Soumyadeb is the founder and CEO of RudderStack, a company which he started in June 2019. Soumyadeb is a serial entrepreneur, RudderStack being his 3rd startup. He sold his previous startup, a B2B ad-tech platform called MarianaIQ, to 8×8 where he spent a year building customer data pipelines. His challenges collecting and processing customer data at enterprise scale at 8×8 inspired him to start RudderStack.
Soumyadeb has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois. His Ph.D. thesis was awarded second best thesis in the field of DataBase by ACM. He has an undergraduate degree from IIT Delhi.
Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is RudderStack all about?
RudderStack helps customers collect, unify, process, and route customer data, whether it’s enabling a real-time, first-party event stream from your web or mobile app, or pulling customer data stored in your SaaS tools like Salesforce. We also enable you to pull data from your data warehouse and send it to all of your customer tools.
We compete with vendors like Segment.com and others. Our key differentiators are our cloud native architecture, our focus on data control and compliance and our warehouse-first approach to customer data storage. These unique features have helped us land some large enterprise customers.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
Prior to starting RudderStack, I was the Sr. Director of AI/ML at a public telecom company called 8×8 where I was working on building out some customer data use cases like scoring incoming leads, predicting which customers would churn, determining who we could upsell, etc.
While building out those use cases, I experienced, first-hand, the challenges around unifying customer data and that was the motivation for starting RudderStack.
What are your plans, how do you plan to grow this company?
We are a VC funded startup and for companies like us, the play book is pretty well defined. Raise money, build a great product, grow like crazy, rinse and repeat as you go from seed stage to Series A, B, C and beyond, hopefully achieving an IPO at some point.
We are in the seed stage. We have raised a small round, have built a product and have quite a bit of early traction (full credit for which goes to the team). However, the bar only gets higher from here – we just need to keep executing on all fronts (product, marketing, operations, etc.)
What was the biggest problem you encountered with your business and how did you overcome it?
Well, the company has only been around for one and a half years. As they say, the scale of your problems scale up with your business, so problems we have faced in the last 1.5 years are hardly any representation of the problems we are going to face in the future.
Having said that, if I had to pick the biggest problem we have faced it would be hiring. We have been extremely fortunate to have a stellar team so far but keeping that bar as we are scaling is hard.
What were the top mistakes you made starting your business and what did you learn from it?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned was from my previous startups: working on ideas for which there is a small (or non-existent) market. We should have detected this way earlier and pivoted—as they say, the market always wins.
With RudderStack, we are thankful to be operating in a massive market.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
We have some core product differentiators (like being cloud native, support for compliance and control, warehouse-first, etc.).
However, I don’t think emphasising competitors is valuable unless you are in a market that is highly monopolized. For example, if I was building a new CRM where Salesforce controls 75% of the market, I would need to have a strong (hopefully 10x) differentiator from Salesforce.
In our market, no vendor has more than 5% ownership (by my rough estimates). We believe our biggest competitor is companies going DIY (do it yourself) and building something similar to our product internally.
What is one thing that you do daily to grow as an entrepreneur?
Read. Not just books but articles, blogs, etc. I have been an engineer all my life which means there are so many things I don’t know about like marketing, sales, support, product etc, things for which I am now (indirectly) responsible for as a CEO. Trying to ramp up on those things as fast as I can.
What are three books or courses you recommend for new entrepreneurs?
- The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
- The Mom Test – Rob Fitzpatrick
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
What is the one thing you wish you knew before starting your business?
I wish I had been more prepared for hard it is to build a really great team. We have been incredibly lucky on that aspect so far.
What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?
Creating great content and somehow distributing it effectively. For example, our original GitHub repo (code is also content imo) went viral on HackerNews and that drove a bunch of interest in our business.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
Customer validation. I would talk to as many potential customers as possible. You can use your personal network (which is free), but you can also expand your reach on platforms like LinkedIn and other professional networking platforms.
What’s your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?
The market always wins. Build something people want, which is often simple.
What is your favorite quote?
When a great team meets a lousy market, the market wins. When a lousy team meets a great market, the market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.
And one more, if I may.
You want to be the last company in a field, not the first. Google wasn’t the first search engine nor Facebook was the first social networking site. Both were the last companies in their space.
How can we get in touch with you?
Email. I am old school so not big on social media.
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