What they do. “We are a leading storage cloud platform, providing businesses and consumers cloud services to store, use, and protect their data in an easy and affordable manner. By substantially reducing the complexity and frustration of storing, using, and protecting data, we empower customers to focus on their core business operations.”
Transparency with customers drives trust. “Transparency is more than a value for us, it’s our default approach. We release quarterly hard drive reports detailing the performance of each serial number and brand of the nearly 200,000 drives in our datacenter. We shared exactly how we store customer data redundantly, and how we do it inexpensively. We shared the source code algorithms used to encode and replicate our customer data to keep it safe. When we face problems, like we did during a 2010 power outage at a datacenter, we openly share what went wrong and how we will do better in the future. When there are problems with our software, we share what went wrong and the steps being taken to fix it, like in 2016 when a bug in a different company’s software caused problems with the Backblaze client if both pieces of software ran on the same customer laptop. This openness has been met with customer appreciation and loyalty.”
A great place to work, with dogs. “Of the first 100 employees, more than half worked with us at previous companies, which speaks to our reputation, as do our Glassdoor ratings — 4.9/5.0 stars, 100% CEO Approval, and 100% Recommend to a Friend as of December 31, 2020. To attract and retain such a team, we provide a warm, friendly office environment where families and well-behaved dogs are welcome.”
The marketing cache of an IPO is huge. “an IPO is a branding event — a coming of age party. It marks the end of the startup period and the beginning of an era where we are a trusted, mature company without the “startup” qualifier.”
Extremely cash efficient. “Our operations have historically been efficient with limited outside investment. Prior to issuing $10.0 million of convertible notes in a private financing round in August 2021, we had raised less than $3.0 million in outside equity since our founding in 2007. We decided to create Backblaze differently, and with essentially no venture capital funding.”
The selling motion is self-serve. “We have a highly efficient go-to-market model that is built on a self-serve selling motion. Prospective customers find us through a variety of channels including our website, partners, and brand advocates. Our frictionless free trial and self-serve sign-up processes help convert our blog readers and referrals from our brand advocates into customers, with over 80% of our revenue in 2020 coming from self-serve customers.”
Thought leadership with content matters. “We have fostered deep community engagement with valuable content we share on our blog — in 2020 alone, more than 3 million readers consumed content that we shared there. Our content encourages organic, inbound traffic that we believe serves as our greatest source of advocates and referrals. We will continue investing in our customer acquisition and inbound demand generation activities, which is driven predominantly by our blog content, our case studies, social sharing, earned media, and our self-serve sign up model.”
International expansion is a must. “While our sales and marketing efforts have primarily focused on the United States, our existing customer base spans more than 175 countries, with 28% of our revenue originating outside of the United States for the year ended December 31, 2020.”
Interesting industry data. “IDC estimates that approximately only 4% of global data was stored in public cloud environments in 2010 compared to a projected 53% in 2024. Multi-cloud deployments are becoming more commonplace as companies seek to avoid vendor lock-in, minimize latency, and provide redundancy for their mission critical data. According to Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 Global Cloud User Survey, 43% of respondents indicated current adoption of multi-cloud in 2020 and 84% of respondents indicated planned adoption of multi-cloud in 2022. Cybersecurity Ventures estimates that the global cost of ransomware attacks alone will reach $20 billion in 2021. According to the Threat Landscape Report in 2020 by Bitdefender, the total number of global ransomware reports increased by 715% year over year in the first half of 2020.”
sammy@blossomstreetventures.comhttps://blossomstreetventures.com/metrics/