Expert Interview with Martin Blumenau, Founder of datapine

Founded in 2012, datapine is a Software as a Service platform that provides the power to visualize your data and represent it in the most professional way. With a brilliant team of data scientists, developers, technological leaders, and academics, datapine empower businesses of all sizes to communicate their data interactively. It has expanded its reach to more than thousands of users in 25+ countries across the globe.

In Conversation with Martin Blumenau, The Founder of datapine

What inspired you to start something like datapine?

I was regularly confronted with issues of extracting data from large databases to analyze the company’s metrics and derive insights that would help me in product development. Most of the time, I had to ask the IT department to generate a report since I’m not a developer myself, and that caused issues in my work. I wanted to be able to create, visualize, and extract data on my own, and that’s when my co-founder, Jakob, and me, saw the opportunity to solve a real business problem for companies and employees across the world, and to make data finally accessible whenever and wherever needed.

What is it that lets you stay passionate about datapine?

Our satisfied customers and dedicated team are crucial in pushing me every day to deliver the best possible results. When you see that our solution is actually helping companies to solve their own set of issues, and the people behind the product, all talented individuals, keep me motivated and passionate about datapine.

Share with us the set of challenges and opportunities you came along in this long journey.

Any business challenges and opportunities keep us going and excited about our future and force us to work even smarter. Recently we got acquired by RIB Software, and now we’re focusing on strengthening that partnership and developing our product even more.

How is your product benefitting its users?

We relieve the IT department from tedious tasks of generating reports and managing data sets that business users can do by themselves, using self-service business intelligence. With just a few clicks, every average employee can create their own visualizations, reports, and analyze data on their own. Basically, we increase productivity and save costs for every organization that uses our product.

Is there anything most critical you are working on right now? If so, how are you making it happen?

Due to the acquisition by a large international company, we’ve been busy with developing strategies to connect datapine into this large software family, so exciting times await us. Essentially, we now reached the next level to not only build a great product but now scale it to millions of users.

How do you measure success?

Customers are the ones that measure our success. When we see how much we’ve helped an organization in their data management challenges, and how satisfied are our users in 25 countries across the world, only then I can say we’re successful. And I firmly believe we are.

Define the work culture at datapine

I would say we work hard but play hard. Flat hierarchies are important to us, we can play games, throw a barbecue, but we’re also dedicated to our work as a top priority. Hence, I would say we’re a mixture of extremely dedicated working people that also like to play Mario Kart. We also provide flexible working schedules and try to keep our culture open and transparent. We have many international colleagues and we learn about different cultures every day. Our work culture is focused on success while having fun at the same time.

What do you do to motivate your team?

We gather for regular team events, have weekly barbecues, provide professional feedback, and always communicate in a friendly, yet professional manner so that everyone knows how much they are appreciated for their hard work and dedication. Often, we meet for a beer or after-work party. And in case someone can’t remember the evening anymore we still have our wall of shame with the most hilarious pictures.

If you weren’t building datapine, what would you be doing differently?

A good question, you never know where you will end up but most likely I would probably build another start-up. As long as you have a vision and great people around you, it doesn’t really matter if you build a BI tool or sell the best ice cream in the world. You just need to find something that floats your boat and that drives your motivation.

What would you advise the new-age entrepreneurs coming up in the industry?

I would advise them to have patience, a good plan, and, most importantly, a great loyal and dedicated team around you.