How SaaS Content Marketing Built an 8-Figure Business

Omer (00:09.760)
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 took to Dominic Angara, the co founder and CEO of StoryBlock, a headless content management system, or CMS that helps developers and marketers create better content experiences.
In 2017, Dominic and Alexander discovered the limitations of traditional CMS platforms while they were working at an agency on various client projects.
They needed to find a CMS that could be customized to fit their clients needs, but there didn't seem to be a good solution out there.
They developed a simple prototype of a headless CMS to use on client projects while they continued searching for a proper solution.
But their prototype grew in popularity and they started adding more features over time.
Eventually, the duo quit their jobs and started their own company.
But it wasn't all smooth sailing.
They wasted a lot of time and energy by trying to pursue too many ideas at once instead of being focused on the problem that mattered the most.
And they lost a big customer that was very interested in their product until they discovered they were dealing with a two person company.
Today, StoryBlock is an eight figure ARR business that serves thousands of customers, including enterprises and has raised $58 million in funding.
In this episode you'll learn how the founders acquired nearly all their customers from inbound marketing and only recently started doing any outbound.
We'll share a simple hack they use to get SEO working for them quickly and driving organic traffic leads and customers.
We also talk how they accidentally discovered how to turn the live chat widget on their website into a significant growth channel and why the decision to choose a domain name that looks like it has a typo in it is still costing them about half a million dollars every year.
I hope you enjoy it.
All right, Dominic, welcome to the show.

Dominik Angerer (02:22.700)
Thank you so much for having me.

Omer (02:24.060)
Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

Dominik Angerer (02:27.940)
Yeah, since 2014, I have it as my WhatsApp status.
If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat, just get on.
And it's by Shirley Sandberg, who also inspired Mark Zuckerberg.
Yeah, yeah, really, really, really good quote.

Omer (02:44.660)
What does that quote mean to you?

Dominik Angerer (02:46.580)
Don't ask too many questions.
Just get on with it and try it and see if you like it or not.
And it helps you be faster and be more Focused, because hey, you're off of the seat.
So yes, get onto the seat and try it.
So it helped to be more focused.

Omer (03:01.440)
Love it.
So tell us about storyblok.
What does the product do, who is it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

Dominik Angerer (03:08.880)
Yeah, so storyblock is headless cms.
It helps you to actually build out flexible content in a faster and more easier way.
Not just in the building part, but also in the management part.
Storyblocks CMS comes with a visual editor, we have collaboration features, we have really, really, really fast API for content consummation on any platform.
You can use any front end technology.
So you're not bound to just PHP or just JavaScript or anything like that.
You can really use the content everywhere.
And by now we are fully enterprise ready.
Not just that, we are actually customer's choice according to Gartner.
And we actually got return of investment calculated by Forrester of 582% which I think is really, really cool.

Omer (03:49.770)
So Forrester said that the return on investment of using Storyblok is 582%.

Dominik Angerer (03:58.650)
Yeah, so we asked Forrester to, without our interference in any way.
We asked them to interview our customers and they selected the customers, they selected the size of the customers and they interviewed them without us being in the room and without us actually preparing them for anything.
And then they shared metrics, they anonymized them and then we got the full calculation of multiple customers and the average was 582% return of investment after using Storyblok.
So the license you paid to Storyblok to use it as a content management solution, after six months you're already completely in the green.

Omer (04:34.670)
Also, that Gartner matrix that you talked about, I saw that, I came across that on your website.
We'll talk about that a little later, I think when we just talk a little bit about competition.
But it was quite nice that you, a storyblock was in a grid of its own in a pretty competitive market and it was one of the good boxes to be in.
It wasn't like Gartner has the boxes you don't want to be in.
So that was pretty good.
We'll talk about that before we get started with your story.
Give us a sense of the size of the business, where are you in terms of revenue, number of customers, size of team and so on.

Dominik Angerer (05:15.590)
Yeah, so we are now 235 people across 47 countries.
We don't have offices, so we're fully remote, mostly home office or co working spaces in that sense.
We have at least 3x growth of year over year basically.
And the craziest thing is I believe we have like 0% enterprise churn.
Actually I don't believe that.
I know that.
3% enterprise churn and revenue split.
To give you some understanding, 70% of our ARR comes from enterprise and 30% is self service.
So paid by a credit card either monthly or yearly.
And yeah, that's storyblock.

Omer (05:46.910)
Awesome.
So you're an eight figure ARR business and I think you have raised what

Dominik Angerer (05:55.390)
was the number total of 58 million so far.
The last series B was 47 million.

Omer (06:01.560)
And so you said the team is remote.
235 people.
And you're based in Austria?

Dominik Angerer (06:07.240)
Yes, I'm based in Austria, in Linz and my co founder Alex is actually living in Teresopolis in Brazil.
So yeah, it really helps on life support and stuff like that being in different time zones.

Omer (06:21.880)
Yeah, exactly.
He can do the work when you're sleeping.

Dominik Angerer (06:25.400)
Exactly.
Especially when we bootstrapped.
We didn't start with being like VC funded so we actually bootstrapped from 2017 until end of 2019 and grew the business to the first million in the hour with just the two of us.
And only then when we hit some struggles we actually decided to go the VC route.

Omer (06:46.130)
Awesome.
So let's talk about where the idea came from.
You and Alexandra were working in an agency.
You're running an agency?

Dominik Angerer (07:00.080)
Working at an agency.
Yeah, so we were running the departments.
Alex was like the head of app development, I was like the head of service and maintenance for our customers.
And so luckily we were not the founders of the agency.
So it would have been quite difficult to move out with StoryBlock.
But it was an intense time back in 2015.

Omer (07:18.720)
Got it.
Okay, so you're at this agency.
How did you come up with the idea?
Where did it come from?

Dominik Angerer (07:25.610)
So Alex initially started it.
So we were using tons of different content management solutions, but one in particular we had later on an exclusive kind of deal which was a really old Java PHP kind of mixture kind of thing from the Austrian state and told us, hey, we are going to shut that down and you need to find something new.
And so you can imagine an agency that has an exclusive deal with one enterprise content market management solution kind of flipping out that they are about to lose all the customers because that's the CMS that they're using.
Right.
So we looked for new CMS.
We looked into WordPress type of free, then Drupal from Drupal.
We saw Aquia on The enterprise side, Adobe sitecore, liferay.
Then we found Headless competitors like Contentful, Content Stack and Prismic back then in 2015.
And we realized that this is are okay for us as a developer, but the marketers actually are not that happy.
Like they need visual guidance.
They need to understand what they're editing because they are used to understanding what they're doing and they don't want to wait for a publishing run to just basically wait to see if they broke something.
And we combined the Headless idea with a visual editor that is still completely separated from the View and launched it for our own customers.
They liked it and then we invited more customers to try it.
We built more features, we added more services, and then we launched it on a website called storyblock.com okay, great.

Omer (08:54.960)
So you mentioned some of the other products out there and I've had Neha Sampath, the founder of Content Stack on the show.
But just for people who aren't familiar, can you just explain what is a Headless CMS and how is it different to what people might be more familiar with, like a WordPress?

Dominik Angerer (09:21.390)
Yeah, so when you get your hands on something like WordPress or any Monolix CMS, how we headless people talk about it, it usually ships with the templating language and the few layers or how the content is displayed together with the cms.
And so you have your admin interface where you have your management or view and basically can change your content at the same time.
When you hit publish, you immediately have the website built from WordPress.
You can install plugins to change the HTML, it ships the JavaScript and all that.
And the idea of Headless originally is that you completely strip away that view layer.
You basically cut the head off your website.
That's why it's called Headless.
And all you're left with is this admin overview where you actually change content and save the drafts, publish it, and then stop at the content, stop at the data.
And all you give to developers at that point is the pure JSON data information.
So they can just consume the data from APIs and use any technology they want to build the website.
The cool thing is Even tools like WordPress and similar, they now have plugins that you can install where you can use them as an API.
That doesn't make them hatless because it's a different way of how they were built originally, but it gives you an option to combine it with other tools that have this philosophy of using APIs from data.

Omer (10:43.000)
Okay, great, thanks for that.
One thing I want to understand I wasn't quite clear on, was when you and Alexandra started working on this idea of a headless CMS when you were at the agency, was this some work you were doing for an agency client?
Or this was.
You spotted an opportunity and then you guys were like, evenings and weekends, build a product and we'll go and sell it to somebody else.

Dominik Angerer (11:11.540)
Yeah.
So we didn't have the plan to do that.
We actually had the goal to not build a cms, because every developer built a CMS before, or at least some kind of management kind of where you can edit stuff.
And we're like, okay, let's not build a cms.
Let's find the CMS we want and then customize it to fit the needs of our clients.
And turns out that when we were looking for that cms, we at one point had to find something that our customers wanted to use in the meantime.
Right.
So it started out as this small prototype that somehow grew and grew.
And the main idea was about storytelling with components, reusable content blocks.
So storytelling with blocks, story block.
And at that point it somehow grew way larger than we expected, given that at that time, like Silhouette, Adidas and so on started using it.
And it was a prototype, that phase still.
And yeah, from that prototype on, we started the journey of writing articles and stuff like that and it grew.

Omer (12:19.300)
So tell me how you got your first customer.

Dominik Angerer (12:21.860)
So the first customers definitely came directly from the agency.
We pitched them.
Hey, this will be just this transition kind of prototype.
I guess it's more interesting to see how we got beyond that agency phase because we spin out of that agency in mid-2017 when StoryBlock GmbH, the Austrian entity, was established.
And what we did is we started the landing page, storyblock.com and we realized quite early on that we need content.
And Alex and my background is in technical SEO.
So we're not talking about add keywords to your site.
You need to add meta tags and stuff like that.
That's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about performance of the site, site structure, searchability, usage and accessibility of the site itself.
And we optimized the site so so much that every article that we wrote not on like these short term keywords, short term phrases, and more on the long tail phrases.
If you Google long tail SEO phrases, that's like a technique you can use to actually get more viewers from more niche content.
And that's what we have done.
We created articles on how to use StoryBlock with PHP with few jazz with react with angular with Python with everything you can imagine.
And we just started writing those articles because people were asking us how to do that, how to use it in the live chat that we had.
And with that, we then started to suddenly have more and more traffic, more and more users coming on the site.
And because the article was about how to solve a certain problem with introducing StoryBlock for free, like there's a freemium version, people just used it, liked it, and suddenly paid for it.
And with that, we ranked up on Google in itself.
And at one point we decided, okay, let's write an article explaining Headless CMS in five minutes.
So we published that.
And because, because we ranked so good for those long tail articles, we also ranked number one for this Headless CMS explained article.
And yeah, then more and more users came in and we hit like 1000 users in November 2017.
And two months later we had 3000 users on the platform and were profitable at that point.
Which is kind of crazy to think about, actually.

Omer (14:38.150)
Wow.
So most founders will be told when you're in the early stages of building a product.
And I just had this conversation with a bunch of founders in my community just a few days ago where it was like, we need to be doing outbound, we need to be doing more outbound, because SEO is great, but SEO isn't going to pay back for six months, nine months, whatever.
But you guys started doing that very early on and you started getting results from that.
So what was it that you were doing differently?

Dominik Angerer (15:15.280)
We started doing outbound mid last year.
So that's what we have done like literally mid last year.
Before that, everything we have done was pure inbound.
And the way we see that is that people that have a problem search for a solution.
If you can be in the number one or second spot, you will be the de facto solution that they are going to at least try.
And then your product needs to be spot on.
So we focused on building the product because we were solving our own problems already and we didn't have the pressure to actually make money at the time because we were just becoming profitable because of the projects we have built before and also because of the users that just came in from the first couple of articles.
We're really, really fortunate in that position because it allowed us to actually build a complete onboarding flow where they didn't need us to onboard them.
So we didn't need to outbound and onboard people because they were just able to register, try it out like it or not, and then subscribe or not.
Right.
So that was our Big luck in that regard and allowed us to actually bootstrap for like two and a half years from basically nothing.
And with purely inbound, we still hit that 1 million err mark.
And I'm not sure if we did something different.
I guess because our product was in this hype kind of niche of that headless movement.
We just were really lucky on the timing.
Plus the product is not too bad because they really liked it.

Omer (16:47.020)
Yeah, that helps with the product.
People like the product.
And I think also the fact that you mentioned that you were going after long tail keywords is also relevant because.
And I think if people aren't familiar with it, I don't know, we can give an example and say headless CMS might be a more competitive keyword.
Using headless CMS with Django on Python would probably be a long tail keyword because fewer people are going to be searching for that.
There's going to be less competition.
So you've got a better chance of ranking for that quickly.
You're not going to get tens of thousands of people doing that, but you will get people there.
So I think that going after long tail keywords.
Great.
And you know, I think everyone should try to do that and whatever they're doing.
Let's talk about a little problem that you also had, which was a typo in your name.
Just tell us the story about StoryBlock and getting the domain and stuff.

Dominik Angerer (17:51.880)
Yeah, if you hear the name storyblock, you instantly think about S T O R Y B L O, C K. But the problem was that this C on the block side, the domain was already gone.
So we wanted to have a.com domain and we said we really like the name because of the idea of storytelling with blocks.
So we don't want to just move it away.
We don't want to take any other name.
Right.
So naive as we were back in the days, we were like, oh yeah, it's fine.
We'll just train Google to understand that this is not a spelling mistake, it's not the typo.
And if Flickr can do that and all the others, we can do that too.
So we decided to, okay, storyblock is fine without the C. And there's so many problems if you do that.
So the first one is, it took us about three months for Google not having this.
Did you mean StoryBlock with a C?
You know, writing under the search results that they are actually receiving or like sending out?
And even today, and we are talking now, five, six years later, we are actually spending a lot of money for these typo campaigns.
So when people are actually spelling storyblock wrong so they can at least find us because of course the other products, but sometimes they actually just look for storyblock or Story Blank Block or anything like that.
So we have now to pay money on like paid advertisement for people to actually find us.
And yeah, we have landing pages and all set up, but it's pretty expensive to have a typo in your name and you should think about it.

Omer (19:25.360)
Definitely.
And I think that, you know, I mean, Google is trying to be helpful by sending people to the correct domain.
You know, I just, I just went up to storyblock.com and there's no website there.
So it looks like one of those domains that somebody's just bought and is sitting on.
And I don't know if you tried to buy it.

Dominik Angerer (19:44.890)
No response.
No response.
If you're out there and you own storyblock.com with a C, please let me know.

Omer (19:52.810)
I'm sure it would have been easier to buy when it was just the two of you running a business with very little revenue.

Dominik Angerer (20:00.010)
Yeah, that's definitely a lesson learned.
Don't have a typo.
I mean, it's fine.
You can get around with it quite well.
And by now it's actually a really nice kind of gimmick because it's somewhat different.
Right, but still an expensive differentiator.

Omer (20:16.100)
Yeah, totally.
Let's talk about enterprise customers.
So earlier you said, we're enterprise ready.
You have enterprise customers today.
But it didn't go so well when you tried to sell to enterprise customers in the early days.
Right?
I mean, from what you told me, you're actually getting interest in the product.
Until they found out, hey, it's just

Dominik Angerer (20:50.870)
two people from Austria or one from now Brazil and one from Austria.
Yeah, it's really tough, you know, right now it's totally fine.
70%, as mentioned, of our revenue is from enterprise customers.
So talking like six figures upwards in, err, per customer and banks and insurance companies and widespread organizations globally from different regions.
And we're talking 52 languages, projects, kind of style, like really, really large projects.
And these kind of projects still had an interest already back in 2017.
So they looked at us, they looked at the freemium version, they tried it out and then they reached out to us and asked us, okay, we want to do redlining, we want to see your ISO certification, we want to see you fill out this 900 questions questionnaire for security audits and so on.
And we're like, yes, we can do that, but just show where like we're two people and they're like, oh, oh, like the POC went great.
The product is cool.
And like we stress tested it.
It works.
It's really, really nice.
But this is a plucker for us because they of course have a risk assessment and they need to do that.
And by now we are fully ISO certified.
You know, we are in the process of getting other certifications, especially for governments as well.
And there's so many, many, many things that we have been doing since then, especially filling out questionnaires.
But back then it was a block of us.
Like literally we got blocked because people said, hey, we love the product.
Please keep pushing so you're getting better and bigger, mostly bigger so we can actually purchase you.
Because right now we couldn't back in 2017, 2016.
So that's why we went with not even bothering about outbounding because that had so many implications for us to fill out those certification processes and all that stuff that just blocked us from building the product.
So we decided actually, hey, let's do self service, let's do a full bootstrap kind of move and move to as big as we possibly can with the smallest amount of people.
And we try to push that as far as possible.
And in 2019, we met again a person, Peter Lasinger from Free VC, which is now one of our early investors that actually encouraged us to at least think about vc.
It's not bad.
It's not, not so bad to take money to grow fast if you can.
And after a lot of convincing and meeting other VCs, we decided, okay, let's move out of the bootstrapping phase that we are in right now and flip it over to tackle those enterprises we never tackled before or because we suddenly had capital to tackle them.
Right.
We suddenly had the possibility to hire those account executives to those security people that we actually need to have a proper compliant answer to the questions that we received.
And yeah, that was what a time.
We were still two people at the time.

Omer (23:50.860)
Right.
So the two of you got to.
You said the first million in ARR, it was just two of you?

Dominik Angerer (23:58.780)
That's correct.
25,000 customers.

Omer (24:01.660)
How many customers?

Dominik Angerer (24:02.700)
25,000 customers.
It was a freemium version.
Plus we had this $9 plan and $13 plan per user.
So you need a lot of customers to ramp that number up.
Right.

Omer (24:15.120)
Aside from the outbound, you did initially kind of going to the agency clients and saying, do you want to buy this product?

Dominik Angerer (24:23.520)
They were inbound as well.

Omer (24:25.360)
The agency clients were as well.

Dominik Angerer (24:27.040)
Yeah.
So we had a live chat on the website.
And because those agencies had developers and those developers tried to solve the same problem as every other developer, they found our articles.
So when they had questions about us and the product and how to build something with it, Alex and I were sitting in the live chat and literally waiting for people to write us.
There are really, really fun stories with people writing us Saturday night like 4am in the morning.
Not even about Storyblock but because we talked with him for the last three weeks and help them build that project that they are just buying a house and stuff like that.
You know, like really, really nice things that happened and that built those relationships with those agencies.
And with that we actually then got into touch with those large agencies and now I have a partner ecosystem of about 1,700 agencies globally.
So like this is basically just exploded from there.

Omer (25:21.940)
Wow.
So it's all really been inbound until very, very recently.

Dominik Angerer (25:27.710)
Last year, mid last year.

Omer (25:29.590)
Yeah.
I want to talk about the live chat.
Just to kind of finish off the previous question I was thinking about was was there anything else that you did to get to that first million in ARR?
We talked about the SEO focusing on long tail.
We're going to talk about live chat in a minute.
Was there anything else that got you to those 25,000 odd customers?

Dominik Angerer (25:58.590)
Yeah, so two things we focused heavily on and especially Alex focused really hard on the onboarding journey.
So we really wanted for people to if you're a register, you should have a clear step forward to the technology that you want to choose to building something and don't need us.
So it should be completely self service.
And the second thing we then did is if they have questions and ask us in the live chat that we had online before we answer in the live chat directly we always just took the answer, made it a little bit more like in depth and published an article about it in an FAQ kind of style.
So with those customers that had questions about the product, we optimized the onboarding flow so it be completely automated basically from our side and those people that still had questions, we could refer them to the faq.
And turns out if you have a good search on your sites and enough content that actually answers the question that they actually have, you suddenly reduce your support costs drastically.
And that was necessary for two people to scale in that sense because suddenly we had more articles, more content, more relevant content that we didn't have to come up with.
Like just thinking okay, what should I write about?
No, people were asking us hey how can you do that?
And is there any way I can go around it.
So it was relevant content for the audience we were already getting, right?
So suddenly we had this loop of people just reading the content that we wrote for others that had been on the site before and maybe resulted in a paid subscription.
So we naturally somehow created this loop of people subscribing.
And it took us like every change we did on the onboarding, it took two to three months to see any impact.
And it was really nice because we are quite lucky that the feedback that we received was so good from those extremely friendly customers that we were able to integrate many, many, many informations.
Like in onboarding, super important, you need to understand who you're onboarding.
So ask the question who they are?
Are they developers?
Are they marketers?
Are they the.
Do you have different audiences depending on that?
They might only want to see a demo and not build a data structure like developers want to do.
So simple things like that.
It's crazy to build a product and have a login form and then just drop them in without any explanation and without fuss at first.
Thinking about who they actually are that are signing up.
That was a big learning that you actually learn.
Okay, which are the audiences that could possibly register and have an onboarding journey for all of them separated or combine them later again.

Omer (28:43.270)
So let's go back to the live chat.
Now, there are very few SaaS companies that I can think of, ones with even dedicated support teams that you go to the live chat and somebody actually replies, right?
Usually it's like the fake live chat, which is you're really just searching the help docs and then they'll say to you, we'll get back to you.
And then maybe 24 hours later or whatever, you hear from them.
Why put a live chat when there's only two of you?
And then like, why were you guys just like, like sitting around and having these conversations with people?
I mean, it was great you did that because it actually turned into a very important growth channel.
But that wasn't the intention right when you started.

Dominik Angerer (29:38.970)
Yeah, no, it wasn't.
So the intention was that we get feedback.
So the easiest, you have multiple options to get feedback.
If you're a larger corporate, you usually know that, hey, this upvotes tool and here's this feature request Dropbox that you can drop in and maybe someone somewhere at any point in time might reply.
And we didn't want that because all the content management systems out there have that.
If you want to get in touch with any CMS vendor, it's super hard to do that.
And we felt like, hey, we actually want to listen and we want to understand what's going on.
And even today, if you go on storyblock.com or even in the app, if you want to have a report an issue, there's a live chat popping up and you can chat with Renate, with Hannes and all our new joiners on the support team.
It's not just Alex and me anymore in there.
Still, we're there, but we have so many more people supporting us now.
And the cool thing is people at first ask even our support team right now if they are bots, because they actually reply super fast because they actually know what they're doing.
And the big difference is they know.
Okay, this is more in depth and this sounds like something we should investigate.
We will come back to you and here's the history of our conversation.
You will be sent that by email automatically, and then later on you will have a service desk ticket created for you out of that conversation and then they will actually follow up.
So it's actually really nice because we can ask those initial kind of questions like, hey, which browser you're using?
Does it happen on all the different spaces?
Does it happen only for your user or other users?
Does it happen on multiple devices?
And so on.
Like those default questions that you usually ask people, we can ask them real time and see them because it's a live person there and with us.
So that's a huge, huge win.
And if you are like just getting started, you want to understand what kind of customers or potential customers you have on your site.
So the easiest way to get that is not about data, because to get somebody to reply to a survey or anything like that, that's a big ask.
But if they already have a question and you just are there for them to answer it, right, that's really, really nice.
It's really nice experience for them as well.
So that allowed us to get like honest feedback and mostly friendly feedback even until today.

Omer (31:57.340)
How did the feedback turn into customers?

Dominik Angerer (32:00.790)
Well, I can give you one example where that feedback turned that person and the company into a customer and then the person becoming an employee and now being the head of product at storyblok.

Omer (32:13.350)
Wow.

Dominik Angerer (32:14.230)
So.
And it was a really, really small feature.
So in StoryBlock in the early days, the title of our application was always storyblok.
And if you had multiple pages open in the application, it's always, always was storyblock on the top.
So it's a really small thing in detail.
Right.
But this person, Sam, was a really big and heavy user.
Of StoryBlock back in the days now still, but a different perspective.
And one of the features that he asked in the live chat was like, hey, would it be possible to just update that title on the top with the current content I'm editing?
So I always know exactly which window is.
It's a small feature, it's nothing big.
Right.
And we shipped that in five minutes.
It was two people coding and we were able to ship it really fast because it was a really small change.
So we shipped that and 10, 15 minutes after our automated test and accessibility and acceptance tests ran through, we shipped it and I pinged them back on the live chat.
Yeah, yeah, it's live.
Please refresh and let us know if it works.
And they're like, wait, what?
You deployed it in 15 minutes?
And yeah, yeah, it's a good feature.
Thanks for the feedback, you know.
And a week later, the agency started onboarding the client.
And then when Sam moved to a different country, he actually joined Storyblok at the end.
And yeah, he moved from Devrel to advocating about storyblok to becoming the head of products so other people can have similar experiences.
Now the timeframe is a little bit longer than 15 minutes because more people are working on that with proper Sprint structure, we have proper security issues and all of that.
But still the experience is quite the same still today.

Omer (33:48.740)
That's a great story.
I love that.
One thing I want to understand is you said the majority of the growth until very recently has come from inbound in terms of sales, onboarding, all of that stuff.
Has that also been product led or the inbound turns into a demo, which turns into eventually a sale.
Which of the two has been kind of the predominant way you've acquired customers?

Dominik Angerer (34:19.730)
Yeah.
So there are two ways depending on who are the initiator of a project inside a company.
So if it's coming from a developer inside a company or inside an agency, they usually just try the freemium version and then go up the tiers to the point.
Okay, we are launching a live product for a customer that has certain security requirements, certain optimum SLA requirements.
They need a certain amount of different spaces and stages and all that.
And then they're moving up to that enterprise level, then there's no demo because they already know the product and it's just a self service, product led growth kind of motion that we're talking about.
And we then also later on started doing that direct sales.
We have a two stage sales process similar to what Salesforce is doing.
It's basically us having an inbound channel for you with contact form different campaigns that we have, different papers that you can download and we ask you about some details and then if you contact us or we think, hey, we could help your company, then we also by now reach out.
Back in the days we just waited for you to drop us a message and we then got on a call with you and ask you some questions and if you have any technical questions or more on the marketing side or what kind of questions you just have.
And then we schedule a demo, prepared that for you and walked you through the platform to the point where we then offered you a poc, not just for the freemium version, but for the enterprise plan that we have.
And you were able to just try that out and if you like it, you purchase it.
If not, then not.
You know, we are not that pushy kind of a sales org.
Even though we have like steep goals and we are growing quite fast, I still believe customers knows best.
If they want our product, they are going to purchase it.
If not, then not.
So that's basically how we are doing it.
It's like the product LED motion.
If it's more on a developer centric side, if it's a marketer that needs help with selling to the dev organization, the IT organization internally, then it's mostly top down or traditional sales.

Omer (36:19.170)
Got it.
Okay.
And then do you still have a freemium model today?

Dominik Angerer (36:23.720)
Of course, of course.
It even got better.
It's really nice.

Omer (36:27.400)
So basically it means that you could have a Fortune 100 company, you could have a developer there who finds this, signs up for the free account, starts basically using it and then you've got sort of that Trojan horse approach where people are, are using the product and eventually it sort of bubbles up and becomes, you know, it gets in front of a decision maker.

Dominik Angerer (36:59.720)
Yeah.
So we had to multiple times.
Yeah.

Omer (37:02.000)
So I think that's great and I think it helps in terms of selling to some of these big organizations because you don't really need to go through like you're doing enterprise sales really, but you don't need to necessarily say we're going to do a proof of concept and we're going to help set this up for you and we're going to do this.
Potentially you could, or maybe you're doing that, but it sounds like a developer could be ahead of everybody and say I already built something so we have

Dominik Angerer (37:28.770)
a customer that had done exactly that.
So Marco Polo, still one of my most favorite case studies, initially started building something without Storyblok and then Johannes, one of the texts and shout outs to him.
If he.
He listens to it, he just, yeah, I'm gonna try this.
Can I have like two, three days?
So I want to really try that.
Like, this looks like it ticks all of our boxes.
And in two days, he built the same thing that they have built in months before in Storybook.
And, you know, like, just having.
Having that, like, we interviewed him and he was telling that, and I'm like, yes, that's the experience that you should get.
And it's so nice, you know, suddenly because you have only data, you can choose any technology you're actually good in, and you don't have to adapt to the cms.
So at the end, it's just data for you and you can just build whatever you want and that's it.
And of course, you need to take care of your own technology stack.
You need to update your own technology stack.
But you know that stack, right?
So it's easier for you.
And that only worked because we had the freemium version.
Like, if we didn't have that, there would be a complete kind of process for him to go through on legal review, on procurement process and all that.
And with the freemium version, they at least could try it.
And our freemium version is free forever.
So you can actually try it with one user, actually can create multiple spaces with just one user and use it however long you want.
You can build your own blogging stuff, you can build anything you really want, and you will not be charged with anything.
I believe after a certain amount of time, we ask you for a credit card.
If you're expanding your traffic using usage or something like that, then we of course are charging traffic because only a certain bandwidth is included on the freemium plan.
And then the next highest tier is $9.
That's also really nice.
Like, every additional user you add, you add for $9, essentially.
And our plans are set up that you actually only need to upgrade if you need more collaboration features, more staging, like, more security kind of features.
And that'll help us really a lot because again, here itself service, they actually should not need us to use StoryBlock.
That's the whole idea.
We tried to actually remove ourselves from the selling process because we are really bad at selling.
It's just two developers building something.

Omer (39:47.220)
That's a good motivation.
Did you have the freemium product in the first couple of years when you were bootstrapping?

Dominik Angerer (39:55.490)
Yeah, from the beginning.

Omer (39:57.010)
Okay.
So the conventional advice to a bootstrapped founder or founders would be don't have a freemium model, you're going to get distracted by hundreds or thousands of people who will be demanding, who will want support, who will never pay for your product and will probably even tell you that.
And it's going to make it, the economics of this thing so difficult to be able to build a profitable business.
And you don't have a lot of money if you're bootstrapping.
So why was it that you were able to make that work and survive and actually thrive?

Dominik Angerer (40:35.770)
We are a developer tool, so that means you actually have an initial investment to be done.
So with Storyblok, we are an API based solution.
So for us to work for you, you first need to build your app, your website, your 3D kind of environment where you want to display something.
You need to first build that environment where you actually want to use that content.
So there is an investment of that developer, that company, that partner that at one point, like those people that just come to try it and test it out, they don't bother doing that investment.
Even though it's not that much of an investment.
Like literally of articles, how to build a multi language website in like 30 minutes.
Like you can literally do that with any tech stack right now.
But the interesting thing is we never had those people, even now, I don't think so.
So having that initial investment from their side, I believe removed like that burden for us.
For B2C, I see freemium, really, really hard.
Same same.
Like I would follow, follow that advice 100% of the time if I'm doing a B2C SaaS company, 100% because like this will burn all your cash, period.

Omer (41:52.920)
And even B2B.
I mean ironically, if you weren't a headless CMS, you were a traditional CMS, people wouldn't have to make that kind of investment before they started using you.
And you would have had probably most of those problems that we mentioned earlier.

Dominik Angerer (42:10.370)
100%.
At one point we actually had a theme kind of store and stuff like that, but we ditched it immediately because hey, we are headless cms.
We should not do that.
We needed to focus.
So that was a big learning as well.
Keep focus on the thing that you actually believe in and not get sidetracked and distracted.

Omer (42:28.690)
So let's talk about that Gartner matrix that had you guys.
So just for people who I want to kind of visualize this.
So Gartner has this matrix for web content management and there are four grids.
They have one grid which is called Strong Performers, one called Aspiring Players.
They have established players where there's Companies like Contentful and Adobe.
And then there's one called Customer's Choice.
And there's only one product in there, which is StoryBlock.
How much did you pay Gartner to get yourselves in your own box?

Dominik Angerer (43:10.710)
So you cannot pay Gartner and it's real.
You cannot pay Gartner Forrester to get any reports.
That's not what they are doing.
And I had a really, really hard time understanding that in the beginning.
But shout out to Julius, our annual installation manager at Storyblok, like he has done an amazing job educating me about what we can get out of Gartner.
Because what I learned, it's like a two way street.
Once you are at a certain level, it doesn't pay for people.
That or companies that just get started like you will not get that much benefit right away.
But as soon as you have a certain amount of customers don't want to say any specific numbers because it depends on are you B2C, B2B, are you a dev tool, Are you more on like the consumer side?
And it depends on just your company.
But at one point you might want to get advice on certain topics.
And that's the moment where we then turned to Gartner and Forrester because they ran analysts or have analysts that run surveys about us, about our area, about our market, so they know what our customers actually think.
Because customers will be more open to individual people that are not basically incentivized to sell you something.
And being a customer from any vendor that goes to Gartner gets advice that that's not a problem.
But as a vendor to get that advice and get that research that they are doing, you actually need to pay.
So you need to pay to actually get access to the analysts, to ask them questions, have inquiries and all that.
And that allowed us to just learn more about them and also address certain things that our customers wanted to to see.
So that allowed us to then build features that customers wanted to see in our product.
And then we asked those customers in our own platform to rate us.
And Garten by now has its own Garten Insights.
And all we did is ask our customers, hey, if you like Storyblok or not on both sides, please review us.
We want to know.
And so they started doing that.
And because we got quite a big amount of customer reviews that were outstandingly good, we were placed into this customer's choice bracket because of the review.
And it was not us asking Gartners, hey, create this quadrant.
That's not what they're doing, not at all.
But they ask, hey, we created that quadrant because it reflects the current state.
Would you like to purchase it?
And then we purchase the rights for us to publish it.
That's what you need to then pay additionally.
But you have no influence what they're going to publish.
Of course you can mention Two Way Street.
Of course you can try to educate them the best about what you're doing and why you're doing it.
But at the end it's their decision on how they see the world.
And I think that it's super fair.
At first I thought why do people depend so much on those reviews?
And not just reviews, but those research results.
But having talked to those analysts like Chuck, analysts for cms, he's amazing.
He knows everything about our market.
He's genuinely a super smart human and you could not influence him if you want to, but he knows how he sees the world and he knows what his actual customers want and then he tries to get the best for them.
And he doesn't care so much about us vendors in that sense.
But it's amazing.
Like they're really nice guys and girls.
Of course.

Omer (46:36.200)
Yeah, I think if you could, if you could influence those folks, then Gartner would probably be out of business.
Right.
And for people who aren't familiar with Gartner, you know, as a soundless firm, don't bother trying to get on the matrix unless you're selling, I'd say mainly primarily to enterprise customers because those are the ones who are going to Gartner to look for this type of information.
But that's a very interesting insight on how you made that happen.
I want to make sure that people don't walk away from this thinking this was easy for Dominic and Alexander.
They were at the agency, they had this idea, they built this thing and now they're running an 8 figure ARR business and everything seems to go right.
And Gartner loves them so much that they give them their own box in the grid and all of this stuff.

Dominik Angerer (47:25.380)
And we pay half a million for a typo every year.

Omer (47:29.540)
See.
So there are a few things we talked about, right.
We talked about the pains of having that so called typo in your name and are you really spending half a million just to resolve those types of issues?
Still, let's not talk about the wow, okay.
We also talked about having basically the rug pulled from under your feet when you thought you were going to get your first enterprise customer in the early days and they realized it was just the two of you.
Tell me also about some of the struggles around focus.
And particularly when you look back when you guys felt like you were doing

Dominik Angerer (48:10.900)
too much in the early days, like 2016-17, even like beginning of 2018, we figured like, hey, we need to build not just the cms.
You know, like there are so many dev tools that we should build in this headless fashion.
And people need an API based e commerce solution, another one.
Then they need another API based full text search.
And now you have Agolia, you have commerce tools, you have Map for like a location finder app that is fully data driven.
And all of those kind of product ideas we of course had as well because these are projects we built or used or wanted to use because they didn't exist, all of them at the time we wanted to build them and we started building and we built an E commerce solution, like literally an API based e commerce solution that was running in production even in mainland China.
Just imagine that we built those projects and they were in production with customers.
And luckily the agency took over those clients and serve them individually so we don't have to maintain those projects anymore.
But we wasted so much time.
At least three months we wasted.
Just because we started building out this full suit of API based tools that at the time were way, way too small.
We should have immediately just focused on the one thing we started building, the first app and that was storyblock, right?
And three csp Peter Lasinger.
We're having this open office space with the agency and Peter was sitting there for another company and Alex and I were sitting in the coffee table.
Like it's a long coffee table and you can just imagine two devs with the laptop sitting across each other.
And we're all just chatting about what we've just built and what we need to tweak and what we need to do.
And then Peter just came in, dropping himself like a coffee just on machine, putting in his basically order and casually starts chatting with us.
And we're like, hey Peter, you're an investor, we need to pitch you that now.
So like super scrappy, super nice actually if you think about it.
And we're like, hey Peter, you know, we have this idea of story block in the center and then you have like E commerce, you have this and that and those and dozens, dozens of tools that we started building.
And Peter just goes like sipping from like his espresso, you know, a cup, like, hey, why not just focus on one thing and do it really, really well.
It just kept going, you know, like just that.
And we're like, well, maybe he's right.
I mean, he's an investor.
He needs to know.
And we're casually then discussing that he's actually right.
And it took us three, four hours of getting our head around throwing away multiple functional products that we spent months building for the sake of one.
You know, like diversification versus centralization of one idea.
And even today, like, this is the best advice we ever received.
Build one thing or build your core structure once and you can expand later.
Once you have an audience, once you have the customer base that you can can then add more functionality, add additional products that solve other problems for them.
And the cool thing is if you listen to your customers to tell you their problems so you can solve them and you have another business value that you can drive.
It's just amazing.
And another thing we at the same time learned really, really in a bad way, we still were doing project work in the beginning because in the early days before we launched Landing Page and so on, we still of course somehow needed to maintain our families and pay rent and stuff like that, right?
But we always kept this project revenue, this one time kind of revenues as a bad KPI.
We kept track of it and every time in a month when it rose a little bit, we actually were like, damn, we missed our goal.
Right?
It should go down and the AR should go up.
And that was super motivating.
When you suddenly see that inflection point where suddenly ARR is larger than or MRR is actually larger than the monthly revenue that you made from a project.
So that's super inspiring if you just keep track of it so you know what you're doing.

Omer (52:28.830)
And yeah, I love the way you describe that, the espresso, the very simple, wise insight.
And then he's gone.
Right.
And I think from what I've seen with the one thing is intuitively we all know that's the right thing to do.
And probably, I think if I had to summarize it, I'd say there were like three reasons why it doesn't happen or it's hard.
I've seen founders who are very tech driven and they just have so many ideas for the technology that they get in their own way.
We can build this, we can build that, we can build this, and so on, and you lose that focus.
The other thing I've seen is founders who kind of have these big aspirational visions of what they want to do, which again is great.
You might get there in whatever time, but it kind of gets in your way because instead of doing that one thing, now you're trying to Figure out how you can do the 25 things that will live up to your vision of what the product will be in 20 years time.
But I think for most people, the one thing they know they've got to do the one thing, they just don't know which one thing.
Right.
It's like I've got four or five features, customer type of customers.
I could go after problems that I could solve, whatever, and I know I need to do one, but how do I pick that?

Dominik Angerer (54:00.340)
So coming back to my quote in the beginning, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat.
So just take one and get on with it.
It doesn't matter which one, try it.
If it fails, it fails.
Try the next one.
Best thing of advice, don't waste time on questioning yourself, what you should do or what you could do.
Do one thing and if it fails, do the next thing.

Omer (54:27.390)
I couldn't have asked for a better way to wrap up this interview.
And I promise everybody who's listening, we didn't plan this.
It just happened like that.
So let's move on to the lightning round.
I'm going to give you the seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Ready?

Dominik Angerer (54:44.070)
Yeah.

Omer (54:44.910)
What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've ever received?

Dominik Angerer (54:48.110)
The focus one from Peter.
100%.

Omer (54:50.660)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Dominik Angerer (54:53.380)
There's a German book called Ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften.
A Man without properties.
Crazy book, highly recommend.
It's not business related but it completely destroyed my view on how to describe the world.
If you want more business related, we are a remote company.
So the culture map from Erin Meyer is like go to anytime.

Omer (55:12.500)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Dominik Angerer (55:16.890)
Directness 100%.
So every founder I've talked with when we were part of founders factory and all those tech hubs where we're able to successfully see successful founders and talk to them, they were always super direct and they tend to ask a lot of why questions.
So why did you do that?
Why not like this?
And funny enough, if they have an opinion and they're wrong about it, they don't really care that they were wrong.
They just want to understand why.
And I believe this why.
And the interest of how they can improve themselves and the business and the idea this why is really, really strong.
And I've seen that multiple times and that's for me it's like an attribute or characteristic for sure.
For a Successful founder.

Omer (55:56.470)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Dominik Angerer (55:59.790)
I'm on my phone a lot, reading a lot of emails and stuff like that, so I get easily distracted as well.
That's why we built so many different apps in the beginning.
So screen time just default feature on iPhone app limits.
Like set time limits for different apps that distract you talking 5 minutes, 10 minutes for social media stuff like that.
Or remove them completely.
I cannot remove them completely because it's part of my job, but limit them to a certain amount of time.

Omer (56:25.560)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

Dominik Angerer (56:29.560)
So it's crazy because it's so boring.
Like financial kind of ERP for SaaS solution Europe with like tax reports and stuff like that.
That's the thing, you know, if you have a proper SaaS solution hosted SaaS solution that does ERP subscription management not for other SaaS solutions but for the actual like.
Like Stripe but not for payment but after that so you get to take care of like the taxation and tax reports for different countries and all of that.
And Stripe has some kind of feature, but not ideally what you actually want with multiple companies in different locations when you're getting bigger.
ERP solution for sus Done.
Definitely.

Omer (57:16.160)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Dominik Angerer (57:19.520)
I'm super clumsy.
I'm not even kidding.
Tomorrow I have surgery because I bumped my leg so many times today.
I have leg surgery tomorrow.
So I'm really, really clumsy.
So if at any conference you see myself falling off like a stage or bumping against chairs or anything like that, don't worry, I know what I'm doing.
It just looks stupid.

Omer (57:41.850)
Love that.
Thank you for sharing that one.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Dominik Angerer (57:46.890)
Music and gaming.
So I love playing guitar and piano and I love gaming.
I've been gaming my whole life from any kind of MMORPG to even any kind of eco shooter and stuff like that.
Really like it.
It's time with friends.
That's super nice.

Omer (58:03.290)
Dominic, thanks so much for joining me and sharing your story.
I just love these types of stories and yours in particular of the two of you just seeing an opportunity, tinkering around with an idea which has now become this eight figure a year business with hundreds of employees.
Love these types of stories.
I also think that hopefully we did a good job not just showing the successes, but also some of the struggles and failures along the way.
If people want to check out Storyblok, sign up for it, play around with it.
They can go to storyblock.com without the C. Yeah.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Dominik Angerer (58:54.550)
LinkedIn?
Twitter, definitely.
I'm actually replying, so just ping me.
And I guess LinkedIn is better.
I got a lot of spam on Twitter right now, but LinkedIn, just ping me.

Omer (59:06.150)
Great.
Well, we'll include links to your profiles in the show notes.
Great.
Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure, and I wish you and the team the best of success.

Dominik Angerer (59:14.410)
Thank you so much.
And thanks for all this SaaS podcast, one of the best podcasts I've been.
And Mario, just an amazing host.
Thank you for having me.

Omer (59:21.610)
Thank you so much.
Appreciate that.