Backblaze

“They're about half a million.”

“So we've raised a total of three million.”

“And the thing that came closest to putting us out of business in all 10 years was actually a flood in Thailand, which was not anywhere on anyone's radar screen.”

“We're growing about 50% year on year.”

“Yeah, it's actually thirty million ARR today.”

“And so we actually introduced a, an offering where you can use storage for anything, similar to an Amazon or Google or a Microsoft offering, but one quarter of their price point.”

“Our consumers churn at only about 10% a year.”

“And at this point we are storing about half as much data as Dropbox.”

“So in, in rough numbers, a consumer is worth about 400 dollars in lifetime revenue to us.”

“Yeah, it's a great team, and we, and every single person that started with us 10 years ago is still here today, so.”

“So it depends on the product line, but in rough numbers, we'll, we'll spend about somewhere between six and 12 months worth of revenue to acquire a customer.”

“We started writing a blog that was focused on storage and had about three million people a year that started reading it.”

“So it cost us, you know, 10 to fifteen million dollars to take the company public. Kind of a big number. Most of that went to the banks because they take seven percent of what you raised, but there are lots of other places where you actually have to spend mone…”

“When we went public, this was the chart that we went out on the roadshow with. A few different numbers on there, but focus on the one that says sixty-five million of ARR. It was not 300. We still went public.”

“We said for one year, we're gonna do nothing in terms of venture funding. There's gonna be no PowerPoints. There's gonna be no, no spreadsheets. There's gonna be no pitches. Just focus on product, focus on customers, see how it goes.”

“If we had raised a whole bunch of venture funding, we probably would have done it and said, we'll figure it out later. Somehow we'll figure out how to make the math work. But we didn't have any money. So we had to start from first principles and figure out how…”

“Well, something that was non-intuitive is you want some of the investors who are actually going to hold for the long term, but you want some investors who are absolutely not going to hold for the long term, and part of the reason you don't want them to hold fo…”

“When we were on the roadshow, every single solitary conversation was, hey, how can you spend more money To grow faster. That was the only thing anybody cared about. Our very first earnings call, which was like two months later, nobody was asking that. You know…”

“One of our key partners who was involved in our IPO roadshow launched a competitor like a week before we were going public.”

“I think bootstrapping is actually, in many ways, a better way to get to be a public company.”