Scaling Storyblok: 270 people, 47 countries, $138M raised

0:01Any company that calls itself an AI company, that's a marketing stunt right now. makes sense. You should do that for sure. Make sure that you're listened to, you heard, and people understand that you have those capabilities. But in the next couple of years, it's about how you're going to use it to create more values for your customers. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS.com. Here, we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment, and more.

0:32Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry. I'm your host, Alex Deema, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. Hey everyone, it's Ken from Backfeet Ventures and we're here with some exciting news. Applications for SaaS like Europe's global pitch competition are now open, and this year we're offering our biggest investment package yet, up to 1 million euros. If you're building the future of AI or SaaS, this is your moment, your chance to pitch the Europe's top PCs live at SaaStock 2025.

1:07To be eligible, you need 35 employees with some€3 million raised and under€1.5 million of AR. Application for this close September 17th, 2025. Are you ready to take the stage? We can see what you're building. Apply now at sastock-year.com backslash global pitch. Thanks. Okay, welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thuma, CEO and founder of SaaStock and general partner of BackFuture Ventures. Delighted to be joined today by Dominic Angara, who's the CEO and co-founder at Storyblock. How are you doing, Dominic? Hi, Alex. Really great. And thank you so much for having me. Yeah, good to have you on the podcast.

1:45Where's home? You're in the home office at the moment? Or is this in the, do you have a physical office? Yeah, this is my forever home. It's actually a home office, yes. But we don't have any offices. We are fully remote. So the whole company is already set up like this, basically. Very cool. And where are you based? Right now in Austria, Linds. So a really, really small town, about one and a half hours out of Vienna. Very nice. Very nice. It's been probably, and maybe showing my age here, but I want to say at least 20 years since I've been to Austria, and I've only been to Vienna. But Instagram is selling me on summer vacations in Austria.

2:23Could look pretty nice. So they do look pretty nice, but it could be pretty good. So I think, unfortunately, my kids, they're nine and ten. I'm sort of in this, I don't know, zone where I'd like to do these mountainous summer holiday, the traditional Alps thing where people think about the winter vacations and it looks lovely. But in the summertime, they're also really nice. And my kids are just not that interested yet. or I haven't done a good enough sales job on them. There are a couple of things you can do there. It's like a Sommerrodelbahn. It's called in German. So think of it as going down a mountain rail with nothing else than like a sheet of plastic underneath you.

3:09And it's going really, really fast and you have no control, but it's actually really fun. So there's a lot of cool things you can do. Oh, not at all. No, okay. Maybe a little bit. Yeah, yeah, good. So I've got one kid that likes danger and one that doesn't. She wouldn't go down the log flume with me recently at one of the fun fairs. But Dominic, I'd love to start with just getting to know you a little bit better, you know, for the audience's sake. So I would love to ask you, who is Dominic Angerer? So hi, everybody. So my name is Dominic Angerer. I'm this person that Alex was just describing. And I've been a software engineer my whole life.

3:42And my whole life, I really mean when I was really, really even a small kid. My dad was a hardware and software engineer. and I got my first PC when I was three years old, playing some games, getting to know Visual Basic, trained from my dad essentially, and then moved into software engineering really, really quickly. And so with just the age of about 15, I started to go on a rogue freelance kind of mission and trying to build as many websites and applications I could. And it turns out that when you start really young, you learn a lot. And if you then get to know people from meetups and developer communities, you end up at really nice places.

4:16Like I was working for agencies in the Netherlands. I was working for companies in Germany and Switzerland. And yeah, later on, I ended up at an agency, a large agency in Austria and took over the whole service and maintenance part. So after sales and also development of those new product features. And at one point, we then realized, OK, hey, we need to start something, not because we wanted to, but because we found an issue. And then StoryBlocker rise. And for the last eight years, I've turned a software engineer to CEO and all steps between. I'm happy to share more on that. But in the root of all of that is still the software engineer that likes to play games.

4:52Oh, I can see the, I don't know what console that is, but pinned up the wall. I can see a Game Boy, right? That's correct, yeah. And then is that a PlayStation, like, control? Perfect, yeah. That's a PS4 controller. Here should be a PS5 controller, actually. It's not yet there because it's currently in use. But I do play on the PC, but the controls on PlayStation are just way more ergonomic. Do you know what I've heard? So you're a CEO of a company, a scaling company. You've been doing this for eight years. Obviously, on the podcast, we speak to a lot of scaling CEOs. And we know it's a difficult job, scaling, being a CEO, managing a big team of people.

5:38And we need to look after ourselves. take some time off, allow the brain to kind of switch off. I understand, and I don't do it enough usually because I'm too tired in the evenings, but being a gamer, playing role-player games or let's say anything on the PlayStation, really doesn't allow you to think about work, right? and it just doesn't allow you to kind of just sort of like switch off and, you know, focus on what you're playing. And so, you know, I have had CEOs on the podcast that that is their way, but, you know, in the evening they're gaming until sort of like late at night. I did buy a PlayStation and I just haven't quite managed to get into it sort of like quite yet.

6:28But is that something that you do or you find, you know, a bit of escapism? For sure. It's rooted in childhood, for sure. And I have to say, the things I played in the beginning were MMORPGs, some massive multiplayer online roleplay games. The most well-known would be World of Warcraft, even though I've never played it. But the reality is you learn a lot about leading a company through those kind of games because you're suddenly surrounded by a lot of people and you have to self-organize yourself in a team, which in there is like alliances or guilds or however you want to call it. And you have hunters, you have farmers, you have people that are working on economic side, inventory side.

7:09So if you listen closely, there's even a hunter-farmer model in sales, right? So actually there are a lot of similarities on how people are running a guild versus how you can run a company. And by now I don't play too much, to be honest. I don't have that much time. And similar, as you've mentioned, when you're late at night and just finished up your day, you're really, really exhausted. but from time to time some friends of mine they called me up like hey Dom you need to try now so log into Discord and Steam and let's play around so it really helps to like calm down and focus on something else and you have more energy afterwards which is really nice.

7:43Very cool and Storyblock itself so you launched it more than eight years ago can you just paint a picture a little bit of the size of the company I think you're in venture capital path how much you've raised? Any data you can share around that? Of course. So we're now at 270 people in 47 different countries. We raised a total of 138 million, where the latest round was end of last year with 80 million, which, by the way, should be our last round, to be fully honest. It should actually allow us to hit profitability, 100 million ERR in the next two years. So I'm really looking forward to that. And as we are growing right now, we're still hiring, especially software engineers on the backend side, something that I'm really, really looking eagerly to add more to our amazing development team.

8:28And yeah, so by now we did a total of four rounds. So this has now been our series C and pretty exciting. We use this money now to actually tackle the US. We started doing that already in the beginning of last year. And with that 80 million, we are now really, really doubling down to head over to the US. Very cool. Very cool. And like heading over, So you waited for Series C to head over into the US? We did it earlier. So we raised$47 million in our Series B in the beginning of 2022, which we used to really double down in EMEA and become somewhat of a headless CMS content management system, basically leader in the EMEA market.

9:10And at one point we realized, okay, we still have enough cash left and we can already start going to the US, which we then did by the beginning of 2024. so establishing the company, setting everything up, setting up the first customer account and also infrastructure, rolling it out globally in a scalable way and then we realized, okay, it's working, we can accelerate it so we decided to do one more round to get the cash into the company so we don't have to raise again no matter how the market shifts or if anything happens so what we realized is that if you have the cash in the bank, we can operate with it we don't have to spend it, we have to invest it and that's what we're doing right now So we've got an amazing head of sales now in Armour, which is on the ground, really with the people that we have there.

9:54We're currently looking for a chief revenue officer located on the East Coast as well, which is a really, really interesting kind of hire to find, given that it's the person that allows me to go back to the product a little bit more. So this chief revenue officer that we're searching should take over sales and partnership or channel sales, however you want to call it, and really, really drive sales, not just in the US, but globally. and it's really really exciting to be honest. So we did not wait for the Series C. We decided to tackle it with the money that we still had of the Series B but the Series C is again now to accelerate and double down.

10:30Was there ever a process of where you were thinking about do you as the CEO need to relocate to the US and thinking about that, having discussions with the VCs, with the family but ultimately deciding to stay in Austria? So I have those conversations every other month, for sure. But so far, we realized that we have a completely distributed team with a distributed set of customers, not just in Armair and EMEA, but also in APEC. We literally are the only headless content management system with an infrastructure in mainland China, so behind the firewall, because we have customers also in that area of the world.

11:09and it's so interesting that none of our VCs have pushed me to move because it would of course increase the costs of living that we're having and right now I'm in this 55 square meter flat finally I got like an office kind of room with windows which is super amazing, highly recommend actual sunlight which was not the case in my previous setup and it's so much cheaper I'm at like 800 euro fixed costs per month that's something you will not get in the US unfortunately Very cool. And in terms of then your sales motion, is it an enterprise-led sales motion? What is the ACV of Storyblocks? Do you still get involved in the sales?

11:56Is a lot of it done remotely and efficiently? You mentioned the people on the ground in the US, are they having to go and visit customers? So in Storyblock, we have two revenue streams. One of them is a PLG motion, which makes about 30 % of our business. So think of developers and people that just tried Storyblock, really liked it. The swipe a credit card and just grew from within the PLG motion. There's no touch with any salespeople. There's no touch with anybody at Storyblock. Maybe the support if they need anything or the community in Discord, but it's pretty much self-service. There are all sizes of companies in there.

12:29So it's not just small businesses, but it's really a variety of companies that started out using Storybook. And 70 % of it is something that we call sales-led growth, which is basically upper-mid markets to enterprise. Those are the two areas that we really focus on, in particular infrastructures, or not infrastructure, industries that we try to tackle. And for that, we do have people on the ground. even the majority of the things that we do we do online through even trumpet kind of setup where they have a proper view on what's going on like a proper display of hey this is the content this is the sales motion this is the process we're following but sometimes especially on the larger side of deals with larger automotive customers larger finance people larger pharma companies we do tend to also visit them if it's required if they want to do that it really depends on the RFP that they have or if we already are in the middle of talks with them and just be in the area we're also going to have an event called TroyConf later this year which is really really big it's actually three different events where we bring together prospects existing customers partners just for them to meet at each other at an easier kind of way where nobody has to organize meeting rooms or anything like that it's just a way easier yeah way of communicating and and yeah talk to people a couple of questions there so like going back to eight years ago did you launch both with PLG and sales led or did you bring one in like after the other?

13:54Yeah so definitely after another so we started with PLG and I have to be honest Alex we did not start at Storyblock to build build a business in the first like and at the root of Storyblock there was not a business idea to be fully honest so my co-founder which is also named Alex and I were both part of that agency and we were using this enterprise content management system from the Austrian Press Agency at the time for all of our clients. And we're talking customers like Adidas, Reebok, Silhouette, and similar, like large B2B and B2C companies that we're using, the solutions that we build on top of that.

14:30And instead of fixing a bug where we send a report to them, hey, please fix it, you have like three months. They did not do that. They actually replied on that email to us with, hey, we're actually shutting down the business. Please find something else. We're not going to do any updates on that. And you have six months. So for us to get started, what we did is we tried to get all the data out of that system into one cohesive kind of database with qualitative structured content. That's the core of the idea that we had. And we then wanted to find a solution to bring it into other content management systems because we had the clear idea to not build a CMS.

15:07And at that point, we then realized after testing the usual suspects of WordPress Type 3, we looked into Drupal. Then we looked into Acquia, which is like an enterprise version of Drupal. Then Adobe, Sitecore, and so on. We tried all of them in actual projects and realized that we were significantly slower in implementation. And that's when two of our customers came to us. Hey, we have two more months left. What should we do? Should we build something? Should we try something? And we were like, okay, the use case that we're trying to tackle right now is storytelling for e-commerce products. And with structured reusable content modules that we called blocks.

15:44So storytelling with blocks. And what we did is on top of that database, where we really had all the data basically sitting in that we used to build websites independently to the software in the background, we then applied the UI on it. So we then built based on our own API, user interface that works for marketers. And it turns out that this user interface then started to grow. We had a login mask, registration mask for people to just sign up. And a month later or two months later, after we launched it in September 2017, we realized hey there are so many people already registered on the platform we didn't even have stripe integrate or anything like that and then they just shared story block in communities they shared the articles that we wrote on how to build certain things on top of a headless content management system like we are and suddenly three months later we're profitable we had 3 000 users on the platform purely word of mouth and that's when we then said okay now we need to step into it.

16:39We need to really get things going and build it out in a proper way. So for the next two and a half years until the end of 2019, we fully bootstrapped. So it was just Alexander and myself building it up, building more product features on top of it, or the first prototype that we had and build it up on an actual valuable product. And at 1 million ERR, purely PLG, we then had first enterprise customers reach out to us about, hey, how about the redlining? We want to have a certain SLA. We want to have certain customer success setups. And we're like, guys, we're like two people. Let us figure that out in the next couple of months and then we can talk.

17:18So that's when we raised our first round. We got it twice from First Minute, from FreeVC, and also from Founders Factory, which is like a startup accelerator in the UK. And it was a tremendous help for us to really get stuff done really, really quickly in the beginning. And then we ramped up the team based on the things that we have learned and absorbed from the team there. And we then scaled to 20 people, 200 people, 200 people in the coming years. But in the beginning, it was purely PLG. There was no SLG, even in our heads. It was purely people sign up with their credit card and we implement Stripe and let's be done with it.

17:56And you mentioned sort of earlier as well the user conference that you run as well, which you said is kind of like three different events. but you're bringing prospects, customers, and another stakeholder. Sorry, I forget. Yeah. And how long have you been doing that? What is the ROI? How do you measure that? Because a lot of SaaS companies, they have user conferences. They start them at different times. They run them generally at a loss or break even. but I'm sure obviously you've done right there is some some good ROI from it so I don't know what you can share you know around that so for now I cannot share anything because it's your first time doing it oh it's the first time okay I have to say years to do it so you know you need to have a certain maturity to make sense of it we in the past always were part of conferences and by now our community is so big the customers have so many amazing stories to tell that we decided that we We want to create a platform for that.

19:02We also, end of last year, actually, about a year ago now, we brought in a new CMO, which is called Mark Wheeler. And Mark has been with Linax, Nutanix, Sidecore, and many other companies before. And one of the things that he really wants to drive is that people understand how amazing our customers are and the stories they can tell. And also what our partners, which are software engineering, agencies, what they can actually deliver when it comes to content experiences and the amazing things that they've been building over the last couple of years. And when he pitched us the idea of JoyConf, which is about the joyful headless setup that we have coming from the ease of use of the platform and where we actually have a scientific proof that we are joyful, like people using Storyblock actually have a higher rating in happiness, which is really interesting to know.

19:55And we then decided, okay, let's do it properly. Let's do one in EMEA with Amsterdam, a huge, huge show, essentially. And then two, one in New York and one in Los Angeles later this year. And happy to give you an update afterwards, for sure. I believe there will be just a high return of investment with customer satisfaction and revenue retention. I'm quite sure about that. And let's see how many people actually are getting infected by the joy of other people enjoying Storyblock. And maybe they like it and subscribe. Well, good luck with that, I know. Thank you. Putting on events is not easy. But, yeah, would love an update afterwards, and I'm sure it works out.

20:37And I love the name as well, JoyConf. So it's a good place, a good start as well. And Dominate, obviously, we're in this era now which is being dominated by AI, right, I think across all sectors and industries. and it certainly is having, I would say, a big and positive impact in B2B software in SaaS. Now, you started the company eight years ago, so if you don't mind me calling you a traditional SaaS company, when did you start thinking about AI? What is your AI strategy? Are you looking at becoming AI first, sort of AI native? We'd love to learn more about that. For sure. And I believe it should be true for all the founders out there that have been around for quite some time.

21:32The moment you first used ChatGPT, sent your first prompt and received the result that was not completely wasted, but actually something like, oh, I can see potential in here. That was the time I really started to think about, how can we use that new set of technology out there? Because at the end, it's just another tool that we can utilize to help our customers create more value. So when we looked into it, what are the first things that we started doing? Of course, content creation, proofreading, translation. We already launched AI translation with one button click inside Storyblock. Another thing is when you upload images to Storyblock or assets of any kind, we can generate alternative text, which is super powerful and important And when you come to accessibility in terms of like really get people access to images if they cannot see them, if they only have screen readers, it can be fully automated.

22:20And even the translation of the alternative text can be automated. Then it's about content optimization and making sure that you have the proper SEO topics set. And given that SEO by now is also something on a dying stake with all the ice that's going on, I mean, there has been a report coming up by, I believe it was from SimilarWeb and the other statistic was the growth of HubSpot's search volume, if I'm not mistaken, where you can see a drop in the traffic directly coming from Google and similar. So that's really, really predominant. That's the whole journey of the buyer journey itself is changing fundamentally.

22:59So everything that we have been trusting, the people are beginning the search for Google, jumping on your landing page and converting. We now, even at Storyblock, already have customers that literally sign up immediately, hitting the app.storyblock.com sign-up site immediately, not for Google or any landing pages. They just search for a content management solution through AI searches, be it complexity, be it JetGPT or any kind of setup that you might have, and jump in building something. And that's the reality that we need to focus on. So the way we are now incorporated is by automating a lot of things for customers.

23:31We started to integrate and launch our own tool on how to set up an MCP server. And you can literally do that in less than a day and connect it with any agent. There's currently a few really nice integrations with, I would say, sister companies, of course. when you look into our investors currently being built, which is enabling our customers to then build even more. I mean, we had one customer already look really, really deeply into how they can automate and use content from Storyblock, which is validated, approved, and I would say highest quality that you can produce within a content or marketing organization because it has the approval workflow built in to then power FAQs, automated bots, agents that you might need.

24:11And one thing that we are going to launch is going to happen at TroyConf later this year, which should shake up the industry. I'm really, really looking forward to that already. But the majority of things that we're building is already out there in terms of like an AI brand awareness kind of topic where we check if you are on tone, if you are on brand, if you are on the setup that you actually want to have and you produce something. I believe personalization at scale will be super important because all of us have been at that point where, and shout out to Marco or CMO, I need to tell that story.

24:44So Mark purchased a gift for his wife, which is like a red dress, has been years ago. And since that day, he still receives ads for red dresses. And I can tell you, he's not the right target audience for that ad. And sadly, right now, personalization is done on maybe one, two or three variables. And all of us have that, had that experience. We go on Amazon, we purchase a fridge or whatever we want to purchase that we for sure will not buy for the next three years. But the day after we get like 40 different ads for another fridge that we might want to purchase. And to be honest, like this is super annoying.

25:19And there's something we can do about it in a wider scale in the industry. And I believe there's a lot of things that we can do where we can generate certain content pieces, better ads, better campaigns. And at the end, way more value for our customers and their customers at the end as well. And yeah, it's going to be huge. It's not just AI features with generation of images and text. That's basic stuff. It really comes down to content observability. How good is your content? Are you on-brand? How updated is it? And then also content orchestration and how you connect it with different tools that you have to make sure it's consistent and not a little bit good here, really bad here on the landing page.

25:58It's good on the AI search that comes up. You have an article from 2018 that doesn't make sense anymore. So it needs to be really smooth throughout all the different channels. That's how I think about it. I'm not allowed to share the amazing feature and actually products that we have filled up, but it's an extension to the content management game. So if you want to know more about that, you will have to reach out to our sales team and ask a little bit. Would you consider yourselves now like an AI company? No. Or are you, you know, you're a SaaS, sort of like a business with AI functionality? So I don't think there is going to be the term of AI companies out there for any longer because people also started, oh, we build on AWS.

26:39We build on Azure. Reality is now it's an infrastructure. It's a commodity. It's a tool that we are using. And same with blockchain and all the other kind of infrastructure tools that came up in a couple of years prior to today. And in the future, AI is default. So if you're not having AI features and compatibility and integrations, you're just not existing anymore. So the reality is that any company that calls itself AI company, that's marketing stunt right now makes sense you should do that for sure to make sure that you're listened to and you heard and people understand that you have those capabilities but in the next couple of years it's about how you're going to use it to create more values for your customers and this is how you need to think about it so if you're ignoring it most likely you will not be here in the next five years because the whole roles that we have right now in companies is about to change and it's already changing right now marketers really need to get more tech enablement they need to be way more savvy when it comes to the data when we look into developers, they can be way, way quicker on the prototyping side, maybe not for production code, although when it's about webcoding because of security concerns that at least we as software engineers have, but there's a lot of potential for prototyping and there's so much more speed that we can get out of it.

27:49And I would not say we're an AI company, we're a company that builds features with AI in its background that enables our users to really get something done quicker. and if you try to solve content and get high quality content out to your audience on every channel it doesn't matter if it's a website mobile application or an llm search you need to be prepared for that and i believe storyblock is the best tool for that and and like beyond let's say the company and the products you as a ceo like how are you using ai you know what is your ai stack you know and how is it helping you yeah so we now introduced a slack ei inside storyblocks organization because we are using Slack already predominantly.