Elastic.io: Getting Traction by Charging More for Your SaaS

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Renat Zubairov is the CEO and co-founder of Elastic.io, a hybrid integration platform that helps businesses connect APIs, and on-premise and cloud applications quickly and securely.

In 2012, Renat and his co-founders were working for a company where they were doing a lot of integration work. They realized that they weren't the only ones feeling the pain.

Eventually, they came up with an idea to build a SaaS integration platform.

They used their savings to start their company and spent the first six months building a product. But they didn't talk to any customers. So when they eventually launched, it was hard for them to find customers. Even giving away the product for free didn't help much.

But when they started charging for their product, something interesting happened. They started attracting better quality customers. And the feedback they got from those customers allowed them to build a better product and serve those customers better.

They realized that they could charge even more for their product by targeting larger companies.

Today, a typical customer pays them around $10K a year and they're currently doing around $2.5 million in annual revenue. And they've been growing over 100% year over year (YOY) for the last 3 years.

Renat shares the story of how they've built Elastic.io, what they've been doing to grow so fast, how he wishes that they'd charged much earlier for their product and the impact of not thinking big enough when they started.

I hope you enjoy it.

This episode is part of our First Customers series.

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