Ep # 188: The AI Metric Founders Should Stop Bragging About ft. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen (CEO & Co-Founder, Omnidocs)

Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 00:05 If we move into the second category, the team and personal productivity, that's much more the personal single user utilizing something that they used to spend 10 hours on that they might be able to reduce to, let's say, five or six hours. Intro 00:20 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 00:35 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Adil, your co-host at Across the Funnel. We are now into the fourth year of this podcast, and it becomes even a harder job when you go along and with so much of AI impact. A lot of these companies that you tried to see, like two years back, even a year back, are trying to do altogether something different with, of course, the AI part in it, and it's so hard to bring on unique stories. That's why we kept on holding, like doing one episode every two weeks, like two episodes a month. We're just cutting down on making sure that we get on these unique stories, and that's why today we're gonna be talking about documentation. When it comes to documentation, I don't mean like a platform like Notion for a lot of B2B SaaS, that is just doing document automation, management, and collaboration for teams. When it comes to document automation, it is not just the automation point, it is like a workflow automation. So we talk about B2B SaaS, but we never spoke about industries like financial, legal, manufacturing, oil and gas, recruitment, like how they are doing knowledge management, how they are doing workflow automation using their knowledge and internal documentation for that. So today we're gonna be speaking with the CEO and co-founder at Omnidocs, Jeppe. Jeppe, thank you very much for taking the time. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 01:57 Thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Adil Saleh 01:59 Perfect. Love it. So I know that you have a long journey. It's not easy to pivot or build something. Just pick on my note as a founder, how you're feeling about a lot of this AI coming into it, and of course, when it comes to conversational AI, the documentation and knowledge and all of this, even chat support, they got absolutely replaced and 100% automated. So how did you see this wave early on, I would say like 18, 19 months back, almost two years back? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 02:30 Yeah. Well, I think there's several components to that story. First of all, yeah, it has become much easier to build something yourself. There's a lot of players out there wanting to deliver something tangible and useful for many types of companies. We see that as well. We feel the pressure as well from both competitors and people trying to build something themselves. We've been in the game for 22 years, so we've seen homegrown solutions before, and AI is for us to a large extent also homegrown, meaning that you're utilizing AI to actually make something in-house, which is, to a certain extent, great and useful. But what we've seen is also the core foundation of what we're building haven't really changed. It's still to service the individual user to be more productive in the everyday work life that they have. So we have 3 million daily users of our software components. We're not losing them. We are adding additional stuff to our own tech stack. We are adding additional capabilities to what they can use and what they can do. Obviously, a lot of that is now and in the future about AI and utilizing the LLMs, and whether it's bring your own LLM or if it's your favorite Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, that's something that we are very open to. Adil Saleh 04:11 Interesting. So now when it comes to workflow integration, AI is a lot like, especially in Anthropic, they have built an entirely new way of connectors and MCPs and all of that. Apart from that, when thinking about as a productized service like Omnidocs, when you think about workflow automation for local businesses, businesses that are physical businesses like shops, restaurants, businesses that are location-heavy, which are like law firms, recruitment firms, all of this, how do you see, as a founder, I know that you've been there for two decades, so who knows it better than you to productize this? Because when it comes to workflow automation, every workflow might be different. People have different user flows, customer segments, journeys, internal operations, global operations. Even talking about big clinics, like healthcare, like medical clinics, healthcare facilities, they are like so complex workflows. So how do you find a productized solution to it? Or you just have a model, like base engineering model as a product, you hook them with some things, and then you go inside their worlds, in trenches with them, understand their workflow, and automating a lot of this documentation management and all of that. So could you also explain some of those experiences for our listeners? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 05:34 Yeah, I think first of all, it's important to distinguish between what's workflow automation and what's document automation. So we don't do the workflow automation per se. We do document automation, meaning that we're taking the different data sources that any given company might use, and we transform that into whatever document output that they actually need. So if it's a recruitment firm, we serve three of the top ten recruitment firms in the world. They do, for example, candidate profiles. That is basically data transformed into a document. And that process we can fully automate, meaning that you only need to give the service or give the solution an idea of where to fetch the data or which profile that you actually wanna present. Then it's fully automated. But obviously, to the point that you are making, it needs some basic fundamental knowledge about how that business actually works. So we're not trying to deliver document automation solutions to everybody in the world, no matter industry, no matter geography. We're trying to be pretty narrow in that. So we're primarily servicing professional services firms, legal, public clients as well. So basically where case management happens or large datasets need to be automated into some output. So one example is the recruitment firms. Another example is the big five, the professional services, financial services. A third example is public municipalities or governmental institutions that have a lot of bulk send-outs, so a lot of automation needs to be done with creating documents as an output to citizens or to clients, depending on the industry. So knowing how they work, what they work with, what the output is, who the recipients are, is pretty important for the success of a project that we involve ourselves in. That can vary from very few users creating hundreds of thousands of documents or potentially millions of documents to many thousand users creating only few documents on a weekly or monthly basis, but those documents are high-value documents. So, for example, whatever financial services firm that is, let's say, 50,000 users, producing investment memorandums, that piece of output is high value. That needs to be on point both in terms of compliance, in terms of accuracy on data, and in terms of visual compliance as well. So it's worth spending dollars on a solution like that and getting that integrated into how the daily operation actually works. Adil Saleh 08:48 Absolutely. Yeah, making sure that this document and this process product works within their workflow, and it fits. Sometimes, of course, you're narrowed down on four or five industry verticals. So for a lot of these segments, you already know what is their business operation, what kind of tooling, let's say they use Airtable for a lot of documentation, review, inventory, and products, and then documentation of those products. So a lot of that is repetitive. Thinking about you've been there for more than two decades now, and there's only a handful of companies I can recall that came onto this podcast out of these 190 episodes that have been there long enough. So now thinking about the mindset, a founder mindset of today's founder that is building some cutting-edge innovation, they don't think about the cost and scale because that's not the problem of today for them, versus some founder doing it for, as you mentioned, millions of active users, and a lot of them are low-hanging, like free users, and then you're trying to expand them over time. Once they grow, their growth is kind of shared. How do you go about making decisions enabling AI or implementing AI, especially these models are now getting expensive over time, the token costs and all, how you're managing scale? I know this is more of a question for Sebastian, but you guys have been there long enough, so what is the mindset that you take making everyday decisions about AI? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 10:10 Yeah, it's obviously, I would say it's still new for almost everybody. People that are claiming that it's not new anymore, they are either stuck or they are changing anyway, so it's still new for them. I would challenge that perception anyways. So we are changing and pivoting as well way more often than we used to. Ten years ago, we didn't pivot all the time. We were staying on the same trajectory. And now we're pivoting both with the token economy, obviously, but also with the pricing. Are we talking about seat-based pricing? Are we talking about consumption-based? Are we talking about site licenses? Are we talking about output? And stuff like that. So we actually currently are very, very open with the clients about that we're experimenting in a way where we need to find the right balance for both us to keep a healthy business, to keep developing our products and our services, but also for the client perspective. I just had a call yesterday with one of our clients that presented that issue. They're approximately 70,000 users. They don't know how many or how much they're using it. They don't know how much output they're generating. They know it's a very high value for the individual user. But they don't realize whether it's a site license, if it's seat-based license, if it's consumption-based that they would actually prefer. And we enter that conversation with open minds and talking our way forward to finding a solution where it seems fair. And that fairness is not just a negotiation thing. It's also a bit trial and error on finding out which components would be better off being priced with the tokens or the output consumption, and which would be not relevant for the output being generated or relevant for the token being used, because there are not that many tokens being used in that case. So yeah, I think the primary thing here is that we are experimenting with it, and we are pivoting more often than we used to a couple of years back. I don't know if that answered your question, but it's changing anyways. Adil Saleh 12:42 Yeah. Given the, because of course, building like, if you just talk about the engineering part of it and, as you mentioned, using LLMs as in, let's say someone like Sebastian or a technology leader on your team, they are figuring out, “Hey, these are the things,” as you mentioned, these are some of these calls or API calls that are going to consume a lot of tokens. We need to put a price on it, and you've been upfront with the customer. So doing the economics, and even platforms today, it's so hard to do the economics starting off with this, because it keeps on changing. That's why a lot of companies, I've interviewed these, and we've done survey for our own product as well. So more than 65% of the companies in the first three years, starting 2023, are now moving from seat-based to consumption-based, usage-based pricing. Of course, a lot of them are A/B testing too. They're not always right with the pricing. But again, this brings me to the next segment of this podcast. How critical do you think customer success in retaining the install base becomes with this usage-based pricing? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 13:49 Yeah. That's always a funny topic when I talk about customer success because we actually don't. We are 180 people, right? And we don't have more than one customer success person. Does it mean that I don't think customer success is important? No, it doesn't. But it means that we've always had the philosophy that customer success is embedded in everything we do. So we have a team of 50, 55 project managers and implementation consultants and technical delivery people and supporters. And that team or those teams are constantly working as customer success as well. The strategic account managers work as customer success as well. I think that's more my philosophy. I know customer success leaders would probably have another viewpoint on that, but my point of view is that if we truly wanna be focusing on customer success and not just retention or upsell, but customer success, the success of being a happy customer, that requires someone from our side to really know on a deep level what they're doing with the solution and what the business issue is. Perhaps putting it out there that some customer success managers are not close enough. They're not close enough to what the business actually are doing, and they're not close enough to understanding the technology from a deeper point of view. I know some customer success managers for real are, but I think that the philosophy that we've always had is that everybody is doing customer success. I'm doing customer success as well. Adil Saleh 15:37 One hundred percent. Yeah, one hundred percent agreement on this, and that's the reason. The biggest proof to it is, like, in the last fifteen years, this category has not grown. Like, you talk about a lot of these players that came fifteen years ago, but they are still, like, a lot of these companies are merging sales account management with customer success. And every founder is thinking around it. It's a company-wide operation. It's not just one typical organization that is quotaed to make sure they're gonna hit on these many expansion across different book of business and all. So a lot of these post-sales GTM, I would call them, in your case, implementation, account management, and even support as a greater component and contribution towards the success of the customer, has to align. And all of these are analog of each other, just like sales. Sales and marketing, they're working as analogs. So now thinking about your post-sales GTM, how big is the team, including all the implementation and professional services and contractors? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 16:40 So if we take all, we've just did a reorganization, so also happy to announce that we've hired Toni Hohlbein as the new Chief Revenue and Operating Officer, and everything will be gathered under him, all client-related stuff, meaning that both sales, marketing, delivery, technical support, and IT and security will be under Toni. So that's approximately, what is it? 90, 95 people in total. Adil Saleh 17:14 Okay, perfect. And now thinking about a lot of these verticals are different, right? So the stakeholders might be different and the team members, like a lot of these verticals, they need hands-on implementation teams going on-site and on-premises. If you were to speak about any customer, like industry vertical and any journey that is kind of a hybrid touch where you're measuring success through data as well, interactions, some of the actions that you're tracking, apart from the billing. I don't want it to be a transactional kind of, of course, that is important, but why it happens is more important, like whether it's lack of usage, adoption, integration into their documentation process or business process. Who is taking care of measuring all of those that are delivering the end value, which is helping them retain those customers across those teams? Talk about maybe legal or recruitment firm or anything. So you go ahead. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 18:09 Yeah. So you mean internally or on the client side? Adil Saleh 18:12 Internally. Of course, your account managers and implementation manager, working across one vertical, one customer, what kind of journeys that they are looking after, like from onboarding to from point A to point B for sales, and how they're measuring, how they are data-driven and measuring success across each of these lifecycle stages, and how overall customer lifecycle management happens. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 18:36 Yeah. Well, first of all, it varies a bit. We serve three different product categories. One is what we call brand and template management. The other one is team and personal productivity, and the third one is process and document automation. So it varies quite significantly across the three different categories. But if we take the first one, brand and template management, well, the journey internally is that when the solution is sold or bought from the client, it's handed over to delivery, managed by a project manager or an engagement manager, implemented by implementation consultants. And what they are measured on or measure the success of the project is obviously, we say the classical things. Are we delivering on time, on budget, on point with a great solution? That's a given. But it's also measured upon the success of the implementation of the product. In that category, we sometimes see implementation across, let's say, a two hundred people company, but also sometimes it's a fifty thousand people company. So we serve quite substantial companies, and some of them are implementing in a solution like ours when they change the visual identity, change the name of the company or whatever. Those success criteria are obviously very closely connected to the success criteria of that specific project. So that's more rollout focused, you could say, and adoption focused. Not necessarily that much data focused on the actual usage from the individual user afterwards. It's more providing the access to the user. If we move into the second category, the team and personal productivity, that's much more the personal single user utilizing something that they used to spend 10 hours on that they might be able to reduce to, let's say, five or six hours. So that's more a post-measurement criteria. So we would like to create a baseline for how much are they spending now in terms of hours. So let's say a professional services firm and an investment associate spending 10 hours doing an investment memorandum, for example. Can we reduce that to six hours? Those four hours of saved time, that's worth a lot. So that was just one investment memorandum, right? So that's counted a lot in hours saved. The third one is the process and document automation. That is either, let's say, big bulk send-outs of many documents or automated processes. So documents and processes, meaning the majority of processes run in an enterprise company today ends up in a document or with a document throughout the journey. And the success of that is primarily measured whether we're able to pull the data from the different data sources. Adil Saleh 21:52 We're able to complete the action, end-to-end action. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 21:54 Yeah. Transfer that and transform it into the document and see, does it actually end up being correct? So again, quality, accuracy, and reliability in what the document ends up being. And that is also obviously connected to reducing the length of the process or reducing the number of hours being spent on producing the output generated from the solution. Adil Saleh 22:21 Yeah. Optimising time is also a bigger USP, and sometimes it's more than just saving the money because you talk about enterprise clients, you're saving one team member one hour. So just imagine the impact it makes. So now thinking about the automation piece, because we had some experiences building bots like UiPath, Blue Prism, all these automated bots, robotic process automation, and that is also changing with the AI and Microsoft coming into the game. So a lot of these enterprise, how you're managing all these one-click repetitive processes? Are you guys building bots, or is there any other way around? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 23:04 We're not building bots per se. We're obviously building agents, but we're not building bots. I think that's more connected to the fact that the companies that we serve are not utilizing bots in an enterprise way, meaning that if it's only single teams creating their own bots or gets bots produced, well, that's not necessarily a process that we naturally hook into. So we are not building the bots, but we are seldom delivering to bots as well. What we see more, that might still be on a bit of a theoretical level, but what we see changing over time is that we will see several of our solutions and outputs being delivered not to a human being, but to an agent, and in some cases, agent to agent as well. So a funky idea is obviously from, for example, a recruitment agency or recruitment firm. They might be able to build an agent for whatever position they're trying to recruit for, but very soon an individual will be able to create an agent as well to apply for that position that is available. And that will end up being human out of the loop for a long time. That will be agent to agent, battling back and forth on how to make this more relevant and how to be more relevant. So that's gonna be a kind of a funky situation when people that are used to being very centerpiece of a recruitment process actually is out of the picture until the actual physical conversation will happen or interview will happen. Adil Saleh 24:50 In your viewpoint, how soon do you think it's gonna happen? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 24:54 How is? Adil Saleh 24:54 How long, how soon do you see it happening? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 24:58 I think that it will be within a year from now that we'll see stuff like that. And will that change the perspective of how we engage with each other? Yes, for sure. But everybody is in the know about that. That's already changing. But I think that it will change into something where the people interactions are becoming even more important. You see that with a lot physical conferences or whatever, that is the human part that becomes even more both interesting but also important. Adil Saleh 25:31 Important, yes, because the human connection is going far away from human connection. And you talk about sales, you talk about enterprise relationships, it's still old school, sitting on a coffee table and building these relationships, multicast, long sales cycle. And that is, people are craving for it. Even on the content side, a lot of this UGC content, a lot of this AI-generated videos. I was just following Oscars last year. There was one movie that was completely shot by AI, like all the actors were AI-driven. And there was one movie that got like 75 or 80% of the production happen in the natural light. Train Dreams. It's a beautiful movie. And it got nominated. So because people are now more craving and they're kind of feeling lost in connection with this so much of AI. And that is also, I think, going to happen alongside. People will get fed up because we are all social animals, right? Unless what Elon Musk says, anybody can replace a brain or a human, that's a different story. But I don't believe that that's gonna happen anytime soon, completely replacing a human brain after feeling an abstract part of it. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 26:43 And this podcast could already today be recorded with you having an agent asking all the questions, me not being here, but my agent replying to all your questions. And who would ever listen to that? That would probably be listened to by other agents doing an executive summary on extract of that, it being played as a podcast for the human ear. I don't necessarily see that as top interesting. I don't know if I would listen to it anyways. Adil Saleh 27:11 Yeah, I was just listening to this former CTO of Tesla, and of course, he's the guy's brain behind all the technology and everything. He speaks about the second brain. So going forward, every person is gonna have their second brain. So the second brain is gonna consume all the knowledge, all the experiences, exceptional behaviors, and everything, and it's kind of a replica of that person. But again, on a human connection standpoint, people would still want to have this connection which they are missing in an agent or interacting with an agent. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 27:45 Yes. Yeah. Adil Saleh 27:46 Perfect. Love it. So I know that you have quite some openings as well. I noticed that you're only hiring from Europe. Are you also looking forward to, because there are some emerging markets, let me educate you, because I've been hiring and firing a lot of people from the US, from overseas, and some experiences. The markets here in Pakistan, they're like more than, I would say, 130 million people under the age of 30. So almost 70% of them are between 18 to 30, so in the first 12 years. And half of their life, they have seen AI grow up and evolve, and these ChatGPTs and Codex and Anthropic and Skills and MCP connectors and everything, they're building apps. So it's a huge opportunity. There are so many companies hiring from Pakistan at a fraction of the cost. You talk about a yearly cost, it's not even 40% of what it costs here in America. So there's a big opportunity there too. How you're thinking about having multi-culture, multi-continent teams? Are you thinking about it or not? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 28:52 Yeah, yeah, for sure. We already have. I think we have 24 nationalities across the business. So we're based out of Copenhagen, the headquarter, but we have seven offices in five countries and we have outsourced, or not outsourced, it's actually fully with us. Adil Saleh 29:13 Contractors, yeah. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 29:14 Fully employed. No, actually fully employed as well in both Vietnam and Thailand and Cyprus. So we have a lot of. We also have a couple of people in the US and a couple of handful of people in the UK as well. So yeah. We're not fully remote, but approximately 40% is remote. Adil Saleh 29:43 Okay, love it. And now thinking about your culture standpoint, I know that building a culture and instilling it for this long enough, 20 plus years, it's not an easy job. Now you being a leader, a lot of people look up to you. What is the one thing that you really want to cultivate into people that has nothing much to do with AI? Because everybody talks about AI. You want to make them AI and everything. So what is that one thing? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 30:10 Well, first of all, I think it's important to say that we've done five acquisitions. So bringing in people from other countries, other cultures has obviously been a huge change of the combined culture. But one thing is obviously the relation between people and the psychological safety to show up as you are. We have some cultural definitions of what we wanna achieve. We have one saying, “Don't let me hang,” which is a high five thing, but it's also, don't let me hang as an employee not being developed. Don't let me hang in fixing things on my own. And we have several other value statements. But one important thing is that I basically and fundamentally think that we don't start with looking at how financially well we can do things. We start at looking at how well people are and how well people are treated and collaborating. Then we are looking at the processes that they're utilizing on a daily basis to find out if there's something to optimise. And if we do number one and number two good, the financial results will follow. And we have been profitable since day one, 22 years ago. We are 21% profitable this year. So I know it works. For us, it works. And it's obviously a challenging thing to have cultures being combined. And what if we add 20 people in two weeks' time from now, from an acquisition that we're currently looking at? What happens then? Well, that happens again, that we are revisiting what that means for our culture. Doesn't mean that we're changing a whole lot of things, but it just means that we need to enable that we are integrating those people as well. Adil Saleh 32:11 Love it. I mean, would you also like to talk about that acquisition that you're looking to have? Because a lot of these VCs, accelerators, they have followers, they have people and companies and professional services. There's lots of consulting firms, they're open to having conversations. Would you like to also explain what kind of acquisitions that you're looking at that are more strategic and more aligned with what you want? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 32:33 Yeah. It's obviously a good strategic fit. I cannot spill too much on who it is and stuff like that. But it's a really interesting component for us. It's something that expands our PLG motion. So a lot of product-led growth in that business. A lot of clients as well. So three, four thousand clients is brought to the existing two thousand five hundred. So a lot of clients, but not necessarily that big of a team to inject into the business. But really interesting from a combination point of view and something that will affect both our first category, the brand and template management, and the second one, the team and personal productivity. The ability to create campaigns, the ability to create personalised content is something that's really being improved with this acquisition. Adil Saleh 33:31 Okay. And on top of this, to my understanding, it's gonna be people that are highly, I would say, growth-enabled, AI-enabled. They're not only able to build the agents and do all the automation that is, of course, marketing is all automation, signal-based output and all of that, and they also have capabilities of managing operators, like as agent operators, in a longer run. Because we're also thinking about moving onto that and now also trying to hire more people, because we have all the process and frameworks, all of this, pretty much defined. We just need to have specific people with specific skill set with this. So it could be a group of bunch of folks that can do all of that, right? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 34:12 Yeah. Yeah. Adil Saleh 34:13 Maybe we both are looking for the same acquisition. But again, this is a new thing. I love the way that you're thinking, and there's so much for me to learn from people like you. You guys are thinking along the lines of this at scale because some of the problems that you don't feel today and nobody's gonna clap for a lot of things that you are going to do tomorrow, but you should have a foresight as a founder. So thank you very much for putting that together. So now thinking about your culture, you already spoke about multiculture. You have more than 30% of your team fully remote operationally. You talk about all these operations divided globally. How big of a challenge it is to make them, on a ground level, all AI-enabled internally? Not internally like that you're using ChatGPTs with their own projects or making skills inside Claude for the internally, but how they're making impact at an operational level and a high level of this. So what kind of initiatives have you guys taken, you and Sebastian, both throughout this journey, and how has it been different than some years ago? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 35:23 Yeah. Well, first of all, a whole lot different than some years ago. Some years ago, it was just about understanding the new version of the same technology, for example. Now it's a completely different ballgame, as everyone on this podcast knows as well. So especially on utilization and product and engineering, it has been and still is a journey to really get a grasp of what makes sense to utilize, not just have a crazy target of, let's say, 90% of all code being produced needs to be produced by Claude Code. That's not a metric for us. I don't measure stuff like that because let's say we have a million lines of code today, will it be a great success if we have two million tomorrow? That's a crazy metric to aim for. So I'm not putting out a measurement on how many lines of code we are producing with AI at all. But I'm obviously extremely interested, and so is Sebastian as well, in how can we optimise the existing way of working. How can we do automated testing much better? How can we patch together components that we are acquiring in a way where it's not necessarily human beings being deep in whatever knowledge it takes to get at that deep level, but something that we can actually utilize AI for, especially when recognizing patterns, especially when adding the proficiency of what the clients that piece of software serves. So yes, spending a lot of time on finding out what can AI do for us in terms of utilizing it in both product and engineering, obviously mostly in engineering. Adil Saleh 37:24 Love it. Because a lot of these engineers, they feel so proud. “Hey, we've done like ten million lines of code in like two months.” because when it comes to using AI to solve a coding problem, this becomes relatively easier than even a marketing problem because you are now more, you have visibility into what you want to solve. Like, this is what I want to build. I want to solve this, right? You have more clarity. Versus marketing, you're just completely iterating. You never know what's gonna work out. It's like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. So versus marketing, could you also put a little more details on the marketing side of things, how you're going about using AI or enabling team to be super AI-run and iterate really fast, so you get to some sort of outcome that you really want that is actually having a bottom-line impact? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 38:11 Yeah. I think one thing is what we've historically been doing, but another thing is the direction that we're moving in currently. And the direction that we're moving in currently is more interesting from that point of view because that is definitely based on a whole lot more fundamental data foundation of what we know about the customers, what we know about our ICPs, what we know about the utilization of the products that we serve to our clients. And bear in mind, we have approximately three million users of our products, so we have a lot of data on that. We have a lot of knowledge that we are stepping into the realm of utilizing a whole lot more from a marketing perspective. And so what does that mean? Well, that means that we are spinning up agents to understand the client from a, let's say, ICP persona point of view and identifying similarities and patterns in the market to approach those types of clients. We're not utilizing AI to outreach or as outreach. We are more focused on the personal introductions, the personal conversations, and the phone is not just invented, but it's reinvented. It's something that our salespeople are definitely using more and more now than just a few years back, which is a great thing to see. I think that everybody on this podcast can recognize that they are bombarded with I don't know how many LinkedIn outreach that is so obvious not written by a human being. Adil Saleh 39:56 Absolutely, and also the emails. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 39:58 Also the emails, yeah. For sure. Adil Saleh 40:00 Yeah. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 40:01 So we're more using AI to identify and to pattern recognize and to select who to approach. Adil Saleh 40:13 Personalize. Yeah. Personalize the engagements and make sure they are hyper-focused on the problems that the product solves and everything. Perfect. And it all starts with, as you mentioned, knowing your ICP better. It's all about it. So the moment you start drilling deep into and you have multiple verticals, and a lot of customer education goes alongside too, like on the press, like on newsletters and all. So you keep on educating people around the product. One last question. I'm sorry, go ahead. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 40:45 One more problem with that is that physical events are something that we really see both a significant uptick in the use of, but also, for example, next week we have this yearly thing that we call Vision Board where we invite all the public clients to this Vision Board. So 120 people signing up for that physical event, full day event that is only about us presenting ideas and presenting new developments that they really love to see. That's 120 client meetings in one sitting. Adil Saleh 41:22 Yeah. Oh, yeah. I would also like to share this experience we have. Last year in October, we did our own event. At that time, I didn't have the product in hand. I just wanted to do it like, hey, a lot of friends from SF, they became my friend coming onto the podcast. I just called them out, and one was like a CCO of billion. Two of them were unicorn companies and they were C-suite executives, and I built an educational sort of a board for that event and the agenda for like four hours. I just simply uploaded on Luma and then more than 50 people turned up. People were asking questions and I was just mediating on the stage and just a chitchat. I never prepared anything. I was just going natural because it was no monetary, just education. And people came up. They were asking questions to the CCO of Vercel, CCO of ContentSquare, all these big companies, and it was pure education, and it was so much useful to us. And now we have the product and we go to them, “Hey, we spoke about these problems. Now we have a product.” So it is more education to earn, and there's no better way of delivering education and human connection and relationship than physical events. I'll definitely check with you. We're coming late in July in Europe, so maybe we can do some event together. I'm always all about it. I'm all about human connection. I tell my team, “Hey, you guys come in three days a week. I come five days a week,” because for the first eight years in my life, from the age of 17 to late, mid-twenties, I've been going 9:00 to 5:00 office and human connection and people talking, customer calls, all that. So it's so hard for me to undo that and unlearn that. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 42:54 Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Adil Saleh 42:57 Perfect. Perfect. So what makes you excited going into, of course, we're almost midway 2026. Going forward, what makes you excited as a founder from a business standpoint, from anything that you think gives you goosebumps every single day and you wake up in the morning and say like, “Hey, this is something that we need to ship, launch, take initiative, complete, whatever”? Is that one thing? Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 43:19 Yeah. Well, first of all, I usually don't provide any advice without context, and very specific context, but I would say two things that I'm really focused on is staying curious. I'm 46, so is that a natural component of a 46-year-old life to be curious on a daily basis? No, it's unfortunately not. But I stay curious, not least in the AI era. That's really important. And also be nice to people. Not all founders and leaders are focusing on being nice to people because they are too busy, they think, doing something, building something. But to answer your question, what gives me goosebumps for the future ahead of us, for the rest of '26, is definitely a combination of, I would say, three things. It's our entrance into the German market. In Europe, Germany is a big country. Denmark is a very small country. We have German clients, we have Dutch clients, we have clients in UK and France and Switzerland and so on. But Germany is a big one, so that's really exciting and it looks really good. Looks really promising. So that's something that I'm very excited about. Changing things here. The new CROO started, Toni. Really excited to get him onboarded and make some changes to how we're doing things and what we're doing. That's also exciting for me. And obviously from the client perspective, I'm really excited to see how the product components that we are launching very soon is affecting not just the clients, the economic buyers, but the users actually. So I'm very focused on, I think many founders would say that, but I'm also very focused on the impact that we actually have on our users. That's really interesting to see how they're taking our product and improving their own workday. That's really, really exciting. Still after 22 years. Adil Saleh 45:32 Yeah. Love it. This is so inspiring. I was talking to my co-founder, like we've been building different products, and some of them are passion projects. And a lot of these passion projects, when you don't think of monetizing it, you just enjoy, that's fine. But at some point you want to give it a business model too, and that takes a lot of persistence and a lot of grit like yourself. So it is so inspiring for even myself as a founder, of course, this goes out for all the listeners too, that all bootstrapped more than two decades, still here and 20 years down telling me that, “Hey, I love the way people are solving their problems a whole lot better than even yesterday as a founder and how I see the difference and this gives me a lot of enjoyment.” And this is super important for any founder, and especially important for someone been there for more than 20 years. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 46:23 Yeah. And we were bootstrapped the first 20 years, and then we invited Main Capital Partners, one of the big PEs in Europe, two years ago. So two years in that journey and really still very appreciative of that collaboration and that partnership that's enabling us in our buy and build strategy. Adil Saleh 46:45 Love that. Great. Perfect. So it was really nice meeting you, Jeppe. Apart from everything else, connecting with you, and I have this kind of conversation pulled on. You've been concrete, genuine, and not many people I can get them on my two hands, fingers, the people that get this original and all, and it's all about it. That's why we never had any sort of monetization attached to these conversations. So thank you very much for being such real person and such a nice person. Jeppe Schytte-Hansen 47:14 Thank you. Likewise, and thank you for reaching out and having me on board here. That was great. Thanks for the conversation. Adil Saleh 47:19 Yeah. The pleasure was entirely mine. Have a good rest of the day. Outro 47:22 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. 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