Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer (Part 5)

Dominik Angerer: Then in 2021, we wanted to get repeatability done in the sales motion. You want to have leads coming in from your marketing. Then they should create opportunities from that. This repeatability was what we were focusing on. The first half of the year in 2021, I had a chat with an advisor.

He was like, “If you see repeatability, you might want to accelerate. You’re like drinking from a fire hose with an espresso cup.” This image got stuck in my head. If the process seems to work, why shouldn’t we use the money that we just raised to hire more people. We scaled from 35 people in the middle of 2021 to about a hundred.

Sramana Mitra: Adding 65 people mostly in sales?

Dominik Angerer: A huge chunk was. 15 people were added to the four sales people that we had. We built out the talent acquisition and people team at the same time. We knew we were going to hire more in the year after. If we hadn’t done that, this would have resulted in us not growing healthily.

If you don’t have a process for onboarding, you will have a hard time. We have scaled the people team, sales team, marketing team, and we started introducing a developer relations team next to our product team.

Sramana Mitra: We are talking 2021 still?

Dominik Angerer: We were at 230 in 2022.

Sramana Mitra: You raised another round?

Dominik Angerer: Yes, we raised $47 million four months ago.

Sramana Mitra: Can you articulate what are the levers of growth? This is a lot of fundraising. There’s not point raising this much unless you’ve identified that if you put in a dollar here, this much comes out.

Dominik Angerer: The indicator for us to go faster was the repeatability. We knew that if we used marketing spend on advertisement channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, events, this will bring in more leads. At the same time, we are a product-led company. If we update our product to a new version completely and add new features, we can increase the number of people that want to use our product and maybe even the satisfaction.

We launched a version two this year as well. At the same time, we saw more people using it on the self-service side. Customers that were using a $499 plan wanted to talk to us about our enterprise offering. Then we did a forecast. We tried to be as close as possible to the goals that we set. We saw that we are growing nicely.

We also got HV Capital in which were heavily focused on e-commerce and B2B SaaS. Given that our first vertical that we focused on is e-commerce and their focus is the same, we felt a perfect fit with them. They joined us in this round.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Rapid Growth and $58 Million in Financing with a Virtual Company: Storyblok CEO Dominik Angerer
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