Episode 13: Scaling Startups and Redefining Remote Work with Sondre Rasch
Welcome to the Remote Business Growth podcast! In this episode, host Paul Urwin speaks with Sondre Rasch, co-founder of SafetyWing, about his journey from working as a policy advisor in the Norwegian government to building startups that support the global remote workforce. Sondre shares his experiences founding Superside, a freelance platform, and SafetyWing, which provides a global social safety net for remote workers and digital nomads. This insightful conversation dives deep into the challenges and strategies involved in building and scaling businesses in the digital age.
Key Takeaways:
- The Entrepreneurial Journey: Sondre discusses his transition from government work to entrepreneurship, highlighting his motivations and the initial challenges he faced.
- Building SafetyWing: Learn about the inspiration behind SafetyWing, a company that aims to provide health insurance and income protection for remote workers globally.
- Navigating Y Combinator: Sondre reflects on his experience with the renowned startup accelerator, Y Combinator, and how it shaped his approach to product development and growth.
- Growth Strategies and Scaling Challenges: From acquiring early users through AdWords to leveraging word-of-mouth and an ambassador program, Sondre explains how SafetyWing grew sustainably.
- The Three Phases of Startup Growth: Sondre outlines the “DIY Stage,” “Adolescent Stage,” and “Scaling Stage,” offering valuable insights on how to handle the unique challenges at each stage.
- Vision for the Future: Sondre shares SafetyWing’s future plans, including launching a membership product that offers comprehensive benefits and protections for remote workers.
Connect with Sondre Rasch:
- Website: SafetyWing
- LinkedIn: Sondre Rasch
Closing Thoughts:
Paul wraps up by reflecting on the value of remote work and digital nomadism, emphasizing the importance of support systems for this new era of the global workforce. If you’re interested in building remote teams or scaling your business, visit There Is Talent.
Here is the full transcript:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
remote work, business growth, Sondre Rasch, Safety Wing, digital nomads, Y Combinator, startup challenges, product development, customer acquisition, growth strategies, team management, legal challenges, scaling phase, user experience, membership product
SPEAKERS
Sondre Rasch, Paul Urwin
Paul Urwin 00:01
Welcome to remote business growth. Your go to source for all things remote work and business growth. Join us as we delve deep into the strategies, insights and success stories that will help you thrive in the remote work landscape. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a remote team leader, or simply curious about how to grow your business, this podcast is your gateway to unlocking your full potential. So get ready to embark on a journey of innovation and success. Hey there, Paul here, and welcome to episode 13 of the remote Business Growth podcast. How you doing this week? I hope everything is going well. I hope your remote work is going well, and I hope you’re considering some of the amazing possibilities that working remotely or building remote teams bring. So just yeah, lots of opportunities out there, and that’s what we like to talk about on this show. If you’d like to find out more about building remote teams or hiring a virtual assistant or remote specialist for your organization, then head on over to www dot, there is talent.com that’s www dot, there is talent.com right? Let’s get cracking today. I’ve got a very special guest, and his name is Sondre Rasch. So this, this podcast episode. I’ve recorded hundreds of podcast episodes, and this, honestly, is just one of the best I just absolutely loved it. I loved the style that that Sondre has and how he takes us through some of his thought processes as he, as he builds startups, as he creates those, those startups, I think was just for me. It was just fascinating, really revealing he’s, he’s just a really smart guy and just just a wealth of information in this episode. If you’re looking, if you’re interested in that, that thought process as of how to actually go about creating and scaling a startup, then this is, this is the episode for you. As I said, I just think it’s really, really brilliant. So let’s get cracking with Sondre. Sondre Rasch, a former policy advisor in the Norwegian parliament, is the co founder of safety wing, a company dedicated to building a global social safety net for remote workers and teams. His vision is to create a country on the internet offering citizenship as a service regardless of your location. The idea for safety wing originated from his previous venture, superside, a freelance platform he co founded in 2016 recognizing the need for benefits and income protection for freelancers. Sondre took the initiative to build these solutions himself when none existed. Both companies were supported by Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator that provides seed funding and membership to early stage companies. Sondre, welcome to the show. Thank you. Paul, great to be here. Yeah, no. Great. Great to talk about anything related to remote work. And today we’re going to be talking about, well, among other things, insurance for remote workers. But before we get to that, Sandra, tell us a little bit about you and your entrepreneurial journey and how you got to where you are today, please.
Sondre Rasch 03:11
Yeah. So I started my career working for as a policy advisor for the government of Norway. Well, I had some as a teenager, some entrepreneurial dabbling as well. Yeah, when I started sort of web hosting company in my room, but later got interested in policy and politics, and so I worked there for a bit, and it was there that I felt, you know, a bit disillusion with the pace of change and government and so, yeah, left to fund startup with my friend from school, Frederick, and we started Freelancer platform, super side.
Paul Urwin 04:00
Okay, that sounds, that sounds, that sounds great. And you make it sound, you know, sort of like it was a smooth transition, and very easy to do. I’m always interested in these transitions. I mean, how did you actually come up, come up with that idea? How did and then, how did you actually take the plunge? Was it was that difficult to go through? Yeah.
Sondre Rasch 04:21
I mean, it was, I should say, I always had a hunch that I probably would start a I wanted to start a technology startup, yeah. So it was like it was in the back of my mind, and I was for a long time looking for a way, but it was still hard. In particular was hard because I was comfortable. So my job was really pleasant. It was quite meaningful, policy advisor. We, I kind of like, got this, you know, it, it felt meaningful and important. I also had a super, like, flat. Flexible place. I lived in a nice part of town. I worked to work along the ocean there in Oslo. Yeah, it was just, it was a really pleasant situation, yep, and, and I had, like, a career there, right? So I was giving that up. And so I come across this idea of the digital nomad idea a few years before, so I knew that, oh, it’s possible, if I get, like, some kind of freelance income, that I can sort of sustain myself while starting my startup. Yeah, if I live in somewhere cheap, like Berlin. Berlin was much cheaper back then. This is continuous, yeah, you could live, you could live in like, $500 a month in Berlin, if you really, okay, yeah, yeah. So anyway, that was, that was roughly the plan. So I started thinking ahead at the time. It was also like developing, you know, exploring a few different ideas and and on the way discover and a few different people I might start something with. And it is just one of those days come up the idea that I’m and then talk with Frederick about it, and very sold on this and it the partnership really works out. Our cooperation works. And yeah. So then I sort of just start planning this day where I was going to quit my job and become a digital nomad and work full time on my startup, yeah. And I think I did that, like, six months ahead of the date and and in between, then I’m registering an Upwork. I’m trying to see if I can get some freelance gigs, like on the weekends and stuff. Yeah, yeah, and, and I do so I get this economics writing thing, and, and, yeah, that the time comes and goes. I should add there’s one part to the story. Right before this. It’s like December. So this is 2015 so in December, 2014 I remember I went to the cinema and watched this movie, Walter Mitty. Okay, Walter Mitty. And there’s such a great scene in the movie, because at this point, my mind is churning on this idea, like, should I quit my job and just go full time on my startup, yeah, yeah. But, and, and there’s some part of that that seems very stupid and irresponsible, because of course I would earn any money. Yeah, yeah, they have bills. So I recall there was the scene in that movie where he’s like, pursuing this person, and weirdly finds himself in Iceland, and there’s this moment where, in order to pursue this one path, there is this helicopter pilot who’s really drunk, who’s getting into his helicopter, and then he’s like, playing the song by David boy, I’m blanking on the name, and He’s sort of running after and jumping into the helicopter. Into the helicopter. And I just found, like, I was like, yes, that’s exactly what this feels like, yeah, like, not like bold, just like, really stupid, like, very unclear reward at the end of this, yeah and, and definitely high risk, and actually likely to go badly. Yeah, reckless way, yeah, but still anyway. So, so, yeah, so. And then I said this date, decided to do it, try to get this freelance job, tried to reduce my costs. So I came across this idea about increasing your personal runway, able to save up, like, I think it was 10, 15k Yeah, which is not that much. But by the idea was, if you reduce your runway, your cost, monthly cost, a lot, that can still give you a lot of runway, okay, yeah, yeah. And then this, this freelance income, and then today comes, and then I quit, and still is quite a while away before I can pay myself anything from my startup, and I’m not expecting Yeah, so yeah. So that’s kind of how the transition goes. And then I quit, and then there’s a few months of like honeymoon, and then, unfortunately, what happened was that it kind of worked out quite quickly, because we applied to Y Combinator in October and got in, yeah. And after that, it’s, it’s like, just, it’s a bit of a rocket ship. So, so yeah,
Paul Urwin 09:29
what was that experience like? Then, amazing, I guess,
Sondre Rasch 09:32
getting into Y Combinator, yeah, yeah. Well, so we, I applied, right when the day we had the idea I applied, and that was because somebody had told me that it’s a good way to think through your idea. So I applied, having zero chance, expectant to to get in. I just as a way to think through the idea. But I had a plan, and then I applied again, like six months later, and then I was hoping to. In, and I put a lot of work into it, yeah, and then we didn’t get in, and then the last time I applied, which is like another so that’s in October. I do not think we will get in fact, a co founder was like, angry at me for even applying. So actually wrote the whole thing in 20 minutes. Turns out, later, I realized, after having, like, helped many other people with their applications, I realized that that was why we got in, because I wrote it in this, like, very concise, but that that looks just very clear and confident, actually, from the other side. Yeah. Well, you work a lot with the application, you tend to get lost in your own world, and it becomes these like huge walls of text that so much work to understand. So anyway, then we did think it in and now that was a joy. I mean, that was when we moved to San Francisco. You know, it’s, it’s an amazing place. Y Combinator, very unique place in the world. You meet these, you get this peers, right? It’s kind of first day of school a bit. So, yeah, and you’ve really learned quickly, like, immediately, I’m sort of just noticing whole areas where I’m like, Oh, we’re doing this in a very amateurish way, and I didn’t know, yeah, just by looking like, literally looking on like, oh, what’s in your computer, you know, like, just literally seeing what some other people are doing, I’m able to lift various pieces up to a higher level. But yeah, the intensity is also probably the most like thing focus on intensity, pre and post Y Combinator. The focus is, I don’t know what’s important. So to give you an example of a thing I wasted my time on, is like, using some kind of accounting SaaS to do, like the accounting myself. That’s one example. Another is like, endless research on, like, best kind of customer service. Essentially, it’s like, I don’t know what’s important, so I put a lot of effort into many things, okay, later, I learned none of that matters. Most of those things only matter if you succeed. Yeah, so you should just, like, go with the the default. You can change it later, but, but until you have a product, as they would say, like, people want that really doesn’t matter, like you’re not going to do any accounting because you have no customers. Yeah,
Paul Urwin 12:48
yeah. So what does so? What does matter? Then
Sondre Rasch 12:55
the thing that matters the most is it’s just at that stage is just the product, making something that at least one person want, that makes them people want. So, yeah, like the and it really is true, like, I really changed this the next company. It’s just focusing on making a product and then making that one, one or 10 customers happy. And you can acquire those people manually, so you don’t have to make a growth channel. That’s another thing we did erroneously. Was that way before we had really delivered any kind of even halfway acceptable user experience, we had put a ton of time into learning how to scale AdWords acquisition.
Paul Urwin 13:38
Yeah, yeah.
Sondre Rasch 13:39
But someone who has done that before, can tell you is that when you do that before you have a product halfway worth selling, all of those customers are gonna, even if you figure it out, they’re gonna try it and then they’re gonna leave, which they, you know, did. So it’s very painful. It’s much better to first try the customer, have some user make and then when you observe them essentially recommending their product to friends in second company, Safeway, that’s when we said, aha. Now this is ready to scale. Now it’s worth Okay, so tell me a little bit more about what super side was doing at that point the service or how it worked, basically, yeah, so it’s a little bit different from today, although most of it is to how it works is quite similar. So one of the observations was this idea that I had both worked on Upwork and used Upwork, and I knew that the difference between using like a Norwegian agency and like an Upwork was large, and that I there was this different in quality and speed as well. So the thought was like. We sort of take that Freelancer economy and curate and quality control and package it in a way so that it could be very useful for companies that was sort of the base idea, and that also later got very, of course, in love with this idea of freelance, online freelancing, and so I also was kind of idealistically motivated to make it work. Yeah, those were two of the main sources of motivation. And so the difference from, say, Upwork is that it was curated, meaning that we actually hired like We almost ran it like an agency, in some sense, but it was software and sort of decentralized to get into. That’s one difference, curated, yeah. And the other difference is teams that we were quality controlling, so everything was run by teams with a project manager, that project and yeah, that the deadlines were met. And yeah, so, and in the beginning we thought this could just this model could just be any type of labor, so it was, in a way, even larger than today in terms of scope. Okay, yeah. But later, we figured out that we were particularly good at design, okay, yeah, and, and that we were also quite better with working with the larger company. So if you go today on Super side, it’s this, but they’ve just, and I say they now because, you know, I’m a shareholder, but I’m not part of the running. Yeah, yeah, it’s they’ve just become amazing at design. Now there’s like the real companies, like 1000 employees or something. It’s and, and, yeah. And they have customers, like every major Silicon Valley company, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and, yeah, and they have these like side teams, so that they can scale up very quickly and and have this flexible pool, kind of like you would an agency, but more in the sort of Freelancer platform price range,
Paul Urwin 17:15
yeah, Yeah, amazing, yeah, nice, nice concept, that isn’t it.
Sondre Rasch 17:22
Other was nice. I’m glad you pulled it off. I mean, actually, I’m not. It’s probably,
Paul Urwin 17:26
it’s probably more brilliant than nice, to be honest. But
Sondre Rasch 17:30
I would say nice. I would say nice is the right, right word, actually, yeah, it’s a lot of work. Yeah. And then, of course, that led me to start safe, to win.
Paul Urwin 17:44
Okay, so what? So I’m interested there. So you’ve got, you got super side. It’s obviously working really well, you know, you’ve, you’ve achieved the dream in in many senses. You know, you’ve, you’ve gone from you’ve, you’ve actually executed your plan, and it completely worked out. And you got into Y Combinator, and you’ve got this company. It’s really six it’s really successful, and then you decide to move on to something else. So what’s going through your mind at that point? Why? Yeah, why? Why did you not continue down that path, the first path,
Sondre Rasch 18:15
very similar situation to the to the first gap there, actually, in the sense that I was very happy where I was, and even more so, in some sense, than the than the government, than the policy advisor, yeah, situation, and it took me a long time. So it was already early 2016 that I discovered the idea of safe doing, and it was like this. So imagine we have this platform. There’s a bunch of freelancers on it. We ask them questions, you know, because we want to have a joyful and productive team and and so we learn that not have having very variable income and and all the risks associated with that, including not and not having what in the US you would call benefits, you know, often not having health insurance or qualifying for certain national programs. Yeah, big problem. It’s a big problem. Yeah, and so and both of me, me and my co founder, had this sort of background in policy, politics, we were interested in this. And so we we first look into like, oh, maybe we could, like, offer something on the platform. And we worked a little bit on that, and we quickly concluded, like, it’s too much of a side quest, like just setting this up is so much work, and we have to make this main product work like that’s that’s hard enough. It has to be its own company. So for a year, I actually went around to my friends and I’m like, You know what? You should start a global social safety net for online freelancers. Yeah. Yeah, and nobody wanted to do that. Okay? One person almost did it, yeah? So essentially, it’s like a year later, and I’m like, dang, nobody’s gonna start this. Yeah? So I definitely have this sense of like, wow, we we got to do something, because this is important, and even though it’s still I had some self awareness that we were early, and that working on the internet was early, so I sort of knew that the problems we were observing was going to affect a lot more people later, and also had a self awareness that the kind of thing we’re thinking about is gonna take a long time to build. So yeah, so I just so that was the sort of pull of it. So yeah, we’re that whole year. This is kind of going in the back of my mind. Someone has to do this, and in the end, decided to do it ourselves. At first, it was almost like a spin off from Super side. On some shares later, we did a switch. So when we realized, okay, this is going to go as an independent company, but obviously superside is one of our biggest customers. I mean, we’re building it for superside, and we work very well with them. Yeah, yeah, but yeah. So, so that was how it began. So yeah, in the end, decided then to start working the summer of 2017 and and like for real, when safe to win. Also did Y Combinator in spring of 2018, Okay,
Paul Urwin 21:45
excellent, excellent, and you have like, so, so what? So? What services are you providing under safety wing,
Sondre Rasch 21:57
right? It’s sort of essentially health insurance, yeah, travel medical insurance for digital nomads and remote teams. Yeah. So it’s really interesting in the sense that you have, you have no background in that. You had no background in that at that point. Is that correct, or did That’s right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’m interested in your thought process then. So, I mean, first of all, I think it’s, I think it’s great that you show that you’re able to do these things. Yeah, obviously, you’ve got a great background. You’ve got a really, you know, a really strong CV up to that point, not that, not that you have a CV, but you’ve got a really strong, you know, startup history. But, you know, it’s interesting. What goes through your mind that you, it doesn’t phase you that you you didn’t know anything about that area. What’s your process for tackling a new area? Because I suspect you’re probably again, yeah, no, I suppose I do have a process. My process is based on a belief that I’m sure many have heard in this sort of motivational poster literature, which is that I think it’s a Steve Jobs quote that says something like the world was built by people not no smarter than you. And I really discovered that in politics like you, you when you’re not there, you see, like the prime minister on TV or something, you’re like, Yeah, I get so distant from you. And like, how’s that even possible to know that much? And then you kind of come up close, and what you see is, like, very normal people improvising based on little notes they were told right before again and again, and it’s not that hard. And I had that experience some time again where things that seemed scarily complex, I had similar experience with computer science, but from the outside. And then once you get into it, it’s like, it’s not that it’s not that hard, actually. And these are completely normal people thinking completely normal ways, and often improvising is just amazed how much of our world is improvid. So, yeah, so it kind of comes down to this. It’s like, it’s probably not that hard, and it seems hard, but that’s usually, usually, that’s because people have made up an insider language, yes, yeah. But once you decode those the lingo, what you find is typically quite simple. And yeah, I would say that that has been the case. Been the case. Of course it helps. You know, I’m not approaching it with pure arrogance here. It’s also a humility in the sense of like finding people who know and trying to learn. But yeah, what is making me not deterred is this idea that I can understand anything, and it’s probably not that hard. Yeah. Yes, yeah. So, you know, figure it out essentially, and yeah, and, and then just proceed.
Paul Urwin 25:12
Excellent, excellent. Okay, so, so you’ve, you’ve set up the company, and we mentioned this word earlier. I’d like to talk a little bit about growth now. So you know, once you’ve you’ve gone through all the proof of concept, and you’ve actually got something that’s working. You’ve got users, you’ve got feedback. So then you do start thinking about growth. How did, how’s that worked out? Or how have you managed that? I presume it’s worked out very well. But how do you go after growth in in your startups? Yeah,
Sondre Rasch 25:42
like, now, like, or should I tell like, a story?
Paul Urwin 25:46
Yeah, tell us a story. Tell us Yeah, yeah.
Sondre Rasch 25:51
Well, I mean, one story I already alluded to, you know, is the beginning of first company, super side? Yeah, one thing I think we really got right was and which was not on purpose, but in retrospect, it is the thing that saved us. So I would, which is that we were just very reckless and very fast. We just all come with it. Implemented next idea. We wouldn’t dwell on things for even one day. And so that allowed that high energy, allowed us to have a, I think, a sharp learning curve. And otherwise we would have died along the way. I see now in retrospect, partly we did that, not out of thinking that that was clever or something. It was partly because we had such it was kind of for fun, like we didn’t expect to succeed, yeah. And I think was also dynamic between the me and my co founder, like, we’re both quick, so almost like, well, it can be quicker. Yeah, yeah, it was helpful. But yes, in the beginning, we’re just like coming up with ideas, trying them and almost nothing works. Some things, though, randomly work, and they are often opportunities that came out of the blue, but in retrospect, seem was very instrumental. One was the first customer we got with this, like global conglomerate called DN, DNV, probably the most conservative enterprise buyer in the world. It’s like a certification company with 100,000 employees. I just talked to, I just talked to someone at a party and talked about the idea, and I talked about it as if it was real. And there’s a lesson in that, by the way, and then they’re like, hey, that’s something we need, because we’re very frustrated with our local agency. Do you want to come and pitch to our communication director? And in order to do that, we had to literally invent the product. To invent, put it on the sales Yeah, to go and present it to them. That’s, that’s a trick I found later to be to be helpful. It’s not that you’re deceitful. It’s just that, yeah, you, if you think you can make it real, just talk about it as if it’s real and see if it’s good. Yeah, yeah, okay. And then, yeah, try a bunch of things, then, as mentioned, stumbled upon AdWords particular, yeah, and that’s dangerous. Everyone who tries AdWords has this following experience they started, and they’re like, hey, I can get customers for like, nothing here. And I think part of it, it may, I don’t be conspiratorial, but I suspect AdWords may be subsidizing their early users a little bit kind of like getting you hooked on the drugs, yeah. But even if they aren’t, it definitely is the case that there is this marginal utility where in the beginning you will have some adjacent keywords that are very unique to you and that are very low cost, but you run out of those very quickly, and then you enter it into like, high traffic, high competition, expensive keywords. They’re essentially public auctions. But anyway, we kind of put a lot of effort into this and figured out how to do that. And as mentioned, we figured out how to figured out how to do that before we really nailed our product to degree that when we get into Y Combinator, we are acquiring, like, when we’re digging, like, 20% growth a week during Y Combinator, wow, kind of like a hype company. That’s crazy. One of the people in the batch that like people talk to and like, they rolled out the sort of red carpet you know, to to like Jason arowitz and Sequoia and these people, we messed it up, but we walked in on a red carpet, and I. So and it was only really by the summer that our ability to occur in your customers starting to hit the same rate that they were opting out because the product isn’t that good, okay? And that resulted in a very painful time, because we didn’t understand what was happening. It took us a long time to understand what was happening. Now. What was happening is this, we put the cart before the horse, kind of thing with product and growth, yeah, but we didn’t. It took a long time to untie that not I also got a bit spooked, you know, from that whole process with performance marketing, I think it is quite oversold, partly because it is so easy, but there’s definitely something too, that you want to have a distribution like, it’s almost like you want to have a distribution idea similar to product idea, not that you have to reinvent things like sales fund or anything. You should definitely use timeless wisdom on those fronts. But, yeah, but if you, if you have nothing unique in distribution, you’re just going to end up in something like, after a long learning curve, you’ll be you’ll acquire customers at the same cost that some big companies, yeah, like, and that’s after a couple of years. Yeah, with safety wing, we took a completely different approach, where, well, one we said, we disciplined ourselves, and said we’re not going to acquire a customer before we observe in the wild. Now that actually happened real quick, but to this day, two thirds of our consumer growth is through word of mouth, impressive, and we also started another channel, which was an ambassador channel. And there we also, you know, had this reasoning about what makes someone buy something like first principles, thinking kind of and using our strengths, which was, I would say, brand like authenticity of what we were doing and software ability. And yeah, we were able to then create a growth channel, this Ambassador thing that really worked, and to this day, you know, is remains a third. Both of those were, were started out of the gate. So yeah, so that’s one way I approached this question, is to to think a bit like product, like try to find a unique thing, not to reinvent every wheel and that that is important, that’s a mistake I might do. Sometimes I might, because there are the timeless you should just have that one differentiator and then apply the rest of the existing knowledge. Yeah, yeah, but it is actually helpful to have a differentiated strategy. Also when it comes to distribution, yeah, I think that’s how I think about it now. As for scaling, you know, I, every month I tell somebody like, I can’t believe how little I know about it. After all these years, right? With safe doing we have 34 soon, million dollars in top line and super side, even more. But so you were to think I’d figure it out by now, but it’s very hard, and I feel like I’m dabbling in the basics. Still to this day, the logic is something like, do it one time and then do it 1000 times. That’s the that’s the rough idea. And, yeah, but, but in terms of executing that, that, that’s a complicated machinery, and I keep, keep stumbling, keep doing it wrong. For some reason, not that we’re not doing well. We’re doing very well, not a great trajectory, but, but behind the scenes is a lot of problem solving.
Paul Urwin 34:17
Would you say? Would you say Sondre that there’s, there’s different stages. So, you know, going from certain number of users, you know, from one to 50, from one to 100, for 100 to 1000, you know, etc. You know that. Did you notice particular stages along your your journey in either of those companies where you thought, well, hang on a minute. It should be, you know, we’ve already got to this point it should be easy just to double up and it, it wasn’t necessarily all or, how did that work for you? Like, did you encounter new, new barriers at different stages of the of the of the abortion? Um.
Sondre Rasch 35:00
There are definitely these kind of org barriers that are a bit curious. And this is funny, because this is a bit of a self inflicted wound, but I’ve done it twice. I know that it’s going to happen to like every company. It doesn’t actually happen on the revenue side. Well, that depends how your company, your product is formulated. Each product I’ve found has, like, unique pain, painful things about it. So with super side, it was this sort of operations of quality control and keeping deadlines on projects. Yeah, you can that causes a lot of pain. And also, I’m sure they’re still working on that this week. It’s continues to be hard. With safety wing. It’s a, it’s kind of a legal, regulatory, yeah, that is the, that is the perpetual challenge. Not that there’s not other things there are, but, but that’s like the one that is unique to the product. Yeah, yeah, being difficult. Um, so what? Okay, so there are two stages here. So one, there’s, this is the first time I think you through this. So bear with me. But here’s one framework I could sort of makeup on the go. There are three stages. Stage one is like, when you can do it yourself. It’s like the DYI stage of startups, and that’s a very good stage. Actually. It’s like that you have so and so number of customers and employees that anything that goes wrong, you can literally backfill that. It literally yourself. Yeah, yeah. You know, supersize case. It’s like some important clients. Project is completely off track and not hitting its targets. Guess what? I’m just, I’ll just literally do the project myself. That happened? Yeah, yeah. And, but that that doesn’t scale. There’s other things you can do the DYI stage right, which is, just forget about building a growth channel. Just ask some ask a friend. Do you want to try this product? That’s, that’s a that’s that that doesn’t scale, but you definitely should do it in the beginning, yeah, because you can go out and do that today. It’s not that hard. Anyone can do that, especially when you sell a product that doesn’t cost millions. It’s just, yeah, $30 like ours. Yeah. So the help that they do is, you know, giving you feedback and stuff. So, so that’s another one in the DYI stage, there is, you can definitely be very risk willing on anything, and you should be, if you’re not completely reckless, I would almost say you’re doing it wrong at that stage, because your number one risk is that nobody’s going to buy a product. And in a way, you have plenty of time to figure out anything else once you’ve solved that problem. So if you’re spending your time on anything else except making this a product people want to buy and keep using, you’re spending the time wrong. That would be something that really hammered in in Y Combinator like, Are you writing code and talking to users anything else? And if so, stop it, to building a product and talking to users. Okay, so that’s the way I stage. And then there is this, like weird middle stage, which is probably the most awkward, which is this building a company or building? Is building a company? Is it building a company? Stage? I’m not sure exactly what to call it, but you made a product. You’re observing it being growing organically in the wild. Yeah, it’s starting to be so many that you can’t do it yourself. So you have to hire more team members at this point, you typically have enough evidence that you can fundraise, you know, at least a seed round, etc, to help pay for those fires. And if, if you were to call something, maybe a good way to call it is like the adolescent stage, because it is awkward. The way teenagers are awkward, you sort of often like have to or feel like you should pretend like you’re a big company, but you’re not. Haven’t figured anything out, and each thing is a lot of trial and error. I am amazed. I. I struggled not to laugh thinking about how difficult that is to build a company, and it has to do with like figuring how to make a product team that works when you’re not doing everything yourself, making you know engineering work as you become more people than a couple, customer service. Each of these are universes of problem, solution. Learning that you gotta, you gotta learn each one of them. And it takes a while, and I don’t know how to shortcut it exactly. You have a lot of it. You have to learn, by by by by doing, unfortunately, so, so that’s like the adolescent phase, and the problems you experience in this phase is messing it up. Primarily, that’s the main thing you do here, is messing it up. And one of the top recent ways people max it out. One is like trying to co founder disputes fight over an imagineer pie that doesn’t exist unless you reconcile and find a way to lovingly co exist. Another is like raising a lot of money, increasing your costs a lot, and then running out of money and put shutting down the company, which wouldn’t have happened had you raised the money that happens all the time. Such a stupid way to die. Yeah. And, and then another is, like, pouring a lot of money, like, exactly the thing that I did, which is pouring a lot of money on your buying, you know, acquiring customers, which then churn, and then your story looked really bad. Would have looked good, had you? Yeah, had you been disciplined? So there are many ways to so, yeah. So, and then the third is, like the scaling phase. So you’ve kind of gotten through this. It takes at least 250 maybe even 100 people before you really out of this adolescent phase. And and and then you get into the third one, and this is here, there comes a new set of threats, this sort of scaling phase. So here what happens is that you start to hire more senior people. In the beginning, only starter people drawing because no one else is interested. But once you get past this adolescent stage, normal people start to apply to your jobs, and they have good looking CVS, however, they also think about things often. They come from big companies, and they think about it in that way, and they’re very risk averse, and they can often ruin your company. But the threat is, in a way, internal, so the solution is usually the same. Thing is just to be orient towards the user, right, to have everything else in service of a great user experience and product. But it’s very easy to have some things, especially the things that feel hard to argue against. I’m talking here, finance, law, security, right? These are topics where just the mention of the names and people are, like, scurrying away, like, yeah, yeah. It’s just hard, to hard to argue against and and they often, they have a lot of insider language, so it’s, it’s like, it’s almost like the peak boss of that thing I mentioned earlier, yeah, yeah. And so in a lot of companies, the user, you know, ends up playing a secondary or tertiary role on the priority list, while some of these internal forces take take the take the rain, and that can be that’s at least a challenge that you kind of have to work out. So you have to be able to but you still have to do it like you still have to become good at security. In our case, we have to be excellent at legal and regulatory. Yeah, yeah. You still have to be excellent of Finance to raise like, $50 million like we have so, so you can’t, you can’t ignore it either. But yeah, you sort of it’s, it’s a real challenge at this stage and and remaining lean and focused on the right things is very hard at that point, while also being able to work with people who have a lot of knowledge that you might need without taking away whatever is making your startup successful? Yeah. And I think this is another thing that people might not realize at this stage, is that the people who come in, they often think that average is good, but for a startup, average is deadly. Often they are. They only exist because they’re not ordinary. Extraordinary, the ordinary startup dies, yeah, the me. In startup die. So the ones that survive are extraordinary in some way. And often you don’t know exactly what that is. It can be a bit hard. Some it’s like a collection of things. Some are just errors, but some is like the thing that make you great. And I’ve seen multiple times, and in my own journey in both companies, we have at some point taken away that thing that made us great and had to put it back in. Okay, yeah, yeah, by simply optimizing and for new hires who come from other companies who notice that something is different and therefore propose you changed it to the way that they’re used to and but actually, that was the differentiator, yeah, work to begin with. Yeah,
Paul Urwin 45:47
there’s kind of a culture clash there, isn’t it? I find that fascinating, the sort of, you know, bringing in new people with a different background, but I guessing it needs to be managed very carefully, because you don’t want to lose your your essence, the thing that made you so special in the first place? Yeah, yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. Sandra, this has been an amazing, amazing conversation. Yeah, I’ve loved talking to you. I think we probably should wrap it up now, so I’ll just leave you with a couple of minutes just to tell us, like, where you are now and what your plan, you know, what’s happening right now, and where, where you’re sort of headed in the future. I’d love to hear that. And, and, yeah, you know, share, share your, your details and, and where people can find out more about safety wing or or anything else, please. But yeah, it’s been amazing, really, truly amazing talking to you today.
Sondre Rasch 46:42
Yeah, no, same. Really enjoy that you, you, you’re able to catch on to mundane details I’ve said 100,000 times and say, let’s go, let’s go further into that, that one. So yeah, right now we’re working on it’s such a joyful time in the company, because we’re out of the downturn. We’re in great shape. Team is happy, and we’re making so much headway. We’ve leveled up in a big way, in licenses. We can make our own global products. We’re working on the sort of membership product, which has been our vision thing. This sort of your membership, and you get not just health, but also health and income protection and sort of community. And we’re working actively on the MVP of what might become the passport and stuff as well with the nominate visas. So yeah, hopefully membership, and not too long we’ve agreed not to communicate any times, but in not forever from now, we will, we’ll have MVP of our membership out, and in the meantime, we’re also have some really cool, small product editions. I’m really thrilled about the kind of safety win card we’re sending out to the first testers right now, so that sometimes the hospital aren’t willing to bill us directly, so then you can use the safe to incur to pay for it, essentially. Okay, yeah, yeah. So we’re now introducing more of these, like, cool user experiences, and so I’m also quite thrilled about that, but yeah, that’s like, what’s on the horizon that we work with, and you can go to siet.com if you want to know more. If you’re a digital nomad or have a remote startup. For remote startup, definitely you can have great benefits for your whole team, regardless of their employers or contractors anywhere in the world, or if you’re a digital nomad embarking on that same adventure I was doing. It’s great. It’s great product. It’s made for you.
Paul Urwin 48:53
Perfect, perfect. Sondre, brilliant. Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and all of your your input today. Just Yeah, absolutely amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you, Paul.
Sondre Rasch 49:03
All right, all the best. Bye. So
Paul Urwin 49:04
I hope you enjoyed that one as much as I did. I thought that was truly amazing. Just packed with packed with really brilliant nuggets of information. Great advice in there. If you’d like to find out more about building remote teams, then head on over to www dot areas talent, and I’ll be back next week with a new episode. All the very best. Take care. Bye, bye. You.
