 Good morning everybody. Welcome. I hope you escaped on time yesterday from the parties as we did in order to be here So I'm Hendrik. I'm co-founder and partner of early bird a pan European early-stage venture investor We are managing actually a family of funds working with the most ambitious and Foresighting entrepreneurs across Europe. I'm here today with two of our great founders and CEOs of our digital West portfolio Oscar E and Christina and the introduction has been made and we are supposed to talk about product-led growth So let me start with the first question. What does it mean product-led growth to you? So for me product-led growth ultimately means that you radically focus on solving a problem And this can be a problem for your end consumer and this can be a problem Yeah, on the business side that you want to for example improve a process make things more efficient and Yeah, radically put your customer in the in the in the middle and actually focus on really solving a problem for your customer Yeah I tend to agree with with you know everything you said there for like the way I look at product-led growth is Is what like it's really simple It's like you know building something that the customers the users really really want and listening to you know Whatever what else do they want what kind of problems they have I'm solving those for them making it really easy for them to extend their use of the product and it you know essentially buy more of the product from you I Mean since you're both standing for companies, which I think are very good examples for companies Which growth is driven by products? How did the thought of product-led growth and influence the management and the development of your companies? How did make it did it make a difference? Were there any options back then where you could have chosen a different path not led by product but by customers whatever I think the biggest difference is how you make decision as a company and how you prioritize So what has changed a lot from us that like from if you're early startup from going from a crazier a crazy feature brainstorming more towards Yeah, more strategic approach how you make decisions and how you create value streams because I think in the end your customers They come to you because they want to have a problem solved They want to use your product to get a job done so to say they're not coming because you're optimizing your sign-up funnel to a T for example or Because you think the technology is very exciting and you built for the sake of technology I think your customers come because you have a great product They will forgive you the some some flaws and the sign-up funnel ultimately And that's why I think you need to radically focus on how to create value for your customer And then everything else is a prior to I think that decision-making for us So when I look at Ivan and you know what we've been doing over the years So I started working on Ivan some six years ago. I'm a developer by background You know, I love to build all sorts of complex applications Sometimes, you know, maybe over engineering things a little bit, but you know the at the end of the day You know all of these applications use data and they want to store data and process data And I was wondering like why do we all have to spend so much time managing the data infrastructure Figuring out how do backups work? How can I scale the you know back ends when I have more customers coming on board rather than let you know fix these Things one by one for you know each each you know customer each employer or whatever We wanted to build a product with Ivan something that we would have loved to use as developers ourselves So something by developers for developers helping them achieve more helping them, you know have you know better time You know focus on building what matters and You know early days with Ivan Like we didn't spend a lot of time thinking of like what are the alternatives we thought You know there's other developers out there that are having similar problems and we can help them No, you know, you know make better make make faster progress and just focus on on their their Applications and building what matters and that's really worked for us over the years So focusing on the core audience I think it's ultimately also about creating empathy for your customer and really go deep and try to understand their problems Because if you speak to a customer we run a lot of user interviews normally they give you a problem that they have But the problem is that people are in general not so self-reflected So you actually have to get a little bit deeper and usually ask them five times Why to get to the actual problem and I think doing this work to get really really deep Understand the mental blockers of users like where the where the moments that they drop out. What are they fears? I think really getting to this point to understand your user better than they understand themselves Have you to create better products and solutions and ultimately solve the problems in a better way through new technologies Interesting. How does that influence the organization you're leading? Is it so that at the end of the day? Yeah, the product guys are setting the stage and Sales is basically in marketing is following. So this is at least how I understand here. So You assuming once you have the right product and It's gonna sell somehow. Is that what you're doing? So I think for us what changed radically is how we set up teams and what we expect from teams, right? I think building a product 10 years ago Your product manager was basically a technical product manager telling the dev team what to do and this has changed Fundamentally in the past years. So I think if I would go to a developer today I expect them to to be able to tell me what am I working on and how does this basically so for larger customer problem? And I think once you get your company to that stage that literally every single person in the organization understands Why are we doing things like what is the better future? We want to create What is the customer problems? What are the customer voices? Then I believe everyone can bring in their best because a deaf person. They're really good in technology, right? They can come up with a better solution But they need to understand the problem first and it's not just the product and the designers It's pretty much everyone even the marketing people if they understand these needs better They can actually approach our customers in a way better way You agree Oskar? Yeah, I think there's definitely like you can think of the different roles that you have in the company and sometimes You know, it's one person having many of those roles, especially early days But you know the point with you know product like growth is like you have to have all of your team Focused on the customers and taking them on the journey with you So when we started building Ivan like you know, it was a team of four four developers You know initially then we added more people over the years and you know now we are 300 But you know what stayed true from the beginning was like everybody has visibility into what the customers are actually doing Everybody can talk to the customers get to understand what matters to them And you know what something you said there sometimes, you know listening to like what exactly the customers want may not be the You know the best thing you can build for them But it's it's more about like what's the problem that they're facing? What's the next problem that they will be facing and how can we fix? Something or how can we build something in our product that makes their lives easier and you know? Everybody else is as well like when we were building scalable companies based on products We cannot be customizing everything for every you know customer one by one We have to build something that's applicable for for many more use cases and there definitely are roles for you know You know sales marketing engineering and especially for product management for kind of distilling all these you know This input and figuring out like what is it that we should be building? How is it should it be packaged so it's really universally applicable? What we also did is that we structured the entire organization to actually drive growth Because in the end if you think about growth now we talk about growing your customer base You could either get new users in you can make sure you retain your current customers And you make sure to not lose a lot of customers right because all of these three buckets together Basically drive growth and this is how we organize in general our company that there is a part in the company That makes sure we get new users in they get onboarded they can try out the product without investing too much into it So that's one part of the organization Then we have the middle part which is basically making sure that our customers are coming back more often that the product is great That we build in kind of loops so we give people reasons to constantly check their app and come back But then there's also part of the organization that makes sure we're not losing people and that's important that you have great customer service but also that you Allow all your customers to to serve themselves through self-service for example to offer a lot of Things that they can help themselves and don't have to reach out and don't get frustrated I mean you both carry a product background Yeah, Oscar and you've been a developer for quite some time and Christina you've led the product design in N26 and salando. So Is it by chance and in the coincidence that you both now lead companies based on product and It's a core of your growth strategies or is it necessary that in CEOs and leadership teams Do have a certain product background in order to be able to what you're doing So I think something you said said you know previously around like having empathy for what you know the customers want like really being no Like understanding the problems they're solving like looking to get solved and you know how you can relate to them I think this is something that you know product people may find more Natural like you could you know be customer of your own product. I think that's key for understanding really like Why we are doing all of these things for you know the customers Sure, there could be other backgrounds and there are definitely you know bunch of you know Diverse backgrounds in all of these companies and that's I think necessary to you know be able to serve also different audiences Yeah, I think for me, it's even more interesting because I'm right now being the CEO and the Cpo still and I believe it really really helps you to that I went through all the stages myself that I did the groundwork myself that I Set and user interviews that I try to create a vision a Strong customer vision myself back in the days But sometimes it's also a bit challenging because on the one side I think it's very helpful to be a CEO that has a product understanding because I believe very new type of leaders, right? I think the whole entire tech scene Will change massively. I think the whole world will change massively Through technology and I think understanding how to build those products Understanding how to create sustainable businesses to think them from a user's perspective is quite helpful However, I still believe like leading a company like a Cpo and a CEO role in my case It's a different role and I think it's also very natural that these people fight with each other To a certain degree because it will make us better and it helps us to challenge each other I mean since I have the privilege to work with both of you I can say that I think what stands out is your passion for your product and This is what I observe in product-led companies CEOs and leadership teams have a passion for their product Not for the business in the first place, but in the first place for the product and that I think Distinguishes and I I'm not sure whether you need a product background to having this But I think the passion for the product is in my observation is decisive. Yeah, but well, you know to follow on that like No, we went from, you know four founders to three three hundred people globally today And we were serving more than seven hundred customers out there But it's still very early days for the company like we have to really be very very connected to the product to the customers And you you want to really like have passion to do that And I want to want to understand them want to you know do something you it's not about like just like optimizing You know the specific things that may be something for you know much later stage But I think you know we can see that you can scale these kinds of companies very far today I think also what makes a big difference when I speak to my company Monday morning, and we're not just presenting the business numbers We're also presenting customer voices So a user researcher would actually show little snippets from customer videos Just that everyone in the company listens to how our customers speak about the product What do they actually say? Because I think this creates the empathy and I think maybe it helps to be a product-led CEO here to Come up with those things because it's so the business side is important, but the customer side is equally important I believe yes, of course I mean I just telling you whenever Oscar is talking about Ivan and he always says does it make the life of a developer better and easier? That's what this is your north star whenever you're discussing business And I think this is a good example for product-led growth. Yeah, does it matter for the developer? Yep, we had an interesting discussion about that that board meeting a few days ago So you know something that definitely said you know guiding us and you know from early days when we were trying to figure out things We were just you know building things for ourselves, and we were trying to figure out like how can we you know? How can we you know make you know grow faster? What are the things there that you know we could could change in the way we operate and you know We spent lots of time and lots of energy lots of money trying to you know build up structures that We didn't fully understand, but you know we went on on and you know Continued growing with the product and you know made our first 10 million in revenue by but just you know making the product available for the people who you know Want to you know be our users and customers and and that's been a that's been a you know great great journey for us. So absolutely Can I ask you what such e-jig advice would you give to other entrepreneurs? maybe a little behind with respect to the maturity of their ambition and and Projects what would you and what advice would you give them in order to create product-led growth for their companies? I? think Really focus first of all focus on the main problem that you're trying to solve and don't get overexcited by technology One of the advises My my former boss in my very first job gave me it was back in the days in the early days of mobile I said you know what don't forget the technologies and enabler not a driver So really focus on the problem and then think how you can solve it and I think the second part is Find a very simple framework Based on that you drive strategy and your organization and for us. This is Like this is active user growth and this is the main product and it can be as simple as that And based on that make decision and make a strict prioritization Because if you don't focus in early days of a startup you get lost you get too distracted by too many things and in the end It's about building your product and make sure that you can onboard new users Yeah So for early-stage companies, I think you know strategic advice is a it's a big word like you know what they should be What really focused on is achieving product market fit and that's I think more important than anything else But you can do after an early stage and product market fit is is it's interesting, right? Some people take product market fit to mean that you know you have to have a like a superior product But the market bit is actually the more important one. You have to find a great market and build something that can satisfy that market and When you have product market fit you will know because the You know customers the people are gonna be demanding more and more from you So stay focused on you know, you know finding that product market fit building what resonates with the audience and really You know always focus on that figure out. What are the best metrics to track? You know if you are achieving that or not, you know, you mentioned like you don't user user Voices and and you know hearing what what the customers are saying what we did at Ivan was you know We said set up this automated daily email that was sent to all of our staff all of our investors early on that That just listed like how many people are using the product? What's our current recurring revenue something that automatically goes out to the entire team keeps everybody really connected to how the business is Doing how our product is being adopted and you know, sometimes we had you know Many times we had difficult times then we overcame some challenges and you know We went over some some you know customer that was a bit skeptical about us and that would show immediately in the numbers You know that were automatically sent over to the team the following day and that keeps people pretty motivated It brings us back to the sorry. Yeah, I also wanted to add like we always talk so much like figure out What what what kind of problem you solve for your customers? But also try to figure out why are people using your product because it's often not what you want them to do So to say it's actually often a complete different reason than what you built for it And that's also it's a very interesting insight And I think this is what you need to know because then you can encourage your people to also refer to their friends and to even like Grow further, but you need to be very aware why your people even come and I tell you in 90% of the cases It's not the reason why you think they actually come but it's a completely different one very good point very good point like We launched Ivan with that database as a service and you know early days we thought we're a database company and That didn't really work out when we then went out to for example hire database sales people We're we're developer tools company. We make we do make databases available for people But what we help them do is actually like get very easy access to them So they can do something else and not have to care about databases and there's a Fine distinction between these two fields that took us a long time to figure out and you know We're still trying to figure it out and you know trying to figure out who are the new class of users and what? What jobs are we sold? You know doing for them? That's I think the important bit That brings me a little bit back to the initial question I'm a product design versus sales. So can we say that product-led companies the products are bought not sold What do you think Christina? Yeah, I think If you change the perspective they're bought not sold you actually put the customer in the middle and not the business And I think this is that's very helpful Also in terms of again organizational structure I think it just helps a lot to change the thinking in our growth department our growth department is basically the marketing Slash sales department. We now also qualify it This part so we don't think again in performance marketing and brand marketing and like life cycle marketing We completely change that we think in terms of consideration awareness Acquisition so we really put again the customer in the foreground when we do marketing and sales because a customer considers you Or a customer creates like is aware now that you exist as a company and you probably need different people You need a brand marketer. You need a designer You need a performance marketer to to to actually get to this stage So I think again if you want to want your product to be bought you need to rethink how How you structure your organization because it can help to to rethink and put a different perspective on it Yeah, that makes sense like the way I look at it at Ivan is that you know what we're doing like we're solving developers You know problems we're helping them them, you know do more and focus more on their own applications So they have to be the ones who like want to have this platform But there definitely is a role for sales sales comes in you know to help these customers the bigger ones especially to kind of navigate the space and build you know confidence in like this You know this platform that we're providing to you know The the customer it's not about just like solving one one, you know Particular small small piece of the puzzle. It's something that you know gives them You know the customer confidence that hey we can you know go far with this team And that's where our sales has had you know a big impact on the company Really it's really connected with kind of you know customer success account management more so than than you know Just going out and and you know selling to audiences who never heard of us before And I also believe you need to really surround yourself by the target group So we're not building financial products for the masses and like constantly like pretty much every week I talked to people just in my private life that are struggling with financial investments And I think by constantly soaking up this information. What are the problems? Why do people not get started for example? I think that's also very important to get the different nuances Because you can only sell a product in the end if you really understand what their problem is And what are the words that somehow trigger them and in the end? What are even things that people would find interesting or where they feel like this is more trustworthy than the products that are out there especially in like fintech products Coming back to the advice piece To to other entrepreneurs. What kind of talent you think one should recruit in an early stage of a company in order to create Product-led growth like you were able to create it. What is the well? How does it good product-led growth company team look like I? Usually give them a challenge that we currently have in the company and I see how they solve it and if someone comes and I see This person has not taken the time to actually speak to at least three of their friends I go a little bit into market research try to research problems It's a no-go for me because we really need people that understand to create empathy with their customers and In the end like get also on top of that data to actually make a point and for me This is a mix of qualitative and quantitative research that at least should happen in this case And if this is not the case There might not be the right people for us. Yeah Yeah Like I think that makes makes a lot of sense when you're thinking of like how you're building the product Like I think one one piece of advice for early-stage companies you really to think of like so You're looking to scale the company to be able to serve more customers So what are also some of the less obvious roles that you have to feel in the company to be able to do so? So I think a lot of companies set up there, you know people or HR organizations way too late when they already have run into a bunch of Problems so I think you know focusing there early on or at least you know Making sure that it's you know You're thinking about it when you're building the company and building the organization and trying to figure out like what kind of a Culture you want to have in the company? You need to invest in people because it all starts from people and then you know You get to also like feeling all the less the more obvious roles like you know You need more product managers for sure to be able to build you know product-wide success You need all the engineers you need the sales people But what should the organization look like that's an important question that a lot of the people just Kind of run into when they are facing a you know bunch of scalability issues Yeah, also we crewed quite massively this year So last at the beginning of the year we were 50 people now We're always 200 and what was important for us as well to establish a strong middle management layer before That actually brings that mindset that has worked in companies before that act that way Because if your middle managers at some point you cannot be involved as a sea level anymore So you need to have people that are advocates and they're basically the ambassadors of this kind of thinking to bring it further Into the organization. I think that's also really key to get strong middle managers that are bring the message to the people in the end Very nice to hear people make the difference. Yeah, like always Maybe it's a final question. What have been the biggest challenges if you look back in your company's growth I think it's a very obvious on finding the right talent because we all know everyone is looking for the best tech talent so that's the biggest challenge for us as a company and For us very personally is as well building financial products It's not the same as building a filter function in an e-commerce app because you actually As HL as you want to be there's a certain part of it which requires a waterfall Because you need to get it through their regulator and I think that's On the one side great that we do have regulation, but on the other side The processes how you act as a tech company and a customer-centric tech company Versus getting something through the regulator sometimes is not it's not going very hand-in-hand so to say Yeah, I think it's you know It all comes back to the people like finding the right people for the company and finding the right people for this Company at this particular stage like you can look at you know all this access that other people are other companies have had out there And you know you can look at the talent that that's there Some of those might might be a good fit for you, but attracting some of this talent You know that's already done everything you want to do is is hard like they've already done it Like why would they want to do it again? And you know would they actually be a good fit for your organization at your current stage? So finding the people who are passionate about what you want to you know build next and who are great fit for for this stage That's I think the biggest challenge and it kind of gets you to the next challenge Which is like taking those people with you on the journey as the company grows the company that you know You founded is different from the company when you are 20 people when you're a hundred people when you're 300 people So you know helping people make the journey with you. That's that's the big challenge Yeah, and I mean in fast-growing company. You always have to do this forward hiring, right? You and you have to hire now and in an infrastructure Which is actually too small and too little for the for the heavy weights you want to attract Because you have to look forward 12 24 months. So that makes life sometimes difficult I know when you've been great in overcoming that challenge. I think time is over unfortunately and we can go on and go on I know thank you very much for coming and Please Join me in an applauding our two CEOs. Thank you And I think I don't know what the next Program is up, but I think we are done and enjoy slash for the day. Thank you very much. Thank you