'No company operating in the cloud should ever lose data' says Sam Gutmann, CEO and Co-Founder at OwnBackup

Consistent revenue growth begins with relentlessly focusing on penetrating your market and winning new customers.

MEDIA 7: What inspired you to start OwnBackup?
SAM GUTMANN: I’ve been working in the backup and recovery space for the better part of 20 years, so it’s something I’m quite passionate about. In 2014, I was lucky enough to meet our Co-Founder Ariel Berkman, who was equally passionate about helping people recover lost data from their personal phones, laptops, and other devices. After building a more traditional disaster recovery business, Ariel started experimenting with a B2B solution backing up cloud data. That’s when me and our CRO, Ori Yankelev, joined Ariel in Tel Aviv and joined the project that would become OwnBackup. The rest, as they say, is history.


M7: OwnBackup has grown from a backup and recovery provider for Salesforce to a multi-cloud data protection provider, what vision did you carry?
SG: From day one, we’ve believed that no company operating in the cloud should ever lose data. Almost seven years later, this mission is as important as ever. As more and more companies move to the cloud, they are realizing the importance of building greater resiliency into their business, and that’s exactly what we’re able to give to customers with our solutions. As we’ve grown our capabilities beyond just backup and recovery, we’ve broadened our vision, which is now to empower companies to own and protect their data on any SaaS platform, like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365. So not only can we help you recover your data if it’s lost, we can help you secure, leverage and manage that data across its entire lifecycle.

Delivering a product customers trust and rely on creates a steady, predictable revenue base and cash flow to reinvest back into the business.

M7: How has your metrics-driven approach helped you improve ROI with a recurring revenue base?
SG: The fundamentals of the SaaS subscription model can be incredibly powerful growth drivers for any software business. Consistent revenue growth is key. It begins with relentlessly focusing on penetrating your market and winning new customers. Delivering a product customers trust and rely on creates a steady, predictable revenue base and cash flow to reinvest back into the business. Expanding existing customer accounts with more usage and additional products accelerates growth beyond what can be delivered by acquiring new accounts and deepens relationships with customers, minimizing lost revenue from churn.


M7: What 3 things makes OwnBackup stand out?
SG: First and foremost, we address a really important gap for companies, which is that they are responsible for protecting the data that they put into their SaaS applications. And since data is now the lifeblood of every organization, companies cannot afford to be without it. Sure, we aren’t the only company out there trying to solve this problem. But what truly sets us apart is the quality of our solutions and the team behind them.

Data is now the lifeblood of every organization, companies cannot afford to be without it.

M7: What is your advice to budding entrepreneurs?
SG: Entrepreneurs are born visionaries, but most startups fail because they fail to focus. We focused exclusively on building the best-in-class backup and recovery solution for the Salesforce ecosystem for over six years. It allowed us to build a truly enterprise-grade product and highly effective go-to-market machine, and a brand people trust with their most critical business data. While there were many opportunities along the way to expand beyond our core market, we’ve been better positioned to adapt to the lessons we learned, and our results speak for themselves. Execute with relentless focus, and you will be rewarded.

Read More : ‘Advances in AI and Machine Learning are not scalable without proper data governance program in place’ says Peggy Tsai, Chief Data Officer at BigID