Sramana Mitra: What other industries are you doing well in?

Dominik Angerer: Financial institutions. We can offer a really high SLA. Finance institutions are quite heavy and old, and have processes to be able to use a software. If the software you’re offering has a read-only option, it’s way easier to get in.

In education, Education First manages over half a million sites with Storyblok – half a million content pieces in 54 languages. For one landing page, it took them several weeks and months to create those sites. Now it’s a matter of days. The same applies to other industries.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have translation features?

Dominik Angerer: We provide them as integrations. There are solutions out there that automate the translation or do translation management. If you don’t want to have a different solution out there, you can use Storyblok and translate it yourself. We might want to tightly integrate in the future.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a complex problem. We are based on WordPress. We get a lot of translation requests, especially China. We always turn everything down because it’s complex. We have text and videos in English.

Dominik Angerer: We run Storyblok purely in English. It would be a huge overhead for us because we’re catering to developers that usually know English. Also we get a lot of translation requests for different areas. Products are easy to translate. You can just upload a list of text and they can translate it to all the different languages. Then you can have your applications in different languages. Maybe, you can do the core pieces. If you have a hundred articles, maybe you can put in the effort for the top 10. It’ll help you get going.

Sramana Mitra: You raised that first round of $2.5 million. What were the other rounds?

Dominik Angerer: Nine months later, we did an $8.5 million round. We wanted to start marketing for real. We didn’t spend too much money at that time. We decided to raise again because there was an investor called Mubadala who wanted to join us and they brought in a lot of additional value outside of money.

They’re super knowledgeable in the B2B SaaS space. They know what they’re doing. The people working there are just outstanding. When I first talked to them, they were really good. When you find someone who’s really good and they want to help you, it would be stupid to say no.

Sramana Mitra: What were they good at?

Dominik Angerer: Making introductions, challenging us on KPIs and forecasts. When you’re a first-time founder and you just moved into the VC space, you don’t understand much. They were completely open and transparent about how they work. They wanted to explain it to me. They wanted to not just coach us but help us grow in the way that we see the company should grow to. When they said they believed in our product because they tested it, that was the point when we said yes. We’re already 2.5x revenue since then. So a total of $11 million.