Innovators Can Laugh
Drive demand & scale your business with insightful lessons & light-hearted conversations with Europe's greatest Marketers & Founders
Innovators Can Laugh is the first podcast exclusively for UK and European Startups. Join host Eric Melchor for conversations with founders as they reveal how they got to where they're at, what obstacles they've had to overcome in growing their startup, and more!
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Topics covered: B2B marketing, podcast marketing, demand generation, B2B growth, go to market strategy (GTM).
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Innovators Can Laugh
Unique AI and Automation Tool to Personalize Your Outreach
This episode is powered by Planable. Head over to Planable.io and sign up for a no strings attached free trial.
How can you utilize AI and automation to personalize your outreach efforts?
Jesper Qvist, founder of Salestools.io, shares how you can use his platform to segment your personas and tailor your messaging to each one for better results.
In this conversation, Jesper shares his journey in building a successful B2B marketing platform, the power of social selling, and the importance of making life easy as an entrepreneur.
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Connect with Eric on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericmelchor/
Previous guests include: Arvid Kahl of FeedbackPanda, Andrei Zinkevich of FullFunnel, Scott Van den Berg of Influencer Capital, Buster Franken of Fruitpunch AI, Valentin Radu of Omniconvert, Evelina Necula of Kinderpedia, Ionut Vlad of Tokinomo, Diana Florescu of MediaforGrowth, Irina Obushtarova of Recursive, Monika Paule of Caszyme, Yannick Veys of Hypefury, Laura Erdem of Dreamdata, and Pija Indriunaite of CityBee.
Check out our four most downloaded episodes:
From Uber and BCG to building a telehealth for pets startup with Michael Fisher
From Starcraft Player to Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value with Valentin Radu
Eric (00:00.17)
I never go shopping anymore. I just open the Bringo app and then all the groceries are coming two hours later. It's easy. And you got to think as an entrepreneur, how are you going to make your life so easy that you can focus more? And that's the fundamental in everything you do because those extra hours shouldn't get in, get so much more revenue.
Eric (00:24.43)
If you want to know how some of the most innovative B2B marketers and founders in Europe are scaling their business, then this is the show for you. Today we have Jesper Kvis, who is the co-founder of Demand, a platform that helps companies leverage social selling and multi-channel approaches to generate more leads, conversions and revenue. With Demand, you can stop doing manual sales outreach by leveraging AI to not only send personalized messages, but also send personalized replies.
based on sentiment analysis and you can sync demand to your CRN. Jesper has over 12 years of experience in innovation, business, development and management. And he is from Denmark, but is currently living in Bucharest like me. Jesper, welcome to the show. Thank you, Erik. And good to see you again. Fun fact was I started this company 200 meters from you where you're living, where you're sitting right now.
In a small apartment when I first got married to my wife and I worked on building a CRM system for SaxoBank. SaxoBank is one of the biggest global traders and they have about a hundred wide label partners and they wanted CRM so they could help engage better with the leads and I went on the hood with the management. And I realized that CRM would sell to somebody else and I wanted to get leads like everybody else. Everybody wants leads, right? Yeah.
It was so hard and there was nothing back in 2014 that could download data from LinkedIn. So we decided to build the first commercial product that actually could leverage the data from LinkedIn and export it to a CSV file. And we built it internally and one day I was in Bucharest, came from Denmark, I said, then create a landing page and post in a forum and five minutes later we had the first order. There was no interface, there was nothing on the product. You had to do command line and copy some prompts and a license key.
And that quickly took up to 20,000 MRR. And then I was like, let me put an interface on. So we put an interface on and then we put it in the cloud. And in the matter of 10 months, we were at 1.4 million and we couldn't wrap in you and have been going up ever since. And if you look at that revenue growth, that was insane back then. Even companies today using AI, they can barely hit that rate. And if they do that, they pay 80% in API credit to somebody else. We were just profitable ever since we started.
Eric (02:49.846)
I've been bootstrapped and we also turned down the $3 million term sheet. And I don't know if that was smart or good, but today I'm happy about it. Okay. Let's backtrack here. Cause there's a lot of good stuff in here. So a few questions. One of the questions is the forum. Were you active in forums at that time? And do you recall which forum it was? I was not active in any forums. I was more active on solving problems that I had myself. And like me, there are thousands of people having the same issue. Yeah.
And I solved that and back then people that were asking the LinkedIn forum, how to export the data. And I just posted it there. And then I realized before everybody did Quora, we owned Quora back then, the platform, so we set up so many accounts that I ended up getting banned. So if you search anything about LinkedIn, you'll find 20, 30 comments companies upvoting us, people talking about us and then we set up this whole way of growth hacking back then.
And that drove an insane amount of leads until everybody copied that. So those are not true innovators, as you will say, but that's the reality. And that's probably where we got a lot of the inbounds on early. And then I had customers coming inbound and they're going, yeah, somebody presented, we were called sales students back then on the stage of the conference. I was like, I have no idea about that, but great. So people go out advocating for us early days, which was quite incredible.
Yeah, and the whole community thing that's going on right now didn't exist. First entrepreneurial things you did Jesper, or was there something even before that, that you did a very innovative or creative way to make some money? So back when I started my MBA in the States, I built a marketplace on the stage, removed backgrounds of images and we found freelancers across. So you uploaded a fixed price. It was very easy to figure out compared to the competitors.
I would sit up like three o'clock in the morning having calls for the e-commerce stores in Europe that then will upload all their shoes. For example, there was not Zalando, the second biggest one is France, I forgot the name anyway. And that went really well. We got over a million dollars in revenue again in the matter of about 12 months. That was my first, I would say, SaaS venture. I did some things before when I lived in the States, I had a friend, a real estate developer.
Eric (05:12.406)
He bootstrapped to a thousand units in Champaign Urbana, Illinois, by University of Illinois. And he owned half that housing for students and he wrote three books. And the fun fact is, he said, Yes, but can you help me get a New York Times bestseller list? And I said, Peter, your book sucks. Your cover sucks. The title sucks. You will not buy it. And then he said, I don't believe you. So I said, I'm going to.
as an experiment, spend one week drinking some red wine in the night, write a book, give it a cool name, a winner's DNA, some cool cover back then, and I'm going to growth hack it to do well. And I think globally we're 38 one day on Amazon and I beat Bill Clinton who did a book tour in the US promoting the book on that day by growth hacking my way there by experimenting. And I thought that was a crucial learning and I've always been doing that ever after, trying to find out.
How can you do something, the unconditional way to get out there and people get to know you? What were some of the things you did to get up to like 38 rates globally there? It was actually really simple. So back then Kindle did something new. You would put your book for free for one day. And I did that. And then after everybody was downloading, I think I had 30,000 downloads. And then the next day was going back to paid. And then I sold 20,000 books. And if books, that's a lot of books to sell. Yeah.
Yeah. I sold 20,000 the next day by a little simple experiment that I had no idea what would happen, but what was the worst that was going to happen? I thought, let's try. What was the experiment? You just give away some free knowledge, right? That would be the downside. That's not bad. You're sharing your knowledge to others. That's okay. You wrote it in one week. Like, how did you write a book in one week? Is this a very short pamphlet? That's only a few pages or what? Just 140 pages. I have this thing where there's something I want to do. I just grind.
You just grind and keep the focus. And that's the same at work. You can do a 12 hour sprint, not think about it. Yeah. And you can do very unstructured work and then you get nothing done. So it's about getting in the zone. Yeah. Getting you sleep and really just focus when you do something, but you need to have the passion. I used to be like that when I ran my nonprofit, cause I was doing that on the side while also working full time. But I had no trouble working all night or on the weekends. Cause like you said, very passionate about it. That's true entrepreneurship.
Eric (07:35.402)
Now prior to launching your startups, Jesper, you were in the corporate world. You held positions at Dell. I think another company was called the European life care group. Now what was one of the best positions that you ever had? What were you doing and what did you enjoy about it? Well, I learned a lot about sales. I'm very good with inbound leads, to be honest. What I discovered there, I will come in as a student, work three hours, two times a week. Okay. And I'll be commission based. The phone will call you, will answer and then you will sell or upsell.
What I did, and this is not what I recommend to do. I didn't follow the script that the sales coach from South Africa, there wasn't Denmark he want us to do. I listened to the tone pitch of the person I spoke to. And then I could feel if there was an upsell where I could lead the conversation. So basically I ended up doing about $5,000 a month in salary working six hours a week. And
When my manager, full-time manager figured out I was basically at that time making more or less the same in him or more, they kept the commission. And then I said, you know what? I calculate that to work five hours, five minutes per hour to reach that quota. I was like, ah, this is not worth it. I wanna go learn something else. But before that, they put me to train all the new students that came. And I got so sick and tired of it. So I developed this framework, presentation and videos back then that actually implemented across Europe.
all new EMEA students joining Dell. So that was quite cool. And then I ended up being backup for all the B2B teams to enter the phone. When I was there, that's also a big reason I got a high commission because I got the, not just the printer toners, I got the really good calls because I could get them shipped fast and upsell. So I was always, when I came in, the other managers said, I give you one year's worth of backup. So that was fun.
But then I live... Where were these calls coming from? Were they mostly just European or are they all markets? Denmark, Sweden and Norway. You said something about listening to the tone though. Can you go deeper into that? What were some of the little things that were inquisitive that you picked up on? You can hear if there's a hesitation, right? So if, for example, if a mother who's pregnant call in and want to buy a laptop, a consumer, that's an example. Backup is very important because she's going to take those before you have iCloud on your phone.
Eric (09:56.522)
She's going to take pictures of the newborn, the one, a backup, the one, antivirus, the one, all this you can outsell because you're playing with the emotions so you find out what is triggering them. The same in B2B. What is the pain? Do I have a painkiller? So B2B is the services. What if you spill coffee on the computer? What if they put a pen in the book, close down the laptop screen and breaks? You need a service agreement. So within two hours, if you pay extra, somebody from Dell shows up and fix it.
Because that downtime is going to cost you more. So you quickly upsell all these items beyond just the product based on the circumstances and it's quite simple. Cool. This is Dell. This is one of the largest computer hardware software companies in the world. You're making this commission at such a young age and you're saying that you didn't follow the playbook. So this is like a natural talent that you just have. My dad was insurance broker. He built the biggest insurance broker he can see in Denmark.
He always been in relations and sales in that sense. So it might come from home, the way I was raised and my mom is from marketing background. So, okay. So you had this number of years where you could observe someone who was really good at it, your own father, and just learn just intrinsically, okay, this is how he does it. And this is how I should probably do it too. That's fascinating. Going to the States and doing my MBA there, that probably helped a lot because
The US is so much better at sales than we are in Europe. So when you pick up that customer service orientation, which we didn't have when I started the company out in Berlin, everything there was like almost like in communist regime so backwards. Like it is here right now in Bucharest. And do it well in Europe. It becomes a lot easier. Yeah. Well, like it is now in many of the stores that you go into in Bucharest. The experience. Bucharest is a great dynamic place. It makes life easy. There's a bit of traffic.
But everywhere there are, I just came back this weekend from Austria. I drove back, met a family that half the distance. They came from Amsterdam. They took double-time driver because it's so dense, the traffic in central Europe now, whereas when you go East, it's really easy. If you look from remote work or hiring people, Romania is amazing. I never go shopping anymore. I just opened the Bringo app and then all the groceries are coming two hours later.
Eric (12:18.706)
Yeah, it's easy. And you got to think as an entrepreneur, how are you going to make your life so easy that you can focus more? And that's the fundamental in everything you do because those extra hours you can get in, get so much more revenue. Marketers can laugh listeners before we dive back into the conversation. I've got a game changer for your content strategy. Imagine a world where the headache of coordinating, reviewing, and approving content for social media blogs and newsletters just disappears. That's right.
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All you need to do is use the code PLANNABLE30 at checkout and you're all set to transform the way you manage your marketing content. That's PLANNABLE30 to lock your 30% discount for the first three months. I think there's never a downtime. There should never be a downtime because there's always going to be some sort of obstacle to hinder the time you can work, especially if you have kids. So I just already have it in my frame of mind that...
for four or five days every month, there's going to be some sort of doctor's appointment or the kid's going to be sick or something that's going to conflict my time to work. And I just have that baked in already. So there, therefore when I do have free time, whether it's on the weekend or early morning or whatever, I use that time to work or try to get a hit. So I think you'd probably do the same because you have, that's why I'm, I started my schedule about a year ago. I get up at 4 a.m. because then from four to 7 30.
Eric (14:42.51)
I get half of work they done that normal people will do. And that put me ahead for the day because then I can drop the children at school. And then when I come home, I'm relaxed. I challenge myself by taking out all the hardest tasks. And I can do what I find enjoyable. I can do all the fun part of work because all the workload that people avoid, it's gone. You did it in the morning. And I think that's fundamentally give you those extra time when, for example, your children are sick. And it did happen.
Two weeks ago, my wife and my twins, all three of them were sick and I was having to work home to be there and it's challenging, but then you have to say, okay, I wake up super early and I work late. And then you bounce off in between and make yourself more productive as a young father. Okay. Let's talk about your latest venture here, which is demand. There's a lot of different tools and integrations that people can use. Like stitching together different platforms to send personalized emails to a thousand different people.
How is demand different? What do customers get excited about when they start using your platform? So demand is an offspring of what we started in 2014 as the first commercial LinkedIn product. We never really care about coining that or talking about that, but it's that experience we had over all those years. How do you get in front of people? How do you get to talk to them? And that is rapidly changing. So with demand, we started off as a LinkedIn automation email, so you can do multi-channel.
Then we added last year, we added AI, we've been in AI since 2017, training internally. So now we can grab the data from a person on LinkedIn, for example, the latest social posts, the bio information about the company. We have ticktracker.io, the technology stack, what technologies are they using into our API. And then we can craft a connection request, a LinkedIn message, an icebreaker, which is...
that line that grabbed attention when you open the email, when you open your phone, you see the first couple of lines. And those are the ones that make people read. That we train the AI models to a scale now so every single person gets something related to them about their context, their data, their world. Because in sales, if I'm selling to you, Eric, you don't care about me, it's all about you. And that's what I keep preaching to every customer coming. Nobody cares about that you're selling an IT service.
Eric (17:03.918)
They care about what you're solving for them. And the AI model, we're training it constantly to actually put that out, talking about it on scale while you only do one click. You take the search on LinkedIn, you design the whole automation, you hit start, and then everything is automated for you. Now, that's where we were six months ago. Then social selling finally became a thing over the last year. If you look two years back, four years back,
There were all these social selling bureaus affiliated with Salesforce, but they didn't really nail what social selling was until David Gearhart adrift. He really nailed it. I would say he made the whole company talk about product launches and they will take takeovers of LinkedIn and everybody has been copying his playbook ever since. They just got acquired recently, right? I think. Yeah, but there was the same private equity firm in both companies. So it's probably more merger, but it looks very sexy to say it's an acquisition. Yeah.
Anyway, it can be an acquisition if then not in the same fund, but if the same fund is probably more richer, but those are technicalities from a PE perspective, private equity. Now, over the last six months, we slowly rolled out what we call social selling because like you and I, we have children. Somebody writes us on LinkedIn, I get a cold email and we say, Hey, this is really interesting. But the fact is one of our children will knock on the door in a second and disturb us. We forget about John Doe, who wrote us.
because that's no longer important. And this is the attention span of every buyer. So with social selling, we created really intelligent. You can go in and say, okay, here's a list of people on LinkedIn that I wanna talk to. They might not know me yet, I'm not connected. So maybe I'm connected, maybe they're customers I wanna keep a relation with, so you have two ways to go. We will monitor by automation those.
accounts every 24 hours. So when the poster will get into the UX, AI will then have four options. They can write a general comment, they can challenge the post. So we basically say we're going to challenge what they're saying. We can ask a question or just press it. So you can have a different strategy for different segment. Then the AI model will rank them up and then you will see the UI when you scroll down every post and the reply. You can edit the reply if you want, but then just in comment.
Eric (19:27.658)
And then you can comment on 30 people in five minutes a day that you want to talk to. Then furthermore, what we have done is you can choose to add them to an automation. After the comment, you can assign an automation six hours, two days, send them a connection request, AI based, and then follow up messages mentioning the post. And then it's fully automated. Now, Eric, you know who Yesper is because I made two, three comments as questions. You engaged with me and now you get a connection request from me. Now you know who Yesper is.
And this is how you may create connections in 2024. You just basically created a robot that's you, that what you were doing at Dell, that you could pick up on the sentiment or the tone of the post and decide how to respond based on whatever the message or the content is. That's what we're doing. So we want to make it so natural. And if you look at some sales gurus like John Barrows and others, they're so afraid of AI because sales coaching will be replaced by it. So they're peeing the pants. So they will...
constantly talk bad about it. And then the paper sales loft and Outreach, the two major VC-backed companies in space, and they would always talk bad about innovation that doesn't drive business to them. So he recently posted a lot about comments on LinkedIn. I do agree with him, that there's some platforms that don't have very well-written prompts. So whatever comments come out are really bad and kind of generic. We don't do that.
It has to resonate. So when you read it, you will think that I wrote it. Otherwise we will not do it at all because then they have no desired outcome. A desired outcome is that you and I have a conversation and you hopefully become a customer. If I have enough pain that I'm solving for you. Obviously, if you sell a vitamin, it's pretty hard to sell. As long as you sell a painkiller and somebody has a pain, then you have a customer. Or are reluctant to try new tools.
because they think that, oh, that's going to be hard to figure out or to learn or to use. Can you walk us through what the onboarding is like and how quickly it is? Like how many hours would it take for somebody to learn how to use the platform, get some sort of campaign set up and start seeing some results? Are we talking here like days or are we talking hours? So you're mixing two things up. Onboarding to results are very hard to say because some
Eric (21:50.422)
Companies have a sales cycle that are 12 to 18 months. Some companies have a sales cycle that is one day. So if we take those two buckets out and differentiate that, I will say when you do outbound, you should always expect 30 to 90 days to see some results because you might not have the right pitch, you might not have the right ICP that you're targeting. And one major mistake people are doing is they don't go really account.
So what we do is we always recommend to go account-based. So I'll give you an example. Back in 2016, Makero, they joined us as a customer. The European sales team, all in Europe were using sales tools back then, which is the man today. And I spent time with Makero with the VP of sales for Europe and to understand their process. So I'll give you an example. When I have a startup coming, they will send to the CEO, CIO, an email. Don't get a reply.
Maketo, they will take, let's say from Luke Tong Group, Hennessy and Moe, they were targeting back then because I've seen it. They will take within that organization, everybody in marketing because somebody have a need and they'll reach out to 60 people, not just two, not just five, but 60 people. And we're talking about Maketo. That's what they did in 16. And that worked for them. They were booking meetings because, you know.
I worked with private equity firms and fundraising, and when they reached out to funds, they will find somebody within the firm saying, oh, we're not focused in this area, while somebody else replied back, hey, this is interesting. This is exactly what I'm looking into right now. Can we have a meeting? Different personas, different replies. That's why you should go very broad. Secondly, when you do sales, you should segment your personas. So when I'm doing sales with demand.
I'm looking at the end user, I'm looking at the decision maker, and my champions. So I'm targeting three types of people, but multiple within an organization. And I'm having a different script for each persona. So I'm having three different scripts I'm using with AI to reaching out because the SDR, if I'm sending to them, they care about how this makes them more efficient and can have more meetings because that's what they're paid for. The AI cares about how you can better follow up.
Eric (24:04.45)
how you can reach into some hardware accounts. While the VF of sales care about how the team does it. So you can see the communication between the three to get a reply would be different. This is the fundamental mistake people are doing. One form of communication. And then the too few people and they don't segment them. You need to dissect your persona. So to come truly back to your question, once you've done that, you get started demand, just putting your credit card for your trial.
Couple of minutes, you integrate your LinkedIn, your email that takes maybe one, two minutes. Then you can take a template, your automation's up and running. You can assign automation. If you already have some scripts that you're using or some idea of what you're communicating, we have a script library you can use. Anywhere from 20 minutes, you can build an automation. Then you can create a sales navigator, a lead list. You can subscribe that one, social selling. And then it takes about an hour to crawl them AI to run in.
comments, then in one hour you're fully up and running. It's not longer than that. Emails only or is it also emails and LinkedIn DMs? We do LinkedIn and emails. So you can combine. So you can send, for example, a connection request, then LinkedIn message, five minutes later it comes out an email, two days later LinkedIn message, five days later email. You can just sign it completely as you want. The second part is we can also see who is the person coming on the website, if they have talked to you or the company.
you can install a JavaScript on your website. And if you have in our network, the person, then we can identify this is Eric from innovators who laughs that came to your website, not just innovators who laugh. And it's particularly important if you have a large company coming in. For example, the Dell, if you sell to marketing, maybe you have 10,000 marketers worldwide, you never know who it is unless we identify the person. And now you can automatically reach out to John Doe, who came from Dell, because you know who they are.
So that's another added value that most people are missing out on. Because if you look at today's market, top of the funnel, who comes to your website, might not understand your value proposition, but you're solving exactly the pain, but because they come, your competitor explained it really well, they end up doing a trial there. Yeah. And then finally, tech tracker. This is actually cool. If tech tracker tracks about 8,000 technologies, it's like builtwith.com. Tech tracker.io and for tech tracker.
Eric (26:29.854)
You can set up an alert. So we use that every time somebody tried lead feeder. We get an alert into demand and go to LinkedIn to prospect the job titles, send an email saying, Hey, we noticed that you are trialing lead feeder, which is amazing. We love what you're doing. Wouldn't you like to know the person as well? You can try it in comparison to see who's better. It doesn't cost you anything.
And that is fully automated that you can do with demand. So imagine the capabilities with your competitors. If the technology is tracked, it can always be added. If it's a web technology, now you can have your competitor drive costs to click ads to the website, acquire a customer, and then you piggyback. It's really fascinating, especially from an account-based marketing perspective or anybody that's just trying to grow their business perspective. So if your job is in sales or an account-based marketing.
Aside from Demand Jesper, are there any other tools that you found very valuable for people in those positions?
That's a good question. I tend to say I drink more than champagne, but there are innovative companies out there and the market is constantly changing. If you ask me, and many years back, I've been clear that it's been amazing on data. They were quite a hot spot. They became ridiculously expensive. I think clay.com has done a good job, but again, they marketed like, this is an air table, then you can prospect on LinkedIn, you do all this. Yeah. But the fact is what the marketing like so simple takes about an hour or two to
put together for every campaign demand, you put a LinkedIn URL, hit start, and then everything is done for you. While with a competitor like Clay, you're going to spend an hour or two to three to do what we do in five minutes with us. So that's where I see some innovation that are really good, but it's just making it more complicated. We're trying to say, I'm a busy person, how can I make my life easy with an outcome? And from social selling, I have not seen a company doing that at the moment. We haven't seen anybody.
Eric (28:30.222)
doing it the way we have done it. Probably there will be a lot of copycats coming out there soon. I'm sure we saw that when we started with LinkedIn. That's the nature of business. The same if you have a coffee shop, suddenly there are many of them. Previously, you had a lot of success by posting in this forum for that first, that first product that you created. With demand, how have you grown and what different channels have you used to scale? What's been really successful so far and what hasn't worked? Jesper.
So what works really well is outbound. So we use our own product and then I would say referrals by customers who are blown away, that is the number one channel. We getting, I think I did some math on it. Every customer in average we get, they refer to two to three trials and, and in average, two of them become paying customers. So I'll say the number one is definitely how we treat the customers, how we work with them, how they're converting to send other people to us that create a tribe.
We're not a company that been so focused on community. I know that's become so popular over the years. I think it's overrated to be honest. I think it's, I think that whole community building approach is overrated. In my honest opinion. It's overrated. And I think fundamentally the people that spend time, if you're in sales, you spend time being out there in trenches and actually converting customers, not sitting into a community and watch. What is the newest trend? Yeah. That is the VP of sales.
He's supposed to set the trend. That's his job and you're supposed to execute it. I know it sounds harsh, but if you're an alien is the art trying to find the new easy way to do everything. Then you never have the full focus. And guess what? The guy next to you has a full focus. He's the one that get promoted. Unfortunately, even though you want to be the smarter one, that's often how it goes and I don't want to say it the wrong way, but I seen that over and over. He's currently doing an MRR right now. Are you.
At what level you add, you don't have to give this specific number amount, but I'm just trying to get an idea. Is it a hundred, 10,000 MRR or is it more than 50,000? So we never publicly talk about those numbers, but 2,000 and 20, 21 we did, or did we do 6.8 million profit. If you had a magic wand that could help you get to, let's just say 500 million in, in ARR.
Eric (30:59.082)
What would you do? What I will do a couple of things, probably one acquisition to bring in some synergies for cross-selling and then triple down on our sales team. In the end of the day, that is what drives growth and probably do a lot more in marketing to be more vocal and more public. I tend to be probably an introvert, focus more on the customer and the product.
delivering a world-class experience versus being out here like I'm doing today talking on the podcast. I really rarely do that. So probably we have to change that. And I would say the magic one is definitely marketing and sales. Probably one acquisition there would be. And then extremely hard work and discipline. And you're also going to be really looking at your cackle all the time because you can raise all the money in the world and acquire customers, but you've got to make sure you don't have...
churn because then it's you poop. You're going to, you're going to have the hockey stick. And then in our space, you can do 500 because zoom in for approving it. We need to be stronger on the data side of it. Working on that to have direct mobile numbers and validate and find way more emails than we do today and those small processes can be that magic wand enabling the rest of the team.
So take it even further. All right. I've got some rapid fire questions for you. Just give me the first thing that pops into your mind. Are you ready? Jesper? I'm ready. All right. What's something that most people do not know about you. They're not going to see this on your LinkedIn profile. I'm a very honest person to be honest. I'm somebody who speaks my mind, say things the way they are. And I love playing golf and love running. And then I care really about being a good father and a husband. And I think those things you wouldn't find, but those would probably be the things out of my head.
And the most interesting thing that you've done in the past 26 days, Jesper. I was skiing last week. I went to Australia. But from work perspective, we did a lot of updates in the backend. The customers just see it because things run faster, but that has been significantly improving our business from the customer end. If you use it daily, you will definitely see the difference. And I think...
Eric (33:15.158)
That's a very important thing we accomplished. Question for you, the best advice that either your mom or dad ever gave you. I think my mom is about being honest and being good person while my dad is about relations, be a person who does what he or she says that is important because otherwise you're going to have a relation. I think when you deal with customers, if you tell them that you're going to launch a feature, you got to make sure you do it.
If you tell them that you're going to do XYZ, you're going to make sure they're able to do it. Because I see now market customers, they get so disappointed. They keep coming from other competitors because they promised them the golden end of the rainbow, and the agencies promised them leads, but it doesn't work for them. But that's again, it's the honesty about it. And when I have an onboarding, I will advise them, I say, can I give you a rural advice here? And I will tell people how I see it and help them.
you should be able to take it. And I think that's something that I've taken and then work on. Fill in the blank. I grew up in blank and my favorite thing about that city is blank. I grew up multiple places. So I grew up in a small city in Denmark in a very safe place where I could bike to school these days is unless you're in Switzerland, it's really rare. You can bicycle. And I think living back, they gave me a very safe childhood.
It's a city called Skilskjø, they don't even have a traffic light by the water. Just to give you an example. And I think if you look at Rocket internet, Oliver Somewhere, very famous for, probably got famous for cloning a lot of companies. He did some speeches and he was going, who grew up on a farm, who grew up in the country side? He goes, my prediction is you're going to be more successful than the one growing up in the city is because you have more hunger and kind of, I can relate to that then later on in life.
I lived north of Copenhagen, I would say, in almost a richer ghetto where everybody was doing extremely well. A guy from a class, his father built a radar system. So when you have the wars going on right now, he invented the Doppler radar. So that guy, he runs that today. So when you have anti-missile defense system, it's that technology, for example. That's quite interesting to see where they're taking to. But that was the network you will get when you live in a more prosperous area versus when I grew up.
Eric (35:40.658)
Everybody wanted to be a construction worker and when he went to high school, and I was like, I want to do better. This is boring for me. They just wanted to drink and party. So I would say where you are early on at a stage in your life that also helps you get on the right track, I believe. It was one of the main decisions why we moved here, our kids here from, from the States, or at least from Houston specifically. Okay, everybody. This is Jesper from.
Demand, I'm going to put links to Jesper's LinkedIn profile as well as the Demand website. Jesper, thank you for coming on the show today. It was a pleasure and good to see you again, Erik. Yeah, good to see you. We'll have to do this in person. For everybody listening, if you enjoy the show, hit subscribe, tell others about it, and you can get the show notes and find out who the next guests are if you subscribe to my newsletter at inno This is Erik signing off until next week. Thank you.