Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s unpack some things. When you put out this product, you put it out on a website and people started coming. What was one that website that drew people into it?

Dominik Angerer: We have used an approach that is now a big theme – product-led growth. We wrote articles on long-tail keywords that we wanted to rank on. For us, it was headless CMS. Headless CMS was bombarded with advertisements. The first page was unreachable for us. We looked into what other people are searching for.

We went for headless CMS for Laravel, for PHP, for Python. We started writing articles surrounding this. We produced about 30 articles written by us. Once we had established ourselves as a brand on Google, we wrote about headless CMS and what it actually means.

Given our brand awareness in Google for the long-tail articles, Google decided that the headless CRM article must be really good because of the other pieces we wrote. It put us on the first place.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome.

Dominik Angerer: That’s how we scaled. We didn’t pay anything for that. We didn’t have money. We started out trying to make money. We had time, so we wrote articles.

Sramana Mitra: This got you a bunch of customers. Were they from agencies?

Dominik Angerer: It was actually a split between agencies that use Storyblok as a CMS and solo developers who want to build something for themselves. In this product-led growth area, you usually have freemium products or a couple of days free trial. We do have that. Then we have a tiered pricing. If you need more users or need collaboration features, you can pay for that.

We then create different self-service areas and subscription models around our product. It worked out fine. A price of $99 a month or $499 for teams worked out quite well for us. These are starting packages. They can add new users on top of that. We wanted to add this layer of at least five users on the entry plan and at least 10 users on the teams plan.

We tried it with just a per user pricing which didn’t scale that well because it’s complex for users to always add another user. We decided that it was going to be a bundle. This brought us to one million ARR. Only after that we introduced an enterprise plan.

Sramana Mitra: Once you reached one million ARR, did you go out to raise money or were VCs coming to you?

Dominik Angerer: They came to us. We’re also part of a state-funded incubator in Austria. No equity was involved. It was like $10,000 plus AWS credits. This combination brought the idea to the incubator to add themselves as investors on Crunchbase even though they didn’t invest. They added themselves on Crunchbase as our seed investors. The CMS space was quite hot back in the days.

That triggered a waitlist in that space and it resulted in me getting 600 emails from VCs all around the world. I was lucky enough to know Peter Lasinger a bit better. He’s from 3VC. He told me to look into all the VCs that might have reached out to me on LinkedIn or that might have visited my site before. We did that and started approaching people that have B2B SaaS experience. We doubled-down on that. We used Crunchbase filters on those areas to identify which investors might be a fit.

Sramana Mitra: There are a lot of things you got to get investor fit around.

Dominik Angerer: Right. Because of our growth to one million ARR, we were in a nice position. We were able to restart hiring. We didn’t need the money. By now, there are other options. There’s revenue financing. You can do so many things once you have a bit of revenue that you can use. We chose a London-based one – firstminute capital – and then 3VC. They split 50/50.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer
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