Ben Dowling: Bootstrapping a Successful IP Geolocation SaaS From a Side Hustle to 50% YoY Growth.

This episode is sponsored by Contentfy, a premium video editing and content repurposing service for busy content creators, influencers, brands, podcasters, YouTubers, and marketers. Contentfy provides unlimited end-to-end editing and repurposing services to help you get your video and audio content edited and repurposed quickly, easily, and reliably. Join other busy content creators, founders, brands, and marketers who now spend even more time creating while they take care of the rest. You no longer need to worry about spending hours editing anymore. Just create content, build your audience, and grow your business. If you're a content creator looking to save time and money, or looking to outsource your content marketing team, get your first free video edited now at contentfy.co. If you'd like to sponsor the SaaS District podcast or recommend any guests that you think would be valuable to be on the show, visit horizoncapital.com/saas-podcast today. Thanks again, folks. Thanks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akhil Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how a founder bootstrapped a successful IP geolocation SaaS starting from a side hustle to now growing over 50% year over year. So today we have our guest Ben Dowling joining us. Ben is the founder and CEO of ipinfo.io and host.io, a reliable, in-depth source of IP addresses, data handling roughly 20 billion API requests per month for 100,000 businesses and developers. Ben was the former CTO at com.com, worked at Facebook as a software engineer, as well as various other startups across the UK. So welcome, Ben. Super excited to have you on SaaS District show today.

Thanks, Akeel. Excited to be here.

So we always like to start off, love to hear a little bit about your background, just kind of quick background. What have been your past ventures, entrepreneurial journey, including I think you found a company called Geonium?

Yep. Geonium. That's right. That was back in London, back in, I guess it would've been 2009. That's my— so I previously, I worked at a startup before then as an employee. I think I was the second hire there. Enjoyed that a lot. I would have been, was it 25 at the time? Just threw myself into the startup life, working every hour that I was awake, working weekends, learning a bunch. It was growing rapidly and enjoyed it, but thought, hey, I'm an employee here. I'm spending all my time on it. I was leading the tech team there at the time and thought, hey, how hard could it be? I could just do this myself, and thought I'd love to do my own startup at some point. And met someone who had a bunch of ideas for a startup in mobile phone location-based space. And that was at the time, maybe it was the iPhone 3 or something around then. And so I'd been doing some mobile apps on the side and thought, hey, this would be fun. And I had a 3-month-old baby at the time. I was living in a flat in London. And I was like, hey, do you think I should go do a startup? It seems crazy. But my wife was super supportive. She's like, you should just do it. You're going to regret it if you don't. Just take the leap. I took the leap and I worked on Jeremi for maybe it's almost 12 months. We raised a very small amount of seed money, enough for us to pay the rent for 6 months, launched a mobile app, got a bunch of good reviews, got some early traction. It was a lot of fun. We never found any business model for it. We never got to a breakout level of traction for consumer startups, but it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot through that process. But when we ran out of seed money, and when the credit card debt was racking up, then it's like, okay, well, I've got to go find some consulting gigs or see what I can do. And then I ended up at Lightbox, which was a venture-backed mobile startup in London at the time. And we started working on a photo sharing app for Android. This is at a time that Instagram was really cool. It was iPhone only. There weren't many good apps on Android at the time. We were working on a great photo sharing app. There were a few photo sharing apps, but nothing that was anywhere near as good as Instagram. Based on the pent-up demand for Instagram that didn't exist on Android, I think we got 3 million downloads within a few months. We were the top Android app in the Play Store for a while. And we weren't too worried about Instagram launching on Android because a few other big popular iPhone apps had launched on Android and things would crash. And we thought, hey, we've got the Android expertise. We've got a head start. Even if Instagram does launch on Android, I'm sure it'll be buggy and it won't work. And maybe that cements our position as the number one photo app on Android. And then Instagram launched and it was better than our app. And so we were like, okay, this is This is not what we wanted. Well, I mean, a really fun lesson I learned from that was that we'd spent months and months perfecting— so on Android, when you rotate it from portrait to landscape, I don't know if it's the same today, the app would just get restarted, right? So it just doesn't re-render it, it sort of restarts the app. And when you're doing photo processing, you've got a bunch of stuff in memory. And so it's really tricky for us to rotate, do a bunch of code handling, okay, rotate the phone from landscape to portrait. At the time, a lot of Android apps, if you rotate them, they would crash and all the photo apps would.

Hmm.

Because that was really tricky. And we totally nailed it. The Android team at Lightbox had really nailed this, spent months on it, and we had it and we were so proud of this. You could rotate from portrait to landscape and it wouldn't crash. And so anytime a new app launched, we tested it, we're like, yeah, it crashes. These guys haven't solved this problem. And as soon as Instagram launched, we tested it, we put it into landscape mode, we waited for the crash, and they made it a portrait-only app. And so they just bypassed this whole problem. It didn't crash, but it didn't go in landscape, but who cared, right? That really was a big lesson for me that actually the users of the app don't care. They don't care if it's a landscape app. They don't care if it's portrait. They just want their app to work. And you can make this 5-minute decision like, hey, we only support portrait mode. Job done. Whereas we'd spent months figuring out all these really difficult technical details on how to make sure it works in landscape mode. We're really proud of that, and there was some good work around it. But in the end, it didn't help us build the best app. And that's time that could have been spent making the product better elsewhere. That was fun, lesson learned there. Then the whole team, we wound up at Facebook, and so I moved out from the UK then to the Bay Area. That was cool. We had to wait for our H-1B visas, and so I managed to take a few months off and did some traveling around Italy with my wife and young daughter at the time. Then we moved to the US, and I was at Facebook for a couple of years as a software engineer. I shifted, a bunch of the team went to to work on the photos at Facebook and some went to work on Instagram because around that same time, they were acquired by Facebook. And so some of the guys that were working at Lightbox went to work on Instagram. I sort of changed track and started on the ads integrity team. And so that was a lot of fun learning about all the sort of scammy ads on Facebook and all the shady corners of the internet, the diet pill scams and all these weird things, learning a lot about those, learning how we can stop them, how we can automatically detect them, how we can clean up some of the ad ecosystem in Facebook. I had a lot of fun with that. I love that. It's really interesting. Then left Facebook to be CTO at Calm for a couple of years. I knew Alex, the founder of Calm. We were friends in London. We did a few side projects together, little ones, and we stayed in touch. He moved to America a few years before me. He had a full-time role, and then he'd been working on Calm as a side project. In those few months where I'd been traveling around Italy before we got to move, get the US visa and move to the US, I did some contracting work for him on Calm and built out some of the synchronous meditation features and some bits for the site. We stayed in touch. After a couple of years at Facebook, I was thinking about what thing I could do next. Calm was still very, very early at that point. It had next to no revenue. It had an app that would crash all the time.

Mm-hmm.

They had these super passionate users that despite the fact that the app was not a very smooth experience. Lots of users that would email in and say, hey, look, this app's changed my life. I'm sleeping better. People say, hey, this has saved my marriage. People saying, hey, I'm off drugs because of this. Obviously, it wasn't everybody's story. Lots of people were frustrated with the app, but the fact that it could have this effect in some people's life, I thought was pretty incredible. It's clear that with an app that didn't crash all the time, that you actually solve some of these issues, the impact can be much, much more profound. And so yeah, then I joined Karma as CTO. I was there for a couple of years. During that period, went from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions in revenue, grew really, really fast. That was a really fun time. But during this time, I've been working on IPinfo as a side project. And so at some point, it got to the point where IPinfo was demanding more and more of my time and decided at that point to say, hey, I want to go focus on IPinfo full-time at this point and see what I can make of it.

Cool. So, I want to dig down into a couple of points there. So, you started off Geonium, that was kind of a project you co-founded. Then you have a baby, you've got to feed, change diapers, pay the bills, obviously. back, got a job, right? Lead engineer at Lightbox. They got acquired by Facebook. Now you're working as a software engineer. Um, so you made that transition from working as an entrepreneur, which is kind of your dream and, and kind of what you're hoping for, deciding to go back to the workforce. What was that kind of, uh, you know, experience like for you? Did you feel defeated? Did you feel lost? Or were you like, okay, I'm just gonna do this for a little bit and I'm gonna try something new all over again? Uh, and you knew that you had to come back.

Yeah, it's interesting. So I think the, the, a bit of both, I think. I certainly didn't go from doing Jeremyum and then go back to a corporate soul-sucking job, right? Where it's— Lightbox was really exciting, really dynamic. We were doing a lot of fun stuff. We had a really great team. And so I loved working there. It definitely did feel a bit like a defeat though, at the point where I committed to like, hey, I'm going to go do a startup. While doing it for myself at Jeremyum, working for myself, I just loved the freedom, flexibility. I was working remotely, working from coffee shops, working from the library, had my own schedule, so I got to spend time with my wife and daughter, and then work all through the night or whatever. And so I loved that freedom and the, hey, I'm only really accountable to myself here. I really enjoyed that. And so when I then had to go and get a job, there were some of those elements that that I lost. But then when going to do IPinfo full-time, I was able to recapture some of those. IPinfo, we've been fully remote, fully distributed team from the start. I guess most companies are now during COVID but that was intentional. That wasn't, hey, this is the best way to start a company. I think there are lots of arguments for it being a great way to start a company. But for me, it was just like, hey, this is how I want to operate. I don't want to have to go into an office every day. I want to be able to hire anybody from around the world and have them operate on whatever time schedule they want, or with whatever flexibility they want. And so there were elements— I was really lucky to land a great job at Lightbox and work on an exciting project, but it was definitely in some ways, it felt like— at the start, I'm like, wow, this is it. I'm never going to work for anybody ever again. Now I'm an entrepreneur, I get to do whatever I want. And so yeah, it was a bit of a step back and took some adjustment in some ways. Um, but it was also, you know, it was also a great, really fun project that I was able to throw myself into as well. So that was, that was great.

And can you, uh, you know, in terms of, you know, when you decided to start IP Info, uh, you know, came back to the entrepreneurial field, started building this on the side, what was that process of, you know, uh, the idea, idea stage where, what, what was the opportunity and problem you were looking to solve in the market that you saw clearly needed a solution?

Yeah. So, so I didn't at all. So, so the, the, you know, it started as a, you know, so I've always been interested in just, you know, working on side projects, some for just engineering curiosity, like, is this something I could build? Is this something I could ship? Some more problem-focused, this is a problem the user's going to have. With IPython, it was to help me with some of my other side projects. And so I've been using geolocation data in a bunch of projects, setting some up, and it was just a hassle. You'd have to download some data files, upload it to a server, they would get outdated and you'd have to update them. By the time I did this the 4th or 5th time over a period of maybe a couple of years, I just thought, I don't have to do this again. Why don't I just do this on one server, wrap it in a simple API? It'd be really useful for me, save me having to do this. I can just do this properly once this weekend, and then I never have to do it again. Probably be useful for other people. I never necessarily thought of it as saying there's a business here or a market opportunity. It's just like, this would be really useful for me. There'll be other people that probably find it useful. And posted about it on Stack Overflow. I was like, hey, fellow developers, here's a much easier way to get geolocation data. It's a free API. There was no paid plans initially. It was completely free. I think it was on a $5 a month server. And so it's, hey, I'm using it. It could be useful for you. Go and use it. But very, very quickly, it started getting a lot of traction. I think I remember I was getting a the bus to work, and I got a text message or something saying, hey, there's an issue with the server. The CPU is pegged or something. I thought, I don't know if I've written a bug or something's gone wrong. I connect into the server, and I see that the server's getting millions of hits at that point.

Wow.

I think for my projects, I was calling a few hundred to a few thousand times a day. Suddenly, getting these millions of hits from these projects, I thought, wow, I mean, it's great. They're using it a lot. Now I need to upgrade the server. It's going to start getting more expensive. I wonder if people are using it millions of times a day, if they might consider paying for it. My wife was like, hey, why don't you just go launch paid plans? I was like, I don't know if it's worth the effort of building out support for paid plans. I don't know if anybody's going to pay. She said, well, just ship it and see what happens. I did. Very, very quickly, people started paying. Things have just very organically evolved from there. We would obviously refine pay plans a lot since then, refine the service. We've got lots of feedback from customers saying, hey, we love what's in your API right now. Could you help us with this other dataset? And so over many, many years, we've built out additional datasets. We've refined the data. We've improved the data. We put a lot of effort into the datasets. Like I said, initially, I was just downloading what I could download on my server and just wrap an API around it.

Right.

Since then, we now got a whole data engineering team that are focused on building out your own proprietary datasets and improving the accuracy. But initially, no, that was obvious. It was like, hey, it's an API. And so yeah, it evolved very organically from there. But there was definitely no— I mean, I personally had a very clear problem. Like, hey, this sucks the way that I'm doing it. I can make it easier for me. It could be easier for other people. I certainly didn't do this, oh, here's a framework for how I'm thinking about the market and how they might pay. It was just like, it felt very natural to be like, well, if someone wants to pay, I would just charge them monthly. They're making requests. Our pricing models evolved, but yeah, that was how it all started.

Makes sense. I love it. So it was kind of a mistake. I mean, you built it as a project for yourself, posted it, it got traction, and then you turned it into a full-time project. So you were working on IPinfo as a side project while working at Calm. How much time were you really dedicating to this? And then over time, what was your schedule like at Calm? And when did you decide eventually, look, I need to go all in and work full-time on IPinfo? What was the decision-making process there?

Sure. Yes. Initially, the time I spent on IPinfo was fairly sporadic. I launched it over a weekend, and then would spend some time posting on Stack Overflow. That was it. As it started getting more traction, and then maybe I wouldn't work on it for a few months, then it's like, oh, let's launch some paid plans. Maybe evenings for a week or two, I might set up billing integration, all that stuff. But my job at Calm was pretty demanding as well. I was working a full-time job, more than a full-time job. It was an early-stage startup, and so I was spending a lot of hours on Calm. And so I wasn't initially spending much time on IPinfo. There would be sprints where I did. It's like, oh, hey, I want to ship this new feature. But what that forced me— not having much time really forced me to be super lean and to really focus on what was important and what was not. I talked about the early days at Lightbox where we spent all that time making it horizontal or portrait and support for that. And it turns out you can just hit a flag when you're building it and say, hey, lock this to portrait mode, save 6 months of work that ended up being irrelevant work in the end. And so taking that mindset and having limited time really, really forced me to say, hey, what actually matters? And it's like, the people are paying us for an API that doesn't go down, that's low latency, that's reliable, Just focusing on delivering on that value proposition. Nothing else, we didn't have anything else. If people wanted to update their credit card, that's why I didn't even have a user database initially. We had Stripe on the backend for billing. There was just Stripe. There was no user database, there was no nothing. If people would email me and say, how do you change my credit card? I would just create a one-time link where they could go and it would show them a Stripe form and that would just go and update Stripe. Me personally, I was the billing dashboard, the account dashboard, all that stuff. People said, hey, I need to debug some requests. I'd go and run a database query and email it to them. And so not much of my time was spent— the time that I did spend was a lot was on customer support and things. But even that was— there wasn't much of that. There may be a few emails a week. And then what happened over time was more and more of my time would be spent on customer support. So I'd commute up from Mountain View up to San Francisco. I was at Cal on the Caltrain. It's about an hour and a half maybe on the train. And so I would, as iPinfall was getting more demanding, I would always work on the train. And so I'd get my laptop out, I would answer a few support emails, and then jump on with some work. And then it would get to the point where over many months, I would get into San Francisco and I still hadn't answered all the support emails. And it's like, wow, there's even more to go. Before, it'd take me 5 minutes. Then it'd be taking me all day. And so yeah, at some point then I hired someone to help with support, which took that burden off. But yeah, it got to the point where those support emails were, some of them were business opportunities as well. People would email me and say, hey, can I jump on a call? I want to buy an enterprise plan off you. And I'd be like, there's no enterprise plans. Just go enter your credit card on the website. I've got no time to talk to you. And so that was like a really great constraint in those early days. So I've got, hey, 10 hours a week in my spare time to spend on IP Info. That's it. There's no point going and building a whole billing dashboard. That's going to take me 6 months and it's probably going to be pretty lame at the end of it. Why don't I just say, hey, you need a billing issue? Send me an email. If I get a few of those emails a month, it's a lot less time than I'd spend on other things. That constraint was really helpful, I think, on us dialing in what's actually important, what people care about, and getting that initial traction. After a couple of years, it got clear that all the support issues are coming on the way. the train, and then more and more requests from users, not just on, hey, can we buy this off you? Hey, we want higher volumes. Hey, can you offer IP to company datasets? We've noticed some issues with the geolocation accuracy here. It's clear to me at that point that there's not only an opportunity to do a lot more work here, there's an opportunity to turn this into a real business. There's enough need and demand out there. There's enough people finding us and coming to us. Initially, I wasn't sure, hey, yeah, this is a great side project. It's bringing in revenue. It's fun to work on and spend 10 hours a week on. But I thought that may be it. How much can this— how big an opportunity can this be? I think it was pretty clear after a while that there was that opportunity there. I just had to choose, is this something that I want to spend my time on and focus on? I was having a lot of fun on it. It was a really interesting problem space. I think we're in a good position. So at that point, it's like, okay, yeah, let's go focus on this full-time.

Was there like a certain milestone or like whether number of users or dollar amount that once you hit that, it's like, okay, I replaced my income and that was it? Or was there something else that drove you to that? Was the customer support or what?

Yeah, it's interesting. So I think there are different things on different sites. So one thing was I really wanted to help Calm get to a point where they had a really solid, really great app. And so I think after a couple of years, I felt that I'd be leaving them in a really solid place, that their issues with the app crashing, they were left at a great place. They had a great team of engineers in place at that point. And so I didn't feel— not that my work there was done, but I felt I'd be leaving at a natural reflection point where all that early work had been mostly wrapped up. And then also, IP Info was getting to a point where it clearly needed more time and attention. I could have made the choice to be like, look, this is all IP Info is going to do, and it could have carried on to be a side project. But it was clear to me at that point that there was an opportunity to really focus on it and do a lot more stuff. And so I think it was both of those. On the one side, it's like, well, there's a bunch of important work to do at Calm. I felt I'd wrapped a lot of that up and we're leaving that team in a really good place. And then it's on IP Info, my list of things I could maybe do someday, right? Initially, it's like, well, if I had a free weekend, I could get through this list. Then it's like, well, if I had a team of 10 people in 2 years, maybe we could get half of this stuff done. At that point, it was like, okay, yeah, this needs some more time.

Got it. And where are you guys in terms of size today? What would you say has worked best In terms of leading to, you know, that successful growth so far, you mentioned, you know, getting on Substack. Any other ways where, you know, after that, was there any other, you know, traction areas you saw that real growth?

Yeah. So, um, yeah, almost all of our initial growth I think came from, you know, Stack Overflow, right? Where people— and I would, I would spend a lot of time in my, in the early, you know, sitting on the train searching for like any Stack Overflow question about, hey, how do I get, you know, a user IP address in JavaScript? And I'd say, hey, you know, like I've just launched this API, right? It's free. It's really useful. Here's the code you could use. And you really spend time answering those questions. And that drove a lot of initial usage. And then I would find that actually also helped drive product development because I would find questions— initially, it's like, okay, how do I get someone's IP location in PHP? And so I'd go and answer that. But then I answered all the questions around that. They were the known ones to be answered. But then people would say, how can I find out what ISP is of an IP address? And I'd be like, hmm, that's a really interesting question. I wonder, is this something that we can go solve? And then we'd go build that. Sometimes that was very easy. Sometimes that might take 6 months of work. But then I would know there was demand for it. I know that people were asking this question. Maybe there weren't good answers, or the answers were, hey, here are the 15 steps where you can go and do this. And it's like, well, if I can make that one step, it's just like call our API and you get the answer. that would be helpful. And so that also led some of our product development, where it's like, hey, this would be a fun problem to solve. I know that people will find this useful. People are asking this question. And then we'd find a bunch of other related Stack Overflow questions and answer those. So that was a big initial driver. After that, I mean, to this day, we still get a lot of traffic from Stack Overflow. We've done a bunch of other things since then. So I think one thing that's been really effective for us A big industry that we're growing in and have grown in for a while is cybersecurity. That was somewhat surprising to me, but one year I got an email from 2 or 3 customers all asking me like, hey, you're going to be at Black Hat in Las Vegas this year, a big cybersecurity conference. And I had no plans to be, but 3 customers, 3 of my larger customers all emailed me and asked. And I thought, well, even if we don't get new business from it, just to meet these 3 customers, say hey to them. It'll be a worthwhile trip. I found 10 other customers that were in a similar industry and emailed them and said, hey, you're going to be there? And 5 were like, hey, yeah, we'd love to meet. And then went to Black Hat and just wore IPInfo hoodie and had like 3 or 4 people come up to me and say, hey, I've seen IPInfo, we'd love to use you. And that's been really great to be going to the conference, helped a little bit, but I think being part of that community where we met with customers and they're like, oh, wow, we love your API. It's great to put a face to it. And then some of those customers have become advocates and introduced us to other companies that may be looking for a provider. So that's been really useful. We've seen a lot of Twitter engagement for people in that industry as well. So whether it's industries where there's small communities and they're happy to share and find a good solution, so that's been a good driver for us as well.

Super cool. You know, so you've hit some kind of great growth here from what you're saying, you know, 50% year over year. Why the decision to kind of bootstrap? And what was kind of the thought process behind, you know, you built this from scratch and then, you know, started getting traction, you went full-time. Why not at that point look for outside capital for, you know, kind of fueling that growth and, you know, hiring that team you needed to really accelerate it?

Sure. Yeah. So I think some of that comes back to the history with Germium and then Lightbox. With Germium, we raised a very small amount of seed funding, but it ran out after 6 months. Then we're like, well, hey, we're stuck. We got to go find contracting gigs, got to do something else. Now, had we have had longer, could we have maybe made something of it? Potentially. I also think had we have not have— one thing I'd done with IPinfo is not say, hey, I've got this new idea, I'm going to spend 6 months and see if we can make it successful or not. Then if not, to go do something else. It's very organically layering on top of each other. That way, there's infinite runway, and the expectations can change as it evolves. There's no timeboxing of like, okay, let's raise some money, we've got 12 months to get to the traction level to here. Otherwise, we've got to sell it or close it down or something. It's like we may say, hey, we want to get to here, Ideally, in 12 months. If it takes 2 years, fine. If it takes 4 years, fine. If it takes 6 months, great. I think being bootstrapped just gives us full freedom to figure out what the right pace is for us, to figure out what markets we want to explore, to figure out basically anything we want to. There's no time pressure, or no external time pressure. We've got complete control of our destiny. I think we probably won't raise ever. I wouldn't rule it out, but I think we're bootstrapped, we're profitable at this point. We're growing at a pace we're happy with. It's not clear to me that an injection of capital is necessarily going to change our trajectory. We're pretty happy with how things are.

50% year-over-year growth, that's quite good. That's very respectable. That's, that's really nice. I mean, if it continues to that, or if you guys find ways to continue to grow it, um, yeah, I mean, there's all those pros and cons of raising versus bootstrapping. Um, any tips or suggestions maybe you could share for those in our audience? Maybe they're looking to bootstrap their next idea, or they're also, you know, contemplating the idea of raising capital, because you've done both. Um, you know, maybe pros and cons of each, and any other tips for them?

Yeah, so I think, I mean, the, the The downside to bootstrapping, obviously, is it just takes a lot longer. This was a side project for many years without me spending much time on it. You just have to be, I think, much more patient. I also think the bonus is it just means you have to plant those seeds earlier. I've worked on a bunch of different side projects, many with big ambitions for them that never became anything, some with like IPinfo, hey, this will be useful, but I don't know if it will be a business, and turned out to be a great one. I think knowing that, hey, this could take years before it gets to a point where it could be a business or could be generating revenue or whatever, and just experimenting and doing a lot of different things, things you're interested in, and saying, hey, this could take many years. Obviously, the big benefit with raising capital is it focuses you like, hey, I get to spend my full time on this for 12 months, 2 years, whatever the runway is, but that could be it. At the end of 2 years, if we've not got certain milestones, you've got certain things, we may have to start again from scratch. And so what I really like about the bootstrap thing is it takes that starting from scratch off the table. It's like, well, hey, we may need to just— maybe we don't grow as well as we'd hoped this year or over the next few years, But there's no starting from scratch, right? We just get to take our time on it, fix things that we think need fixing, and just play for the really long term.

Makes sense. Yeah, I guess if you can afford to build this over committing to it for a long term, then maybe bootstrap makes sense. But I think a lot of people maybe think, I need to go all in on this. They'll bootstrap it themselves, put everything in. It might take longer than than you actually think, right? Maybe it always does.

Yeah. That's definitely the trade-off I think is the time it takes. You see people raise money and then they can hire a bunch of really smart people. And that definitely, I think, can increase your chances of making something successful, right? But it also ups the bar of where you need to get to.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'd like to chat a little bit more about IPinfo itself, the product. How are you guys innovating the product? And tell us, how does your technology stand out from any of the other IP data providers out there right now?

Yeah, sure. Initially, I talked about the background of IPInfo. It was just like, hey, I downloaded some dataset wrapped in an API. Initially, that's what we were. Our whole innovation and our differentiator was, hey, if you want IP geolocation data anywhere else, you've either got to download a dataset, set it up on a server, or you've got to pay for an expensive, hard-to-use API. They weren't good options. I want, hey, let's make a free, really easy-to-use API, that's quick and reliable. For the first few years, while this was a side project, that's where we innovated. That's where we got our footholds and where we got our initial growth. But then it was becoming clear that we would get feedback from people saying, but hey, your data, you're saying I'm in San Francisco, but really, I'm down in San Jose. Can you fix this data for me? I'm like, hey, this isn't our data. We just download it. We're an API provider. If you want to fix the data, you can go upstream. But this happened again and again and again. It's like, oh, that's interesting. Actually, there's an opportunity to fix the data and we're getting feedback about where some gaps are in the data. And so then we went down a path of, okay, let's just build out our own data that's really world-class, high-accuracy data. So we stopped getting all this feedback about data being broken. We can just— people were like, oh, wow, this is really great. The accuracy is really great. Then we get feedback on other datasets as well. Like I mentioned the ISP one, what's the ISP? What's the company? Is this IP address a carrier or not? Then we thought, hey, instead of just being great at the API piece, and we established that, let's make sure we've got really great data and world-class data as well. That should be easy. It should be done in 12 months. That's been a focus for many, many years now. It turns out to be a really hard problem, but it's been really fun. and rewarding solving that piece and making lots of progress there. One key thing that differentiates us now is, yep, we have the really easy-to-use API, we're really developer-friendly. That's our roots. It's like, hey, we're just solving problems for developers. But now we also have really great data and a great data team that's working on this. A differentiator between us and other companies as well is that we have really great, highly accurate data. We update it daily. And we have a bunch of different datasets as well. So like I said, there's the geolocation, we do VPN detection, carrier detection. And so we're really focused on what context can we give you around an IP address. And so I mentioned there's the cybersecurity industry where we're growing, but we do try and be industry agnostic. There are lots of different use cases. There's ad tech, there's marketing, there's website personalization, there's cybersecurity. And we really try and get a lot of feedback from our users on the different ways that they're using it. and try and make datasets that are useful across all of those. And they tend to be similar solutions. The one thing we do is IP type detection. So we'll say, given this IP address, is it most likely to be from a hosting provider, an ISP, a business or educational institution? Different use cases, but the same data can be used for different use cases. So someone that's using it in marketing or ad tech may be like, hey, I just want to advertise to people. I don't want to show ads to any automation or whatever. And so they can use that data and say, hey, I want to filter out anything that's not an ISP. But then a cybersecurity person may have a use case of, actually, I just want to look at everything from a hosting provider. Maybe that's riskier or there's something else. And so we try and work out what are these datasets that we can apply broadly to all IP address space that also apply to a broad set of use cases. And so yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

And kind of just going specific on those different datasets, and you say you create a kind of world-class data that's updated daily, kind of use cases specifically for, say, SaaS founders listening in, how can they use that to improve 2 things? One is what I hear, you know, customer experience, and then also on the sales side, how are you increasing, you know, conversions from the quality of leads? If you can speak about those.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, and there's lots you can do on this. And so, you know, if we dive into the IP geolocation dataset, so that is one where you give us an IP address and we'll tell you city-level accuracy for this IP address. So you may say, hey, you know, this is someone visiting from Seattle. And so depending on your business and what you're doing, there are a bunch of different personalizations you could do with that. One could be a user experience improvement. So if there's anywhere, say on your website, that you're asking the user to give you a location, you could bypass that step. And so you could, say you were in the travel industry and it was a flight booking app, you could easily say, if I visited the website, it could say, hey, here are nearest flights from SeaTac Airport, say. If I was in the UK, the website could just say, here are the nearest flights from Heathrow. It'd be great to give the user a way to override that and say, well, actually, I'm actually going to be flying from a different airport, or maybe I'm on a VPN and it looks like I'm in London, but really I'm in Seattle. And so you may want to do something different there. So it'd be great to give the user a way to override that. But lots of websites you go to, if you go to the IKEA website, I think the first thing that pops up is, what country you're in. It's like, hey, I just wanted to order some furniture online. They could use IP geolocation to say, hey, we know this guy's in the US, let's just take him right there, start showing him some furniture. That would not only give the user a better experience, that would probably result in more sales, less frustrated users, and all these things. And so there's that user experience where if you want to know something about the user's location, if you're going to ask them for something, you can just skip that step and jump right into providing value for the user. That's one. Another way you can do that is instead of personalizing the experience for the user is using that information to help with marketing. For example, on a user signup form, for everybody that signs up, you may want to get their location, their IPG location, and then you could say, hey, we had a signup from a user in Seattle, a user in London, and then various different things you could do with that. You may want to automatically send emails based on time of day. If you say, hey, it's better for us to land in this person's inbox at 9:00 AM their local time rather than it be 4:00 AM or whatever, and then they're going to wake up and we're not going to be at the top of the inbox. And so you could use that. We return the time zone API and you could do something based on that. You could also, maybe post-COVID when there's in-person events, you may want to email all users in Seattle and say, hey, we're going to have an event, come meet up with us. You could also inform where you might want to run events. If you notice that you had 50 signups in Seattle last week, but 5 in London, you may say, hey, let's go do more in Seattle, or maybe we need to be doing more in London to increase the number of users there. Yeah, lots of different things like that. Even user-invisible things. One could be, say you were a book publisher, or you're an author of a book, and you wanted to sell your book. You may want to send the user to Amazon, but it's going to be a bad user experience if someone in London goes to amazon.com, and then they've got to either ship it from the US, or they've got to go switch to the UK. Yeah, it's a really simple personalization where it's like, hey, come buy my book. And that link just goes to the country-specific Amazon, right? And you could just use the country location data there and say, hey, if they're from the UK, let's send them to amazon.co.uk. If they're from the US, let's send them to amazon.com. And maybe there's a default that's go buy them somewhere else if they're not in either of those countries.

Makes sense. Yeah, I love that personalization. I think that's where a lot of money in it for any marketer or any company.

Yeah.

Um, cool. Uh, ipinfo.io, guys, check that out if you guys want to try it out yourself. Uh, Ben, kind of switching gears here to kind of the, you know, rapid-fire questions and a little bit more personal here. Um, what's one advice you wish you had known and would tell your, say, 25-year-old self just starting off your, your entrepreneur journey?

Yeah, it's a great question. Uh, at 25, what do I wish I knew at 25? Um, I guess Take your time. I think I was really— I was around 25 when I jumped into Jomio and was like, hey, let's just do this and figure it out. I think that's the lesson I learned over 10 years and took to heart with IPinfo is, hey, there's no rush here. You've got the rest of your life to work on this. You're in this for the long haul. It's a marathon, not a sprint. That's the lesson I learned over the last 10 years. I think if I had known that at 25, although on the flip side, it's hard to not be really ambitious and want to get things done really fast when you're 25. But I think maybe that is like slow down, take the time. I think another one is the lesson I learned through Lightblocks where we spent 6 months building this, let's rotate it from landscape to portrait. It's like, is what you're working on what the customer actually cares about?

Mm-hmm.

And I definitely took that type info as well where it's like people actually don't care about a user dashboard. If someone wants to change their credit card, they're more than happy for me to just email them a link where they can go and do it. It makes sense to build one at the point that you're inundated with emails and it's just, hey, let's just spend 10 hours building this instead of 10 hours a week answering those emails. But until you get to that point, users don't care. As long as you're delivering on what they actually care about, which for us was, hey, a fast, reliable API. And so I think it's very easy to get distracted and build things you think are important or things that other companies are doing, whereas I think it's really important to try and nail that. The key reason that someone would choose you.

Makes sense. What are some of the biggest challenges you're currently facing in order to grow or to continue to grow IPinfo? Meaning, what keeps you up at night these days? Yeah.

So I think some of the key challenges are, as the organization gets bigger, they change. So we're 15 people now. And so in some ways we've got a lot more firepower. You can get a lot more done. But then there's a lot more bottlenecks and a lot more communication and things that come with that. And so I think just the challenges shift from being, hey, how do we build great data? They're less problem domain specific and more scaling organization specific. And so how do we make sure that we're communicating effectively? How do we make sure that we're shipping the right things quickly? You have higher expectations from customers around reliability. How do we take where we're at in the world today, our customers, and use that as an asset rather than it becoming a liability where it's like, okay, now we have all these demands, all these things? Yeah, thinking around that.

That makes sense. Ben, who or what would you say are the best 3 resources? It could be books, people, maybe people you follow or mentors. Who would you say have been the most instrumental to your success over these last few years?

Cool. I mean, I would say podcasts in general are a huge source of wisdom, knowledge. I'm always walking around with my AirPods in, listening to podcasts. I mean, they're free to listen to, right? There's some amazing inspirational people on podcasts. I love listening to to business leaders and people talking about how they scaled their company to thousands of people and how terrible things were in the early days and how kind of things work out and all the missteps and how they corrected things. So I think podcasts are an amazing resource. I think I just often just go on the podcast app, search for SaaS or founders or whatever. There's lots of great content. So I think podcasts are one. Books, I think obviously another incredible resource. Shoe Dog is one that I read recently. You know, the founder of Nike. And what I loved about that one is he talks as well about, I guess it's very easy, the story often when businesses are very successful is, you know, this was a surefire thing from day one that, you know, these guys are geniuses and know what they're doing. But it's very interesting going back to the early days of businesses and, you know, looking at Nike where they were getting sued. Like they could have gone bankrupt. You know, like the whole thing was a total disaster. Any one of 5 or 6 things would have changed, that would have been what happened, but they made it through that. That was a really inspiring story that even these great companies, and I think clearly lots of business smarts behind Nike and lots of really great decisions, but even those businesses are chaotic in the early days. There's a lot of luck involved. There's a lot of hard work. And so I love stories like that and books that sort of COVID that.

Any favorite books other than that one or podcasts that you listen to?

One of my favorite books is called How to Get Rich. I read this many years ago. It's Felix Dennis who— I don't know if you— so he was a founder of Felix Publishing in the UK and it's really an autobiography and it's not really about getting rich. It's kind of about his life story. It's more like why you wouldn't want to get rich, some of the trials of his life. But that was pretty inspirational. I got to— he did an event in London where he was reading some poetry and got to get a signed copy from him, which was really cool. But that's an amazing book. I know lots of people that are— I don't think it's that well known, but I know lots of people that have read it that love it. There's lots of good wisdom in there, lots of interesting stuff. So yeah, I found that a pretty inspirational book.

Cool, cool. We'll add that link to our show notes for people to check out. Cool. Ben, what does success mean to you today? Whether it's personally, financially, business life, no right answer.

Yeah, cool. So I think, I mean, for me personally, yeah, it's, you know, I guess being able to sort of live life on my terms, right? So I talked about the, when I was doing Jeremy, it was like, hey, I can, you know, work from wherever I want, whatever hours I want. And, you know, I sort of, set Akeel for up that way. We're a remote team all around the globe. And so I get to spend time with my kids and drop them off at school or whatever and work late in the evening and work around that. And so that's great. For the business, one thing I really want to do is make sure that we keep delighting our customers, have that world-class data, really be the guys that have the expertise and the data and the know-how around IP address data and build a team that really like working here, that are proud to work here, make our customers happy, and keep growing that.

Cool. Love it. I appreciate you jumping on SaaS District show today, Ben. If you want to just wrap up here, what are your future plans for IPInfo? And sorry, where can our audience get in touch with you to learn more about you?

Sure, yes. So future plans, we're going to continue, you know, the main 2 threads of work we have are, you know, continuing improving our data, continue making it easier to access and use. We have branched out as well away from IP, not away, but including IP address data into domain data, which was a very natural extension from us. And so we launched host.io, which is, you know, basically IP info for domain data. So both those places, check us out, ipinfo.io and Also on Twitter, ipinfo.io is our company Twitter account where we're tweeting about some of the cool stuff that we're getting up to.

Cool. We'll add those links to our show notes for people to check you guys out. Thank you so much, Ben. I appreciate you jumping on today. It was great chatting.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.

Thank you.