From Side Project to Global Platforms
photography by DaniloPhoto
Ben Liebert never set out to build one of the most sophisticated cloud integration and data access platforms on the market. But then again, the SyncHub founder never quite followed the script either. “I’ve built about 15 different startups or software platforms over the years,” he says. “But this one just clicked. It met my interests. It provided high value. And we used it ourselves. We built it because we needed it.”
SyncHub is a platform that connects cloud-based apps like Xero, HubSpot and others with data warehouses and business intelligence tools. It came out of years of work running Blackball Software, the development company Ben started more than two decades ago.
“Over the years, we seemed to coalesce more and more on these pretty nerdy kind of data-heavy integration projects,” Ben says. “I started getting all these integration inquiries for like Xero into Power BI or HubSpot into Excel. We’d reply back and say, yeah, no problem. That’d be 30 grand. We can do that for you. But who wants that kind of commitment?”
After about six months of that, Ben decided it was time to build a product. “This is ridiculous,” he recalls thinking. “We had all this collateral from years of work, connectors, engines that handled retries, OAuth handshakes, deletion management, all the last 5 percent that separates usable data from junk. So I took a week off work and I built what became SyncHub.”
That week turned out to be a turning point. “That bad boy made money for us from day one,” he says. “I still had Blackball running, but over the next three years I was running both. Then eventually SyncHub’s revenue overtook Blackball and I’ve been slowly dismantling that and moving full-time to SyncHub.”
From there, growth came steadily. SyncHub now manages over two billion records across more than 500 customers. “We’re in 30 countries now,” Ben says. “and growing at about 70 percent a year. And the last four or five months it’s ticking up further because of this AI thing we’re building.”
SyncHub has never taken external investment. “Part of the reason is ironic,” he says. “We had a shared office at a startup incubator. So I was surrounded by venture capital. And when I started SyncHub, we had countless offers. It was the first thing anybody suggested. But all I saw, not just there, but with startups around the world, is you come up with an idea, some investor who’s looking for that one-in-ten hockey stick will give you a million bucks. But a million dollars that’s given to you goes a lot quicker than a million dollars you earned yourself. So a lot of this incredibly valuable opportunity just ends up wasted.”
“I think it works sometimes, but what that hockey stick hides is that you’re in debt. You’re running at a loss for a long time. And if you can’t bounce out of that, then you’ve just lost a whole lot of money, a whole lot of pride and a whole lot of time.”
Ben’s preference is for building lean and owning the results. “I didn’t want to be beholden to that kind of pressure. I would have taken it when I was in my 20s, but I was 40 when SyncHub took off. We’ve got a really sticky product. It’s long-living. It’s solid.”
At its core, SyncHub solves a simple but time-consuming problem. “It gets your cloud data to your fingertips and – more importantly – it keeps it up to date because the quality of data decays over time. You need new and modified records. You need deleted records handled. Before SyncHub, a BI analyst would have to put on their developer hat. Write a service, connect to an API, parse the JSON, rustle up a database, manage background jobs, merge records, all to build one report. That’s hundreds of hours.”
“Instead, with SyncHub, in two or three minutes, you do a few clicks and you’ve got your data, like Xero or HubSpot for example, syncing into your database. We’ll even provide a database for free if you don’t have one. Or we’ll drop the data into yours if you do.”
He adds, “And that’s just one API. Most businesses use at least a half dozen, often more. We store all that data side-by-side in a single relational structure, so you can run cross-platform queries. For example, at Blackball we store timesheets in Harvest and export to Xero, and over the years I’ve forgotten a few times to export our time each month. Now, we’ve got a report in SyncHub that makes sure every timesheet has a matching invoice.”
The value proposition became even clearer when AI entered the picture. “Everyone’s doing AI,” Ben says. “But slapping an LLM over your product isn’t the whole equation. The most powerful part of an AI is the context your app can provide around that. SyncHub spent five years codifying these big data models for over 70 platforms, which means our AI doesn’t doesn’t just leverage your business data like ‘what were last month’s sales?’, but understands that invoices marked as ‘VOID’ should be ignored. So not only do we know what fields are available, but we’ve described the relationships between those endpoints and what field values mean – this is context that cannot be gleaned by an LLM alone.”
It’s context engineering. “Everyone talks about prompt engineering. But only technical users can do that, so your product is only as good as the user makes it. Context engineering lets us scaffold the conversation before the chat even starts, giving the LLMs structured business context so they don’t hallucinate. That’s when the insights get interesting.”
Ben put that idea into practice himself. “I set up a prompt and said: ‘You are the world’s best operations executive. You’re running SyncHub. Here’s our Stripe account, our HubSpot account, our customer data. I’m not going to ask what to look for, you go find it. Then send me a daily summary.’”
“That email comes through every day at 6pm. It’s almost too much information. But it’s real. It’s grounded in our actual data. It asks questions I wouldn’t think to ask. And I think it’s helping me run the business better.”
Despite all that, SyncHub doesn’t use AI in its internal workflows much. “We don’t create a lot of free-text content. We tried using LLMs for code generation, but I personally barely use it. A couple of the team do. But it often takes longer to review and fit into our architecture. So no, AI hasn’t taken over any part of our business yet.”
He adds, “There’s a bit of irony there. We talk a lot about AI, and we’re definitely building AI features, but we’re still doing the work ourselves.”
The team is fully remote. They meet every day in the metaverse. “We never went back to the office after lockdown, we just leaned into it. Everyone got Oculus headsets. Every day at 2:30 we meet in VR. We sit around a virtual table. The spatial audio is what really makes it work. You can hear someone off to your left and you turn and look at them. It feels like real conversation.”
That daily check-in isn’t just a novelty. It’s a working style. “While we keep in touch all day via Slack for example, we’re also free to take the kids to school or head off to the beach. It takes a level of trust on both parts, but that’s the business I want to run and the freedom that comes with it is worth more than the risk.”
That trust extends to how the business is built. “I want to keep coding. I want to work on features that matter to me. Sometimes I just build something because I like it. I don’t want to have to justify every decision to an investor. We eat our own dog food. We use the product ourselves. If all our customers left tomorrow, I’d probably still run it.”
Asked what advice he would give to other founders, Ben doesn’t hesitate. “Be very wary of taking money too early. That’s easy for me to say because I’m a technical founder. If I had to pay wages for someone else to build it, that’s a different conversation.”
He also recommends thinking globally early on. “Don’t spend much effort targeting New Zealand. Australia was great for us. A bit wealthier, much bigger, and the timezone lines up nicely. Most of our customers are from Australia. Just 15 percent are in New Zealand.”
On the obsession with the US, Ben is direct. “I’ve never really understood it. Everyone’s trying to get into America, but the regulatory hoops are a pain and the timezone’s on the other side of the world. I just don’t see the point. The world is big enough without America.”
If he could go back 21 years with some advice to his younger self, it would be “Build something you use yourself.” and “Don’t lose sight of the love of your craft. Make sure you take time to remember why you’re doing this for a job in the first place. Passion and curiosity saw me through 20 years. Not all of them were easy. But I still love what I do. And stay curious.”