Omer (00:11.680)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Olaf Mathe, the co founder and CEO of Mixmax, a productivity tool for Gmail.
Mixmax lets you track emails, set up meetings, save time with email templates, and schedule emails to be sent later.
In this episode, you'll learn how frustration that Olaf and his co founders were experiencing helped them to come up with the idea for Mixmax.
We talk about why they created a product that solves a number of different problems such as email tracking, scheduling meetings, and so on.
Instead of going deep in just one area, we also look at how they launched the product and have grown it to over 10,000 customers and are currently doing over $5 million in annual recurring revenue.
And we also discussed some mistakes that the co founders made along the way and what they wish they had done differently.
I hope you enjoyed the interview.
Olaf, welcome to the show.
Olof Mathe (01:23.160)
Thanks for having me.
Omer (01:23.920)
Omer, what gets you out of bed every day?
What inspires you to work on your business?
Olof Mathe (01:28.840)
Well, I think there's probably a couple of things on kind of a day to day basis and even longer term, I mean, that's like the people I get to work with every day.
And then if you're looking for the literal what's the jolt that gets me out of bed?
That's probably Twitter and an espresso.
Omer (01:45.700)
Good combination.
Okay, so for people who aren't familiar with Mixmax, can you kind of, in your own words, describe what does the product do and what problem are you trying to solve?
For who?
Olof Mathe (01:58.900)
So Mixmax is a communications platform for people in sales and success.
And what we do is we help you automate your most common workflows.
And we do that by integrating across email, Slack, CRM, document signing products, and any SaaS product that you use.
And so one of our kind of flexibility flagship product is a chrome extension for a lot of your daily productivity or that helps automate a lot of the tasks you need to do in email, whether you're in sales, success, even recruiting.
And one very nice thing we do is we integrate with your calendar and kind of combine it with your email in a really nice way.
So if you want to set up time to meet someone, you can just in a keystroke type meeting will automatically put in times from your calendar that work for you.
And when someone taps on one of those times, the meeting is automatically set up.
So great example of how we take a workflow that's really cumbersome, 10 messages back and forth and just kind of automate it.
Omer (02:54.500)
And so who are your target customers?
Olof Mathe (02:56.660)
Mainly people in sales and customer success.
So that's account executives, account managers, customer success managers, SDRs, and people who have what I call like sales jobs to be done.
So a lot of our customers are small business owners or have roles at SMBs where they might not have sales sales in the title, but a lot of what they do on a day to day basis is kind of de facto sales related.
Omer (03:25.280)
The thing that sort of struck me about Mixmax was that it does a number of different things.
I mean there are tools out there that help you that focus just on scheduling or they help you to track emails and who reads them and you know, that kind of stuff.
Or there are tools out there that will help you create automation sequences and things like that.
But it sounds like you guys, the approach you took was to kind of bundle all of that functionality into one product.
Olof Mathe (04:01.170)
To a certain extent, yes.
Omer (04:03.330)
Why did you do that?
Why not focus on like one thing?
Olof Mathe (04:10.450)
To us, I think what drove us, and this perhaps gets a little bit philosophical, is just there's been so much innovation in how kind of what I would call makers build product or get get about their daily work at almost no innovation in terms of how what I would call closers do business.
So either people who build product or people who sell product.
And so our goal has always been to like kind of bring the same degree of innovation that makers have had to closers.
And so it's just kind of naturally felt that a lot of these products needed to be integrated.
And one of the reasons why life is hard for people in customer facing roles is that they have to deal with 5 to 10 to 15 disparate solutions that don't talk between themselves.
And so there are a lot of benefits when you can actually combine some of this functionality on something like calendaring.
Once you've set a meeting, you want automated reminders for that to be sent in a certain way.
And perhaps not just through email, but perhaps through text or perhaps when people book meetings with you, you want to be notified in Slack about that, or you need these meetings sync to some kind of CRM or perhaps when a document gets signed, you want to notify your team about that in a public Slack channel, something like that.
So I think there are a lot of benefits when these products get combined.
Omer (05:33.520)
Yeah, I agree.
I think there are A lot of benefits there.
I'm curious whether you find that there are also a lot of challenges with, with doing that.
Like do you have people who like take one feature, like I don't know, like the calendar and scheduling and maybe look at, you know, other products in the market that only do calendar and scheduling and then come back to you and constantly kind of asking for more and more.
And does that make it harder for you?
Because essentially you guys are building multiple products that are sort of obviously integrated together.
Yep.
But it kind of feels like it could potentially be an incredibly demanding place to be because you got to make sure that each one of these sub products are just as good as somebody who's focusing on just that product.
Olof Mathe (06:23.780)
Yeah, I think this is like a classic question in like business and for products overall.
Right.
And so what's our bet at Mixmax?
Well, our bets that we create a product experience that's just so, so natural and delightful that you want these different use cases to be speaking together and integrated together.
I think this actually mainly comes up with very, very big companies.
So if you're an SMB, huge benefits to have just what you need in like one comprehensive platform, pay for one product, know it all works together.
If you're a really big company, that might not be as important.
You might just want the very best solution in the market for thing X.
That typically happens the more upmarket you go, whereas Mixmax is more of an SMB mid market product.
So I think it depends a little bit on what segment you target, I'd say.
Omer (07:16.680)
So let's go back to pre2014 before you launched this business.
Where did the idea for Mixmax come from?
Olof Mathe (07:26.680)
Mixmax started with kind of just a general frustration with the paucity and lack of innovation communications products, I think.
And perhaps we were a little bit less focused on customer facing roles per se back then and more focused just on, hey, it's crazy that you know when you want to talk to someone outside of your team, generally you're like stuck with email or a phone call or a text message kind of modes of communication that haven't evolved for literally 20 years.
And so we decided first of all to focus on email.
And it was just striking to us that hey, email's kind of fundamentally, they're just under the hood, they're just like web pages.
How come the web has evolved so much whereas email has remained stagnant?
And we discovered that there's actually a lot you can do to give messages superpowers and by themselves and make them rich Interactive, expressive, and have them potentially even update like webpages do.
And so, yeah, giving people more kind of expressive potential in their email was the.
Was the starting point for the product and business, which obviously has evolved so much since.
Omer (08:33.799)
Was this a kind of a.
Were you trying to scratch your own itch or was this an idea that you.
An opportunity you saw and kind of, what did you do next to figure out if people were willing to pay for something like this?
Olof Mathe (08:46.599)
Very much a combination of both.
As founders, we've actually all worked in communications before, and I personally worked at Skype a couple of years before creating mixmex with my co founders.
The kind of itch they have for ourselves I think was related, as I mentioned, to just feeling that this mode of communication hadn't changed in forever.
And whereas there was a lot of innovation and kind of consumer communications, right, with like Snapchat and different types of video calling and scribbling on images, et cetera, whereas none of this had come to the workplace.
So it's probably out of boredom with our current communication stack.
The way we kind of got about this is we just said, hey, what are some like really, really awful kind of workflows that you have to deal with in email and where you're talking to people outside of your company?
And the very first one that came up was, hey, it really just like setting up time to meet someone is like a really cumbersome experience today where, you know, you propose times, can you do Thursday, no, I can't, what about Friday, etc.
And we kind of realized that, hey, you can actually just have kind of an interactive widget inside of an email.
And when someone potentially taps on a time inside of that message, the meeting can be scheduled automatically.
And that just felt like night and day versus the prior experience.
And so that was kind of the core version of the product that we launched at first.
And it seemed like a lot of other people found that product really valuable.
Omer (10:13.610)
And this was primarily focused on Gmail and Google Calendar at the time?
Olof Mathe (10:18.250)
Yes.
Omer (10:19.530)
And so you built the product and then were you charging for it?
Olof Mathe (10:25.480)
We charged from the get go, day one.
And actually I think when we launched the product, we had pricing tiers.
We didn't even necessarily have feature gates in the product, although we built those soon thereafter.
And still it was interesting to see people paying for the product.
Omer (10:44.120)
How did you get the word out about the product?
Olof Mathe (10:46.600)
We were in private beta for a while actually before launching, and then we launched the product in 2015.
And interestingly, there's this service called Product Hunt, which today is bigger than it was back then.
It was kind of just getting started back then and so there were a lot of kind of early tech adopters on that platform.
So we launched Mixmax there and I think that helped kickstart the product and the business.
Omer (11:10.830)
Were you working full time on this or in the early days?
Was it more of a side project or experiment just to see where it
Olof Mathe (11:18.910)
would go 100% full time from the get go?
I think this is a little bit of a philosophical point.
I know some people say, hey, I really think you should moonlight before and see how it goes.
I think if you're doing a company, when you start something and experiment, you need to kind of have at least some kind of inter founder commitment that, hey, we're going to be working full time on this idea for at least 18 months to see if we can get it off the ground.
Omer (11:43.530)
And did you raise money right away?
Olof Mathe (11:47.460)
We did kind of during the private beta phase, actually.
Omer (11:52.180)
How much did you raise then?
Olof Mathe (11:53.780)
We raised 1.5 million.
Omer (11:56.660)
I know recently you did another round and you're at over 13 million that you've raised so far.
Olof Mathe (12:04.260)
Yep.
Omer (12:05.380)
I mean, I've got to say that, you know, like we talked about earlier, I think there are a number of products out there that do a lot of the things that you're talking about with Mixmax.
What do you think it is about Mixmax that has helped you to differentiate the product and get it to over 10,000 customers and having.
Having raised $13 million.
Olof Mathe (12:29.060)
Wow.
So, so many things.
And this is kind of just my take on it.
Right.
One thing is we're really obsessive about product and product experience.
And you're absolutely right that since kind of communications is an infinite market and there are like 2 billion people on email, lot of products in the space, which is great because the product categories are kind of known and so people are looking for solutions.
Omer (12:53.440)
There are a couple of different ways that I'm kind of thinking about this.
Like, firstly, I'm curious how investors saw Mixmax compared to what else is out there on the market that made them want to invest here.
And secondly, from a customer perspective, what is the value prop?
What is it that convinces people to say, yes, this is the reason why I should pick Mixmax over the, you know, the myriad of other possible choices
Olof Mathe (13:23.530)
that I have out there from a VC perspective?
I think it's kind of a couple of things.
One is as founders, we had worked together for a number of years and we have very complementary roles and we had kind of like built successful product in the past.
And so if you think about just from a seed investor's perspective, right.
It's very hard to make bets on product.
And that's why a lot of people make bets on founding teams.
And so that could have been it.
The other thing that I think really felt really unique was this aspect of everything you can do inside of a message.
A lot of innovation, traditionally, at least in email, happens in like, oh, better triage or AI to read the contents of email, etc.
No one has done anything to kind of revolutionize the features, format of a message itself and what a message can contain.
And so I think that felt really unique and compelling and kind of are the early version of the product in terms of customers.
And like, what's unique about the value prop?
I think that so many things, if we're talking just kind of strictly about SMBs, a big part of this is the value prop of you kind of get five products in one and you also get products that in that case.
Right.
Were calendaring, works together with your email sequences, which works together with your analytics holistically, which work together with your reminders, which works together with tracking, et cetera.
Whereas if you have disparate solutions, you're kind of.
You're not getting any of the exponential benefits you get when these different features work together holistically.
Omer (14:58.850)
Yeah, that's interesting because what we talked about earlier, having these multiple products and the potential strain that might put on you as a team is also probably one of the biggest differentiators.
Yeah, exactly.
Olof Mathe (15:14.100)
Yep, yep.
Yeah, it's, I think with all things startups, right, it's like pick your poison.
There's no silver bullet, so you pick a niche that you feel that you're personally really excited about.
And then there are so many ways to.
Markets are really big and there are many ways to carve out a space for yourself.
Omer (15:34.440)
Okay, so you launched the initial product, got the word out on product hunt, you were charging from day one and you started getting some early customers.
What did you learn from that and did that significantly in any way change the direction of the product, or was it just validation to keep doing what you were doing?
Olof Mathe (15:59.370)
Got a combination of all the above to some extent.
It was about, you know, the initial promise of the product was definitely there.
I think we found that we had probably launched too early from a technical perspective, which was also a good thing.
We just wanted to get something out and we had a lot of kind of stability issues early, so those became a priority for us.
To fix in terms of target market, what it helped us with.
We had a kind of a wide variety of people in various jobs that were using the product.
So it did help us in terms of talking to various types of customers and seeing the type of value they got.
For example, we had a.
Somehow we had a lot of real estate agents using the product early and that's super exciting and great.
And we're excited to have, you know, people in real estate as customers.
We kind of quickly discovered that they probably weren't the idea deal type of customer wanted to like build a product for.
For a variety of reasons related to the fact that, you know, they're often kind of solopreneurs on their own.
Some of their use cases are like much more specific and kind of aren't as broadly applicable, et cetera.
So I think it did help us narrow.
Actually having a very broad customer base initially was very beneficial because it helped us get data to narrow it down with Realtors.
Omer (17:16.210)
What was it that you were getting very specific kind of feature requests for the product?
Olof Mathe (17:22.530)
In part, I think overall, and this has been our focus, we launched Mixmex as kind of general productivity for SMBs.
I don't think we had a particular Persona in mind when we launched.
Whereas now we're kind of like very much focused on people and sales and success.
And so we kind of let that fall a little bit from the product overall.
Well, some reasons why we felt real estate perhaps wasn't as good a fit is a lot of Realtors actually get to choose entirely what type of product they use.
And so there was really no opportunity to sell to, you know, a 10 person license to a team of Realtors because that's just not how that business works.
Whereas in sales, for example, a sales team will agree on a product to use and then everyone will use it.
So it wasn't just about features in the product.
It was just as much how might this impact the go to market model for the company?
Omer (18:21.990)
Yeah, that makes sense.
So let's talk about kind of what happened after that.
So product hunt got you some initial momentum, but what else did you guys do to keep growing the product?
Olof Mathe (18:37.190)
I think you can grow a lot without building as much product as we did.
I think that just comes as a.
As given our background as kind of product product people.
Some things we did to kind of keep momentum and continue launching.
So one thing we did, multiple product launches actually follow on launches.
As we did new features and built up more product, we made sure to keep a pretty good cadence of newsletters to nurture our kind of original base.
We experimented quite a bit with pricing.
I don't see a lot of companies doing this and I really encourage people to do this.
We also, I think on pricing did some things that kind of defy conventional wisdom.
We started with prices really low and we increased them over time.
And the beauty of increasing prices is a it makes you feel great.
Secondly, you can actually do promotions a lot.
You know, hey, we're going to increase price in a week.
Get the current price now before it gets more expensive.
Omer (19:36.290)
How much were you charging when you first started?
Olof Mathe (19:38.770)
God, it was like a couple of dollars on the cheapest plan.
It was not a lot.
Omer (19:44.130)
And then now it kind of goes up from like $9 to infinity.
That's a good place to be.
What else did you do with pricing?
Like you said, you kind of tested a lot with pricing.
Olof Mathe (19:57.970)
Well, a couple of things as I mentioned, like we had a pricing page up when we launched.
We didn't really have feature gates in the product in the immediately we still got people buying the product.
We changed around a bit the types of features under plans.
We, I think we only had monthly plans for a very long time until we did also added annual plans.
We expanded the number of plans.
I think when we started the kind of gist as it was that let's make it as easy as possible for someone just to buy Mex Mex.
And so, you know, having a cheap monthly plan, I can't think of anything easier.
Annual plans are great because in theory you get lower churn on them and it's more of a commitment and you get more cash up front.
The drawback is it's a little bit, you know, you're introducing some friction for the customer to buy.
So yeah, those are some of the, some of the experiments I think we did on pricing.
We did do a fair amount in terms of experimenting with upsells within the product as well.
Not just having kind of like feature gates as we went along, but also giving people more ways to pay us in the product.
Omer (21:01.740)
Can you give me an example of that?
I'd love to know more about that.
Olof Mathe (21:04.460)
This is something I've actually seen consistently in companies I've been at.
The more ways you offer people to give you money, the more money you will make.
Just like we spoke about segmentation on the types of products people want to use.
People want to pay for your product in different ways and in different circumstances.
That's one of the reasons you have annual and monthly plans.
Some people just will always buy monthly Some people really want to buy annual, etc.
Some people want to feel they're buying the very, very best plan.
Some people want a cheaper plan in terms of inside of the product.
The more places we put kind of buy Mixmax links in the product, the more people would buy.
Omer (21:49.240)
Were you restricting certain features and then using that as a call to action to buy Mixmax and get access, or was it just they kind of had access to pretty much most of the functionality, but it was really kind of more of a constant reminder within the
Olof Mathe (22:06.440)
product that, yeah, I don't think you need to restrict access actually per se.
I think you can just say, you know, pay us 20 bucks a month to use this feature.
That's a great place to start.
It's much less work.
One thing I would, I guess I would love for us to actually experiment more on that.
I, when I was at Skype that we did, that actually helped growth a lot.
Obviously Skype, very different product for calling.
They're kind of really interesting ways you can get more revenue by kind of changing around the pricing model.
So with Skype, it was things like Skype first only had pay as you go and then that growth started to plateau out.
Then we introduced calling cards.
So, you know, pay 20 bucks and have your minutes be deducted from that.
Then a whole new set of people wanted to pay for your product.
And then we introduced annual subscriptions or monthly subscriptions and a whole new set of customers were willing to pay for the product that way.
Omer (23:02.110)
And then there was phone numbers.
That was another.
Olof Mathe (23:06.190)
And so note that the way you're paying is actually you're still getting the same feature.
You're just paying for it in a different way.
I think it's pretty exciting to think about novel ways in which you can charge for your product.
Omer (23:22.040)
You also were doing quite a bit with referrals.
Olof Mathe (23:25.320)
Indeed.
Omer (23:26.760)
Can you tell us about that?
Olof Mathe (23:27.720)
Yeah.
So this was very much from the get go.
We still prompt people to share mix mix with their friends.
That's a core part of the experience that's also helped with growth.
I think every SaaS app should do that.
Omer (23:39.880)
Is this in app, email or both?
Olof Mathe (23:42.160)
Yeah, this is mainly in app today we actually have an incentive for this.
I think it's today that you get unlimited tracking if you invite seven or more people.
So it's a little bit similar to what you might see other referral programs.
Kind of like give 10, get 10 kind of thing.
Obviously ours wasn't with cash and so, yeah, I Definitely encourage any SaaS product to have Some kind of invite or referral flow.
And now we built this in house.
Now there are actually companies that build this as kind of SDKs out of the box as well, to help you manage referral programs.
Omer (24:19.500)
For someone who's thinking about maybe doing something like that, some sort of referral program or something within the product and they haven't kind of done something like this before.
Are there any lessons you learned from that experience that you could share?
Olof Mathe (24:36.140)
The one lesson which was kind of hard learned was at least our referral flow was incredibly sensitive to the copy we had in the referral flow.
So I remember at some point we changed what the call to action was.
We might have changed the how we communicated what you would get when you referred friends, but the.
The benefit you'd get would still be the same and the number of referrals just tanked.
It was insightful to me to see how sensitive it was to copy and design.
Omer (25:10.160)
So this was just kind of.
You just changed like a few sentences which describe what they were getting.
Olof Mathe (25:15.840)
Yes.
It's interesting if you think more deeply about it.
Kind of makes sense, right?
Because the perceived benefit can change a lot with copy and snap decisions.
And so, yeah, I guess our changes didn't resonate.
So also just tells us there's a great opportunity.
Right.
Because there's nothing to say that our version that worked best is actually the optimal copy in any shape or form.
Omer (25:40.650)
Yeah, no, I'm a big believer in good copy.
And I think as sort of product people, we put a lot of thought into the design of the product and the interface and all of those kinds of things.
But I've seen so many examples and I was talking to somebody last week actually who had a product or it was a service actually, so it was slightly different.
But they were kind of having a hard time getting interest from potential customers.
And they spent a lot of time really kind of reworking and kind of coming up with a much clearer offering and a much better guarantee.
And now that they're at the point where they have to turn business away because they just can't cope with it and what they're offering hasn't changed.
It's the same thing.
It's just how it's delivered and perceived
Olof Mathe (26:38.250)
by people, which actually ties nicely back into pricing that we spoke about earlier.
And so this isn't a Mixmax example, but when I was at Skype, there were certain people who did not want to pay for calling on a pay as you go basis.
They wanted to pay for calling with calling cards and vice Versa.
And so the fundamental service they were getting was exactly the same in some way.
Right.
It was just the way they were getting, the service was different.
Omer (27:08.820)
Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah, we could probably break that down and analyze it, but yeah, I get the point.
Okay, so in terms of growth, we talked about product hunts, we talked about what you did with pricing and referrals.
Was there anything else that kind of has been a big contributor?
Olof Mathe (27:31.440)
I think one thing, and Mixmax has a little bit of an unfair advantage compared to other products in that we're a communications product and communications products have some degree of virality or hopefully do.
Right.
And so one thing to note about us, which is both a little bit of blessing and a curse, is kind of our top of funnel is the entire universe, by which I mean kind of everyone who uses email, which is literally everyone.
That doesn't mean that, you know, our value prop is necessarily optimized for that just means that our kind of top of funnel is very wide.
And so it helps a little bit in a company.
Right, because someone on at your pod at work might start using the product and then tell, you know, other people in the pod.
And it helps that it's not a product just for mid market SDRs and that it's also more broadly a product for people in customer facing roles or people have sales jobs to be done.
It just helps with that type of virality and word of mouth.
Omer (28:32.790)
Now I know you don't talk about specific revenue numbers, but can you give us a ballpark in terms of where you guys are right now?
Olof Mathe (28:39.750)
So I guess what I can share here is we have north of 10,000 customers and we're north of 5 million arrows.
Omer (28:47.200)
That's awesome.
And I know before we started recording we talked about what you wish you had done differently and one of the things that you told me about was hiring and taking a different approach.
Can you share that with me?
Olof Mathe (29:08.080)
Here's the thing.
As founders in this entire SaaS industry, we talk a lot about product market fit.
What we don't talk about is what happens after you have product market fit.
And somehow it's like once you have product market fit, everything's fine and you've like cleared it and you've made it.
Whereas of course that's like absolutely not the case.
You just have like the next hurdle that you need to overcome.
And that hurdle, I think after product market fit is building out a senior team so that you don't go completely bonkers as a CEO.
And so hiring senior people I think is something that we did too late and that we started doing too late.
And I think that's something that impacts the growth rate of a lot of companies.
And as founders or as founders, CEOs, I think you kind of almost go through what I'd call like three stages of denial when you think about bringing on senior people to your team and happy to chat about those.
Omer (30:05.990)
Yeah, sure, I'd love to hear about that.
Olof Mathe (30:07.830)
Yeah.
The way I think about it is kind of in terms of like what I would call the three stages of denial there.
It kind of happens this way.
Firstly, you're a little bit of denial about whether you need someone senior to start with.
So you say to yourself, well, you know, we actually don't need that role right now.
We don't need a VP sales or we don't need a VP marketing or we don't need a head of finance right now.
And you're typically afraid of it being, you know, it's too expensive or it's too early.
And so you have all these types of objections.
And I can share more where I think those actually don't matter.
Once you kind of overcome that objection either way and you're like, okay, I need someone, then you kind of tell yourself, oh, I can find this person on my own.
By which you mean, you know, I'm a founder, I'm well connected, I have investors, I have an in house recruiter, we can find this person on our own.
That also is not a great strategy and typically won't work and also isn't very helpful in terms of building a diverse team.
And then kind of what I would call the third stage of denial is not being really sure of the level of seniority that you need.
And so you tell yourself that hey, you can do with someone who's director level, whereas what you actually need is someone who's really done it before.
And as a vp.
And so you tell yourself, oh, this person will grow into the role.
And the reason you tell yourself that is, you know, you're used in your startup putting people in stretch roles and it kind of works.
Whereas for senior leadership that won't always be the be the case.
So you kind of see how it's almost a funnel of like multiple stages of like denial that you, that you go through and that you have to I think, be a little bit conscious of.
Omer (31:42.240)
So yeah, so give me one example of how doing that at mixmax, what kind of impact did that have for you as a CEO and what kind of impact did it have for the rest of the Team.
Olof Mathe (31:55.030)
Firstly, what it means, very tactically, it means that you as CEO, you have way more on your plate and opportunity cost is like the absolutely biggest cost and so you're not focusing on what your core area of expertise is.
So for me that happens to be product.
Right.
And so not having someone in finance means I need to spend a lot of time on like revrec.
Not having had someone in sales mean I need to spend time, you know, managing the couple of salespeople we had on the team, et cetera.
And so it's really costly just in terms of your time.
Then it's also really costly in terms of the growth trajectory of the company.
Right.
So I'm not a marketer, I've never done any marketing, etc.
We've been really, it's, we've been really fortunate in terms of having like a lot of kind of like viral word of mouth around the product.
Obviously having someone who's like knows the tricks and trades of marketing, which is an incredibly like subtle and nuanced craft, will help your growth rate and will help with how customers perceive your product.
And similarly on sales.
Right.
If you have a couple of people in sales and they don't have the right leadership, how do they grow as people and how do they excel?
Omer (33:01.690)
Yeah, I mean when you lay it out like that, it kind of seems pretty obvious.
Yeah, of course.
Why would you not hire a senior enough person as soon as you can?
But I think kind of the way you set up the context with those three stages of denial is probably also important to understand because I think a lot of leaders will go through that.
Olof Mathe (33:23.840)
Yeah, it's always the, I think it's too expensive, I think it's too early.
Perhaps our go to market strategy will change.
Are we actually sure we have product market fit?
What if we don't have enough resources to give this senior person a lot of headcount?
Day one the great news is the kind of entire point of hiring someone senior is that you don't have to figure out have the answers to those questions yourselves, yourself.
That is what a senior hire is there for, right?
Omer (33:49.880)
Totally.
Olof Mathe (33:51.240)
So you don't need all the answers.
Omer (33:52.640)
How big is the team?
Olof Mathe (33:54.600)
We're 48 people today.
Omer (33:56.520)
Wow.
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere and it was less than a year ago that you were about 18 people.
Olof Mathe (34:02.120)
I think that's correct.
We've grown quite a bit.
Omer (34:05.320)
So you've been busy hiring.
That's good.
Olof Mathe (34:07.320)
Yes.
Omer (34:09.000)
Great.
Okay, we should wrap up.
So I'm going to go into the Lightning round and ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Olof Mathe (34:17.730)
You ready?
Sweet.
Omer (34:19.530)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?
Olof Mathe (34:24.730)
Hire senior leaders early.
Omer (34:26.490)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Olof Mathe (34:29.290)
Well, if we're talking specifically kind of business books, that would probably be.
I bet everyone on this podcast has said this as a hard thing about hard things.
Omer (34:37.930)
Yep, we've had that a few times.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be a business book a lot of the times.
You know, some non business books are actually just as interesting for people who listen to the show.
Olof Mathe (34:46.920)
Well, that would probably be Don Quixote.
It's incredibly refreshing to read a book that's 500 years old and probably the funniest book I've ever read.
Omer (34:57.160)
Really?
I'll have to read that myself.
Olof Mathe (35:00.360)
Yes, it's great.
Omer (35:01.880)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Olof Mathe (35:07.240)
Being a very good listener.
Omer (35:09.560)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
Olof Mathe (35:14.360)
I guess I can't say.
Mixmax.
So, colored pencils.
Sorry, colored pens.
Omer (35:22.880)
What do you do with the colored pens?
Olof Mathe (35:25.720)
Having abnormally sized sheets of paper and colored pens helps you organize your thoughts and think more freely about solution spaces.
Omer (35:35.480)
Are you a mind mapper?
Olof Mathe (35:37.560)
Not formally.
In that sense, probably yes, but not
Omer (35:40.940)
for what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time.
Olof Mathe (35:47.060)
I'm going to venture outside of communications here since Mixmax.
Communications related.
I think there's a lot more to do in communications even outside of Mixmax.
Something completely different would probably be something finance related.
So not so much personal finance as kind of business finance and business banking related.
Omer (36:06.630)
Interesting.
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Olof Mathe (36:13.430)
I typically listen to music written before 1764.
Omer (36:23.830)
Seriously?
Olof Mathe (36:25.270)
Yes.
Omer (36:26.630)
So 1765 is a big no for you?
Olof Mathe (36:30.870)
Well, 1764, I think is the year a French composer called Rameau died.
That's kind of the cutoff point for me.
Omer (36:40.290)
Wow.
Olof Mathe (36:41.250)
You asked for something obscure.
Omer (36:43.410)
Yeah.
And you met the challenge.
Olof Mathe (36:45.730)
Yeah.
Omer (36:46.690)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
Olof Mathe (36:50.930)
I really enjoy cooking and inventing new dishes.
It gives me great satisfaction to be doing something with my hands.
Omer (37:01.380)
Awesome.
So Olaf, thank you for joining me.
It's been a pleasure talking to you and learning more about Mixmax and what you guys are up to there.
If people want to find out more about Mixmax, they can go to mixmax.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Olof Mathe (37:20.500)
Probably on Twitter.
I'm Lofter on Twitter.
And you can also, of course, follow Mixmax at Mixmax.
Really fun being on the show.
Omer (37:29.860)
Awesome.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
And I wish you and the team all the best.
Olof Mathe (37:33.700)
Thanks, Omari.
You too.
Omer (37:34.780)
Cheers.
Olof Mathe (37:35.620)
Cheers.
