
And so I wrote a blog post which I still think is a good blog post, which just walked through the trade offs and when you should use it, when you shouldn't use it.
And I think I referenced GitLab, had some public content around what didn't work for them and so I referenced that.
And so that post is still performing well today from an SEO perspective.
If you search for postgres gen index, you'll find Your post, somewhere on the first page, it's something that people.
I actually last week got somebody to say, hey, there's this issue in this post.
You're saying this, but actually you probably mean this.
And I was like, oh yeah, the person's right.
And so it has become this reference piece.
And so I think good content, like really good technical content for me are things that people want to reference where you can become the authoritative source or at least in this case postgres documentation is the authoritative source.
But I think we can accompany that and give you things that the main actual postgres documentation does not have.
And so that's for me the good kind of content.
But it's also really hard to write, which makes it challenging sometimes.

Omer (19:51.650)
Yeah.
So how long did it take before you felt that you were starting to see results from the content marketing efforts?

Lukas Fittl (20:02.060)
Definitely multiple months, if not years.
So I think that's part of the problem, why it's not a great strategy if you're trying to get revenue fast.
So again, kind of comparing this with the funded strategy, right?
If you just like you've got a bunch of VC funding and you got to get to big revenue fast, it's not a great strategy because it just takes time.
So I think always do something else as well if you're trying to get revenue fast.
But I would say at the very least multiple months to actually get good content that actually is successful and then probably multiple years to the point that we can say our organic search traffic, for example, is significant and we know how to create that and how to create the content that supports that.

Omer (20:42.120)
And is the experience mostly product led?
Do people read a blog post and then some of them go on and sign up, try the product and then become customers?
Or are you having to.
Well actually I know you're doing it today, but back then getting to that first million, were you also having to go and basically do demos and sell the product?
What was that general kind of that sales flow look like?

Lukas Fittl (21:10.460)
So I think in our funnel it really splits up.
So there's some people that are self serve, they just want to.
There are people with buying authority essentially that have a credit card they can use and they have a problem that let's say their team needs solving.
So maybe it's the infrastructure team lead.
And so they don't necessarily need to see a demo, they are more interested in just getting the job done.
So to say they just know they have a problem, they want to solve it, they think PGA analyze can help, so they sign up SWIPE a credit card and it's done.
There's the other class of customers who are, I would say more enterprise y.
At least that's how I think about them in my mind.
Right.
There's something about either their company structure or the way that what they're used to that they want to buy in a different way.
They're used to talking to an enterprise sales team.
They're used to their procurement process being complicated.
They're used to things like security questionnaires.
And that type of customer has always existed for us, but it's definitely gotten worse in a sense that we have more of these customers that need that level of attention.
And so I think sometimes these are the customers that make you more money, but not always.
I think one of our biggest customer today, I think came from a swipe a credit card type experience initially.
So they just signed up for, I think at the time, $99 a month type plan.
And today they're more than 100k a year type customer.
And this was just by essentially expansion revenue.
They had a small use case and then they had a lot more database servers, which is our per seat, essentially pricing.
And so it's just growing from initial experience.
Somebody had success internally, somebody became a champion for the product inside the company.
And then that's how it grew to a much bigger contract for us.

Omer (22:44.100)
Did you know who your ICP was at the time?
Because it strikes me that postgres is like a very accessible database.
Like, you know, I could spin up an app this afternoon and have a Postgres database up and running, but probably I would never require PG analyze unless I was doing so well that, you know, I needed to worry about, you know, scale and performance and all these kinds of things in my database.
So I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there using, you know, postgres who aren't your ideal customers.
So how did you, how did you figure who.
Who that was?
Like, when you were doing your marketing, was there a certain type of person you were, you were thinking of, you were targeting?
And if not, like, what was the process you went through to figure out who that ICP was?

Lukas Fittl (23:37.840)
I think it's funny when you say icp, for me, there is icp.
We're trying to measure this and we're trying to say, oh, this prospect is an ICP and it just doesn't work.
So it's really funny because we keep trying to make this work well so that we identify people in a funnel in an automated fashion.
And it's really Hard.
But what does work well is I can tell you what's a good customer.
So in a sense, I do know the icp.
It's just funny that measuring it is hard sometimes.
In a sense.
Of course, this has shifted over time, but I think of customers.
So Atlassian, for example, is one of the public case studies we have.
And so they have a very common setup which a lot of bigger companies that we work with have, which is they have a central team that's supporting other teams.
So in their case, there's an infrastructure team.
And I think, well, I don't actually know right now if they have a data team as well, but oftentimes in other companies they have an infrastructure team and they have a data platform data engineering team as well.
And so these central teams then support other application teams.
And so I think one of the most important insights for us was understanding that structure.
So when we think about which customer.
For us, customers that have more database servers are more valuable because they pay us more money because we charge per database server.
And so what setup?
Which kind of customers have 100 database servers?
Now, it turns out if you're just, you know, a startup starting out and you have, as you mentioned, your Postgres database, I mean, at the worst case, you have one badly performing Postgres database, but you don't have 100 badly performing Postgres databases.
And so in that sense, right, Like, I think what we've seen over the years is that the teams like the companies where it's really beneficial are these kind of setups where there are these central teams.
They try to kind of provide something to the other teams.
And the motivation for them is ultimately they don't scale.

Omer (25:24.220)
Right.

Lukas Fittl (25:24.460)
Like they're five people, but there's 100 plus application engineers.
And so what happens right now, if we're not in the picture, then these application engineers come to them with questions like, please optimize my query.
What's the database doing?
It's slow.
Again, all these things that are kind of centralized in this team that doesn't really scale.
Even if they are experts at what they're doing, it still doesn't scale.
And so that's really what we found over the years by listening to our customers, by talking with them, by seeing who is buying, who's the person writing the check.
And it usually wasn't the infrastructure side or data engineering side.
That's kind of how we evolved that ideal customer profile to today, I would say the best customer we can get are those teams where there's multiple Application teams that use postgres as the main record store and then there's a data platform team that supports them.
And that data platform team needs a better solution.

Omer (26:14.770)
And is most of those leads still coming through content marketing and inbound?

Lukas Fittl (26:22.780)
That's right, yeah.
I mean, some word of mouth as well these days.
So we definitely get people that are like, hey, I used you guys at a previous company, now I'm at a new company, so I still like the product, so can we use it here?
But yeah, it's definitely all inbound.
So today we don't do much outbound.
It's one of the things we're looking to change now to essentially scale up revenue further.
But otherwise it's all inbound from content.

Omer (26:44.220)
And then what do you do in terms of nurturing potential leads?
I mean, as we know, 90% plus of the traffic coming to your site isn't going to be ready to buy.
So what do you do to capture those leads and nurture them?

Lukas Fittl (27:03.280)
So I think, I mean in the technical sense or in the practical sense, like what are we doing is we have a Lifecycle email campaign.
So let's say.
So a couple of things actually.
So you can sign up for a newsletter, that's one way of getting into the system, so to say.
But generally speaking, where we can follow the trail most of the cases do is we have ebooks that we publish which are essentially like 20 page PDFs and we put them behind a gated content page.
So it's like, hey, you want to download this, give us your email address, tell us size of your company, how many database servers you have, stuff like that, ICP type questions.
And so once they give us an email address, we try not to be obnoxious, but we do try to give them a little bit of a hey, here is why this product might be relevant to you.
And so we're starting, we've revised this over time, but I think the current iteration we have is we essentially start by providing we don't focus on the product, but we focus on what we think their problem would be.
So in our case, slow SQL queries.
So oftentimes queries are slow.
And so we kind of walked them through how I as the expert, for example, putting my postgres hat on how I would optimize a query and just providing value essentially through a lifecycle email.
So day one you get kind of a quick intro how I optimize SQL queries.
Day two you kind of get, I think an extension of that.
But then we kind of Weave in the product.
Day three.
Well, I think it's actually after week, if I recall correctly.
So it's like one day, three, day seven day.
And on the seventh day we were like, well, as we talked about last week, here's our general process, here's some more resources.
And if you want to try pgmyze, here's a link to try it out or schedule a demo to kind of set it up.
That's kind of the basic lifecycle campaign to try to get people's attention.
The other thing we do, which I think helps to keep things alive over time, because the problem is, of course a lot of people drop out.
They will read those emails or not read them, but essentially that happens once when they go into the system as a prospect, but then they never hear from us again.
Except our monthly newsletter.
Now what we do in these monthly newsletters is besides product updates, we have started doing webinars about two years ago, I would say.
And these webinars have been really successful.
We had multiple hundred people, I think 400 people show up live for webinar, which is very unusual.
I've usually seen 50 people show up live.
You'll get a couple hundred registrations, but actually people showing up.
It's very unusual to get multiple hundreds of people.
And so that was a really good signal because our webinars, they were again providing value first and then selling second.
So we were saying, here is how to solve this problem in postgres.
We can tell you all the background and how it works.
And also we can make it easier with pganlyze, but you don't have to use the product.
This is even valuable to listen to if you don't use the product.

Omer (29:48.350)
Yeah.
I think in your market and your target customers, I think that's so important, particularly with developers.
I think they can smell marketing type stuff a mile away.
And so I think it's so much more important to be leading with value and educational content and so on.
And I love this thing about we'll help you solve the problem.
And you can use our product, if you like, to make your life easier.
But if not, here's still things that you can do to make your life easier.
That's a good way to think about it.
You also run a YouTube channel now.
Is that something you started recently?

Lukas Fittl (30:30.470)
We did, yeah.
So one of the challenges with content strategies is how do you produce the content?
Right.
And so like one and a half years ago we started.
So ultimately we're trying to figure out how do we scale this without relying on Lukas to sit down and write content.
Because turns out the busier you get as a founder, the less time you have for writing content.
And so especially the activation energy is high.
Actually, taking the time to start writing was a struggle and is still a struggle for me today.
And so what we started as an experiment 1 1/2 years ago, which I think is working actually pretty well, is we started a weekly video series on YouTube called Five Minutes of Postgres.
And the idea is literally just to say, hey, Lucas has things that are of interest to people in the Postgres space.
How do we get Lucas to say things that are interesting is to take a blog post by somebody else in the space and talk about that as a starting point.
So, hey, this person wrote about that.
And also I think you should know this other thing that this person didn't include in their post.
And so just using that as a kind of starting point, so making it easier for me to do it.
Right.
I spent, let's say three hours a week on recording those weekly videos.
But I can always find a starting point so I can just sit down and do it.
Versus if it's a fresh piece of content, I would have to really struggle to even know where to start, what to write about all that stuff.
So it's kind of a hack for us to get more content.

Omer (31:49.840)
Isn't that amazing?
You just said we do these five minute videos and I spend three hours a week on those videos.

Lukas Fittl (31:58.080)
Well, the hard part is the research.
So I still try to give you good content.
Right.
The hard part is figuring out if there's 20 pieces of blog posts, which one is the one worth about talking.
Talking about.

Omer (32:07.480)
Yeah.
And I think often people on the other side of that, people who are consuming that content, forget that.
Right.
It's like, oh, five, five minutes.
They probably just sat down and just recorded it and spent a little bit more time editing and publishing and stuff.
But if you want to do really good stuff, you have to research.
You have to do something which is going to be different.
Something that's going to give people some new insight or some new takeaway, not something that they've heard a hundred times.
Because those types of content videos you could probably create in five or 10 minutes.
But do they add much value?
Probably not.

Lukas Fittl (32:45.780)
I mean, it's still interesting, right?
Some people just get on the stream and talk for an hour.
And I think people like that too.
It's just I found myself being more interested in shorter content that's edited.
I do heavy editing of that content and I tried to get a good transcript because I feel like that ultimately values our listeners time and makes it more broadly interesting to more people.

Omer (33:04.950)
So how is that working for you?
Is that still kind of an experiment or are you seeing results from that in terms of generating leads and customers?

Lukas Fittl (33:16.390)
So I think it's definitely generating results as well.
So for reference, today that channel has 2,100 subscribers.
So not that many for YouTube channel, but it's a very targeted channel.
Right?
So think of this as, I mean there's channels with millions of subscribers, but for us having 2,000 people that really care about Postgres content and listen to us each week and probably talk about it to their colleagues, that's really valuable.
And so I think anecdotally the reason I think it's worth doing and investing the time also from our side is because I have conversations and people are like, oh yeah, well thank you for these five minute videos.
I find them really educational.
And this is not just one.
I had multiple of those cases over the last months essentially.
And so I know that it's a way for people to remember us because that's part of the struggle is these people use Postgres every day, but they don't think about PG Analyze every day.
So how do we get pgans into the conversation of their interest in Postgres to also be something that they think about when the time is right?

Omer (34:12.600)
When I was researching for this interview, the first thing I started asking myself was, you're building, you're offering people a tool that they can use for their Postgres databases that are on AWS or Google Cloud or Azure or wherever.
And surely there must be these types of tools like Amazon's already building this or Microsoft.
So what is out there?
What is available for people through some of these bigger companies?
And how did you sort of figure out the best way to position pganalyze as something that made sense for people despite maybe other tools being available for them to use.

Lukas Fittl (35:03.310)
So I think it's definitely true.
Right.
Like very specific examples.
So on Amazon AWS you have RDS performance insights, which is like the.
Built in here are the queries that are running on your database type view, right?
So Google has something similar, Azure has something similar.
Now I think in a sense it comes to looking at this also through a what will these companies be able to do and what can't they do?
And one of the things that they struggle with, like the cloud providers struggle with, is doing a lot of unique user experience around debugging type tools.
Right?
Because that doesn't really fit their pattern.
Right.
So I think they do services and say sometimes like AWS for example, has DevOps Guru, which is like their recommendation service, but it's very restricted in terms of the UI that it's able to provide.
And so one of the things that I think we've from a values how do we build the product perspective, we've always emphasized good user experience, like we have a designer on our team.
And I always felt that it's important to make things good to understand, not just kind of provide a feature.
And so I think that's in a sense a very like that has longevity because it's very unlikely that aws would do 180 degree turn and suddenly actually ship good user experience in their console.
I mean it's not bad, but it's not really good.
It's not the kind of thing that helps you when you're debugging.
And so I think in a sense that means that the people that use it get a better experience than they could get otherwise, even if it's more basic, essentially.
And I think from a very practical perspective, of course it's a question of what we emphasize.
One of the things we did, I think must have been like two years ago we started publishing competitor comparison pages on our website.
So we said, hey, if you are using RDS Performance Insights, which in a sense is a competitor and it's built in, so it's free, so it's the worst kind of competitor.
We just said, well, here are the features that they have and here are the features that we have.
And if people ask me, I say, hey, this is biased, we published this.
Of course you should do your own research.
But here are the things you should be looking at.
They don't do execution plans, they don't do index recommendations.
Here are all the things that they don't do.
And that works pretty well.
People are citing those features that we reference.
They see that as the reason why they don't think it's efficient, why they don't think it's a good starting point.
But then they really struggle with solving the problems end to end with those built in solutions.

Omer (37:19.980)
Okay, good.
Let's also talk about competitors beyond those platforms we just mentioned.
Can we talk about Datadog?
I think that was a good example of so here's a company here that is funded.
I mean they've raised I think like 100, 150 million or something.

Lukas Fittl (37:40.550)
I mean they're public now, right?

Omer (37:41.750)
So yeah, so tell us the story about what happened there when you woke up one day and discovered what Datadog was doing?

Lukas Fittl (37:51.830)
Sure, yeah.
And I think they do some good work, but they are definitely very aggressive in their marketing machinery and their sales machinery.
And so I think what Datadog did a couple years ago is they launched their database performance monitoring product.
So Datadog has all kinds of products, but.
But amongst other things, they now have a product that more directly competes with what we're doing.
And essentially it provides query statistics at a very high level.
And so I was worried at the time that they launched that.
I mean, I knew a little bit earlier than it was publicly launched, but not in a sense that I could say, well, here is my grand strategy, how to solve it.
And so I think in that very moment I was like, huh, well that sucks.
Will we see our revenue drop?
Will we see, you know, people migrating there and stop using us?
And I think what we've seen since then, since this is, let's say, two years ago, three years ago, is that because we, I think, worked on our positioning and because we worked on features that are maybe not solved and very explicitly not solved what they are doing, we were kind of able to, I think, unwind ourselves out of that kind of perspective.
And also I think the practical implications, right, so sometimes with these competitive comparisons you're just getting obsessed and it doesn't really help you.
So as a founder, I think it's kind of pointless to worry about competitors day long, night long.
But it is I think still good to think about how you position yourself.
And so why would a customer choose you vs them?
And also what data are you seeing?
Are you seeing people bring up Datadog as a comparable?
And so I think what we did, for example, very specifically in our case is we focused more on recommendations.
So we essentially said, well, if we just go into the observability route, observability gets commoditized.
So I think the fact that Datadog is getting into this means, and all these cloud providers have all their built in solutions as well, means that the commodity here is that basic monitoring side of it.
And so how do we become more than that?
And essentially we ourselves treat it as a commodity instead of saying we are so much better in that, even though we are.
But how do we say, well, here are the other things that are distinct things that you need.
And so for us it was really introducing what we call advisors, which are essentially ways that we can tell you what to improve in your database, not just show you the data.

Omer (40:01.990)
And when was that?
When did they come out with the

Lukas Fittl (40:05.990)
I'd have to look at the actual year, but it must have been.
I think it was shortly into the pandemic, so it must have been like 2021 or something.
2020.

Omer (40:13.750)
And did it have much of an impact on your revenue?

Lukas Fittl (40:17.350)
No, interestingly not.
We've not seen anything.
I mean, I've definitely seen it brought up in conversations.
Right.
So definitely people talked about it.
And I kind of know when we would lose a deal from what they do well versus what we do well.
But generally speaking, I do not recall a single instance where we specifically lost somebody's business.
I'm sure we have, but I think it's not to the point where I was like, oh, my God, it's a problem.
And our revenue kept growing since then.
In a sense, it's also good for the customer, right?
I mean, a customer gets a better product because we have to compete.
So in a sense, the same with Datadog, hopefully.
I mean, I don't know if we show up on their competitive landscape much, but ultimately the customer gets a better product.

Omer (41:00.300)
Let's talk about sales.
Earlier we talked about Lucas not having, as the business is growing, not having enough time to really be able to create as much content as you would like.
You are working, you've been working on the business full time now for a few years, but you're still doing all the selling, right.
To these, what do you call them, like enterprise type customers.
And you don't have a sales background.
And I know some of these companies are fairly big, and anytime you're selling to an enterprise, it's not a straightforward sale.
Right.
It's just like, just in terms of corralling these people and getting the right people to turn up for the right meeting to do a demo or whatever, and, and, you know, kind of sock compliance and reviews and all of that.
This is not an easy thing to go through.
And you're doing all of that yourself today.
I mean, do you consider yourself like a natural salesperson?
It's not something that you'd done in the past?

Lukas Fittl (42:04.860)
I think I consider myself a reasonably okay listener.
So, like, you know, like, I don't go into a situation being like, here's how we do it.
It's more like, what are they trying to do and how can I help that?
Right.
So I'm very much a consultative sales team type mentality, I would say, which in some ways is good.
I think the parts that I've struggled with and I've tried to do better over the years is streamlining processes.
So sometimes it's very good to listen, but sometimes it's also very good to just say while they're just trying to get this done, how do you enable that getting it done versus trying to listen too much?
And so I think I'm not necessarily a good salesperson per se, but I'm again pretty good at listening and I think I'm pretty good at optimizing or automating things or identifying what's different blocker.
And so compliance.
For example, you mentioned SOC 2.
So last year was the first year where we had our SOC 2 type 2 report.
And that's just wholesale, just removed a bunch of work because we didn't have to do as many compliance type questionnaires like security questionnaires.
And it just became a checklist item essentially for companies that also changed a lot over the years.
Like five years ago that wouldn't have been as extreme.
But nowadays a lot of companies just ask for your SoC2 type 2 report and if you don't have it they'll ask you a security questionnaire.
But I think it is still a limited quantity for me.
I think the important realization is I can only spend so much time in a day.
And so I think identifying which customers are worth spending time on versus which customers we essentially say, well, you are not an enterprise type customer for us.
Sorry, the fact that you are, I mean sometimes it's a big corporation, but that the fact database team is small.
And so I think those are the cases where we, I think are starting to get more explicit and say, well you know, there's a self serve motion, buy it that way, you know, we cannot support your procurement requirements if you're just purchasing a $5,000 a year type license.

Omer (43:57.450)
What's been the hardest part of selling to enterprises for you so far?

Lukas Fittl (44:01.930)
I think feeling knowing when to push back on things on a contractual basis is challenging.
We have a good lawyer who is an external counsel, but she's really good at being fast and responsive, which is an important quality in a lawyer.
But I think there are businesses that will always want to do things on their paperwork.
So bigger enterprises, they have their standard MSA that they will request you to use.
And knowing when to push back on that is hard.
And I think by now what we've done is we've pushed back on most of these except really to big names where we just say, well we want that name.
Unfortunately I can't name them, but let's just say they're household names where we're like, okay, review their agreement.
But it's Been challenging to know when that's okay.
And what's also on a contract insurance limits, for example.
Right.
So which level of cyber liability insurance do you have and what should you actually pay for with your insurance carrier?
And so I think that's just trial and error in a sense.
Right.
Because I think feeling confident to push back on terms and then hearing from the other side, no, that's not okay.
We absolutely must have that.
And in some cases, there was one well known household name where they essentially requested something in a contract that didn't make sense for us.
And so it was like, nope, we don't need you as a customer.
If that's what you're requesting.
Essentially we can say no.
This is the extreme.
And I usually wouldn't do it, but I'd rather say say no and not sign up for something that I couldn't put my name to, essentially.
But that's kind of hard to do, I think.
Well, and I don't know if we're doing it well these days, but it's definitely been a struggle.

Omer (45:40.710)
Do you find it's hard to sell to enterprises in terms of do they look at you and say, you guys are a small business or a small company?
Has that been.
You know, I remember talking to Dominic, who runs Storyblock and who's also from.
He's still based in Austria.
You know, I remember him saying, you know, the first big customer that they were about to close.
You know, it was great.
They were excited about the products and everything.
And then the security reviews came and, you know, all this stuff.
And then Dominic was like, well, yeah, no problem.
But just you should know that, you know, like, we're a very small company.
And they said, how small?
And like, there's two of us.
And they're like, oh.
And you know, that killed the deal.
I mean, obviously it's like, it's a little different here.
It's not like, you know, they're kind of betting the farm by using PG analyzer.
Something is helping them improve what's already there on AWS or whatever.
But has that been an issue for you?

Lukas Fittl (46:45.170)
You mean just the size of the company?
Yeah, I mean, I would say I've definitely revised how I talk about it to customers directly because I don't think there's much to gain by telling an enterprise you're small.
I don't think you should lie.
So if somebody asks how many team members you have, you should be honest.
And I am always honest.
But I don't think you need to focus on that proactively because I don't think that's helpful.
It's not going to.
For example, if they give you a big compliance questionnaire and you say, oh, I can't fill it out because I'm small, that's not going to win the deal.
Right.
So I think what I've learned over the years is using other things like saying, hey, we have a SOC 2 type 2 report and oh, sorry, we're so busy we can't answer your 150 compliance questions.
But can you make this work with this?
Right.
So I try to work around it when I see that there's stuff that we just can't support for our team size.
The other thing, this is not necessarily directly related to team size, but the other thing that we've done which worked well for us is we have a version of the product called PG Analytics Enterprise Server, which is essentially the full product as a self contained software.
So generally speaking, when people sign up for the product or pay for the product, it's our cloud based version which runs on our AWS account.
But oftentimes when you get these really long compliance questionnaires, part of the fear that they have is that they have a data breach, they are sharing PI with you and then you have data breaching your small vendor and so there's a bigger risk.
And so one of the ways to sidestep that has been to have that self contained version where they can be sure that if they put a bunch of firewall rules on it, then the data stays in their environment, guaranteed, essentially, instead of kind of going through our cloud.
So that's been a good trick.

Omer (48:24.840)
Yeah, that's a good way to get around it.
Okay, let's wrap up.
Let's go into the lightning round.
I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

Lukas Fittl (48:37.340)
Don't listen to advice unless somebody's talking about their own past where they've done something.
But don't listen to somebody giving you generic advice.

Omer (48:45.500)
Unless it's advice telling you not to listen to advice, then you should.
Exactly what book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Lukas Fittl (48:53.580)
So I found this book earlier again.
There we go.
Don't Just Roll the Dice by Neil Davidson.
It's a good book on pricing.
Neil Davidson is actually in our space, or used to be in our space.
He was the CEO of Redgate Software, which does what we do for postgres, but for SQL Server.
But it's a really nice short book on just different pricing.
Strategies.
And so you as a founder should always think about pricing.
Every year you should think about should we change our pricing, should we raise our prices?
Because I think people, especially engineering type founders, don't do that often enough.
And so it's just a good reference book.
Don't just roll the dice.

Omer (49:26.150)
I haven't come across that one before.
That sounds interesting.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Lukas Fittl (49:34.950)
I think ultimately realizing that you will need to solve the problems and so you can hire for solving problems.
Right.
But I think that basic sense of grit and kind of just getting into it and doing it, I do a lot of things that don't scale.
Right.
Coming back to that point in the beginning, it's just important when to know not to do that.
But I think oftentimes just sitting down and doing it versus being like, oh, I need a head of marketing ahead of sales to be able to do it.
So just getting in the seat and doing it is so important.

Omer (50:03.740)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Lukas Fittl (50:06.860)
I think for me, it's funny, for me it's been so even though we're a distributed company, for me it's actually been renting an office.
I have two kids at home, so that's part of the struggle.
But it's just having a dedicated space to work in versus trying to make working from home work for me personally has been the best productivity tool.

Omer (50:24.540)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Lukas Fittl (50:28.460)
Well, over the years I kept thinking it'd be nice to do a postgres as a service, database hosting.
That's just better than everything else.
But then there have been so many of those launched recently.
If you're in that space, you would know.
And so it's probably not a good idea anymore.
But I kept thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we were also running the database?
But I don't want to do that.

Omer (50:45.900)
I think it goes back to the timing.
Right.
Timing is important as well with a lot of these ideas.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Lukas Fittl (50:55.260)
It's a good question.
This is more about how I see my own work, which is I think it's very important to not have a strict schedule during the day.
So sometimes, for example, I like to go bouldering, rock climbing during the day, and that really helps me work my schedule and feel like everything fits together.
And so I think just not kind of being stuck in those you need to be 9 to 5 or you need to do that and that I think that's just me.

Omer (51:22.630)
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Lukas Fittl (51:26.070)
Well, in part rock climbing, as I just mentioned.
I think the thing that I really like doing when I have the time is doing multi day hikes like you know, just in the backcountry, getting, having no reception and having hired enough people so that I can actually be out of office.
Completely

Omer (51:43.410)
love it.
All right, great.
Well, thank you so much for joining me.
It's been a pleasure chatting and thanks for racking your brain and finding some of the things that were deep in there from, you know, 10, 11 years ago.
It's never an easy thing to do.
If people want to check out pganalyze, they go to pganalyze.com and if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Lukas Fittl (52:08.700)
So, well, go to our website, send something to the contact us form if you don't want to write this down.
Otherwise, send me an email at Lucas L U K A S the K is important, not the c the k lucasganalyze.com and then also if you do know somebody who's good at sales, we are currently hiring our head of sales for the team so that I don't have to do all the selling.
So if you know somebody, please drop me an email or go to our curious page.

Omer (52:32.020)
Perfect.
Lukas, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
I wish you, the team, the best of success and good luck with filling that position.

Lukas Fittl (52:41.219)
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.

Omer (52:43.380)
My pleasure.
All the best.
Cheers.