Thread by @agazdecki

Data is the new gold.

Here’s how one entrepreneur turned that gold into $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue:

The company with the best insights about its customers wins over the competition.

However, many businesses still struggle to wrangle all their raw data into something that’s usable.

Holistics (@holistics_bi) empowers everyone to answer their own data questions without the need to rely on the data team.

The platform lets technical teams define & curate a set of business metrics so non-technical teams can build their own reports & charts without writing SQL.

The value of a self-service data intelligence platform is clear from the numbers.

Holistics has 250 customers across 30 countries who use the software to make their data accessible and actionable.

Currently, the company does $1.5 million in ARR and they are on track to hit $2 million by early next year.

Their platform runs over 5 million queries every month to support customers’ analytics operations.

91% of their customers say they can deliver business answers within a day of adopting Holistics.

It’s also one of the top analytics tools for Software Advice FrontRunner 2018-2021 and a Capterra Top Performer for 2021.

Rather than a startup founder or CTO, Huy Nguyen (@iamhuy) sees himself as a builder.

He’s been a software engineer since high school. He moved away from Vietnam to study Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

There, he joined a special program for entrepreneurs, where they fly students to another country to work for a startup for a year and learn the ropes.

He went to Sweden to work for a bio haptics startup and to Palo Alto to work as a software engineering intern at Facebook.

When he graduated from university, he joined a startup called Viki (it’s like Hulu, but for Korean dramas) as a data engineer.

During that time, Huy was part of a small team that built the entire data infrastructure for the business, along with a lot of internal data tools.

According to Huy, “One of the tools evolved into something useful. And then I thought, ‘Hey, this could actually help a lot of other businesses too.’"

That tool was a dashboarding solution that allowed a user to input a query and quickly get a data report, without the need for a data engineer.

“I asked my boss, my CEO, my CTO, and my CFO if I could run with it and they were all very supportive. I’m very grateful for that,” Huy says.

“Then I went out to find co-founders who would be able to turn this into a real business with me.”

In 2015, Huy and his two co-founders, Vincent Woon and Thanh Dinh, had everything they needed to start Holistics.
In the early years, Holistics grew very slowly.

As first-time founders, they had to go through some rough patches to get to where they are today.

He says that the mistakes weren’t necessarily about doing something wrong – it was more about the fact that they weren’t doing certain things they should have been doing.

According to Huy, “We had these blind spots and we kept thinking ‘Why didn’t we know about this earlier?’”

The trio of founders each had their own strengths:

Huy was the product guy

Vincent was the sales and operations guy

Thanh was the one with engineering and infrastructure expertise.

The only skill set that was missing between the three of them was marketing.

One of their biggest marketing challenges was Holistics’ positioning.

“We didn’t even really know what positioning meant at the time, we weren’t sure if messaging was the same thing… So, deciding how to market the platform in general was a struggle.”

Finally, they realized their customers’ primary pain point: They were frustrated that, despite all the business intelligence reports that the data team prepared, other departments kept coming back to them for every small change in report structure.

With their ideal customer pinpointed, the Holistics team went back and updated all their sales, marketing, and product materials to reflect that common pain point and underlying belief.

That’s how Holistics landed on their current messaging and go-to-market strategy. And ever since, things just started to click.

Their growth picked up, they had more happy customers, and the support team had an easier time.

Want the full story on how @holistics_bi scaled to $1.5 million in annual recurring revenue? Read the full story on @Bootstraprs. bootstrappers.com/how-identifyin…