#334: Ryan Buick of Canvas, on Democratizing Data for Business Intelligence, Leveraging Unique Market Positioning, and Building an MVP while Fundraising

Welcome to the Just Go Grind podcast. I'm your host, Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital. On today's episode, we have Ryan Buick, co-founder of Canvas, a data exploration tool for business teams to automate manual reporting, build dashboards, and answer ad hoc questions, all without needing SQL. Let's dive in. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Justin, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Absolutely. And with Canvas, a lot to talk about with building this company and growing this company, the need for Canvas. But for people who are like, what is Canvas to begin with, Ryan, what is this company?

Yeah, totally. So at Canvas, we help really anyone with an operational background, anyone who doesn't consider themselves technical, but they're analytically minded. We help them get all their data in one place, be able to Really analyze that data, explore it, be able to share it with their team, and ultimately make faster, better decisions without needing to know SQL or really having those technical skills.

Especially now, it's needed more than ever because there's always just more data in different ways. I think as we go on, there's more and more every single day, it seems like. And to have this something that's helping to make it easier for founders is obviously really useful. But for this, How did this get started in the first place, Ryan? Why, why Canvas?

Yeah, so I'll go with a bit of the longer version of the story. So, um, really got the first idea for Canvas, I joined Flexport. Um, for those of you who don't know, basically a tech-enabled freight forwarder. Um, so I joined as one of their first product managers, uh, a handful of years ago, uh, and really saw it take off from, you know, 100 people to 2,500 people by the time I left. And one of the sort of more interesting things that I saw when I got there was just how data-driven the company was, but how hard it was for people that didn't know SQL or advanced SQL like myself to be able to really grab that data and independently and confidently work with it. And so I actually had some pretty bad anxiety starting out there because before I was a PM and had a data person sort of that you could ask questions from and it was relatively easy. But with Flexport, there's so much data that you had to make decisions with and we didn't have a data team really at the time. So I had to figure out how to do this all myself. So I actually did a bootcamp to go and learn data analytics. And so did that. And then at the same time saw really how hard it was for the organization to roll out For thousands of operators to roll out the data that they needed to give them an interface to comfortably play with that data, right? Really, if you're an operator today, you only have like sort of 2 paths. One is like, get in line with everybody else and ask your question and you get something back and you're like, okay, this is kind of what I wanted, but I now need to ask 12 new questions. And then you have to figure out what your data analyst's favorite whiskey is to bribe them to keep getting your answers.

Yeah.

Or you basically have to export to CSV and work out of spreadsheets and do the same repetitive INDEX MATCH or VLOOKUP or whatnot. So we saw how hard that was, my co-founders and I who were early engineers there, and we had worked on internal data products as well. And we decided, hey, why not try to give everyone sort of a spreadsheet-style interface, something that they're familiar with, comfortable with. Give them an interface to the data that they need. And so we left Flexport to go and build that ourselves.

With this as well, so anytime someone mentions what they're building and everything, I naturally, my brain goes to, okay, great. Like, who'd you get your first customers as? Like, who were those people? Because there's always the grand vision for where you want to get to. And a lot of people, it's like enterprise sales, massive contracts. Great. Okay. What were like your first customers? customers? Like, who'd you first target? I'm curious about that with Canvas.

Yeah, totally. So we left Flexport, basically had a loose idea of what we wanted to do, but we were lucky enough to be in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, where we had a ton of friends that had worked at other startups. And so we just honestly talked to as many people as we could. We had a general idea of making data easier for everyone, but we weren't coming from the data space. We didn't have a ton of context on the data stack and the data tools. But frankly, we felt like that was a strength. Most data tools are built by data teams for data teams under the sort of guise of business intelligence.

Yep.

And we actually felt the pain firsthand as operators and wanted to go and solve that pain. So really, talk about just grinding, just reaching out to everyone from your high school, grade school classmates for user research and interviews and asking them, hey, what's What's your workflow like? What's your day-to-day like? What's the number one pain that you have? And is that something you'd be willing to pay for if we could solve that? And so we really just did that for a handful of months and simultaneously we're doing the fundraising thing and we're able to put together at least a prototype and an early version of the product and work with folks as design partners and just say, hey, you don't have to pay Okay, now, but we know the problem that you have. Let's work together on solving this and hopefully get you to value. So a lot of the first customers are honestly just friends, you know, personal connections, friends of friends.

With that too, with that early product that you took to them, obviously, you said, hey, use this product, we want, we want the feedback more than anything to make sure this is good, build the right thing, etc. But what did that early product look like compared to what it is today, if it is much different at all? I'm not, I'm not sure. But I'm curious on what that looks like.

Yeah, totally. So we had this original conception of, okay, let's build the spreadsheet of the future, right? Let's go and get these teams out of Google Sheets, out of Excel. And there's a large graveyard of startups that have tried to do that. And then I think we've found out some reasons why, which is a lot of these teams, you're going to have to pry Excel from their cold, dead hands, right?

Yeah.

And so our original inception sort of turned into, okay, well, A lot of the problems are actually around getting data all in one place and getting data in an easy-to-access manner, right? A lot of it is, today at startups, is data teams building out this data stack, centralizing all the data within your warehouse, transforming the data to make it reasonable, and then putting it into some dashboards. And so what we found is actually the biggest pain was around sort of getting that all into one easy-to-use, simple package where you didn't have to spend months implementing a data stack and having someone technical to implement it. Or spending a fortune on consultants. And so what we ended up with is actually relatively like a data stack in a box. And so we actually give you access to best-of-breed tools. We put you on that stack and you just connect your apps and your database, which is relatively accessible for most operators. And you get what you need without months and 10x the cost of what you would get with Canvas.

With that too, so with that product and those early users, you mentioned you're kind of building the product along the way, fundraising at the same time. Did you like, how much of a window did you have? Like, okay, we have to fundraise right away for this because we know we just need money to be able to fuel this. Like, just take me through that experience fundraising alongside of also building the product at the same time.

Yeah. So I think like, first, the VCs that are going to come to you and we're coming from blue-chip sort of tech startups and in the Valley and we are pretty confident in that side. But when you say that you're tackling a problem as large and as hairy as what we were tackling, having a prototype, having a product that showed that you have technical chops and that you're different, I think was a big focus for us. And we knew that the best VCs would respond well to that. And so that's really sort of what we tried to do first, come to the table with VC conversations of, hey, we're not some engineers building this thing that we want. We're actually talking to people and we have evidence and things that we can point to, people that are willing and waiting for us to build this product. They've signed an LOI or something like that, right? So we sort of tried to do it very quickly, right? We didn't want to sort of bootstrap this. We didn't want to dip into our savings. And so we gave ourselves kind of, you know, a couple months to basically say, okay, let's talk to hundreds of people, let's build the prototype, and let's go and fundraise sort of simultaneously, which I think worked out well in the end, especially because, you know, you don't want to, you know, veer off in a direction that's like, hey, this is a cool product, but no one wants to use it. That would be a problem. Or it's not solving a real problem, you know? Yeah. And so thinking in terms of those 3 things all at once, I think helped us ground ourselves to reality. And I think investors appreciate that.

To that point, with the product you launched with, then what was the feedback you were getting from those early users? Obviously, they were using it for free at the time. So take what you want, you think they're going to pay for it, etc. But like, what was the feedback you were getting from them that was like, okay, totally validated on these points, maybe not so on these points? What they love most about it. I'm curious.

Yeah, I think going back to making it easy for them to get the data that they need in one place, much more so than the analysis portion. I think that was sort of the key thing that we were starting to hone in on and ended up with the strategy that we have today. And I think we definitely had teams that, design partners that would take us farther away in this direction of, okay, we're actually just building them Google Sheets and I don't think that's, or Excel, and I don't think that's actually a a winning proposition here. Because there's a lot to build if you're going to do that. I think you might die trying. So I think that was a realization. And I think a lot of it comes from having skin in the game. So we didn't say, okay, you're going to use this for free for however long. It was more so like, hey, let's pick it. Let's put together a plan, right? Let's get a month together. Here's what the product looks like today. Here's the 2 or 3 things that you've asked for, right? These are in line with our long-term— You know, as long-term as it is when you're a couple, couple guys on the couch in an apartment. Um, but you know, this is, this aligns with, we think, where we want to go. Um, and then holding them accountable and making sure they have skin in the game to say, okay, if we get this delivered, let's sign a contract.

With that too, so going from the free, it's not really free, but it's really testing it out for now, knowing that they're going to obviously pay if it's something that works out. The business model behind this. A lot about enterprise sales or like the actual, how much you're gonna charge for the pricing can be different. Looking at the website, there's like a free trial looks like, or free something. And then there's different tiers of that. Just take me through how you thought about pricing this based on the value and everything. I'm just curious on how you thought about, cuz I know founders are always like, how much do we charge? And there's a playbook somewhat for like certain SaaS products, but this is like, I'm just curious on how you thought about the pricing.

Yeah, this is definitely a Something we spent a lot of time on, and I think it's like something that's honestly just kind of stressed overly in the early stages. And like, you go to people for help and they're just like, you know, it's an art, not a science. Like, you'll figure it out. I think for us where the business model came to where it made the most sense is when you're going into a crowded space, right? Like data is pretty saturated. A lot of people looking at us weird when we said we wanted to build the the next gen of BI tools, right? I think when we were looking at the market, we were looking at a lot of things that felt old to us. We were looking at things that were, pricing was vague. You had to talk to sales. You had your price per seat, right? And then you end up with these long drawn out implementations that like, I don't think are good for anyone. You can't try the product, you can't kick the tires on it. A lot of technically savvy-minded people just want to be able to play with the product and not have to talk to someone. So we tried to really organize it around a product-led motion, right? Giving them an ability to get a taste of the product, to try it out, see what they like and don't like, and then let's start a conversation from there. And also not charge per seat, which if you're at a company, you then see 50 people are using the same login for for a tool. And so we tried to really just be as different, as many different levers as we could there. And I think that's sort of been an informing, something that's worked really well for us across the board, which is question the status quo, because if you don't, you're going to end up looking the same as everyone else. And that's the last— that's going to make it just everything so much harder downstream. There's this amazing story about cake pops and like when they were coming up. I don't know if you've seen this.

No, I haven't heard it. Go ahead.

I'm curious. Like this famous like positioning, I don't know if it's famous, but this like positioning case study where the cake pops team, which is in like every Starbucks right now, they originally started selling it as like, you know, cake, like basically cake on a stick or it was like just cake, right? And like Starbucks and the market was like, who, what adults are gonna want to eat? cake for breakfast, right? And so they started positioning it as cake pops instead, which is something that is new. It's something that's different, even if it's just a name. But I think that goes back to like when you're trying to think about positioning early, be as different as you can and see what happens and see how that changes the perception of what you're doing.

What was it that initially made you even think that way though, in terms of being different in that capacity? Was it just like, You're seeing all these things in the market that are the same over and over. You're like, okay, we're not going to do that because people hear that and like, oh yeah, be different. Like, great. Like, but how do I actually do it? To your point, you mentioned differences you have in pricing, but what feels— what actually got you over the edge? Like, all right, we have to though. Like, we, we literally have to try this different style. I'm just curious on how you were thinking about that. What got you to that point with that too?

Yeah, totally. And I don't think it's being different just to be different. Yeah, I think it's being different in a way that you want the world to be, right? Like none of us, none of my co-founders and I want to have to talk to a sales rep to try out a product. Like, I don't care how complicated it is. I'm still gonna go through that journey. And if you've made it simple enough, then even more credit, I'll wanna talk to your team if I can at least get to some value.

Yeah.

So I think that was one thing. And then I think talking to as many folks as possible, like when we did, we started seeing just how many teams were Either not actually their whole team wasn't using the tool, which for us was insane because it's a data tool. Like everyone, like you're talking about democratizing, you know, data, but then you're charging per viewer license.

Yeah.

And so we're like, okay, well that doesn't make any sense. And so basically it was a sort of this loop of looking at the existing status quo, seeing what we didn't like, and then seeing what we could be different on the things that we didn't like. And what that would look like.

In the early days, you mentioned talking to basically everyone you knew early on, and the first few months was just like, who do we know we can talk to about this product and has this need? Eventually, though, you did raise $4.2 million, at least from Sequoia, other like 2 dozen individual investors. You raise money, have some cash, great, helpful. What has fueled growth? What does that look like moving forward? Because I know there's always a progression from getting your first customers and validation to, okay, but we're creating a scalable company that becomes multi-billion dollar. What is Field of Growth or how do you think about growth since those early conversations?

Yeah. So we've tried to stay pretty lean, right? Because we want to make sure that we get to the thing that is really working before then we decide to scale. And so in that spirit, right, you can try out with ads and you should be able to experiment with these different different growth strategies, but keep it tight, keep it refined, run an experiment for a month, set out with your plan of like, hey, there's the things that we want to try, and then come back after the month and see, okay, these are the things we proved right. These are things that are working well. And so we've tried a few of those, but I think the thing that I really wish that we did earlier was just around the content side because that's the Blogs, these podcasts, right? They accrue value over time. They give you a chance to be your authentic self, which might be different than what else is out there in terms of like, yeah, the corporate sort of speak and blog posts that you'll see elsewhere. So that's something that we've just been like, hey, let's write a blog that comes to mind and just start creating habits there. I think that's one thing that I wish that we had done earlier and it's starting to pay off now.

Yeah.

And definitely tried to experiment with some paid ads. And then really, I think using our site as a key sort of instrument and driver for product-led growth, which is we have a Loom video of our demo front and center in the site that you can click on to actually understand what the product looks like and it is like without having to know, take a call for a demo. And so people really respond well to that. And really trying to use just, you know, any sort of opportunity that you have to say, okay, here's the experience that you're going to get with our product. Here's our brand voice. Here's who we are without having to spend a ton of money. I think it's been a key for us.

It's interesting you mentioned like that too on the content side of it. And I'm very admittedly super biased about content, but I've seen how it benefits different companies and Career Karma is a good example and they have all this content around getting people in like software engineers into bootcamps. They crush it. I just talked to Mariam from Softr, a no-code tool, right before this call, previous interview right before this. They're thinking about content way more with what they're doing because there's a whole education piece on no-code. So you see these companies more and more start to think about content and how it drives it. And to the point you mentioned, which I think is the golden part of it, if you do it in the right way, those assets just become more valuable. Having done podcasting for like 4 years now, Those episodes from 4 years ago still get downloads and views. Like, that is insane to me, but it still happens. And I've had people who are like, yeah, we raised, we got raised from our first angels because they heard your podcast after doing a Google search. I was like, what? That was like years back already. So it's like the value of that for any founders thinking about content, it's obviously an investment you have to make to be able to do that and do it well, but they just keep accruing in value over time. So it's so worth it if you can pull it off in that way too.

Totally. And like, of course, the obvious one is just make a product that People love, right? Helpful.

Very helpful.

The word of mouth piece, like it just works in pretty incredible ways. And so if you have your early customers and you treat them right and you do the right thing and help them out, they see you as a consultant. They see you as someone who's gonna help you think about data in our particular instance, right? But like, we had one of our customers that they were presenting Canvas in their board meeting, just not using a deck, just straight from the Canvas, which is our version of a dashboard. And we had investors reach out to that were in the room saying like, hey, they've never seen a tool like this. So you start to do these pretty interesting— you start to see these interesting word of mouth growth aspects as well, just from people using the tool and it being different.

With Canvas as well, with those early customers, you get a certain set of feedback from your early customers and you're trying to figure out a lot with the product and what to build, but also for who. Take me through more of that today, what that looks like for Canvas in terms of who you're targeting, who you're going after, like who are the best people to use this product? I'm just curious on more of that. So for founders wondering about if it's for my team or people listening, is it for my team? I'm just curious more on that side of Canvas as well.

Yeah. So we really see ourselves as the simplest, easiest way to get data-driven as an early-stage startup. So founders are Totally top of mind for us as a persona, right? Because you're the one that has to think about these board metrics. You're the one that's getting heat from your investors on not being data-driven enough because you're still presenting out of Google Sheets. You're the one that's not able to answer some of these questions on the fly because you can't dive into the numbers live and double-click and see why your CAC for this particular cohort is higher. So founders, we see ourselves as a really easy way to just say, hey, connect your apps, connect your database. You don't have to worry about hiring a data team, hiring data consultants, getting that all in one place. So we're a really fast, easy way for them. And then also for data teams that are just underwater, that they're getting so many requests from the business, we work with their existing stack. So work with your existing warehouse, work with your existing data tools and say, hey, just Just here's a self-service sort of ad hoc interface for your business teams so that you're not answering 100 Slacks a week and you can actually start to scale your own work and shift that onus to the business team and just help them out when they need help rather than being responsible for turning over every SQL query every day. Sounds miserable.

For you, just as we kind of wrap things up here, I'm curious. You were in product management before, management BA at Flexport. Different than being a co-founder of a startup though. How has this experience been so far? Any challenges along the way, things you wish maybe you had known a year and a half or whatever it was ago when you started this? I'm curious about that because I know there's a lot of first-time founders who'll be listening and curious on that transition for you and how that's gone.

Yeah, there's that like classic, like PMs are like the CEOs of their product and it's like, no, you're just a, you're more often a janitor and picking up the So I think that was like a, I think that was a good, like sort of PM skills translate well, I think, to some of the founder lifestyle. I think like the biggest gap that like I just wasn't familiar with is just go-to-market and being able to sell something. It's a lot easier to ask for feedback as a PM when someone's already bought your product and They want you to fix it or make it better. But I think when you're trying to actively sell, like, I think that's something that if you don't have experience with, like, figure out how to start picking up some experience with that. Figure out how to get someone from a problem statement to here's a solution to how much do you think, you know, what is the value that you think this provides, right? So I think that sort of sales-minded approach is like something that complements the PM skillset really nicely in order to become a founder. Yeah. And then learning like sort of growth, like growth, like marketing, those different skillsets, something I think is most PMs don't have to touch a lot unless you're like a growth PM at a consumer company. Like I was B2B SaaS.

Yeah.

So think about like rounding out like the rest of the sort of skills that a founder needs. Even through side projects, even through, you know, maybe do some like PM consulting, maybe, you know, figure out how to sell something, how to market yourself, I think has been really key.

There's definitely something there with the sales side of it, especially as founders, cuz you're really, you're selling to investors, you're selling to potential employees, you're selling to customers, you're selling your ideas internally that you want. There's just so many aspects that everything like ties back to selling as founders, it seems like, and people I've talked to for the last 4 years, like just reigns true throughout all of those. You're selling something. And even though it's like, oh, what about the next stage when you're at like, you raise another round of funding? Oh, it's different challenges, but it all still kind of comes back to selling. And now it's more like our team is growing super fast and we're hiring more engineers, so we're selling them. And it's like the vision as that goes on, why is there more growth? And it's like, it's just this theme that for any founder learning to sell in some capacity. It's worthwhile if you're even thinking about being a founder at some point. So I always tell people that as well. And I know we're almost out of time here. Where is just the best place for people to learn more about Canvas and connect with you if they'd like to as well, Ryan?

Yeah, for sure. So our site is canvasapp.com. You can check out a demo, like I said, on the site there. You can actually get started, connect to your data, whether it be your apps, your database, your warehouse. You don't have to talk to us. You can get through the product, try it out. And you can also reach out to me on Twitter, handle's RyanJBuick, like the car, and would love to, you know, hear about some of the issues that you're dealing with and try to help you out.

Perfect. Ryan, I appreciate the time today, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me on, man.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Just Go Grind. If you want to follow along on the socials for all things Just Go Grind and with me as well, You can find Just Go Grind on Instagram and Twitter @JustGoGrind. You can find me on Twitter @JustinGordon212. Find me on Instagram @JustinGordon8. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day.

Bye.