Insight
Gurfinkel: Founders should remove all sales friction during pivots to test PMF
“Moving these barriers was, I think, a very smart decision, and retrospectively, I would do it even before. That every pivot that I'm doing, everything in order to find and to optimize the time To find the mistakes, and to realize that you are in the wrong dire…”
Insight
Gurfinkel: CFOs with 15 years in Excel won't adopt web-based FP&A
“You are a CFO of a 200 employees company. You use Excel for 15 years to run your finance. You will never leave Excel. So all these web-based FP&A solution, FP&A web-based financial system, you will never Even think to move from Excel to the web.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Datarails beat competitors in every deal due to connectivity
“And when we came with such a compelling and impressive technology with this capability that we beat them in every deal. In every deal, we beat them because they couldn't even get close to what we offer with this connectivity with Excel and database.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: 100% outbound sales scaled Datarails from $0 to $20M ARR
“And this outbound motion took us from zero to a million in the first year, second year from million to five, and the third, we got to almost twenty million in outbound. At some point in the third year, we started to develop also the inbound, but the outbound, …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Investors called Data Rails the black sheep of their portfolio
“They used to tell me that we are the black sheep of their portfolios. You know, they have like this annual events, you come with a nice and you go and you know that you are the black sheep of their portfolio. You don't show any revenue. You don't show any succ…”
Insight
Gurfinkel: CIOs want to replace Excel, but finance teams insist on it
“If you speak with the CIO of the company, you speak with the business, the typically business user, they use Excel, but their dream is to get rid of Excel, right?... Finance people want to stay with Excel because it's more just a tool. This is part of their, e…”
What-if
Gurfinkel: DataRails would not have built deep spreadsheet tech without early failures
“I think that the depth of the technology, the platform that we developed, We would never invested so much in a robust platform that connects a spreadsheet to database. And you can look at our competitor that they have some Excel integration, this and that, but…”
Disclosure
Gurfinkel: Datarails priced initial FP&A product at $790 monthly without commitments
“We decided we are going to move any Obstacles. Any barrier we move from the sale in order to focus only on finding the product market fit. I'm not trying to optimize revenue, to optimize contract size, nothing... So it was a seven 90 dollar a month. That was t…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: FP&A software has penetrated only 20K North American mid-market firms
“So if you look at the North America, a market midsize companies, you have, let's say half a million companies. And you can total up the entire customer base of all the players of the FP&A, including DataRest, you will get to, let's say, 15,000 customers, ok, o…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Data Rails Took Five Years to Find Product-Market Fit
“We spent actually five years before we found the product market fit and started to grow”
Disclosure
Gurfinkel: Did Not Know What FP&A Was When Founding Datarails
“When we founded in the company in in in I honestly, I didn't even know what is FP&A. The solution or the concept or the technology that we developed. Well, nothing related to finance. It was related to business users that use Excel.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Focusing on the FP&A vertical unlocked Datarails' customer revenue
“Once we focus on the one use case or one vertical of the FP&A, that was the missing piece of creating a company and a revenue and customers and build the world data that we have today.”
Assertion Supported
Gurfinkel: Data Rails raised nearly $10M pre-PMF between 2015 and 2020
“We raised almost ten million dollars during this time. Not in one time. We started with half a million dollars and then 2,000,003 dollars.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Datarails matched 5 years of customer acquisition in 5 days
“In that week that we sold four customers in one week, it was almost the same amount of customers that we had in the five years. So in five days we acquired four new customers.”
Disclosure
Gurfinkel: DataRails had roughly $100K ARR before its FP&A pivot
“A hundred K ARR or so. Nothing. Five customers.”
