 Kiitos. TH0. I'm Mikael, founder and CEO of Supermatrix. And today I'm going to tell about our story. And there are a lot of very successful growth companies here at Schlage. But I think in some ways our story is rather rare. So I think not a lot of these companies have been started out as a Toyminimi. In Finnish sole proprietor. So one-man businesses operated from once bedroom for five years. until suddenly going on a huge growth trajectory. So let's go to our story, but first just briefly on what we do. So you have the context. So we help companies measure all of their online marketing activities. So if you do a lot of advertising in different platforms, so you advertise in Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on. You may have a web analytics tool, you have a CRM. You have all your marketing data split between different systems and it's really difficult to get the big picture on how your investments in marketing are paying off. So what we do is we collect all of this data together and we make that data available to you in the tools you can use for analyzing and reporting that data. So it can be a spreadsheet, it can be a BI tool or we can also push that data into your data warehouse if you have that in use. And basically our clients, we have 17,000 clients and they range from one-man SEO and practitioners all the way into huge companies like Google and Warner Bros, Zalando and so on. And now to the story. So the company has very humble beginnings. So I started the company alone in 2010. My first client was a web store that sold front pocket wallets like this. And as a reward for my work, they sent me one wallet. Not even the bills does the wallet. But from that pitiful start, somehow over the years we got to where we are now. So 55 million euros in annual recurring revenue. Growing fast, we've always been profitable. And what I'm really proud to say is that we've used zero euros of investor money to build the company. So we've raised two rounds, but we've always been profitable so we didn't really need the money. And most of that money, most of that was secondary. So setting shares and even the money we raised we still haven't used. So it's in the bank or even invested back into the stock market. So how did we do this? So I'm going to go through some of the points that I think were really important along this journey. So first how I got started with the company. So this was me 13 years ago before I started the company. So I was working as an analyst in another company here. My task there was to do reporting for various parts of that organization. And I loved analyzing data, allowed making conclusions based on that data. But a lot of my time actually went into gathering that data. And that was really tedious. So basically copy-pasting numbers from various platforms into Excel where I was making these reports. And I really hated that. I wanted to get rid of that part. And especially I was struggling with Google Analytics because we had a lot of websites that we were tracking with Google Analytics. So I went online looking for a solution to this problem. I didn't find a solution. But instead I found this web forum where this guy called Nick working at Google had posted a question if there were solutions for that. Because a lot of Google customers were asking Google if there was a way to do this. And people had suggested solutions to Nick, but none of them worked. So what he did was he posted that the first person to actually make a working solution gets a Google t-shirt as a reward for that. And I thought that's perfect. I get to try to solve my own problem and maybe I can earn a free t-shirt as well. And I'm not a developer by background, but this seemed like an interesting problem and not too complicated. So I went into work, created a small script to get that data from Google Analytics into Excel. It worked really well for me at that job. And then I also posted in that forum and said, you know, here's this thing you can take into use for free. And people loved it. And also this Google guy, he liked it a lot and he sent me the t-shirt. But what was actually more important was that then he blocked about it in the Google Analytics blog and that generated a lot of interest toward what I was doing. And I think that proved that there was a lot of demand. There was a big problem that no one was really addressing in any good way. So a lot of people were struggling with the same issue that I was struggling with. So collecting all of this data together, spending a lot of time on really boring stuff. So I didn't need to invent a problem. The problem was clearly there. And, you know, I started getting requests from all over the world. Can you do something more than the simple script? And, you know, I had never thought about becoming an entrepreneur, but the opportunity seemed really good. So I decided to leave my job and try my luck with this. And like I said, I didn't have a developer background. So I didn't have the excuse to really build anything, anything very great. And I also didn't have a business background. So I never, you know, had run a business. I didn't have any understanding of how to run a business. I was just an analyst. So basically I was lacking the tech skills and the business skills. So basically I didn't have any of the relevant skills you need as a tech entrepreneur. But nonetheless, I decided to try my luck on this and found my own business. And what I think was key in eventually making success was that even though I didn't really have the skills in the beginning, I did very concretely understand the problem. And the problem was huge and unaddressed. And that in the long term then was enough to get the company going. And so I started the company early 2010. And of course I didn't have any capital to invest into the company. And because I didn't have any of the skills and I didn't have a background as an entrepreneur, no sane investor would have invested in what I was doing. So I didn't even consider that option. There was zero sense that any investor would believe in me. So I didn't even try to get any capital for the company. So what I did from the get go was being just really stingy, just keeping the expenses super low. And you can see my expenses for the first couple of years were really, really low. And actually when I started the company, the biggest purchase I made was this IKEA chair. So I could sit in my bedroom and work on this. And I think like for a lot of non-technical software company founders, the first thing you think you need is you need capital so you can hire developers to build a product for you. And I claim based on my experience at least that that is false. So programming is actually not that difficult that you think. Even as a non-technical person you can learn enough to build an MVP that can already create value. And then you can prove you have something. You can get some traction and maybe later on you can then hire the developers who will fix all of your messy amateur code. But you can get started on your own as well if you just put time on it. So I didn't hire developers. And also on the go-to-market side, I didn't have the capital to hire any salespeople. Of course I didn't even know I have a product that can be sold successfully. I didn't want to do sales myself. I'm not a sales person. That's not really my passion at all. So what I did is I just made the product such that it can sell itself. And I think PLG product-led growth wasn't really a term back then yet. But that's what I did. And that just worked very well for us for many, many years. And I could also say that in the beginning of the company I didn't really have the ambition to build a huge company. So I was really happy making just a living for myself. And what that meant was that I didn't put in place any of the structures that you would if you were aiming to build a big company. So I didn't really hire any people, expensive people to assist on that and didn't take any services that would cost me money. We kept the expenses really low. And that meant that the whole company was built on a foundation of efficiency. And that's been crucial for our success and continues to this day. So I didn't have the ambition to build a great company. But I did have ambition to build a great product. And I really love building product even today and getting satisfaction from people using that product. And that's where I put all of my effort just on the product. And there's a lot of stuff, a lot of distractions, I would say, for founders of startups. And you can put a lot of time onto this stuff. And I'm not saying all of this is a waste of time necessarily. But I think in the early days nothing can be a higher return on investment than putting time on building the product. So working with the clients, getting their feedback and building the product. While some of this stuff can be useful, I think in my case I didn't really put any time on any of this. And I think still I managed to get the company going. So I don't think any of this is really necessary and can be a distraction as well. Of course funny saying this in a startup event, but still. One key thing to our success has been the distribution of the product. So I would say actually the distribution in some ways has been a more critical differentiator for us than the product itself. And what that means is that we've always had the strategy of embedding the product into existing products that are already in use in these companies. So the first product I sold was actually this Excel file. So I was sending an Excel file to my clients. And that was really handy. Some of the clients really appreciated that because then you could bypass their internally IT security processes so it's not an installable software. It's just a file you're taking to use. But then going forward like the strategy has kept out. So we expanded into Google Seeds, into Looker Studio, Google BigQuery and so on. And always the strategy has been to embed tightly into these products. And why that has been good? Well the problem that we are solving is the proliferation of marketing platforms. So the problem is that there are already different platforms in use in these companies. So the last thing they are looking for is to add yet another platform. So no one is looking to add a super metrics platform on top of all the other tools they have in use. So what we do instead, we allow them to keep using the tools they have, like Google Seeds or Excel or Looker or whatever. And then we just make it easy to get the data into these tools. So it's really handy for the user point of view. They don't need to onboard their organization into yet another tool. But it's also been a good business strategy for us in other ways. So of course this has meant that we can partner with companies like Google or Microsoft. And we can make their product more valuable to their users. So we are complementary offering to theirs. And that's meant that we can, you know, we've been able to have like co-marketing, co-selling with these companies instead of competing against them. So many of the existing solutions, they were end-to-end solutions. And that means that you are directly competing against companies like Google, which I wouldn't recommend to do. So making it easy to get started. So what this PLG motion in our case, how it concretely worked is that from the very good go, we kept like removed all the hurdles from getting started. So you can get the free trial without giving any information to us. You certainly don't need to give a credit card to get the free trial into use. You definitely don't need to have a call with our salespeople to see the product like many of our competitors required to do. Instead you can get the free trial into use. You can see the value. And if you like it, then you can, you know, buy the product on our website. And again, you don't need to talk to anyone to do that. So everything is very streamlined, very straightforward. Of course this came out of necessity. As I was working alone in the beginning, I wouldn't have time to talk with all of the clients. But it's also been really great for the efficiency of the company. The monetization. So from the get-go, the product did provide a lot of value to the clients. That was clear. So it was a critical part of the marketing team's workflow to be able to analyze what they were doing and being able to report on that. You know, the clients if they were a marketing agency or to higher ups in their organization. But I really kept the monetization really low. The pricing was really low for many, many years. And I think that was a good strategy. How it was possible, because the expenses were so low. So I didn't really need to maximize the monetization in the early years at all. So I could leave a lot of money on the table. And of course that meant that like, I had a decent product, super low price, I really could capture the market. And there were competitors that were VC funded starting around the same time. And you know, they had raised millions in funding. But that also meant that they had put in place all of these expensive structures and they were burning money. And of course they couldn't afford to do what I did. So they had to, you know, get a decent price for their product. So they had the sales model that meant that they couldn't be selling the product with 50 euros per month like I was doing. They needed to charge much more for that motion to make sense. So that meant that even though they were well funded and they put in place all of this structure, we came out as winners from this competition because we were more efficient and we had the model where users could acquire the product on their own. And of course then later on when you already have the market then you can start capturing more of that value that you generate and that's what we are doing now. But for a long time, as you can see from this graph that shows our ARR development, we didn't really monetize pretty much at all. And then hiring sales last. So we had a really good PLG motion going on. And that was super successful for us. So until for the first eight years, we didn't have any people working on sales. And everything was going very well with that. But now we do have a big sales team. So what did change? What did we start to change that starting from 2018? So basically the answer is here. So we were seeing a lot of big companies becoming our clients. So there were like individual marketers and analysts from say Disney were using the product. Of course it wasn't like the whole marketing team in Disney would be using it. But like individual people in these companies and then they were paying us like 500 a year for that. And we just saw that because these companies has huge online marketing budgets that there must be a lot of value that we could be generating there and could be capturing if we were a bit more active with our sales process. And we just started with the PLG motion with the sales service. We could never really drive that to the full extent. So we started building sales team. And what the sales team does is they talk with the most potential trial users when we see a big company coming as a trial user and trying to convert that to a bigger deal size. But mostly they work with our existing client base so we have 17,000 sales service clients and they try to find the opportunities there. So companies like Disney or Dyson and so on that are using the product to a little extent with individual people and then we try to expand that usage across their marketing teams. The PLG motion is still working so it's still generating half of our revenue but during the recent years the fact that we built the sales team on top of that has accounted for more and more of our growth. I have to say like there are also challenges in merging these two models together so PLG and then layering the sales team on top of that. I didn't really anticipate the challenges when I started on that journey. So of course when you have a PLG model per PLG then everyone's interests in the company are pretty well aligned. But then when you start hiring sales there starts to come these conflicts of interest as well so maybe something that is good for PLG good for the self-service motion maybe good for the company as a whole may actually be really detrimental to the sales team and as their compensation is tied to their own performance it's really difficult to start making any changes that affect that balance. So looking back maybe we should have planned that better beforehand like what is available self-service what is the sales team exactly targeting and so on. I think we've been very successful with what we did but it's not been without these hiccups. So here you see the timeline of the company some key events. So I see it took a long time to get from starting the company alone in 2010 to hiring the first employee then even more years to hire the first sales person and starting building that sales team and maybe I could highlight the two investments here so as the company was built on this efficient foundation so always being profitable we didn't really need the investments and when I then eventually got into some conversations with investors it was a really good negotiation position when you're profitable you don't need the money and that has meant that well first of all I can still control the maturity of the company even at this scale because I could negotiate good deal terms but also we could do a lot of secondary so myself and other early employees selling their shares to investors and getting some money out of the company and of course that's you know good for your piece of mind at least you don't need to worry about money that much but all the other things in the company and to conclude I think some of the things in our story I think are a bit counterintuitive and probably different than with a lot of other growth companies so taking it slow in the beginning being patient maybe not having that great ambition in the beginning can actually be a good thing if that means that you focus on the product build on an efficient efficient foundation efficient go-to-market model at least in our case that has led to a lot of success for us you know studied statistic in the university so I can say a sample size of one is not significant but I can say in our case this has worked I give no guarantees to anyone else though and I wanted to end presentation here by inviting all of you to our beautiful office in the center of Helsinki for a party tonight unfortunately the party has been way over booked so I will not be able to do that for all of you but we have our own guys here somewhere so if you can find a super matrix person they can if you are very nice give you an invitation to the party so that's it, thank you everyone