Sameer Al-Sakran

A buried CTA deep in the admin panel generated close to six figures in ARR - with zero salespeople, no support, and no marketing. Sameer Al-Sakran spent four years building Metabase without charging a dollar. When he finally monetized through self-serve SaaS, strangers started paying $300/month just to remove a logo. Then he followed expert advice, built enterprise sales, and nearly stalled the business. Sameer reveals why the self-serve SaaS signal was hiding in plain sight, how expert advice to hire AEs nearly killed product-led growth momentum, and the two-year pricing battle before accepting the per-user model customers actually wanted. His PLG playbook shows why self-serve growth beats fighting your company's DNA. Metabase is an open-source BI tool used by 70,000+ companies. Sameer grew it to 8-figure ARR by returning to three principles: win the taste test against Tableau, let the product sell itself, and build for self-serve growth over enterprise sales cycles. 🔑 Key Lessons 🚀 Self-serve SaaS beats fighting your DNA: Metabase's team was wired for product-led growth, not enterprise sales. Leaning into self-serve SaaS made the cloud option dwarf direct sales and drive 8-figure ARR. 📉 Expert advice can derail self-serve SaaS momentum: Advisors told Sameer self-serve was naive and pushed the enterprise playbook. He hired AEs, ran sales calls, and nearly stalled the business for years. 🎯 Win the taste test instead of the feature war: Metabase focused on being the tool users wanted to keep after trying it alongside Tableau and Looker back to back. No paid acquisition needed. 💰 Let customers dictate your pricing model: Metabase spent two years trying installation and per-server pricing while customers kept asking for per-user. Accepting their preferred model simplified negotiations and grew PLG revenue. 🛠️ Build something you love before asking strangers to pay: Metabase's team used the product daily and refused to ship until they enjoyed it. If builders don't love it, the self-serve growth motion won't work. Chapters Introduction and favorite quote What Metabase does and who it's for Revenue, team size, and 70,000 companies Origin story at Expa startup incubator Why Metabase waited 4 years to charge The buried CTA that generated self-serve SaaS revenue Following expert advice into enterprise sales Why the enterprise detour stalled growth Cloud self-service takes off Competing against Tableau and winning the taste test Two years of pricing mistakes before per-user pricing Scaling from 7 figures to 8 figures through PLG Lightning round Resources Full show notes: https://saasclub.io/439 Join 5,000+ SaaS founders: https://saasclub.io/email

Sameer Al-Sakran

Co-founder

Metabase

Summary Business Intelligence software is often cumbersome and requires specialized knowledge of the tools and data to be able to ask and answer questions about the state of the organization. Metabase is a tool built with the goal of making the act of discovering information and asking questions of an organizations data easy and self-service for non-technical users. In this episode the CEO of Metabase, Sameer Al-Sakran, discusses how and why the project got started, the ways that it can be used to build and share useful reports, some of the useful features planned for future releases, and how to get it set up to start using it in your environment. Preamble Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 40Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to run a bullet-proof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute. For complete visibility into the health of your pipeline, including deployment tracking, and powerful alerting driven by machine-learning, DataDog has got you covered. With their monitoring, metrics, and log collection agent, including extensive integrations and distributed tracing, you’ll have everything you need to find and fix performance bottlenecks in no time. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/datadog today to start your free 14 day trial and get a sweet new T-Shirt. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch. Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Sameer Al-Sakran about Metabase, a free and open source tool for self service business intelligence Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? The current goal for most companies is to be “data driven”. How would you define that concept? How does Metabase assist in that endeavor? What is the ratio of users that take advantage of the GUI query builder as opposed to writing raw SQL? What level of complexity is possible with the query builder? What have you found to be the typical use cases for Metabase in the context of an organization? How do you manage scaling for large or complex queries? What was the motivation for using Clojure as the language for implementing Metabase? What is involved in adding support for a new data source? What are the differentiating features of Metabase that would lead someone to choose it for their organization? What have been the most challenging aspects of building and growing Metabase, both from a technical and business perspective? What do you have planned for the future of Metabase? Contact Info Sameer salsakran on GitHub @sameer_alsakran on Twitter LinkedIn Metabase Website @metabase on Twitter metabase on GitHub Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Links Expa Metabase Blackjet Hadoop Imeem Maslow’s Hierarchy of Data Needs 2 Sided Marketplace Honeycomb Interview Excel Tableau Go-JEK Clojure React Python Scala JVM Redash How To Lie With Data Stripe Braintree Payments The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA Support Data Engineering Podcast

Sameer Al-Sakran

Co-founder

Metabase

Sameer Al-Sakran and Tom Robinson from Metabase joined the show to discuss Metabase - their open source tool that’s laying the foundation of their goals for open source business intelligence. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Codeship – If it works with Docker, it works with Codeship Jet. Toptal – Apply for a $5,000 STEM scholarship - Toptal supports aspiring female computer scientists, developers, and software engineers to achieve their goals via financial support and mentorship by top professional developers and designers. Harvest – Simple online time tracking software. DigitalOcean – Use the code CHANGELOG to get a $10 hosting credit when you create a new DigitalOcean account Featuring: Sameer Al-Sakran – Website, GitHub, X Tom Robinson – Website, GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Metabase metabase/metabase Metabase Discussion Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 280 North, Inc. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Objective-J - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Cappuccino (application development framework) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia AWS | Amazon Redshift - Cloud Data Warehouse Solutions Justin Dorfman: @metabase looks awesome, can’t wait to try it out. How do you plan to sustain it? Will there be a pro version? Jeff Dean (computer scientist) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia John Carmack - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia TensorFlow The Changelog #149: React.js, React Native, Flux, Relay, and GraphQL with Facebook The Changelog #171: Living Clojure, ClojureScript, and more with Carin Meier Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Sameer Al-Sakran

Co-founder

Metabase

Tom Robinson

Co-founder

MetabaseElliptic