Boscovic: SaaS products are useless until customers import their data
David Boscovic · How Flatfile Built $100m+ WarChest to Create Data Onboarding Category, Hit $6m ARR · Sep 30, 2022 · at 1:58
Flatfile co-founder and CEO David Boscovic explains why data onboarding is a fundamental hurdle for modern SaaS applications.
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“You build a CRM, useless until the customer brings their data. You build a visitor management system, which is the company I was working at before Flatfile, Envoy, and you need your customers to bring lists of employees and daily lists of visitors coming to their building. And you realize that by and far, like software and SaaS products have to solve this data import data onboarding problem.”
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“So fast forward three years now with the billions of decisions we've observed across our customers, we can automate 97% of the decisions in the data exchange process.”
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“There's no cute API that you can connect to. To get your data automatically synchronizing via Zapier in when you're coming from a system that was built 20, 30 years ago. And that's where the majority of SaaS innovation is happening, right? We're solving these …”
Boscovic: Enterprise internal tools often exceed billion-dollar SaaS products in active users
“Whether you're CBRE or whether you're a large multinational bank, you have hundreds of internal tools that have more users than the average, like billion dollar SaaS product, right? Like CBRE has internal tools with 50,000 brokers using it every day, right?”
Boscovic: Category creation is costlier than competing in established markets
“Category creation is incredibly expensive because unlike, you know, innovating in a, with a new CRM where you can, all of your sort of education, your customers is clearly done and you get to be better, right? You get to differentiate yourself.”
Boscovic: Flatfile reaches $100M total funding with $50M Series B
“Five, zero million. So we've come up to about a hundred million total in funding.”
Boscovic: Investors ignored customer acquisition costs in 2020 and 2021
“By and far through 20, 20, 20, 21, right? This is going to be top line growth at that point, right? Like, you know, you talk to your board, you talk to investors, nobody's paying an enormous amount of attention to the cost of acquiring these customers.”