Interview with David Boskovic, Co-founder and CEO of Flatfile: the data onboarding company

The joy of signing on a new customer can quickly fade as companies are greeted with a mountain of customer data to ingest. From messy data, non-technical users, encoding formats, data onboarding is a huge pain-point.

Flatfile’s goal is to make onboarding new customers and their data as easy as pressing a button. That’s why we created an easy-to-use import button that does just that. With our AI-assisted data onboarding solution, we automate every repetitive and painstaking process involved in teaching different systems what data is and where it should go, removing the barriers between people and data. 

How did you come up with the idea for the company? 

I’ve always been an avid problem solver and coder and I wanted to use these skills to build my own business, but I wasn’t quite sure what that business was until I started working for and building B2B SaaS companies.

I quickly got frustrated when I was continually building data import tools to help customers onboard their data into software platforms. Building these custom data importers was painstaking work and I ended up rage designing the first version of Flatfile! From there the product evolved and organisations soon discovered a way to simply and effectively ingest customer data without tying up their internal resources to build and manage a data import solution. We continue to learn from our customers and iterate on improving the data onboarding experience, enabling seamless data transactions between companies.   

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

I believe every good business starts from a personally-felt problem but to be a truly successful entrepreneur, you have to take this massive problem, learn everything there is to know about it and fall deeply in love with it. From there, you’ll spend your time telling everybody about the problem and why they should also fall in love with it too. Aspire to be the expert in that problem and then it’s far easier to get people to believe in you and your product.

Another great piece of advice I received as an early founder was “your speed of growth is your speed of iteration.” The faster you can complete the full cycle of build, learn and build again will determine how quickly you can grow. 

What can we hope to see from Flatfile in the future?

As the world moves deeper into the Information Age, pretty much every business transaction involves data. Over time you’ll see Flatfile becoming part of nearly every business transaction in the world, making it easy to exchange relevant data effortlessly and securely. In the more immediate future, we’ll be focusing our resources on rolling out a new no-code data onboarding product that we hope will help every startup and software company in the world scale faster.