Being Apped: Confessions of a startup CEO

Apped has come far but fortunately there is no end in sight. It’s all about having a wild idea, killer team and products, interested investors and and loving customers. Our challenging, sleep-depriving and rewarding journey continues.

I had a chance to spend some time in Silicon Valley a couple of years back. The startup entrepreneurs I met - each at a different point in their journey - seemed tired, arrogant, ready for anything and most importantly obsessed with their solutions. Back then I didn’t really understand them but now, well now’s a completely different story.

You meet hundreds of potential customers, dozens and dozens of VCs or other investors. You are challenged every day to see if you can stand your ground (or sometimes just for fun of it). Your vision is questioned by your organization and by your board. You might run into cash crisis and be unable to pay salaries or to subcontractors. Existing technology doesn’t agree with your vision and you have to endlessly seek new solutions to problems.

When you’ve heard all the doubts and questions, you learn to have an answer for everything. All the positive events on your path you instantly turn into a story that will be told in your next meeting. You keep things mostly polite, always ready to share your vision and to shake the naysayers off your shoulders like dandruff. You don’t sleep much. Your company is your religion, your obsession. You know all the statistics of success rates of startups but they no longer matter. It’s your ship, and your sail with it. It’s Giri, your responsibility, fate and destiny dwindled together. Well, there’s my 6 months old baby girl as well but adding her to the story would spoil the sense of drama.

Apped has officially existed since February 2015 and we’ve got something done since then. It’s hard to be objective (or impossible) but looking at the baby’s growth chart, I think we have done better than average. Firstly, most startups don’t even survive their first year. Secondly, we can look at my imaginary startup to-do list to see how Apped is actually doing.

Disruptive Idea

Our idea was to reinvent the B2B mobile market. The popularity of cloud-based business systems meant that architectures, which used to be custom-made, changed to utilize standard technologies. We figured that it would be possible to manage the whole chain from complex integrations to public app stores automatically. One clear benefit of this is that B2B apps wouldn’t require separate registration. You just log in with your existing credentials and yet it’s secure. Amazingly enough, under certain conditions you can even access premise data automatically. Without any interaction with the IT department or purchasing; anyone can download the apps and enjoy the benefits. Sounds cool but also scary. It all depends on the mindset towards the networked API economy, faster go-to-market times and simpler automation of process bottlenecks.

Killer Team 

Next on the to-do list (after ordering cool startup T-shirts) is of course getting the talent to work on the impossible. For the first year we pretty much ran the show with my colleague, Mikko Lampi. We had some financial means but it’s pretty hard to convince people (I mean the level of people we wanted) to abandon their golden handcuffs with an absurd idea. We looked into potential partners to form a world class virtual organization. It’s also hard in its own way; everybody wants your money but deciding who has the competence to work with emerging technologies and who sees you as a relevant customer can be challenging. But we overcome it and the cooperation with our current partners Great Apes, Kompozure, Qentinell, Kallan and Palmu works smoothly.

Virtual organization works well but it’s critical to have some key assets within the company. Next to join our team was another heavyweight (metaphorically), Riikka Jakovuori, who jumped the boat from Accenture to drive our marketing efforts. Creative genius Jani L?nsim?ki created our amazing design and a series of fortunate events enables us to hire him. Anna Piela is the youngest in our team but the most famous. Added to almost two Master’s degrees, she just performed to the full crowd in Harwall Areena with Nickelback.

Then there’s the board. Sometimes I really wonder do they know what board should do, as they run around selling us to all possible directions. Ari Rahkonen used to run Microsoft Finland. Kimmo Rasila has similar business background and an added bonus of having the biggest IT related network in Finland. Tero Virtala is the CEO of Remedy and Aki Antman the CEO of Sulava (and selected as top influencer in technology in Finland). Mikko Suonenlahti heard our story and joined the team; he’s experienced and connects us with different parties to helps us forward.

Brand / Media  

Media has been kind to us. The latest story was in Kauppalehti (leading business newspaper in Finland) last week. Most Finnish newspapers touching finance or technology have written something about us. There was a great story on Good News from Finland. Our co-operation with Tieto got noticed and was spread around by Reuters for example. I was interviewed in a radio show in Atlanta that has 400 000 listeners. We have been up and down on Finnish and European startup lists.

Social media and word to mouth are also important. You could, naturally, always do better, but it seems that our content attracts companies to us. We have done wide market surveys about modern working culture and how companies utilize technology. Especially from international customers we hear that they found us through Google; that’s pretty impressive as we don’t do AdWords. Next step is to reach mainstream U.S. media, but I believe we must be present there before this plan works out.

Raising seed money  

As a startup CEO you worry constantly over your runway (months before money runs out). To be honest, it was a bit of a surprise how much time it takes to manage. You have to pitch on different stages and build your story over and over again. You need to work hard to get people to meet you, and once you get some traction there are plentitude of meetings to be run. If and when you succeed there are the due diligence processes that require loads of paperwork. And that’s just one aspect of it. Then there are other financing options backed by the EU or Finnish government. Tekes has been a great support throughout our journey but writing applications and reporting results takes always a few days. There’s a solid control as there should be, but it takes time to understand and manage all details. Anyway, it feels like a full-time job.

In total, we have now gotten 1.5 million euros of funding and have runway till the end of the year. We are currently in the middle of our second funding round and we have been noticed and qualified to discuss with various heavy hitters for serious investment. Having walked through piles of VCs in Scandinavia and US, I’d like to say a lot depends on chemistry. Some people just get your story and they also like you. Most VCs have been super nice (perhaps against my expectations) and I have learned a lot from them. We have got three kinds of feedback: a clear no, come back to us when you have more cash flow or are looking for your next funding round or have references from the US, and the feedback that wants to continue discussions (my favorite kind). Seeking funding is exciting and feelings can vary from nervous desperation to megalomaniacal. Just as they should be in a startup that pushes forward with the speed of light.

Launching Products

To be credible, a startup needs to deliver. Apped Pulse was launched globally in

February and Apped Meetz will be launched in October. Our apps are co-created with our customers and solve everyday issues but the apps also showcase the capabilities of our platform. Easy deployment, identity management without registration and automatic integrations still make jaws drop. We have started first customer projects to utilize the platform directly. It’s a big moment for us. Platform will be launched for wider commercial use for companies and developers at some point next year, but the basic features have already been tested through our apps.

Our customers wanted to have some more traditional management tools over our apps so we created a portal, with which you can manage licenses, use advanced features (like mass distribution) and dig into analytics. Additional and challenging project was to integrate billing system (Stripe) with app stores. Portal has been surprisingly popular and we have just started a facelift project; new version will combine different data to give an overview how the company is doing from regional differences to meeting efficiency data. And it all works as everything we do, automatically; no development or even configuration needed.

Pilots with real customers / MVP   

We have been customer-centric from the day one. We have talked to top CIOs and interviewed organizations such as Kone, Fortum, VR, UPM and Finnair. Based on their feedback we created the first prototypes and actually started with a project called Apped Away, that was never published. One thing with limited resources is that sometimes you have to shoot down things that won’t fly. So instead, we created Apped Pulse and now Meetz. We’ve always been faithful to the MVP model; we want to push out raw versions and test them with real customers to see what brings value to them.

Paying customers

The requirement for cash flow prevents us from focusing solely on the fun stuff. Even though we are changing the world for the better, some parties say that the business also has to make sense. Boring but, luckily we have had some traction there and have also received references. In most cases, we are dealing with very large organizations with a hit rate of 96%, so it seems that our story resonates even with C-level decision makers.

What frustrates me from the sales perspective is that currently we rely a lot on physical sales. But we are working to fix this. We have built a dashboard to understand both the usage of our apps and the conversions rates in the digital channel. Once we see how the inbound traffic turn into paying customers we can start optimizing it. Secondly, we have started amazing partnerships, like a joint go-to-market program with Tieto, which help us widen our sales reach. These are a win-win partnerships. We have scalable products but no interest in expanding to consulting or bigger IT-projects. This way it all fits.

The outside world 

Do you have customers outside your home market? Yes, Sir, we do. Odlo is a 1000 people organization in Switzerland. Through the digital channel we have gotten customers from Sweden and Norway. And out of the non-paying customers about third comes from outside Finland. We are negotiating with French, German and U.S. companies even though we haven’t done any marketing in these markets. It’s beautiful. I happened to visit Microsoft office in NY on the same day as Kevin Turner left and bang! Off went a topic request with Apped Pulse “Kevin Turner leaving, quite a bomb! How do you feel about it?”.

Expanding operations to the U.S.

My 6 months old baby has a business visa to U.S. And maybe not so surprisingly, so has her parents. We have spent already considerable time in New York meeting potential customers, investors and partners. It’s a cloud market. There are loads of potential customers and the costs and time difference to the mothership in Helsinki is tolerable.

There are many people telling you that you won’t get far as a foreigner. That’s bullshit. First of all, everyone’s a foreigner in New York. If you are from Scandinavia, your language skills are more than adequate. What you need to do is stop worrying. Talk much, meet as many people as you can, jump to the microphone when it’s offered. It’s people business. If you want to open a door, you need an introduction. Don’t waste time with trade fairs or cold calling. I can’t wait to get there. I love big cities. I used to live in Moscow and I just love the crazy energy. You need to be there permanently to have any impact; it takes time to build a network and usually one thing leads to another really fast. But you have to be present.

 So what’s next? 

I’d say God only knows, but in the age of atheism that not probably the best thing to say. Fortune favors the brave. We have a solid plan to push towards A-series and wider go-to-market in the U.S. World domination is just behind the corner.

But this is our story so far. These are exciting times. I wish good luck and prosperity to all the startups out there. And to my loyal supporters who read my confessions this far.

More about Apped.