An interview with Ben
With our recent high-profile customers and appearance in the Xero Awards, we thought it was about time you got to know SyncHub’s founder, Ben Liebert, and how SyncHub came to be.
In early 2019, Blackball Software founder Ben Liebert started receiving enquiries from businesses looking to feed data from multiple cloud platforms into their reporting tools. Increasingly, he was seeing demand for a SaaS solution that would automate data in real time for rich insights that could drive key business decisions. “Because Blackball built bespoke software, we 'd say ‘sure, no problem, that will be $30k please’ – and nobody took us up the offer, which isn't surprising because in the SaaS world people are used to paying by the month, not a one-off fee.”
As enquiries continued to come in, Ben realised that he had all the moving parts via Blackball. Namely, a robust and battle-tested web framework called Foundation that underpinned the SaaS platforms built for Blackball clients, and API connectors to many of the most popular cloud services around the world.
From that point, it was all systems go. “A regular software development company starting from scratch would have taken 6-12 months to build the first version of SyncHub. But with the tools and framework we already had our disposal, it took Blackball less than a week - and voila, SyncHub was born.”
Since then, Ben and the team have invested thousands more development hours, building out additional features like Deletion Management, BYOD, and of course the famous API Explorer. But Ben is especially proud of that first one-week MVP.
“We had a bank of potential customers who had expressed interest and we signed a few up straight away. I told the team that we'd spend our first month's monthly recurring revenue (MRR), celebrating with drinks and dinner in town. It was just $300 as I recall, but it was more valuable than $3,000 from bespoke work, because to me it just appeared out of nowhere like magic. I had been bitten by the SaaS bug.”
Ben Liebert, Founder, SyncHub
Fast forward two years…
Fast forward two years and SyncHub is now syncing over 3m records every day, facilitating previously unobtainable reports in platforms such as Power BI, Excel and Tableau. SyncHub's pay-as-you-go model and turnkey solution means they can easily onboard any size business, from small owner-operators, right up to global enterprise - as evidenced by their recent partnership with KPMG.
“The last decade has seen a proliferation of cloud services, and now everybody's business is spread across the cloud,” says Ben. “This is cool, but it introduces a new problem around data disparity and accessibility. At the same time, there has been a ‘democratisation’ of data visualisation tools, such as Power BI and even Excel. So we've got heaps of data out there, and Joe Bloggs has the tools to analyse it - you just need something like SyncHub to join the dots and get the data where it's needed.”
On the surface, SyncHub addresses the most common data problems:
uncertainty around business expenses;
delays in real time reporting (i.e., CSV exports),
the resource intensive process of manually exporting CSV; and
siloed data across multiple cloud platforms
Anecdotally though, Ben believes that SyncHub fits an even tighter niche for some customers….
“Most cloud platforms expose their data via API, but you need to be pretty nerdy to do a good job of extracting it, and while many people have the analytical skills to understand data, they lack the technical/specialist skills to extract this. SyncHub is a turnkey solution in lieu of employing a software developer for your business”
It’s all about data
For Ben, his relationship with data and databases began during his second year of University. “I still remember when computers finally clicked for me. It was a database class and suddenly I could see how the world around me could be transposed into a relational database. It was just so clear. This might be why, in my computers career, I've always been a database-driven design kind of guy. It just makes so much sense to me.”
“SyncHub is an answer to the complexity of format and distribution in data. I hope that the next step is a move towards data standardisation. For example, the concept of an invoice being presented in the same format, regardless of which cloud platform you are talking to. Imagine that power…then Excel would have a generic ‘Get invoices’ button, where you tell it what you’re using….Xero, MYOB, etc. and voila - got ‘em. The same goes with authorisation….OAuth2 is a step in the right direction, but I can promise you from experience that there is a lot of variation between platforms, both within and out of the spec”
And whilst that’s about getting the data, one of the biggest barriers businesses face is knowing how to use it. “It's not even about being smart - I mean, you don't know what you don't know, so you may be missing a really obvious question to ask of your data. For example, it may turn out that my cafe sells twice the coffees on days when Vodafone drops its overseas call prices. How could you possibly draw a line between those? I believe the future of data is machine learning and automation. You won't ask questions of Power BI and Excel - Clippy will knock on your door and tell you. There's a frightening thought.”
“Actually being able to query the data thoughtfully, and then doing something about it…measuring the results and comparing – that’s where you find the gold. I'm proud that SyncHub is part of this solution, but we are only a means to the end. The real value is in the decisions that we enable.”
“You won’t ask questions of Power BI and Excel - Clippy will knock on your door and tell you. There’s a frightening thought”