Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I noticed that you said solve the problem that people were not backing up data. You can create back-up opportunities. How do you solve the problem that people were not backing up data?

Gleb Budman: The reason I say that what we were trying to do was solve that problem was because back-up solutions existed. We joked that we were 30 years too late to data backup. There was definitely no first mover advantage and it wasn’t the kind of thing where we’re like, “We should definitely do backup because no one else is.” We were not going to be first. The problem that we realized was that people still were not backing up their data. We wanted to understand a little bit deeper about that. Why were people not doing it? What could we possibly do to help? We explored a variety of different solution types. We explored making better software for people to back up to external hard drives.

We thought, “Something that would just make it easy for people to automate the process of backing up to their hard drives.” We explored the idea of backing up to existing services. We thought, “Maybe if people could just have some software that would back up their spreadsheets to Google Docs or their photos to Flickr and use existing services that they might have accounts to, maybe that would work.” We explored peer to peer. If I back up to you and you back up to me, maybe that would be a good solution. We went on these various paths to try different ideas and see what stuck. What we found was the number one thing that people struggled with was that it was too hard. A lot of people had actually tried to back up. They had tried some way to back up their computers before and gave up because it was too difficult. The number one reason they said it was too difficult was that every single solitary service that they’ve tried asked them this question that they had a hard time answering, “What do you want to back up?”

The reason that was a hard question was because they would say, “You know, the stuff that’s important to me.” When it came to the way these products wanted you to answer that question, they wanted you to select files and folders on your computer. Most people did not have a great grasp of where everything on their computer was. People would just give up or they would just check My Documents and hope that whatever was important was in there. Usually, that would be about half of what they actually cared about. We didn’t come at it with a solution to the problem. We came up with this idea of instead of asking you what you want to back up, we’re just going to back up everything. Instead of deciding what to include, we would ask what you wanted to exclude. Then, if you didn’t know about it and we didn’t know about it, it was just going to get backed up. That was the idea for Backblaze.

We would build this unlimited back up service. It had to be unlimited since you couldn’t choose what to back up and most people didn’t know how much data they had. Asking them to pay for gigabyte didn’t make sense. Then we did some pricing analysis and the $5 came as the clear answer. That became the core vision for Backblaze. It would be $5 a month totally unlimited back-up that would be online. It would just grab all of your data and copy a secure version of it on to the Internet. If you needed your data back, you could download it or we could FedEx your flash drive. That was the original vision of what we pretty much stayed true to for almost the last eight years.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Sustainable, Capital-Efficient Business: Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman
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