Dominik has built a 230-people virtual company and raised $58 million in Financing. But first, he and his Brazilian co-founder bootstrapped to $1M ARR before raising a penny! Clever SEO strategy was at the heart of the first success. Read on for more!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to Storyblok.

Dominik Angerer: I’m one of the two founders and the current CEO. Before jumping to what Storyblok is, a quick background on my end. I started as a software developer when I was 15. I started as a freelancer consultant for multiple companies in the tech space. I worked for agencies across Europe, Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria. Then, I moved more toward leading a team when I was 19. We scaled businesses and companies on the e-commerce side.

Then we found that there were content problems for most customers that we’re serving. That was the beginning of Storyblok. It’s a content management solution that we have bootstrapped from 2017 to the beginning of 2020 with two people to one million in ARR. It’s purely organic and bootstrapped.

Then we went the VC route because we saw that we could be the market leader. We raised $58 million in total. We have grown the team from two people to 230. We have 140,000 customers in 130 countries as a remote company.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Dominik Angerer: I’m in Austria.

Sramana Mitra: In Vienna?

Dominik Angerer: In Linz.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You have a virtual company. Where is everybody else?

Dominik Angerer: My co-founder is living close to Rio in Brazil. We have people in Chile, Singapore, Indonesia, France, and Sweden. Probably about 45 different countries by now.

Sramana Mitra: You’re operating as a virtual company?

Dominik Angerer: Right. We don’t have an office.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about what is Storyblock.

Dominik Angerer: Most people use WordPress or similar to that. We put a spin on it. As soon as you become a brand and have to serve multiple channels, you need to reuse content at a faster pace, in a different format, on different devices and with different visuals. Even in-app features.

We don’t produce a website but use purely data. Developers can load the data and use it to build something on their own. You can think of it as a large database with an interface for marketers to manage content and designers to manage designs. Developers can pull out the data behind it and not just the visuals.

Sramana Mitra: How did you come up with this idea?

Dominik Angerer: We were using an enterprise CMS in the agency. It was a really old one. We asked them to change a small feature. We sent a feature request. We needed this to be fixed. The response was that they’re going to run out of business and we should find something else.

It was a bad position for us because we had to find something new. We tried all different things from Adobe, Sitecore, and Drupal. We wanted to find something that has a visual kind of editor but still API-driven. There was nothing.

We decided to build a prototype and showed it to some customers. Then we started creating this idea of storytelling using blocks. That was the idea basically. It was this headless CMS. People liked it once they tried it. Once it is set up, you don’t have to do anything to do anymore. It’s nice because it brings down the maintenance cost.

A month later, we were profitable with 1,000 users on the platform. Then we scaled to 3,000 three months later, 10,000 a year later, and 15,000 at the end of 2019. That was the trajectory based on purely SEO.