Stay Lean, Double Down on Channels, and Acquire New Customers4 min read

In just four years, Peter Caputa and his team have grown Databox — which helps companies pool all of their performance data into one spot — to almost $4 million in ARR. 

The Databox platform enables users to set goals, track progress, and build dashboards based on data from Google Analytics, Facebook ads, QuickBooks, HubSpot, and other tools.

Peter was an early employee at HubSpot, where he spent nine years building the sales and marketing funnel for agencies. HubSpot is now a public company, and Peter had started feeling the itch to build again, which is why he joined the comparatively smaller Databox as its CEO. 

“I was looking for a new challenge, looking to be entrepreneurial again,” he explains. 

On 0 to 5 Million, Peter discusses:

• How he acquired the first 10 customers after joining Databox 
• How the team uses content marketing to generate 4,5000 leads per month
• Why Databox uses chat to convert customers

Leaning on warm contacts for acquiring the first 10 customers

When Peter joined Databox, the team was lean after a previous version of the product didn’t work out as expected. “There was one support/QA person, along with 11 engineers and product people,” he says.  

No one was devoted to the go-to-market strategy, so Peter hit the phone with the goal of introducing Databox to his contacts at marketing agencies. 

As he discussed Databox with agencies, he soon discovered many of them were using manual processes for their reporting — “literally pulling data from different systems into spreadsheets, taking screengrabs, putting them into a slide deck,” he explains. 

Armed with that insight, he pitched Databox as a tool to automate that process. 

“I think in the first month, I closed maybe 10 or 15 of those deals. We weren’t charging a whole lot then, but I could get them on board,” Peter says.

Content marketing that drives 4,500 leads

Content marketing is a critical part of the customer acquisition strategy for Databox, which doesn’t spend anything on advertising.  

The company publishes about 12 pieces of content each week, including video and long-form articles. That content drives about 4,500 signups for the free product every month. 

“Obviously, coming from HubSpot, I’m a big believer in content marketing,” Peter says. “It can be a huge driver of any business. I think it scales well because an investment today has a long-term return, not just a short-term return. But what I really love about Databox is that our content marketing could be so broad. We can write about Google Analytics one day and QuickBooks the next.”

Databox is also strategic about their product pages. The team refreshed each page with videos, images, and multiple calls to action, as well as FAQs to maximize each page’s SEO potential. 

These product pages “are a gold standard,” Peter explains. 

The results were good and fast: The pages rose from the second or third page of search results for high-volume, high-intent keywords to the first page ––  “literally two days after we relaunched them,” Peter notes.

The support team as a growth tool

Databox’s sales process is complex because there are so many different ways to customize the platform. 

Because every customer uses its tools differently, “it’s difficult for us to figure out what they want, get them to explain it and then figure out how to do it,” Peter concludes. 

Databox has been able to address this by building out its support team. “It’s actually the first team we scaled,” he says. 

A colleague Peter worked with during his HubSpot days joined the company as director of customer success and insisted on building out a knowledge base. Although Peter didn’t see the urgency at the time, the knowledge base “laid the groundwork for us to chat effectively,” he says.

They started offering chat as an option for website prospects, but quickly expanded it for the whole customer base. Having the ability to respond to customers at the moment when they want to learn how to use Databox — with a chat response rate of just “single-digit” minutes — “has been huge,” says Peter. 

The support team also helps identify ideal prospects for the sales team through chat. Each month, support reps identify between 100 and 150 leads who are likely to buy and pass them on to the sales team. 

That’s been a brilliant strategy, says Peter: “The close rate on those is really high.” 

This is based on a conversation from The 0 to 5 Million Podcast, featuring founders, CEOs and revenue leaders from businesses between 0 and 5 million in ARR. Subscribe to future episodes to find out how they did it.