Tomer Levy. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Logz.io. Before co-founding Logz, he co-founded and was the CTO of Intigua, a company that innovated locker-like containers designed for large enterprises. Prior to Intigua, Tomer spent 6 years at Check Point, where he led its intrusion prevention system product from concept to market. He has an MBA for Tel Avi University, a BA in Computer Science, and is an enthusiastic kite surfer.
Famous Five:
Favorite Book? – The Hard Thing About Hard Things What CEO do you follow? – Jeff Bezos Favorite online tool? — Grammarly How many hours of sleep do you get?— 6-7 If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Take it easy, you’ll figure it out”
Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:20 – Nathan introduces Tomer to the show 02:06 – Logz is a logins company 02:12 – Some of their customers are Kantar Media and British Airways 02:30 – Logz solves systematic problems in web servers and databases 02:41 – Logz is a SaaS business 02:52 – Logz caters to IT operations and security team of a company 03:24 – You can subscribe to Logz’ website directly and pay monthly 03:29 – Logz has 2 main cohorts 03:32 – SMBs would pay around $10-15K a year 03:41 – SMEs would usually pay annually that can grow to hundreds of thousands 03:58 – Average pay is $10K-40K in annual contract value 04:10 – Logz was launched in 2014 and the product end of 2015 04:30 – Logz has an inside sales team 04:38 – Logz offers an open source platform like ELK which is around $500K a month 04:58 – Instead of libraries, ELK will be installed in the servers and take all the data 05:12 – ELK visualizes the data and Logz offer ELK with more capabilities 05:27 – Logz is based on the open-source community 05:55 – Logz isn’t the developer of the open source 06:05 – Logz built a solution on top of the open source for log management 06:30 – ELK is like google search for all of your log data 07:02 – There are also other companies who are doing open SaaS 07:10 – Pantheon for WordPress and similar with Cloudera are doing open SaaS too 07:38 – Github just recently offered Git open source as a service 08:03 – Tomer has been writing content even before the launch of the company 08:14 – Logz is number for ELK search and they contribute the most in the open source community 08:43 – Open source has to be good and easy enough to get started so it will have mass distribution 08:51 – But it has to get to a point that it is difficult to scale and make it production grade 09:04 – Logz currently has a thousand companies on board 09:17 – Some are paid customers and some are on free 09:35 – Logz has raised money but they could have built a lifestyle business 09:52 – Logz raised $24M and the last round was $15.6M in October 2016 10:07 – Team size is 70 10:54 – Logz started in October 2014 and ran their first product by February 2015 11:05 – Logz started with 5 non-paying customers after shifting to paid model 11:38 – As your company grow, people will realizes your company’s value and be willing to pay for it 11:49 – Logz has 0 revenue in 2014 and 2015 revenue was around 6 figures 12:44 – Logz has already broken a million dollar runway 13:02 – Logz competes mostly with engineers setting up their own open source 13:10 – The commercial side, Logz competes with AWS or Amazon Web Services 13:45 – Gross margin 14:12 – Logz pays $1-5M to Amazon for hosting 15:20 – Minimum MRR 15:46 – Team is based in Telavi, Israel 15:59 – Logz also has a team in Boston where Tomer currently is 16:11 – Gross monthly customer churn 17:07 – “We’re very much a land and expand business” 17:43 – Marketing team has 8 or 9 people and 7 sales people 18:10 – Fully weighted CAC 18:40 – Payback period 19:22 – Logz also invest in paid marketing with around $5k a month 19:50 – Logz invests massively in events this year 20:23 – Logz spends a few hundreds of dollars in sponsorships 22:17 – The Famous Five
3 Key Points:
When thinking about a business model, try and create on that is “land and expand”. Starting as a free service is fine, but you need to make sure you’re built to offer your customers more value behind the paywall. Great content coupled with great keywords builds great companies.Resources Mentioned:
The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences GetLatka - Database of all B2B SaaS companies who have been on my show including their revenue, CAC, churn, ARPU and more Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio booksShow Notes provided by Mallard Creatives
