00:00 - Introduction to Klaro and Its Purpose
04:48 - The Journey from Templates to a Standalone Tool
09:24 - Redefining the Form Factor of Numerical Tasks
14:16 - The Psychological Aspect of User Experience
19:08 - Design-Led Founding and Company Values
24:09 - The Impact of AI on Product Development
28:48 - Understanding the Importance of Language in Product Design
30:16 - Creating an Intuitive Workspace
32:47 - Evolving as a Founder: Lessons Learned
35:53 - Shipping Products: Balancing Short-Term Bets and Long-Term Vision
46:39 - Building a Strong Team: Intentionality and Fit

‍

‍

Niklas Olsson:
How do we ship product? I think it's an ever-evolving process. But right now we value velocity very highly. We value having users in the loop very highly. So to the extent that you can combine those two and get meaningful progress is kind of like the yardstick for like, what's an improvement on this dimension of shipping product?

Megha Sevekari:
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for being so patient as we learn to do this podcast. I'd love to kind of just start with, know, telling us a little bit more about yourself and Klaro, what it is.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, nice to meet you everyone. My name is Niklas and I'm the founder of Klaro. As you might have already picked up in a few words, am originally not an English native speaker. I'm originally from Sweden and where I grew up on the rural countryside. There was like 250 people where I lived and I moved to Australia about 15 years ago.

Niklas Olsson:
And through most of my career, I've worked in startups or had my own startups. I would say they've all been successful. Some were conventionally that it did well, but the other ones were successful too, because I learned a lot. But I basically spent my whole career building startups and stuff. And now most recently founded Klaro. And Klaro is an easy way for people, particularly without a financial background, to perform numerical tasks.

Niklas Olsson:
Like forecasting or budgeting or business casing, assessing wholesale deals. Like, yeah, basically it's stuff you would normally wrangle yourself through a spreadsheet doing. We try to make that easier.

Megha Sevekari:
Really cool. That sounds like something that I could really, really need in use. That's awesome. And how did you come up with the idea? Was it something that you struggled with?

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, you're not alone in that so yeah.

Niklas Olsson:
I have to confess that I didn't. So when I came across the idea, it wasn't like something that I necessarily had lived directly myself, more so indirectly through working with teams that don't have a financial background or an engineer, engineering or technical background. And it's surprisingly often when you make decisions in your day to day work where, you know, you create a little model or you tally up some numbers or you perform.

Niklas Olsson:
Some sort of calculations to inform your decision. It doesn't mean that that's the be all end all, but it's kind of part of the equation, no pun intended. And I look back and I was like, wow, we're not doing this nearly enough. And the best decisions I ever made had some level of quantitative thinking. So I sort of started staring into that problem why that is. Originally I actually started thinking about

Niklas Olsson:
Handling risk and quantifying risk. Then I quickly learned that people didn't care about that. But everybody was saying like, hey, I need to do this forecast or I need to do this business case or David Jones has sent me an offer to do a wholesale deal. I need to work out what pricing to give them. So people started telling me about those other use cases. They were non risk related. And the first thing I did was to try and solve that through some templating. So building Google Sheet templates and making them available to people.

Niklas Olsson:
And that went sort of a bit gangbusters where I had posted once on LinkedIn, I had three and a half thousand comments. And then the next templates I built had like 7,000 comments. And as I went through that journey, yeah, I learned more and more about what people struggle with when doing these things. And I learned the templates was not enough because fundamentally you're still stuck in a spreadsheet and even making small edits. People were afraid of taking my template, which was like 95 % there.

Niklas Olsson:
For say like a market sizing or something and they just needed to make a few small tweaks and they would write me email saying, hey, can you hop on a call? I just need to change from US dollar to Australian dollar. And to me, I was like, that's a very simple spreadsheet change. But the reason why people were doing that was because they were afraid of breaking it or even if they made the change, they didn't know it was correct. Like it was just, you know, lack of confidence in doing even the smallest of edits, which led me down the path of like, okay, we need to build a new standalone tool.

Niklas Olsson:
So that's kind of how the idea came about.

Megha Sevekari:
I think my immediate thought is how did you go about solving for that lack of confidence or what was your thinking going into it to address that specific issue?

Niklas Olsson:
Hmm. Yeah. I so I had maybe 7,000 people download those initial templates that I built and then I could continue building more because it was clear that people wanted this. But when I saw they couldn't go all way to the end, was kind of like a vanity exercise. That point is better to just try and focus on why couldn't you close the loop and go all the way and solve the problem, which is, know, at the end of the day, people don't want to spend the time doing these numerical tasks. They want to actually go about the decision they're making or

Niklas Olsson:
You know, it's just a means to an end. So when I learned that they lack the confidence, I spent, you know, 100 plus interviews with people that had downloaded a spreadsheet and struggled, one of my templates and struggled and try to learn as much as possible why that is. And one obvious idea could be that all people don't know people are numbers illiterate. You know, they don't know how to, they didn't even pass high school math. You know, there's some sort of assumption that people just don't understand basic math.

Niklas Olsson:
Which wasn't true. People know math. It's just that when you put a layer on top where you have to express yourself in like a cryptic coding language, cause you know, spreadsheet is almost like a coding language. Then you kind of lose the, what you, Hey, I know math, but then I have to speak this way. And like, now I'm like this abstraction on top of it that makes me not understand what's going on. So I suppose the first thing was to just understand what those drivers were and

Niklas Olsson:
You know, have we solved it? No, we're in the very early days of that. And that's what the product is meant to be. But I think there are some hallmarks of like, if I think of what's the opposite of experience. Well, it's one where you, instead of having these nested models where everything depends on one another, try and break it out, you know, make it modular and you can work on pieces at a time. Know, modularity is almost the human brain's lever to complexity. If you can break it down, you can understand them bits by bits. And now you understand the big picture.

Niklas Olsson:
So that's probably one thing we started doing. The other one was to, instead of speaking this cryptic coding language, try as much as possible to just speak plain English, which when you read a math, when you like, people would say, I want to multiply these prices with these sales volumes and I want it to match so that the product volume of that product matches the price of that product. People can say it in English, but then when you need to do that in spreadsheet, you would have to write some.

Niklas Olsson:
Index matching formula that's just crazy. And with the AI coming into the picture, you can clearly see how plain English is fine in the modern world where you don't have to write those formulas yourself. And yeah, that's kind of like the earliest thought I have on that topic. But obviously that could be a podcast in and of itself.

Megha Sevekari:
How did you go from a template on a spreadsheet into what is Klaro now and how do you see Klaro moving forward from there with a new form factor?

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, I can share what I've learned in a journey today because I studied industrial design and mechanical engineering and off the two, I I wanted to be a car designer when I started off, that's why I both, but off the two, think I'm more design-led in many ways. So thinking about a form factor, you kind of have to go to first principles, like, hey, why does it work the way it does today? What was the reason why?

Niklas Olsson:
And if you look at Spreadsheet when they started, they were built a long time ago when you had limited computing power, you had limited even understanding of what is a graphical user interface. It was built back on computers that didn't have the richness of computers today. And then that obviously evolved. there's things about that that is still good. So for example, when you look at redesigned the form factor, OK, let's break down the front.

Niklas Olsson:
The one we have today and you quickly realize that we're not going to reinvent math. We're not going to say, the way you write mathematical expression is now going to be completely different. Math is math. We're not going to change that. And when you start reading into math, there's a lot of things about math that make sense and it's a system that's cohesive and works together. that gives you that endless flexibility of expressing yourself. And then you look at, how is this?

Niklas Olsson:
What's the coding language of a spreadsheet? And one thing that's very essential to a spreadsheet and the whole experience, which makes it very powerful, but also very difficult to understand is positional referencing, where essentially each cell, it's its own thing. And you run an expression there and that results in a single number. And the way that works is like, if you write an expression in one cell, you can drag it in various ways and lock certain things. And when you do that, you're essentially duplicating the same expression.

Niklas Olsson:
Across a row and in a programming language that's almost like a for loop like hey for every cell do this these these computations but you know change it in this way so you could write that as a in a computer language you just write it as a for loop but in in especially you express it in this like positional way and then you when you start studying that you learn how powerful it is and why it's so flexible and why spreadsheets been around for so long because you can literally you know do anything and then you also learn like wow

Niklas Olsson:
This is why it gets so difficult, especially this like super fast to start. do enter some things, do this, do this, and it's all makes sense. But once you spent like 30 minutes, it looks like Frankenstein's monster. Like everything is everywhere. And then you're like, I just want to move this thing or the whole thing breaks. so you, it's very powerful because it's very quick, but unless you know how to structure things, unless you like think of it as a programming language where much like when you're writing programming language, you need to structure things properly.

Niklas Olsson:
You also need to do that in a spreadsheet and like that's what's not obvious to people when you start using it. And that's something that is like way too high barrier for someone who just wants to do some calculations. So I suppose when it comes to the form factor is then, okay, well, that's what we have as a base. We know the power of it and what it allows and also what the limitations are. What would a new language, it's almost like what would a new language and form factor look like? And then you take the hallmarks of that experience. Like it needs to be modular. It needs to be plain English. It's easy to understand.

Niklas Olsson:
It needs to be easy to play with, like do versions of without it costing too much. So you kind of learn, okay, what are the characteristics of the new form factor? And then you try and innovate around that, obviously with people's use cases in mind. And yeah, it's very hard. That's kind of where you begin in trying to solve for a new form factor. Yeah.

Megha Sevekari:
When we started working together, thing that I didn't know was how complicated spreadsheets are. You look at it, you're like, oh, this must be a better way. And then as soon as you go a couple level deeper, I think, yeah, it's very hard to find a better way. And there is a better way, but it's very hard to find one.

Niklas Olsson:
Mm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, it's like we got to compliment spreadsheets. I stand by the fact that I think it's the best piece of software ever built in terms of, you know, the usefulness and how many people, how many things it can solve. And there's a reason why pretty much the entire B2B SaaS industry is pick a use case that you use a spreadsheet for and create a vertical business out of it. And people have created billion dollar companies, tens of billion dollar companies just doing that. And, you know, there's plenty of businesses left. And I kind of think of us as the same.

Niklas Olsson:
One mistake to make is to say, we're going to replace spreadsheets. That's never going to happen. There's some people that say we're going to build a better one. like, well, I don't know. It's going to be hard to compete with the Excels and Google Sheets of the world. But we're not trying to replace spreadsheets. But we're trying to take what was the original use case of a spreadsheet, is perform numerical task and do basic calculations, and just tackle that way better.

Niklas Olsson:
We're not going to be a database of information. We're not going to be a project planning tool. You know, we're not going to be any of those use cases, which you can also use spreadsheet for. You know, our tool will probably not be so good at that, but it would be very good at those numerical tasks. So in a way, we're no different to any other, I suppose, B2B SAS attempt to take a spreadsheet use case and build a solution for it. We just happened to pick the biggest use case, which is what it was originally intended for.

Megha Sevekari:
I wonder if there's also a bit of a psychological angle to it when it comes to the user, when you see it a different form, just because it's not a spreadsheet and something that it is immediately intimidating to hear, can just make it a little bit more approachable and that lack of confidence is addressed that much more easily. But I'm not sure if there's like, know, realisticness to it, but it's just a thought that, a past where, as you said, that so many have adapted that concept

Niklas Olsson:
Yes.

Niklas Olsson:
Hmm.

Megha Sevekari:
Spreadsheet because it's just not a spreadsheet therefore better to you.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah.

Niklas Olsson:
He he he.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, it's like you have this existential dread like, oh my God. like, but you're right though, in terms of there is, there are kind of a few aspects to it. One is like you abstract away things that you'd have to write in code in a spreadsheet. You'd have to like write the, the, all the plumbing and structure around to perform the task. You can do it in a speck, but you're basically writing the language and in a vertical tool, there's like a button or, know, it's much, much more.

Niklas Olsson:
User-friendly and it's got guardrails because you click the button and there's four options and choose that one versus effectively creating the same button in the spreadsheet. can do it. There's like so many more issues with that. The other one is you also, to your point, create a different emotion to the task and a different feeling when you're going through the motion. And that's part of what we're trying to do as well, where if anything, people might have dread, fear.

Niklas Olsson:
Like these sort of emotions associated with numerical tasks. Now, okay, if you are in investment banking and you're working at Macquarie bank, you're trying to work out, should we invest in this toll road in Belgium? Here's my financial forecast. That's put a hundred million in it. Okay. You love spreadsheets. Like that's your day to day. But for, there's a very small amount of people that feel that way. And for others, like, my God, this is very fearful. If I, you know, write something wrong, it says div zero ref, like it almost screams at you that you're stupid. And like,

Niklas Olsson:
That's not a nice experience. should, and you know, you can then think about when we're designing our experience, what is the opposite of fear where the opposite of fear is play the opposite of, know, you can try things and if it doesn't work, that's okay. Cause you can delete it very quickly. You didn't ruin anything. Like it's just sort of like lower the barrier, lower the stakes a bit and allow people to have a gradual experience. And you should also think of it as educational where maybe you starting Klaro and you can do very basic things. Like I can do a back off the envelope calculation.

Niklas Olsson:
How much I should charge for this product. Like I'm in e-commerce store, I'm launching a new product. How much should I charge so that I make money? You know, like it sounds simple, but it's just a tally of costs and maybe you can do those first. And then our product nudges you and goes, hey, now that you know how much you want to charge for this, let's work out how much you should buy in your first purchase based on how much cash you have at hand. And then you do level two, which is the purchase. And then maybe level three is, all right, well, let's also add a marketing campaign to this and see how much money you should spend.

Niklas Olsson:
You know what needs to be true if you want to sell out in this in three months so you can kind of level up almost inevitable as an educational experience versus a spreadsheet is like whether you are that Macquarie Bank investment banker or you're an e-commerce store that had had some success turning over say say a million dollars or two and you're running the show you get the exact same product experience and that's terrible I mean you should have better personalized experience and you know spreadsheets just doesn't invest in that at all which we obviously will

Megha Sevekari:
That's a great way of summarizing, like Klaro. I don't think it's that dissimilar to Canva for designers, for non-designers. Like, if you're designer, you need to do a piece of work and you use it in design, or you use it in design, or the proper tools, or Figma, so on. But if you're not, and you see these blank Canvas in front of you, that's as well quite intimidating, I think. yeah.

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yep. Yep.

Megha Sevekari:
I was going to say you did mention that you're a design lead founder and I'm just keen to kind of understand what that means and what that means for Klaro.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, design led found is a rare breed, you know, it's not many of us around and it's like the white rhinos or something. But yeah, so what that means is obviously I have since a very young age had a very big interest in design. So when I was a kid, there were two things I mean, as a kid, you love a lot of stuff. You love candy, you love play, you love sports like, but you know, take all the

Niklas Olsson:
Normal kids stuff that you like. were two things I really enjoyed. was math. So I was a few years ahead in math in school. I would walk around to other kids teaching them math when I ran out of my problems to solve. So I suppose I was working on Klaro when I was eight. I don't know. It seems like that. And the other aspect is being design-led. So I always loved sketching when I was a kid and stuff like that.

Niklas Olsson:
What it translates to now is that I think there's a bit of a founder problem fit, if you heard that expression before, like which founders fit to what problems. And I feel this problem is like such a good fit for me because it's a problem of very complex math and you can't just like create a simple product that does away with all the complexity because you lose all the power. You like, you literally can't perform the task if you're not using math. So you need to have a deep appreciation, understanding of math, but also it's a design problem.

Niklas Olsson:
Which is how do you make that accessible? So I think as a design lead founder, I value design, I can appreciate design, I have a deep insight, interest in it. And if you're say, joining as a team member, if you're joining as a designer, we are looking for a founding designer to join us now, you get to work with someone who has the same love and appreciation for design as you do. And I think there's a lot of pros with that. There's obviously cons because, you know, I'll debate things.

Niklas Olsson:
Endlessly as Francesca would know. So I think it means that yeah, you have an appreciation for that and it means that I have a good fit with the problem that we're trying to solve. Yeah.

Megha Sevekari:
Really cool. And from eight, is a bit of a flex. So, yep.

Niklas Olsson:
Not that's true but i think that was that's but my reality

Megha Sevekari:
Also, spoke earlier when we were talking before this about being a values-driven company, and I'm wondering if these two things then intersect and how they intersect.

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah. So I think, yeah, being design led mean that we appreciate and use design as part of the solution of what we're trying to do. Maybe to a higher extent that if you don't have that special skillset, it's a bit like if you're building a machine learning, if you're solving a problem that requires, say if you're at open AI and you're building the AI infrastructure of the future, it helps if you're very good at building AI and LLMs. Like that's probably a good thing because that's the problem you're trying to solve for. So similar here, like,

Niklas Olsson:
It a design problem. It's good if you have an appreciation for design. I suppose the overlap is, there is an overlap there, but on values alone, I think it's very important to have values from day one. And it's something that people say, perhaps because of the more common reasons, which is we have a shared understanding of how we behave. It is motivating. It drives the right kind of actions out of people. I think that's obviously true, but

Niklas Olsson:
That's not why we have values from day one because for me, the values, the mission is what we're trying to do. And I kind of are why, like if we're successful, this is what we're going to bring to the world that everybody's going to benefit from. The value says, who do we become in the process? You spend 40, 50, 60, sometimes 80 hours a week working on something and you're dedicating a big part of your life. You need, you should be intentional about who do you become in that process? Like you should become a better person. And by having in

Niklas Olsson:
Being intentional about what values you have, you're basically being intentional about who do you want to become in the future. And you should become a better person across important dimensions. So that's kind how we think about our values that we're to try our best to deliver great outcomes for the world that they can benefit from. But in the process, when we look back, we want to say, wow, I've grown a lot as a person, and I'm a better human being as a result. So that's kind of what values means to us.

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, great question. Yeah, so I think we hire based on someone who has a natural inclination already for the values that we seek. And one of our values is mindful intentions. So this means that every time we do something in the company, we should know why we're doing it. And that doesn't mean we need to have a Klaro for every decision with all our

Niklas Olsson:
Numbers lined up and like, black or white, this is a better outcome. But it could also be that I have a gut feel for something. example, Farley and the team, we made a decision the other week around an architectural direction. And the way we practice our value then was he could quantify like, I've done this direction before I've learned this. I've done this direction before I've done this. And, you know, my gut feel says this direction is the right one. And we would say, why, why? like, he would sort of go through his own intuition.

Niklas Olsson:
And articulated and we were happy with that. We like, we trust your intuition, but he now we know we're mindful that we're going this direction because we trust father's intuition and that's fine. Like it doesn't have to be black and white. So for values, then if I look at, who, is someone who exhibits mindful intention? Well, well, it's someone who's maybe emotionally in tune with themselves. Maybe someone who knows themselves quite well, who's quite comfortable being open with their inner thoughts and processing.

Niklas Olsson:
That's probably someone who's going to enjoy being here and furthering that trait. So that's an example.

Megha Sevekari:
You founded Klaro at the end of 2023. Is that, first of all, correct?

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, we could say that. I mean, the idea was there before, but at some point you become a legal entity. And I believe that was then. Yeah.

Megha Sevekari:
Yeah. what I'm trying to understand is AI and the presence of AI has grown exponentially since then. So I'm wondering how it's impacted the way you design and think about

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Megha Sevekari:
Klaro.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, I mean, we set off with solving the problem with the technology available today and what we anticipate to be available in the future. And AI was already around when we discovered this problem and the lack of solutions to this problem. So we obviously with that in mind, you know, if you want to use the word AI first or AI native, like we think with we build with that in mind and it's a technology we want to leverage as part of the product.

Niklas Olsson:
But I suppose we think of AI as an enabler of more, not as a requirement for it to work. Like, not like, oh, our solution is terrible if you don't have AI. And I think a lot of people build such dependence on AI to solve everything that you forget that it's still a collaborative experience between a new technology and existing users. So I think that's one way that how we think about it. I suppose in a macro sense, if I take a step back, the AI means that

Niklas Olsson:
The cost of creation goes to zero. Cloud was like cost of distribution goes to zero. You can cheaply copy a piece of software and distribute it all across the world for almost nothing. And now cost of creation goes to zero where you can like invest, you know, comparatively a very small amount of time and money and get an outcome that would otherwise take whole teams or people to do for hours or days. And you can just invest, you can just, you know, create that same outcome using an AI for like fraction of the cost.

Niklas Olsson:
Okay, quality is not quite there, but it will get there. Like it would just be, but the cost is already very low, even though the outcomes are not as good. So then the question you got to ask yourself, okay, in a world where cost of creation goes to zero, what kind of software experience are you going to be building? Well, you're to be building one where you are an editor and a curator first. You're not actually creating yourself. You are curating and editing what's being created for you by this new technology. And at the right moment, you should

Niklas Olsson:
Inject yourself as a creator in smaller pieces and make, you know, maybe I create something here, maybe I edit this here. So the human is very much in the loop, meaning that you have to have an interface that humans can still interact with meaningfully. And if AI creates work, you need to be able to understand it. You need to be able to give feedback on it. You need to be able to process it and make your own touches to it. So I think that's kind of like the experience that we are designing for and that most software will be designing for. Now, what does that manifest into concretely? Okay, you can say,

Niklas Olsson:
Click this button, AI does it for you. You can invite an AI coworker to your environment and they can do work as an operator for you. I mean, those are very tactical level implementations of a very powerful technology. But I think when you're designing product, you should think one or two steps back. Like where does, what does it mean in a more deeper sense? And then yeah, those are tactical ways of how to use the technology and they will always change as technology gets better and ideas come up. But.

Niklas Olsson:
The movement is creation goes to zero and you become an editor and a curator first.

Megha Sevekari:
Yeah, what you were saying earlier about, you know, humans are able to very clearly articulate the equation in English, what they want, what they need, they already know that, and then enabling that process through the AI.

Niklas Olsson:
Right. I mean, the wrong way of doing this would be, cool. So I can articulate myself in English and AI can build a formula for me. Awesome. All right, problem. So let's just spit out some spreadsheet code at the end of it. The user doesn't have to see that. All right, let's say you do that. And then as a user, like, I want revenue to grow by 10 % year on year. And I want it to be adding new revenue from this calculation over here. And I want you to also remove churn.

Niklas Olsson:
Okay, you can say that in English. That's amazing, right? And then spreadsheet will do it or AI will do it. let's say you live in a, this is what Google and Microsoft will do. There will be a copilot who builds some spreadsheet code and puts it in a spreadsheet. And then you're like, awesome. How do I make money again? Oh, then you got to ask AI again, explain it. Like, oh, you can see here, goes to here. And suddenly you're zigzagging between tabs and C15, D15. man, like I don't understand this. Like, and if I...

Niklas Olsson:
Maybe wanted to make a small tweak to it, I just have to try and get the prompt right and explain. I just feel like if you build exclusively for, I'm going to be prompting someone to do everything for me, I think you're missing the point. You need to create a language that I can then parse afterwards and read and go, yes, I understand this. Okay. It still means that you 99 % of time not write it yourself, but 100 % of time you got to understand it.

Megha Sevekari:
It sounds like that's a modular system that's fragmented, but you still want one that can come together and work together in a logical way.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, that's right. you know, humans are very good at understanding visuals and, not as, you know, we process visuals very quickly. So for example, you should build a product where I can explain revenue visually through a graph or like, you know, I can show the relationship of this formula and how it works. And then you can maybe play with it, change some stuff. And as you play with it, you verify, yeah, that's how I revenue to behave. Perfect. It seems to work, but

Niklas Olsson:
Mean, good luck trying to do that in a spreadsheet. It's just not designed for that type of experience. But if you build on a canvas, you have infinite space to go on the side and have these educational moments as you're using the product, because it's just right there on the canvas. Or you have more freedom of operation. And then once you've had your moment of education, it should just go away quickly and easily. Or maybe you want to store it for later. I don't know. But you've got to create an environment where those things are possible. And I just can't see how a rigid spreadsheet is the way to do that.

Megha Sevekari:
Brings me really nicely into the next question, which is about having an intuitive workspace.

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Megha Sevekari:
What you're thinking about when you're building Klaro so that it is intuitive.

Niklas Olsson:
Right. Yeah, so the hallmarks of the product is that if you know basic math, you can speak English, you can understand it. It should be modular so things can be broken down. I think I said it before, but modularity is the human brain's lever to complexity. If you can break it down, sadly, I can understand. If you leave it all together, it's like, don't get it. But if you break it down to this, actually two pieces, this one does this, this one does this. OK, I get it now. So modularity is very important.

Niklas Olsson:
I think highly visual. again, humans learn well through visuals, like illustrate, visualize as much as possible to explain and make it educational. So someone can start very easily with something simple. And as they learn, use the product more, more complex things build on top of what you've already learned. So I think that's, that's, that's the hallmarks of it. And, you know, how have we manifested that in a product today?

Niklas Olsson:
Is through a canvas with blocks. have a content library with a lot of pre-built things are there for you. So you can just drag it onto your canvas and you can create a copy. Say if I've done a forecast of, I've got a, you know, one of our customers I spoke to today, he is a music, like he's got a label where he manages artists and he plans their tours. Like we're doing a tour in New Zealand and to plan that he needs to know which venues are we going to, how many tickets are we selling at each? are we selling merchandise?

Niklas Olsson:
And overall, this is toward profitable. How much budget do we have? So once he's done a version A, which, you know, he can just pull the template out and use that, then he can just copy the whole thing and do version B and change a few things. And he can compare it to and go, oh, version B, if we lower our ticket sales by 40%, I don't make money anymore. Okay. When do I break even? And that's as simple as copy, play a bit. And then if you don't like them, so you can just delete it. Like in a spreadsheet, it becomes, like, oh my God, I got 40 tabs. got a...

Niklas Olsson:
Like it's basically impossible to do that quick. yeah, like that's, I suppose if you're listening, if you want to see this for yourself, let's take it for a spin. It's, you know, much easier to show than tell.

Megha Sevekari:
Actually, again, you've kind of, like, spoken to the next question, which was talking about undertaking research and testing to, like, validate the intuitive experience. So you have a very intuitive way of answering these questions, which is great for me.

Niklas Olsson:
Good

Megha Sevekari:
Yeah, kind of branching off a little bit away from Klaro, you did say right at the start that you founded a whole bunch of different ventures now. How do you think you've evolved as a founder and what have you kept close to your heart and what's changed?

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Niklas Olsson:
Hmm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, so like I said, I think every single venture I've done has been highly successful, but maybe not in a conventional sense because, you know, not all of them made any money and not all of them even solved an actual problem. Somebody's wishful thinking, but I learned something on each of them and some did do really well. And, know, you learn a lot from success. We also learned a lot from failure. I suppose as a founder, what's remained the same is that

Niklas Olsson:
I am quite high energy and I still love the game. In fact, I think the biggest days are yet to come. I think I have so many more things in me and that belief in myself is like, you know, if anything grown and stayed the same and I'm happy to try something, it doesn't work, doesn't really matter. Like I'm happy to fail and that confidence I think is still there. I think I'm still the first principles thinker. Like let's break this down into, you know.

Niklas Olsson:
The smallest components and then understand why and then go, these things make sense. These ones do not. Why do they not make sense? And then build from there. I think also I'm still one of my superpowers is still I'm fairly good with people. Like I meet people where they're at and understand I can easily have empathy for someone else. And through that, understand the customer or understand a team member who's having a tough day or something. And I suppose the downside of that is that you end up being a bit of a people pleaser.

Niklas Olsson:
Because you're intuitive, just listen out for people all the time. And then you change yourself to fit and meet that need almost like you don't even think about it. And then you end up, hang on, that's not what I think actually. should say, so that's the downside of being good at that is that, yeah, you tend to forget about yourself and that's something I'm working on. I suppose what's changed is, is anyone, you you go through life, you have life experiences, you learn more about yourself and you learn that,

Niklas Olsson:
I was very heady when I was young, like everything is in my head, my mind was very strong. But then some problems are emotional problems and your mind can apply themselves as much as possible to the emotion, but it doesn't do anything. It doesn't process any emotion, doesn't understand them. It's just like, hey, stop being emotional, doesn't work, you know, because that's how the mind thinks. But if you listen to your heart and you invite the heart to your, to the conversation, the heart has a lot to say about your emotion and it helps you process them. And in fact, some decisions are absolutely best based on your emotion.

Niklas Olsson:
That doesn't mean it's only if you're a mind only person that you don't understand that because you think emotions are just like all over the place. Yeah. If you don't know how to control them, of course they are. But if you're a master of your own emotion, they can be super powerful. And that's what becomes gut feel and intuition. It's kind of master your own emotions in that sense. So I suppose that's something that I've gotten better at.

Megha Sevekari:
We'd also love to hear about how you think about shipping product and what that looks like for you.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, Very hot topic for any startup, right? Like ship fast and break things used to be cool 10 years ago. I think there's still some truth to that. But yeah,

Niklas Olsson:
How do we ship product? I think it's a constant. We learn a lot constantly of how to improve. So it's an ever-evolving process. But right now we value velocity very highly. We value having users in the loop very highly. So

Niklas Olsson:
You know, to the extent that you can combine those two and get meaningful progress is kind of like the yardstick for like, what's an improvement on this dimension of shipping product?

Niklas Olsson:
Like if those two things are producing meaningful, basically validated learnings and progress towards your goal. So we currently, we work on a weekly basis. Like we, we essentially iterate on a weekly basis. And what we do is like we place bets.

Niklas Olsson:
So we sort of sit down and we shape bets leading up to sort of the betting table where we sit and say, which bet do we want to place? And this is very inspired by 37 signals or the base camp team. wrote a, it's actually a book called shape up. They talk about how they use these practices in their environment. We have then taken some of those learnings from there and some other companies we admire and create our own version. So yeah, we place bets and we're placing bets mean it's like,

Niklas Olsson:
You look at kind of what's going to move the needle next week. Like what, what is a bet we're willing to make this kind of move the needle and it could be a bet along a dimension. like, you know, you have, you're not going to implement AI in one week. Like that's not gonna or whatever. Like you need to, you start with like, okay, this is a direction and this is a bet in that direction. We want to make that everyone in the team can have a bet and they can say, I want to bet on this. I want to bet on this. And they have the reasoning why, and we discuss it. And then we say, if we want to make a bet, how can we do it in a week? Like what's the.

Niklas Olsson:
What's the version of this bet that takes a week to do? And you you might start with a bet that's like four weeks. Like one example was content library that we introduced last week, which is like the ability for you to drag templates straight onto the whiteboard. Like you can just like pre-build stuff or blocks that are pre-built. Let's say I'm doing a forecast for my business and I want to get, know how much R &D I'm going to get back. Yeah, just dragging the R &D block and it's there. So like this could be a big undertaking. And we said, what does it look like if we release it in a week?

Niklas Olsson:
And then whoever leads the bet in execution mode, they only have a week. You don't get the next Monday. You don't get the next Tuesday. You have to finish it by Friday. Okay. You can also do it on the weekend exception, but you ship it in a week. And that means that throughout the week, you kind of like, we do our best to make, to make an estimate that's going to take a week, but you push yourself to try and get in a week. And maybe on Wednesday you realize I'm not going to make it. Okay. What do we take out of scope? we got to this out. And you still ship it in a week. And then you say, all right.

Niklas Olsson:
For next week, do we want to make another bet for content library? Maybe you shape up a new bet, say, I want to improve it in this dimension, and it's going to be, this is why we should do this. But then another bet might be, no, we want to introduce text to the product, or we want to introduce a new set of functions that allows you to model certain things. And it happens many times where we say, oh, this is going to be a, we're definitely going to bet on this three weeks in a row. Like, this is going to be big one. We do one week, and we're like, actually, that's good. We don't want to bet more on this.

Niklas Olsson:
And so it's a very helpful exercise to increase velocity and still ship meaningful things by making bets. We don't have backlogs. So I think backlog is like a huge drain on your like time and mind space because you end up feeling like the, know, every founder can relate to this. You have a million ideas and you add your own million ideas, your team's million ideas. Suddenly you have a backlog full of wishful thinking like, this one, this one, this one, this one. And they're all.

Niklas Olsson:
You know, terribly defined and you forget about context and you get this like huge backlog of wishful thinking that is not useful. And it's scary not to have a backlog, but if it's important enough, it's going to come back to you. So we encourage no backlog in the company. You can have individual lists of little tidbits that you want to have. And we make exception for bugs. So we have a bug tracker. So any bug goes into the bug tracker and that's the only sort of ongoing list that we keep because you know, bugs annoy the users and the experience and we should try and get rid of them.

Niklas Olsson:
So that's the only exception that we have a sort of exhaustive list of. But that gives you a little bit of an idea of how we build. And I suppose the last thing is we have demos every Friday. So throughout the week, we get together as a team on Friday, and you have to showcase what you shipped. And you don't want to up on Friday having nothing shipped or nothing done during the week, because that's embarrassing. Like all your peers did all this cool stuff, and you didn't do anything. So it's a good forcing function as well. And it happened to me the other week when

Niklas Olsson:
I knew the guys had been working on really cool shit and I was like, I'm so excited about the demo tomorrow to see what you guys are going to show. And the immediate response from Fali was, yeah, what are you showing tomorrow? I was like, crap. Like I have nothing to show tomorrow. So I cleared my old calendar and like shipped something and that was actually the absolute best thing we could do for the company. But that wouldn't have happened if I didn't have this forcing function. So yeah, that's kind of how we think about shipping products.

Megha Sevekari:
Can I ask question? I've got to say, I'm not the biggest fan of Basecamp. just put that from. I'm curious, how do you manage short-term bets and long-term vision? Because those two things sometimes can go and take you in different places.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, you have alongside the bets you make short term, you have a product vision, which is also always evolving. And I think it helps a lot to have the end goal and a very clear idea of what is your product in a feeling in a, like when I look at it, can I, do I know if we've achieved it? So that's very clearly defined. And then you have, all right, in the next six months, where do we want to be? mean, to be honest, like we know what our goals are in this phase of the company.

Niklas Olsson:
And they are finding users who get tremendous amount of value in using our product, ship more value to them to the point where they feel like, the tools I'm using, this is one of the, if not the most important one in my stack. I need to have this. Okay, cool. Let's find more of those people and help more people. Once we've done that, let's see if we create enough value that we can charge a piece ourselves for the effort, which is how you create a business. And that's the goal. Product Vision, yeah, sure it's there, but like,

Niklas Olsson:
We're building towards that in this phase of the company. You are so early that you can't really have the luxury of few strategic directions. You're most likely wrong anyway. So like you should just focus on the here and now and have a very clear idea of where you're heading in a more longer term. yeah, how do we manage and make sure we move in the right direction? Yeah, we kind of sense check regularly against our vision. Like, is this a longer dimension we want to go? Yes or no.

Niklas Olsson:
And we look back at the month like, hey, what did we ship the last month? Where did that, it took us this direction. well, that's not where we want to be heading. We should be heading more this direction. Okay, let's be intentional about the bets we place in L to be more in this direction. So like, I suppose that's how we do it. Yeah.

Megha Sevekari:
Something though that like

Megha Sevekari:
You know, like you should talk about the father. Like you spend like solid time at the beginning to define the vision. You did a lot of research. You and like some of the founders that jump into I have an idea. This is my vision. That's not exactly the same thing. You went very deep on what you want to solve and what is in the market already. There's already solving something similar where you're trying to solve and you refine that a lot like designs, user testing. So you have in your mind a vision and then you're doing short term bets that eventually will take you there.

Niklas Olsson:
Mmm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yes. Yes.

Megha Sevekari:
But maybe not, we'll take you maybe somewhere else. But you have some sort of direction.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, true. I think it's important that you have a very clear idea in your mind what the future looks like. Like if you can wave a wand, what would the future be like? And what would our users life be if we were in the picture versus what it is today? And you should be very, you should feel that you should be able to articulate that very clearly. And for some people that needs to be manifested in some

Niklas Olsson:
Tangible things like we do X and it looks like this and to me I'm maybe a little bit on that spectrum So I needed to think through You know, is it even possible like how what are the dimensions we can innovate on? Realistically to get to that goal and in the beginning it's very important to again think from first principles Firstly, do you even have a problem that's worth solving? Do people give a shit about this? Do people people pay money for this with the templates very early on? Yes, I gave away one template for free

Niklas Olsson:
But then immediately you can upgrade to get the full pack of 30 and you pay 15 years dollar or something. You don't pay a lot. But, I sent one email after you downloaded a free template, five to 6 % of people paid. I was like, okay. Even my little templates that I haven't, the people willing to pay for to solve this problem. All right. That's a good myth. Like you have to still validate a bunch of things. And I suppose in that process, you, you discover your vision in that process. And I probably spent more time.

Niklas Olsson:
Doing that with user, yeah, user conversations, figma prototypes, prototypes I coded myself in before I committed to a larger team to build a lot, to build towards that. That was a deliberate decision to learn enough about the problem space and the value we can create if we solve for that problem to feel confident, to invest more heavily and therefore go and, do it in a more structured sense. for sure.

Niklas Olsson:
There is a phase where you need to validate your problem and you should be very lean when you do that. But that's very different from what the product would look like. Sometimes, I mean, I remember some of the guys who now joined the team, they asked me through the interview, Nick, what does the product look like in two years? You know, if you had a magic wand. And honestly, my answer was, I have no idea. That's not up to me to figure that out. That's up to us to figure that out. I know if something is shown to me, if it is the right one.

Niklas Olsson:
Because I know how should feel, I know what problem you should solve, I know the value it bring to the customer, but exactly what it looks like, what features, et cetera, that's up to us to build. Like that's a joint effort. Okay, I have my ideas and I can share what they are, but I'm not too wedded to them.

Megha Sevekari:
You did touch on earlier about the values and when you're hiring team members, but I'm keen to hear more about how you build your team.

Niklas Olsson:
Mm.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah. So building a team, there are kind of a few things that every startup in the earlier stage do. mean, everybody builds a team, but there are a few things you should focus on as a startup. And with your limited time and issue, there's only a few things that really matter. And the first one is staying alive. Like, you continue to pursue your vision for as long as possible and maximize the time you have available to do that? And, you know, the other one is to

Niklas Olsson:
Build something people want, right? Like eventually throughout that time you were awarded to yourself, are you building something that people want? Is it solving a meaningful problem that people care about? And then I suppose the next one is build a team and create an environment where, yeah, you guys, you you can go after the first two, sorry, go after that. So on building a team, I was quite intentional with how I to build a team this time. That's probably one thing you learned.

Niklas Olsson:
As a multiple time founder, that gets better. It's like, how do you build the team who works well with me? What kind of environment do I want? And I feel more confident about that because I've learned through trial and error. Things like product market fit. Unfortunately, it's restart like every time is a new journey and you can't say, I found it before I'm going to found it again. There's never a translation. Okay. Some tactics, maybe, but it's like, it's in the footnotes. Like the large part of the challenge is just a completely new one anyway. But for team, yeah, I wanted to build a team which was small because small teams are nimble.

Niklas Olsson:
Small teams burn less money. Small teams.

Niklas Olsson:
You know, because you're a small team, end up like being so engrossed in the whole problem that everybody carries it around versus like you're doing this part, you're doing this part. you kind of a team, you know, as you grow, you kind of become a little bit specialized in dimensions. But I like early on that we're all just living and breathing this and that's easier when you're smaller. The other thing was I wanted to build a senior team because this is a very difficult problem. Like you have the luxury of staring down math and like, how do you do math?

Niklas Olsson:
And then like, how do you make that easy? Like that's a huge design challenge. You kind of have, it's a big problem. I mean, spreadsheets have calculation engines that have been refined for decades and like be fast, be accurate. And we realized very early on that, okay, we ought to build our own engine. All right, well that's not, that's not computer science 101. Like that's, that's a bit harder. So we wanted to build a senior team. And with that, I was intentional to give a lot of equity and

Niklas Olsson:
Much higher salary than you would normally for a startup position because I want a senior only. And because we keep the team smaller, I can afford to do that and that's fine. So that's kind of how I was intentional about that. I also was quite intentional about the type of person that would be a fit for us, like who would enjoy the problem. When I reached out to say engineers, I, and this is a hot tip for anyone who's looking to build their team.

Niklas Olsson:
When you reach out and speak to engineers, you need to not just be, this is our mission. Do you love our mission and the impact we're going to have in the world? You need to say, these are the problems we will face to achieve that mission. You seem to love these problems. Like you seem to have solved these before or work in environments where these come up. You seem to enjoy this way of, you know, these kinds of problems. That's why I want to talk to you specifically, because we have those problems and I think you're going to love it here. Like that's such a simple thing to do.

Niklas Olsson:
But you get an immensely better result and response because you're being intentional about why you're reaching out to someone and you're thinking about their career. It's like, seem to like this, you will enjoy this versus like selfishly, I need this build. You seem to be able to build stuff like this. So that's how you should reach out when building a team. yeah.

Megha Sevekari:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Niklas Olsson:
Yeah, that was fun. That was good.

Megha Sevekari:
Thanks. It is fun. It was really fun. Amazing, amazing man.

‍