2 People, No Funding, Nearly $1M ARR: SaaS Onboarding Done Right

Omer (00:10.000)
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 help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to Espen Fries Jensen, the co founder of User Flow, a no code platform for building onboarding guides and product tours.
Before working on User Flow, Espen co founded Cobalt IO, an application security platform.
In 2013, Espen and three of his friends decided that they were going to build a marketplace for bug bounty programs.
Companies such as Google were paying bounties to people who found security exploits or vulnerabilities in their products and the Cobot founders believed they could build a marketplace to facilitate that process for more companies, but they didn't have any experience in the security space.
However, they managed to launch the marketplace and get a few customers, but the business wasn't a huge success and before long they were close to running out of money until they got a request from from a customer that changed everything.
That one request led them to eventually pivoting and building a completely different security product and they went on to raise $37 million and build a team of over 200 people.
In this interview we talk about how four guys in Denmark who had no experience in the security space managed to pull this off.
And Espen and I talk about why this time he he's going down the bootstrap path and wants to see how far they can get with User flow without any VC funding.
He's gone from co founding a VC backed company with over 200 employees to a bootstrap startup where with just a team of two people are closing in on a million dollars in annual recurring revenue.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Esmen, welcome to the show.

Esben Friis-Jensen (02:12.120)
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.

Omer (02:13.720)
Do you have a favorite quote?
Something you can share with us that inspires or motivates you?

Esben Friis-Jensen (02:18.760)
I don't have a quote per se, but I have something that was also a core value of Cobalt, my previous company, and it's something I live a lot by, which is called Quality at Speed.
Kind of derives from maybe we all know kind of done is better than perfect and these kind of things.
But I really like the Quality at Speed because it speaks to you're moving fast but you're doing it with quality in mind.
And that's something I live a lot by in when I build companies and products and so on.

Omer (02:51.010)
Love it.
So we're going to talk about Cobot, but before we do that.
Let's talk about your current company user flow.
What does the product do, who's it for and what's the main problem that you're helping to solve?

Esben Friis-Jensen (03:01.010)
Yeah, so I'm one of the founders of UserFlow.
Together with my co founder we built this product that basically allows you to do in app onboarding, product tours and surveys and you can do that without using any code.
All you really need to do is install a small piece of JavaScript in your website and then you can build these kind of in app guides and onboarding flows without using any code.
And that basically allows customer success managers, product managers, designers to build these flows without using expensive engineering time.

Omer (03:34.950)
Where are you in terms of revenue with user flow?

Esben Friis-Jensen (03:38.560)
So we are very small bootstrap, two person company, but we are, we are closing in on the 1,000,000 ARR mark.
Yeah, it's going really good.

Omer (03:47.280)
That's awesome.
So we're going to talk about that and how the two of you have been able to do that.
But before we do, let's talk about Cobalt.
That's a very different type of company that you co founded and worked on for over seven years.
So let's go back to 2013 actually before we do that and talk about how it started.
Just again, tell us what is Cobalt?

Esben Friis-Jensen (04:13.370)
So Cobalt today is a pen test as a service provider.
So basically it's a term that we help kind of coin.
It's basically a way to do penetration testing, which is security testing of your web app, mobile app, API or so on your, your SaaS platform to do a security test of that using real humans that does the testing.
So people who can really mirror what a bad hacker would be doing.
So that's the service and the way we delivered in Cobalt is through a platform.
So that's why it's pentest as a service.
It's basically a platform driven model.
So you have a SaaS platform where you interact with the testers, get the results and work with your pen test and, and do data analysis and so on.

Omer (05:00.130)
Is this the same as ethical hacking or is pen testing different?

Esben Friis-Jensen (05:03.570)
Yeah, I would say so.
Ethical hacking is basically what you do when you do pen testing, so you find the vulnerabilities before the bad guys do.

Omer (05:10.850)
So the company was founded in 2013.
How did you come up with the idea for the business?

Esben Friis-Jensen (05:16.690)
So we were four Danish founders who wanted to start a business and we had seen what Google and Facebook were doing where they were inviting the entire world to come and find vulnerabilities in their websites and Then they would pay them bounties for the findings.
None of us four founders were actually in security, so that was pretty interesting.
But we found it super was a time where a lot of big hacks were happening.
So we were also finding it kind of odd that why is this problem so hard to solve and so on.
So we saw those two trends and then we decided to build a platform that could facilitate these kind of bug bounty programs, as they're called, for more than just Google and Facebook.
You should be able to do it if you were any kind of business.
So that's why we started and we moved initially to Buenos Aires where we kind of built an MVP in Argentina.
And then we got accepted into a accelerator in the Bay Area and then we stayed around in the Bay Area where we built out the business.

Omer (06:20.610)
If you guys, if none of you had any experience in security, how did you know what to build?

Esben Friis-Jensen (06:25.090)
Yeah, good question.
I think we looked at what Google and Facebook had done, right.
So we could see, okay, this is how the model works.
So really what we had to build was some kind of marketplace platform, right.
A two sided marketplace platform where you have the testers on one side who should be able to submit a report and then the business on the other side should be able to accept or reject that report and pay a bounty if they accept it.
Right.
So it was really facilitating a workflow more so than facilitating a security kind of deep security kind of thing.
And I think we were all great at facilitating workflows and we've used that throughout building the business.
And I also think given we came in with a unbiased kind of view on the security industry, has actually helped us a lot to think out of the box and, and really challenge the status quo in the security industry.

Omer (07:22.610)
Okay, so you built the, the MVP and then you moved to the Bay Area to get into this accelerator.
Tell me sort of what that first year looked like and how did you go about turning that MVP into, you know, your final product and kind of finding that first customer?

Esben Friis-Jensen (07:45.570)
Yeah, so we got into the accelerator and it was Boost vc, by the way, Adam Draber, who's the son of Tim Draper accelerator in the Valley.
And that was an amazing experience.
We were coming from another country, Denmark, and moving into Silicon Valley.
And that was of course really, really cool.
And we just wanted to build a great business.
And we also got some early traction.
Initially we sold a lot of smaller businesses, especially bitcoin exchanges.
Was a, back then that turned out to be probably today it could be a good market Again, but back then they were like going under every day and not the best market to go with.
And then we moved into selling more to software as a service businesses, which was a bit more stable market.
So we were growing okay that first year, but it was definitely, it had its challenges, of course, coming from another country and having to build a market and, and it was also our first startup, so we had to learn everything from scratch.
Initially, we did everything that was a good thing about having a semaphore, that we could do a bit of everything.
So we had one building the product, one doing operations, one maybe looking for fundraising.
And then I was primarily focused on the sales and marketing piece of the business.

Omer (09:08.110)
The product that Cobalt is now is very different to the product that you, you started out with.

Esben Friis-Jensen (09:16.060)
Yeah.

Omer (09:16.780)
So presumably there was some kind of pivot at, at some point.

Esben Friis-Jensen (09:21.900)
Yeah.

Omer (09:22.420)
Can you talk a little bit about, like, how.
What led to that point?

Esben Friis-Jensen (09:26.540)
Yeah.
So first of all, there are of course similarities between the products we have today, but it is a much more different model and it's, it's a structured way of testing.
When you do pen testing, you do like a two week test with maybe a group, a small group of testers where the original model was to invite everybody in the world and pay them bounties.
We also moved both from a more transactional, boundary driven model to a more subscription driven, you buy X amount of pen testing for a year.
But what led us to.
There was actually, I think two years or three years into Cobalt's history, we were struggling to grow more.
We were growing okay in the beginning and growing okay fast.
And we had raised like a angel round of 1 million.
And we had used that to grow a bit more.
But we could kind of see as we started to try to raise our seed round, we were struggling a bit, one with raising the round and we were getting like pushback from investors.
But we were also seeing that our growth rate was maybe not amazing.
Right.
And we struggle a bit to admit that because we did have customers for this bug bounty model.
Right.
So it's not like the business was going totally bad, but it was just not growing as fast as we expected.
So we knew something was wrong.
And then we actually had one or two customers who asked us, can you do a pen test for us?
And we said, yeah, sure, we can probably hack our platform a bit to do it right.
And then we saw, okay, this is.
They were willing to pay like a fixed price of things like back then, like $8,000.
Right.
Which was like, that was the Biggest customers we ever had was that size.
Right.
And then they paid it all up front.
So that kind of triggered something in us.
Like, that's odd.
Why are they willing to do that?
Right.
We were really, I would say it was that tough that we were, you know, like not being able to raise money, not being able to really grow your business.
That's a tough, tough time for business.
But this kind of eureka moment of discovering that pen testing was maybe the way to go kind of triggered something in us.
And then we basically decided to go all in on pen testing.
And then with that kind of strategy in mind, we were able to go out and raise a seed round that kind of saved the day and allowed us to then pursue this Tensor strategy that really took off.
Right.
We just, from there we just grew really, really fast.
And I think it was due to a couple of different reasons.
One, it was instead of like creating a new market, which Bug Bounty kind of was, we were tapping into an existing market that was owned by consultancies and we were then coming with the modern approach to this existing pen test market.
And two, pen testing is very much a sales driven motion.
A lot of customers do pen testing to satisfy big enterprises they want to sell to and so on.
So there's like a sales driver behind it.
And that Bug Bounty didn't really have that.
There was only the security driver.
And even though I would love that, security was like the only, like the could be a driver on its own, it's not always the case.
A lot of business are more driven by, you know, sales and so on.
So that helped us as well.
Right.
That there was actually a sales driver as well on top of the security driver.
So those two things really helped us grow.
And you can say that's when we found product market fit.
Right.
We didn't admit that we were struggling to find it back then, but we really were right.
And when we pivoted to pen testing, that's where we found it.
And then it just took off.

Omer (13:14.510)
I mean, I know you said before that you had customers, but you were also starting to run out of money as well, right?

Esben Friis-Jensen (13:22.200)
Yeah, yeah, we were.
You know, as a real estate company, you always kind of the next round is super critical.
Right.
Especially in a VC funded business.
Right.
So yeah, we were, we were getting close to that.
And we're talking about, okay, what strategies should we do if we start running really out of money.
So this came as a just in the right time for us.
Right.
This discovery of the power of pen testing and yeah, so that Sometimes the timing is just right.
Right.
And we were lucky or had the grit to also find the new strategy.
Right.
And we also took a risk, Right.
Because we actually lost some existing customers in doing this transition.
But in the end, we gained so much more from doing it.

Omer (14:09.840)
Yeah.
So I think this pivot was pivotal moment.
Forgive the pun here.
Right.
But I think that was a really an important point because a lot of founders get stuck and don't get past this point.
And you guys were also sort of there and struggling to figure out effectively product market fit and when this.
So I want to talk more about this because I think this is a really interesting part of the story.
When this customer turned up and asked you if you could do pen testing, did the lights go off immediately when you were like, great, yeah, this is.
This is the direction we need to be going, or was this more about great, we've got somebody who's going to pay us some money and give us a little bit more of a lifeline while we can figure out what to do with the bug bounty business.
Like, how long did it take for you to decide to figure out that pen testing was the way to take the product as well?

Esben Friis-Jensen (15:08.320)
It was definitely a transition period, right.
It was not like, okay, day one, then we do it, right.
It was like, okay, let's try to do this.
We kind of hack it a bit.
We hack our platform a bit to satisfy this customer.
It was a customer we really liked.
They also liked our bug bounty and they said, can you do this as well?
And yeah, sure.
We want to try it out.
And when you're a small startup, you are more flexible in what you can try out.
Right.
So I think we initially tried it out, then we did it on a couple of more customers and in a period, we started marketing kind of the dual thing.
Right.
Like, we are the pentest and bug Bounty platform.
But actually that didn't work so well either because that was just confusing and you didn't have like a full focus.
I always been a big advocate and I think all the co founders were.
And also newsflow, like the power of focus.
Right.
Like doing one thing really well.
And I think we at some point landed maybe in a kind of like dual marketing where we had like bug bounty and pen testing because we were afraid to let go of our existing customer side.
But in sometimes we just took the risk and said in order for us to really grow fast because we could see that the pen test business was growing faster than the bug bounty, let's just go all in on Pen testing.
Because then we can build a product that's perfect for pen testing.
We can build all our support and sales and marketing, everything aligned around that single product.
And that was a super important period.
So I think it was like a transition period of one year we went through before we fully transitioned.

Omer (16:51.130)
Do you remember roughly how much revenue you were making at the time and what the split was between Bug Bounty and Pen testing?

Esben Friis-Jensen (16:58.090)
Oh, that's a good question.
Probably.
I can't remember the exact numbers, like 1 million AR, but then we started doing the triple, triple, double, double, double kind of growth numbers.
I can't remember the exact number, but it was, it was in the lower end.
But and the other thing you have to keep in mind, we were actually transactional business at that point.
So we didn't even count things like ar, we just counted our revenue and looked at that.
Right?

Omer (17:26.310)
Yeah.

Esben Friis-Jensen (17:26.870)
And then we, the other pivot we did was really transition into a subscription business.
Right.
And that was another critical decision that, because we could just have kept on selling Pen Test as transaction.
But really what we saw in the industry, and I think that was again us thinking out of the box consultancies were selling a lot of this, like transactionally.
Right.
Pen test by pen test.
But we saw that especially compliance and these kind of things were actually driving a model where SaaS businesses had to do pen testing year after year after year.
Right.
It was not just a one time thing.
So we, with the platform, because we had the SaaS platform, we had that consistent touch point that allowed us to say, okay, yes, you might just do one pen test a year, but it's actually an annual subscription where you have access to the platform, you can get retesting, et cetera, throughout the year and then it renews the next year.
Right.
And companies that do many, many pensas, that makes even more sense.
Right?
Because then they have that platform on an annual basis and then they run the same amount of pen test again the following year.
So moving into subscription, as many have done, others have done successfully, we also did that.
Right.
And that was also a pivotal moment and we started counting er, from that point on.

Omer (18:47.440)
So around the time you were doing about a million a year, how much of that was coming from the Bug Bounty business?

Esben Friis-Jensen (18:53.520)
I can't remember those exact numbers, Omar.
I'm sorry.

Omer (18:57.400)
But was it just like, was it like 50, 50, was it?

Esben Friis-Jensen (19:01.980)
Yeah, I mean it was initially, you know, it was a transition period over the year.
Right.
So it was like initially maybe 5%, it was like it grew.
Right.
Pensacing just took more and more market share.

Omer (19:15.100)
And is that how you started to see the future?
Because you were seeing more and more customers, this need and that was growing faster.

Esben Friis-Jensen (19:22.300)
Yeah.
And also the willingness to pay more for it.
Right.
Because it actually, it was an existing market, it had an existing price tag, it had the sales driver, compliance driver.
So there was a defined pricing where we as any other early stage SaaS company creating a new market, we maybe priced ourselves too low in the bug bounty space.
I think it was like a 20% fee on bounties.
So you both had the problem that what then happens when you stop finding stuff?
Because when a platform becomes very secure, you kind of, you're still delivering value.
Right.
Because you're technically testing.
But if you're paying per bounty and you're charging a fee per bounty and they don't find as much anymore, then you are not earning any money.
Right.
So the business model was also bad.
So a lot of things were stuff we learned.
Right.
And then we really hit the nail with the subscription driven model, the pen test and so on.
So a lot of learnings along the way, but it was, you know, tough learnings.
But that's what, what is fun about startups, right.
It's, it's those kind of learnings that you do over time.

Omer (20:32.500)
So, so you guys were going out and doing this selling, right.
In the early days.

Esben Friis-Jensen (20:36.580)
Yeah.

Omer (20:37.060)
And when, when you started to focus on pen testing, traditionally that as you said, was an area that had been sold as a consulting service, not a product.

Esben Friis-Jensen (20:49.300)
Yeah.

Omer (20:49.940)
And so now if you're getting in front of customers, you guys don't have that much experience in security.
You're probably competing with consulting companies that have been doing this kind of stuff for a long time.

Esben Friis-Jensen (21:01.840)
Yeah.

Omer (21:02.720)
What was that experience like?
What did you learn from that?
About how to sell?

Esben Friis-Jensen (21:08.320)
Yeah, I think so.
One, we were moving into a market where there was a high touch sales process.
Right.
For.
And we were maybe more in favor of a lower touch product led kind of model.
Right.
That's what we had done with the bug bounty stuff.
But with pen testing we really saw, okay, now we're competing against service companies and they have a tendency to do higher touch sales.
And we were coming with a brand new model, so we had to do some education on our model.
So I think we at that point decided to transition into a more sales led model where we did demos, we had customer success for every customer.
So a more high touch, both sales and support model.
And we needed to do that because of the kind of competing with the service industry.
Right.
But then over time, as COBOL grew in size and maturity and our model became something everybody knew about, especially in the software as a service space and pen testing became more and more normal to do.
Everybody knows what a pen test is.
We also again started looking to move more and more product.
We always kept eye on trying to have as much self service post purchase as possible.
Right.
But I think the other thing we then started to transition back towards was what can we also do pre purchase?
Right.
And you know, can you do a free trial?
Can you do these kind of product led motions for Copilot as well?
So that was a journey we started on and that I helped facilitate together with our product and customer success and sales and so on.
And that really also was what got me excited about user Flow.
And that's why I decided to leave Cobalt and I'm still an advisor there, but leave my operational role and join userflow, which is, you can say a product in the product led growth space.
And it's also a born product led product, which is interesting.

Omer (23:10.450)
Yeah, yeah.
I think there's some interesting connections between product LED and sales LED and what you're doing with, with user flow.
So I want to kind of just wrap up a little bit on the, the story here with Cobalt and then we'll, we'll talk more about user flow.
So you're doing, you're doing outbound with Cobalt.
You guys are doing the sales efforts.
There was some inbound that you were also getting.
The other thing was events was another part of your growth strategy, right?

Esben Friis-Jensen (23:41.790)
Yeah, yeah.
So we had an amazing chief marketing or VB of marketing, sorry, who he had been in the security industry for a long time, so we hired him.
And then we also hired an amazing chief Strategy officer, Caroline Wong, who's a thought leader in the security space and an amazing speaker and thought leader.
And both those hires really helped us also create a brand.
Right.
We remember we were for Danish people, so we didn't really have a big network in the security industry in the US or anywhere.
And so they helped us create that brand in the security space.
And a big part of selling in security is there's a couple of big conferences, rsa, Black Hat, DEF Con and these kind of where you do a bit more event driven sales.
Right.
So event driven marketing.
And we were really good at that due to especially our VP of marketing being really good at that.
But then also for especially smaller customers, we of course had a lot of inbound from SEO.
But all of that of course also Came from the branding we were doing to our VP of marketing and Caroline.

Omer (24:55.760)
So you told me earlier that the security community in the US is pretty close knit and that's not something that you guys were initially put.

Esben Friis-Jensen (25:05.920)
We didn't know anybody.
Right.
So we were not even from security.
And then on top of that, the security industry is a close knit group.
So I think even though we had an amazing product, you had to get speaking time.
Right.
And that was hard for us to get as we were unknown.
And I think that's where Caroline and Chris, our VP of marketing, really helped us create that trust and brand in the US security industry so we could get, get out and speak about our product and when then people actually could listen.
They all liked it.
Right.
And that helped us grow a bit.
But yeah, that was also a challenge for us getting through the.
There's so many vendors in the security space.
Right.
So you really have to figure out

Omer (25:54.580)
how you get through the noise and to date.
So eventually you did raise money and Cobalt's gone on to raise, I think $37 million so far.

Esben Friis-Jensen (26:04.610)
Yeah, in total.

Omer (26:06.130)
And what's the size of the team?
How many employees does the company have?

Esben Friis-Jensen (26:08.690)
It's getting close to 200, so they're growing really fast these days.
Raised the CRSB in last year and yeah, the company's going really well.
Security has not, you know, as you probably know, security, the security market is keep on increasing and it's likely not going away soon.

Omer (26:25.330)
Yeah.
So over 200 people at Cobalt.
How many people do you have working at user flow?

Esben Friis-Jensen (26:30.790)
2, and that's the founders.

Omer (26:37.030)
So you guys are closing in on your first million in ARR.
And Sebastian, your co founder at UserFlow has been working on this product since 2018.
And just kind of describe what your relationship was because you sort of joined full time earlier this year, but you've been involved with Sebastian and with userflow for quite some time.

Esben Friis-Jensen (27:02.210)
Yeah.
So Sebastian is a friend of mine.
He was actually a customer of Cobalt.
That's how I got to know him initially.
He's also from Denmark and he was based in the Bay Area as well.
So there's a small Danish community in the Bay Area.

Omer (27:16.930)
How many Danish people are there in the Bay Area?

Esben Friis-Jensen (27:19.890)
I think it's actually more than a thousand, I think I've heard.
So there are a few.
But I got to know him through the Bay Area and San Francisco and then we stayed friends.
And when he started working on back then he worked on something called Studio One that later transitioned into being User Flow.
It was actually a video kind of a platform for making videos, training videos, onboarding videos.
But he transitioned into this more interactive in app guidance in 2019.
I stayed very close to him.
I, I did consider joining him already back then, but Cobo was going so great and I wanted to help push COBOL to the next level.
And I could still see me adding a lot of value in Kobold then.
So I waited a bit, but advised him from time to time on certain topics.
And then in the end of 2020, where cobalt had really been on this product led journey for a year or so and I really was getting excited about it, maybe I was also looking to get back to that early stage feeling again.
You know, I'm a founder by heart, so really enjoy that early stage of a company.
And Kobo was maturing into a great larger company.
Right.
So I maybe made the decision due to those reasons to join Sebastian full time and go all in on helping grow user flow to the next level.
So that's the short story about that.

Omer (28:54.510)
So you spent many years at Cobalt in a very sales LED environment and then now with user flow you've gone back to product led, which is kind of how you guys started out with Cobalt.
So kind of gone full circle.

Esben Friis-Jensen (29:10.110)
Yeah.
And I think we always kept a bit of it in Cobalt, but you know, we just were, we were more forced to have a more sales LED model.
Right.
So yeah, I think.
But in userflow we're really at that, I think, which we were also in the early stage of COVID like the true product led, where you, everything you do is product led.
Right.
We try really not to do sales meetings at all and not have customer success necessarily.
And it's all like the product is driving the selling and the support and the retention and so on.
Of course we are not negligent to our customers and we still talk to them if needed, but we try to push everything into the product and that I think is what has allowed us to scale to that level of revenue without hiring anybody.
Right.
Because we're basically, we do free trials and the customers, many customers, will just buy without ever speaking to us.
Right.
They'll just go to free trial and then buy our product.

Omer (30:10.550)
Are you hiring freelancers, vendors?
No, nothing?

Esben Friis-Jensen (30:14.710)
No.
We've had a bit of UX help from a freelancer there, but that's it.
It is basically because we can manage business just the two of us the moment.
And we also have this.
We want to try to see how it is to bootstrap a business.
Right.
So we Also haven't raised capital and we're not planning to raise capital.
We want to see how far can you actually go with hiring maybe a limited amount of people and, and, and not raising any capital.
And, and so far it's been, it's been so good.

Omer (30:41.410)
So, so what is it like, Sebastian's working on the product and you're focused on growth?

Esben Friis-Jensen (30:45.170)
Yeah, he, he builds the product.
Sebastian is an amazing engineer.
He, he has built other software as a service products before and also worked at Google.
And then I focus on the growth path and customer support and these kind of things.
So really making sure that we get more customers and also support the customers that we have.

Omer (31:05.020)
So user flow is not the only onboarding product out there.
There's quite a few around.
How is the product different to other products that are out there?
And then secondly, how are you messaging that to the market?

Esben Friis-Jensen (31:21.140)
Yeah, I think really the biggest difference, and I think that's what I, of course I'm biased, but the biggest difference is we focused a lot on building a fantastic ux.
So a product that's easy to use but yet advanced.
So we have all the advanced functionality that you would expect from a solution like ours, like version control, localization, you can branch flows, you can do all sorts of advanced things, but we really focused on keeping it clean and nice.
Right.
So that is, I think, our biggest differentiator.
And that's also what we hear from customers, is that we are, that's where we win.
Right.
Like we have a really strong ux.
So you can say there are two buckets of competitors.
They're the ones that are, they're simple to use, but they're also very basic.
And then you have the ones that are advanced, but they're also a bit harder to use.
And we really try to find that middle ground where you have something that's advanced but easy to use.

Omer (32:21.450)
How do you go about building a great user experience?
And I know this is probably a question that we could spend all day kind of talking about, but what I'm trying to get to here is that like, I mean, I'll talk about personally, from my experience, I can, like, I'm always like, you know, just because of what I do, I'm always like looking at different products and trying things.
And for me, it's often about when I, when I sign up, regardless of the functionality, there's this kind of this visceral thing that I go through to, to decide, do I actually like being in this app?
Does it actually feel pleasant to use?
Does it actually make sense.
And in many ways, even if a product lacks some features but kind of passes those things that I just mentioned, I'm more likely to stick with that and spend money on that than something that has more functionality but for whatever reason just doesn't feel right or is a little difficult to use.
So what does a great user experience mean for you guys?
And then how do you figure that out for user flow?

Esben Friis-Jensen (33:32.500)
No, I totally agree with you that UX is sometimes more important than features, or I would say always more important.
But of course the features matters as well as you start using the product more.
If you really lack some key integration or something, it's also not good.
Right?
Then you might start accepting a worse UX just to get that feature.
But I think UX is in my view also the most important thing.
I really don't like working with products that are hard to use or doesn't give me a smooth experience.
Maybe they're slow and things like that.
It's always hard to put definition on what is a great ux.
I think there are many elements that plays into that.
One of them is of course less is more sometimes.
Many platforms try to put a lot of stuff in their platforms, which of course adds complexity.
Right.
And it's really about like, how can you make it as simple as possible while still achieving the aha moment, the goal of what you want the user to do.
So I think that's how we always think as well.
Like how can you keep things simple and how can you do things smarter?
We're looking a lot on our customers challenges, right?
Like are there certain challenges?
Whenever we get a support ticket, we always think how can we solve that in the product?
Instead of thinking of how can we write a help desk article that can explain it.
Right?
Like we much rather want to solve that support issue by having the product do something smarter or better.
Right?
So we're also always listening to our customers and seeing what they struggle with and also do like maybe videos with our customers, seeing how they use the platform so we can see certain things they're struggling with that we can maybe make smarter.
So we do a lot of customer analysis, but that's also combined with a lot of intuition about what is a good user experience and how would you like it to work yourself and care about that.
Care about the quality.
And that quality at speed I mentioned in the beginning is super important.

Omer (35:42.410)
Yeah.
And it can be hard to do that the more time you spend on a product because you get used to it and sometimes you don't notice those little things that a new user coming in might see or might struggle with.

Esben Friis-Jensen (35:57.720)
Exactly.
There are great tools for that today.
Right?
There are tools like logrocket and these kind of tools out there where you can actually see what new users do and then you can learn from that.
I think that those are tools you can use to kind of learn and see what you can do better.
And then it's also not a customer saying you should do this, but you actually witness the problem and see, okay, this is actually like a real problem they struggle with.
How can we do this smarter?
Right.

Omer (36:25.740)
So do you use userflow for userflow?

Esben Friis-Jensen (36:28.940)
Yes, we do very meta.
But yeah, we do use userflow and userflow and we are very focused on.
So I think even though we use userflow and userflow which helps guide the user.
Right.
We are also still focused on having a great UX of our platform in general.
Right.
So User Flow should be used for introducing people to the key kind of actions they need to do.
But it's not a compromise for bad ux.
Right.
I think you should do both and you should have like a good focus on having a good UX and then have something like User Flow to do your onboarding.
Right.
Or guidance.
I think even in the most user friendly app there's still a lot of power and in guiding the user to do certain things.
Especially in B2B where you just have.
There is a level of complexity in B2B applications that you might do it in a different way than others do it and people are used to certain things and so on.
So yeah, it's good to have that kind of onboarding even though you have a great ux.

Omer (37:34.050)
Yeah, I think that's a great distinction because I mean, and to me if you don't have a great ux, using a tool like User Flow might help, but it's kind of.
You're not fixing the root cause of the problem, you're just trying to put a bandage on it and trying to sort of get things through.
Whereas I think it's like User Flow or tools like that I think are really about the onboarding that in terms of, okay, even if it wasn't there, the product is still intuitive, it's easy to use, but there's in order for them, your customers, to have success, there's a certain pathway or steps that they should take to get there.
And then those, you know, using tools like User Flow can help you to take users from point A to point Z where they need to get to.
But don't think that this is going to compensate for a crappy ux?

Esben Friis-Jensen (38:29.680)
No, exactly.
That's exactly what I mean.
Yeah.
And I think you can actually learn a lot from building the user flow onboarding as well because you have to build the guides.
So you will see.
Okay, is there something that we're doing here that doesn't really make sense.
Right.
So that's also interesting.

Omer (38:47.580)
Yeah.
I really like what you said about rather than just creating another help doc, we first take a look at and think about how could we make things more obvious or easier in the product.
That's a great mindset to have.
So let's talk about what you've done, what you and Sebastian have done to grow this, this business.
What, what are, what are sort of the main growth drivers here?
Like, are you doing a lot of like outbound emails?
Are you, are you kind of driving a bunch of inbound through SEO?
Where, where are the customers coming from?

Esben Friis-Jensen (39:22.940)
Yeah.
No.
So we, we do, of course SEO is.
SEO is something we always work on.
Can we do more SEO because it's cheaper?
We also do run Google Ads.
Right.
To help while SEO is improving.
Google Ads is great for like compensating for that.
Right.
And then I would say we don't, it's not like we don't do any form of outbound.
We do have some outbound like email campaigns, LinkedIn, networking and so on.
But other than that, we do a lot of thought leadership.
So we try to go out and talk a lot about product led growth, SaaS onboarding to really create a brand around that.
It's also big trends these days and we also speak to the whole no code trend that we also play into as we do a lot of thought leadership.
It of course helps that I founded a company before so I can use my voice this time, which I have a bit more voice now than I used to have in the early days of Kobold.
Right.
And then we also are listed on a number of like the G2s, the capterras of this world.
Right.
That's also a great channel for us where people leave reviews because that's a good place to spread the word of mouth.
And, and that's the fifth thing I really want to mention is word of mouth.
Right.
It's.
That's essential for us.
We focus a lot on building a great product so people will talk about it to their peers and share the word.
Right.
And that's really how we see ourselves growing a lot in the future.
Right.
Of course we're going to spark that with other things.
But, but you know, worth of mouth is key to us.
And that's also what you see with all the successful players with product like growth, Slack, Zoom, et cetera.
They have amazing products and that creates word of mouth, that creates these viral effects so they get even more customers.

Omer (41:11.020)
I'm still curious, how are just the two of you able to do everything?
Are you guys just ultra productive or you've just figured out a way to, to decide that the 80, 20, there's only a certain number of things you're going to focus on and say no to everything else.
How are you doing it?

Esben Friis-Jensen (41:32.210)
Yeah, I mean you of course don't do everything, right?
You say no to certain things.
I mean, I don't have a partnership program or anything like that today, but it is really about letting the product be the main driver for a lot of stuff.
Exactly.
That mindset that when you get a support ticket you try to solve it via the product so you avoid that support ticket going forward.
Right.
It also helps that Sebastian is an amazing engineer and can build stuff extremely fast.
Right.
So that of course helps us a lot.
But in general it's that mindset around having the product as your main kind of tool.
And actually what we see is they, the customers, they ask a lot of questions.
Maybe in the beginning when they do the trial, right.
We have a two week free trial, but then after that they kind of go away and they build their stuff and they know what to do, right.
Because it's a good UX and all the initial questions were answered and then we don't hear so much from them again and they still keep on renewing.
Right.
So it's that, that's ideally how you want it to be.
So, so you, you don't have to spend significant amount of time.
I think when you look at, at least for me and like products like Salesforce and so on as well and Slack, I mean I don't think they get a lot of, I don't know, I mean I haven't been in their teams but I've never written a support ticket to Slack.
Right.
I've never written a support ticket to Zoom because they have great products so I don't need to, I might need to write them about something I would like to purchase or some advanced scenario.
But like for the baseline functionality I don't really need to write them.
Right.
And I think that that is what categorizes a great product is one where you can just use it and it's a no brainer how you use IT and so on.

Omer (43:18.540)
So who are your customers today and what's the mix?
Like for example, how many enterprise customers do you have?
Just a percentage wise.

Esben Friis-Jensen (43:27.180)
Yeah.
So, right.
I mean like any other early stage SaaS business, a majority of our customer base is SMB and SaaS.
B2B SMB.
That's kind of the majority of our customers.
But we have seen a couple of larger enterprises both in terms of like larger SaaS business where maybe one or two product teams are using it.
Right.
Or also larger traditional enterprises.
So like we all know like SaaS is becoming a thing even for the traditional enterprise and they're building portals and platforms to interact with their customers and they also need onboarding.
So we work with a couple of like larger traditional Fortune 500 companies that have these kind of platforms as well.

Omer (44:18.260)
And then has the sales process for them for those larger customers been different or are they just going through and signing up?

Esben Friis-Jensen (44:26.340)
Yeah, so yeah, it definitely has.
Right.
That's where we often end up having a demo with them.
The procurement process is also still a contract and so on.
Right.
So that is different.
But the way we handle it is basically we have three packages today.
Right.
We have startup, we have pro, we have enterprise.
And you can get more or less the same functionality in Pro, but it's online terms and credit card.
Right.
So we really disincentivize the enterprise purchase.
Right.
So we really want enterprise to think about are you a truly enterprise?
Right.
And many business, I think especially like the size of like 200 employees, they sometimes end up thinking like an enterprise even though they really shouldn't.
Right.
And we try to push those type of business to think a bit less like an enterprise and maybe buy the credit card online terms package.
Right.
And then have the true enterprises that really needs this kind of lengthy procurement process and all this stuff go the enterprise route.
Right.
So that's how we do that.
And then we of course, to satisfy all the pro customers, we make a lot of material available on our website, like security policy, all the kind of things they would need for the lengthy procurement process.
But it's all written by us.
It's not something that has to be manually drafted.
So I think yes, if we move more up market with the traditional enterprise, we would have to do more of this kind of demo and contract work.
But that's just a part of the game.

Omer (46:00.850)
Yeah, no, I like, I like that.
I never sort of come across that before.
This whole idea of like trying to deincentivize customers and really think about, do you really really need that.

Esben Friis-Jensen (46:13.570)
It sounds funny, right?
Because wouldn't you like these big enterprise custom.
But really what we want, we want a business that works at scale.
Right.
And the more business we can try to work in a scalable fashion where they don't like need like heavy kind of procurement cycles or anything like that, the better.
Right.
That's easier for us.

Omer (46:34.080)
Yeah, that's good stuff.
All right, we should wrap up, get onto the lightning round.
So I've got seven quick fire questions for you.
So just try to answer them as quickly as you can.

Esben Friis-Jensen (46:46.720)
Yep.

Omer (46:47.240)
All right.
Ready?

Esben Friis-Jensen (46:48.160)
Yep, I'm ready.

Omer (46:49.040)
Okay.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Esben Friis-Jensen (46:52.560)
Stay focused.
Do one thing well and stay focused on that.

Omer (46:56.990)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Esben Friis-Jensen (46:59.390)
The product led book by West Bush is a great book.
It's really gives a great answer to the whole product led movement.
So that's one I would recommend.

Omer (47:08.670)
Yep.
And I had Wes on the show a while back, so we kind of did.
I can't remember which episode it was.

Esben Friis-Jensen (47:13.470)
Just.

Omer (47:13.710)
Just look it up.
But we chatted about that.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Esben Friis-Jensen (47:20.110)
Grit.
I think you need to have a lot of grit.
Just keep going.
And there will be a lot of tough times, but you got to keep going.

Omer (47:27.070)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Esben Friis-Jensen (47:29.950)
That's a good question.
I don't know.
I'm very much an inbox zero kind of guy and I organize my inbox to be zero.
Even though you get a lot of emails that I don't read, they're all the right ones are structured in a way so it becomes inbox zero.
And I think for me at least to function and be structured and make sure our customers get response on time, I think that's super important to kind of follow that group.

Omer (47:58.290)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Esben Friis-Jensen (48:02.850)
Crazy.
I would.
I mean, I don't know if this is crazy, but this is actually.
I'm looking for a CRM for product LED businesses and I think that is something we need in the market.
The era of Salesforce is I love everything Salesforce did for our industry and they've done so much amazing stuff, but their CRM is outdated when it comes to product LED sales motions and we need something new in the market and I think I would love to see that.
And I know there are a few early stages coming, but let's see what's out there.

Omer (48:36.970)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Esben Friis-Jensen (48:40.970)
Oh, man.
So I actually lived in Tanzania until I was like three years old.
I've been born global, you can say, even though I'm Danish.
And since then I've moved around in the world and now live in the Bay Area for the last eight years.

Omer (48:59.590)
Africa, Europe, South America, North America.

Esben Friis-Jensen (49:02.710)
That's great.

Omer (49:04.790)
Finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Esben Friis-Jensen (49:07.910)
So, I do a lot of biking.
I bike the beautiful nature here in the Bay Area and also go to other places to bike and like both biking and hiking and the nature.

Omer (49:19.030)
Awesome.
So if people want to find out more about User Flow, they can go to userflow.com and they can find cobaltobolt IO.
If people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Esben Friis-Jensen (49:34.240)
LinkedIn is the best way.
So just connect with me.
Espen.
Freestanding.

Omer (49:38.480)
We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes.

Esben Friis-Jensen (49:41.160)
There.
Perfect.

Omer (49:42.240)
Espen.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for joining me and spending some time to chat about User Flow and Cobalt.
I wish you and Sebastian the best of success and I'm curious to know how far you guys can go before you feel like you need to hire someone.

Esben Friis-Jensen (49:59.740)
Before we hire someone.
Yeah.
That's going to be interesting.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Thanks for having me.
It was a pleasure being on the show.

Omer (50:06.940)
Awesome.
Thanks so much.
Cheers.

Esben Friis-Jensen (50:08.540)
Cheers.