Matias Mäenpää and Anssi Kiviranta, co-founders of SaaS startup Videobot, interviewed the founders of companies like Booking.com and Fiverr for their book Exit Stories, without which Mäenpää admits the company might not exist at all.
What was the motivation behind Exit Stories, which follows your books Exit 1 and 2 about Finnish entrepreneurs?
We have always been very curious about big success stories, let’s call them unicorns, and what kind of people have been able to make it on another level than us. We decided to make a global version and have entrepreneurs from different countries telling their stories and what they did differently when it was on a unicorn level.
We always had three-to-four-hour interviews with those people. It was quite a deep dive. For some of the entrepreneurs, it was a bit of a psychological thing to go through their whole life and how they got where they are today. Actually, most of them liked it a lot. But the big challenge was to get three or four hours from those very, very busy people.
“It’s impossible to say if Videobot would be alive without this process of interviewing all these entrepreneurs.”
Matias Mäenpää, co-founder of Videobot.
During these conversations, was anything shared off the record, not for the book but just between entrepreneurs?
Not so much. Most of them actually are not working anymore in the companies in question. I believe that helped them a lot to share freely their stories. It was pretty relaxed, and they were able to be very open.
I have to say many people think that a unicorn founder is something like a Mark Zuckerberg, a 20-year-old who started in university. But here you see 12 unicorn founders, and most of them already had entrepreneurial experience. Most unicorn founders and studies also show that, have actually sold a company before, not a unicorn-level company, but they have had experience building up a company and selling it. Maybe they also don’t have that much financial risk because if the company wouldn’t succeed, they can take more risks because their whole life is not dependent on that.
Did the founders you interviewed have past experiences that taught them how to make their big exit?
Yes, the founder of Pipedrive [customer relationship SaaS] went bankrupt with his earlier startup. For sure, the mistakes he made with the first startup as a founder helped him a lot in the second try. Some had done successful exits and got a bunch of money, and some of them had done unsuccessful exits.
There are very different backgrounds as well. Some had both parents, some had only one, many of them grew up not in the country they were born in. Lukasz Gadowski [Delivery Hero] is Polish and moved to Germany as a kid. The same applied to David Helgason from Unity. Fred Simon [JFrog] is from France but grew the company in Israel. There were things that, as a Finn living in Luxembourg, made me reflect on that because now my kid is growing up in a country that is not our home country.
“The same applied to Videobot. We got our first client before we had a business ID, and we had 10 clients before we had a bank account.”
Matias Mäenpää, co-founder of Videobot.
What about your professional life? Did you learn something, and did you get inspiration from the process of doing this book?
We did all the interviews before founding Videobot. It’s impossible to say if Videobot would be alive without this process of interviewing all these entrepreneurs. For sure, it inspired us a lot in terms of building yet again a new company and trying to build a unicorn-level success as well, which is the clear goal of Videobot.
I would call this book a bit of an MBA on building a unicorn. I have done an MBA in a real school as well, but this was my real MBA, to be honest.
One thing that a normal startup is not focusing on as much as the people in this book is the end client, the paying client. All of these guys were super focused on bringing value to the end client, not so much loving their product but loving the problem and solution that they found. You have to focus from the beginning on being active with your potential clients because too many startups are just developing their own idea, product, or solution with too many assumptions that somebody actually needs it and somebody is willing to pay for it.
Even if you can’t sell your product yet, you can do so many things, and Tonies is a perfect example because it is a physical product. It was a kid’s toy, and they needed a lot of money to develop it. Before they even had a single product, they had sold it to many store chains. Being in touch super early with your most important stakeholder, which is your paying client, is something European startups don’t understand many times.
When you think of when you should talk with potential clients, you have to be embarrassed of your product or solution. It should be on that level that you are still embarrassed.
Do you mean being underdeveloped?
Yes, because otherwise, you don’t learn what the clients really want and what they really need unless you have an active discussion with them. The same applied to Videobot. We got our first client before we had a business ID, and we had 10 clients before we had a bank account. That’s how we learned that we sold to some wrong clients who were not our ideal customer profile, but otherwise, we wouldn’t learn that. And then we found our ideal customer profile and were able to focus on those from very early days, which helped us to get traction, raising our seed round and getting further.
“In food delivery there are thousands of people who thought someone would like pizza delivered, and there can be an app where you can order it, but there are 10 or 20 unicorns in that field.”
Matias Mäenpää, co-founder of Videobot.
Is the execution more important than the product?
Yes, because you can always change the product, but if you are not executing and if you’re not talking with your paying clients, you never know actually how to develop it and what the direction should be.
Videobot, we are still fundamentally a website solution. We started to build a website solution, but I had no idea that our clients wanted to use Videobot in their physical stores. It was the clients who invented that use case.
Were there any common traits that you saw in the unicorn founders that you interviewed?
They have very fast thinking. They are patient and impatient at the same time. They are going and going and are obsessed with the end goal. I would really also add clock speed and being very curious. If you think of an idea, okay Angry Birds is an exception, but in food delivery, there are thousands of people who thought someone would like pizza delivered, and there can be an app where you can order it, but there are 10 or 20 unicorns in that field. So, what is it [that makes the difference] if it’s not the execution?
