This summer I joined the product marketing team of Estonia’s up and coming startup & Superangel portfolio company — KOOS (“together” in Estonian), a stakeholder incentivisation platform.
KOOS is founded by tech visionaries and backed by VCs like LocalGlobe and Plural VC, among other prominent angels like the CEO of Veriff and Bolt. They offer flexible, equity-like benefits to non-employee contributors of business growth, without the complexity or hassle of shareholder schemes. A new form of ownership likely to shape how businesses interact with their most valuable contributors.
As an advisor, first adopter, community member or a valuable supporter, you can develop almost like your own portfolio of companies that you’re proud to be part of and contribute towards:
My main goal was to remind myself of the main challenges and opportunities that early-stage companies face. I spend a lot of time with many startups but I really wanted to deep-dive into one. By doing so, I can be more relevant to Superangel startups and rethink how we work with our teams. I achieved exactly that and I’m elaborating on the key challenges and good practices that I picked up from KOOS.
🤝In addition to being an investor, Superangel is a client. That meant I got to develop our own strategy (we tokenised 5% of our carry) whilst providing feedback to KOOS team as a customer
👫 Epic team — KOOS was co-founded by Taavi Kotka, the first Chief Tech Officer (if you will) of the entire country, alongside several other serial entrepreneurs + domain experts
🏄🏼♀️ The trend that KOOS is riding on — a new form of ownership (i.e. engaging and rewarding the very people that drive business growth) & how the concept is leveraged by businesses is intriguing (more on that below)
*As a side note, the gender balance in the team is one of the best I’ve seen!
I was most worried about whether two-months is enough to fully onboard to the company and start providing value. I know that as a small team, onboarding someone new takes a significant amount of time and effort. So I definitely felt the pressure to deliver.
The first step of becoming relevant … was to sit and listen :’) I was a silent listener to all relevant meetings and also sat down with product marketing, customer support and sales teams individually to learn about their biggest challenges. I then went on to read the materials that the teams had put together for positioning, brand development, sales etc. Thanks to that I was able to get up to speed rather quickly. It can also be useful to reflect what you heard back to the team — a fresh perspective can go a long way.
Two months flies by so quickly you can barely scratch the surface if there are no defined goals (ooh, isn’t this true with everything?!). So we set realistic (and somewhat measurable) goals and worked up from there. For example, we agreed that by the end of two months, I’d at least have interviewed 3–4 clients and drafted the first playbook of implementing the KOOS token program. It would serve as an input for putting together sales & onboarding collateral to minimise team’s input and empower clients to use the product the most impactful way. Easier said than done.
The goal of customer interviews was to map out all the challenges our clients faced so that we could provide better, proactive support. I also wanted to understand if there are smart hacks that they’re doing that could benefit others. Lastly, I wanted to clearly understand their use case and need for KOOS.
In an ideal world, your clients all say the same thing and you know exactly what to focus on. The reality is probably different.
KOOS has many different customer profiles (marketplaces, startups, B2B) with varying use cases (referrals, community building, supply motivation). The resources and expertise that these teams have also varies, which means the level of support KOOS needs to provide differs.
It’s an ongoing process in which you just need to continue gathering data until there’s enough for pattern recognition. Maintaining an open mind and embracing that you don’t have rock hard truths at this moment is OK. You can, however, start forming loosely held hypotheses and use new data to either strengthen or lose them. That’s what we did. The product marketing team took the data I had gathered and formulated their initial thesis.
Anyyyyhow, from my conversations with clients, I started putting together a manual or a playbook of implementing the KOOS token system internally. I wrote down what I knew and didn’t know (it’s a messy document — I sent out my warnings before handing it over). For that, I also did some heavy research on communities, community-led businesses, shared ownership, tokenisation, marketing & brand development etc.
Shared ownership & tokenisation:
Community capitalism & post-marketing era: Podcast & Blog — Discusses how Web3 affects marketing (i.e. — ads are not the future)
Community:
Aside from my own activities, I was fully immersed in the everyday life of a startup. It was refreshing to see what are the actual challenges from the inside rather than having the VC glasses on.
I think these challenges boil down to two main things: operations / communication and focus.
When things are so hectic — e.g. you’re hunting for your first customers whilst trying to understand who are the best ones, each week someone onboarding to the company, opening up new markets, figuring out positioning & messaging, launching a new website etc. — it can be challenging to ensure important topics don’t fall off the table and that information is equally available for everyone.
In an early phase like that it’s likely that you don’t have efficient processes set up for data collection & sharing, and communicating between the teams (or in the early stage, individuals). There are overlapping conversations and topics, combined with opinions and ad-hoc brainstormings. This creates noise and it’s not unusual to feel overwhelmed.
At this point, maintaining focus is the most important, and hardest, thing to do. Learning fast is of utmost importance, which is why you really have to choose your battles. The issue is not a lack of ideas, it’s saying no to most things (but not to the right things 😅).
It’s soooo easy to be drawn into a new thread of conversations and go down the rabbithole or start brainstorming ALL the good things that should be there or happen. OK… but let’s focus and come back to the thing that moves the needle the most, right now.
As Taavi put it, the goal is to be a bit smarter than last week.
This little chaos was okay for me because I fully trusted the team to figure it out. So here are the good practises that I really liked about how the team thought and worked.
KOOS used https://www.g2.com to narrow down to 3 relevant categories but realised that with each of them they need to do more explaining why they’re different than to emphasise on their strengths. So category creation was the only way to go (and the way Pirjo did it was impressive but unfortunately not scalable to other startups — so try to find your own Pirjo 😜)
I took a lot from only two months and came back with a much clearer understanding of what we as VCs can do to help support companies like these on a very fast-moving journey.
Thanks KOOS for being so welcoming & fun to work with! Now go and talk to their team how your business could accelerate growth through stakeholder incentivisation!