We catched up with him, about how his current startup, as well as insight into his thoughts on building a company.

Starting Dexplora

Knowing what his latest startup should be was a strategic decision for Hampus and his co-founder Mikael Tellhed. They wanted to be in a business where they could learn about sales – real “high velocity sales” and not the kind of “elephant hunting” they did at TAT. They were both in love with data visualisation (and had plenty of skills from their learnings at TAT in it) but didn’t know where it could be put to really valuable use. The startup became to create a tool to help salesmen in the corporate world get an better overview over their prospects and general sales insight. It got a name: Dexplora – for Data exploration.

“We wanted to create a tool that enabled salespeople to understand and easily manage all the data they had. A great looking and user friendly CRM (customer relation management).”

Pivots and micro-pivots

After a while, and the addition of two co-founders (Alfred Gunnarsson and Andreas Pålsson) and the departure of one (Henrik Been), the team realised that Dexplora was however not the best solution to the problems.

“We found that visualising the data was useless as most of the data, frankly, was crap. Salespeople did not use the CRM at all or at least not as intended.“

Dexplora pivoted to be a “data cleaning tool” – where the idea was to increase usage of the sales tools (the CRM) so that the information in it could be used to forecast, see the competitor landscape, and material to train new sales people. The new product was called GetSalesDone. For the sales person it was a task manager with a heavy focus on UX and design.

However, after building a working solution and integrating it with the CRM Salesforce, the product still was not the right one. another pivot was done – Brisk.io was created. Brisk.io still has the Salesforce integration, but this time it was a merge between Dexplora’s top-down managment focused approach and the ease of use and users from GetSalesDone. The company could now design an ideal way of working with customers and the salespeople would get a tailor made tool. The result was not just happier salesmen but better insight for management.

Naming: Dexplora -> GetSalesDone -> Brisk.io

“We just made it easy for ourselves and saw the name as any agile process. When we started the company we knew that we wanted the name of the company to be that of the product, and Dexplora was both. When we changed product to GetSalesDone, we didn’t change the name till the product had proven itself, and it didn’t. And when finally Brisk.io proved itself as product we changed the name of the company to that too.”

Lessons learned

“In the beginning we just talked to sales managers and salespeople – if I did it again today we would have structured this a lot more. I would find 10 people every day on LinkedIn or something and I would ask them what their headaches were and whatever they answered I would proceed with asking ‘why’, ‘why’, ‘why’’. And after that, ‘why’ again, till we got to the core of what the problem and its consequences.”

He recently made an excellent blogpost about this method, which goes into it in much greater details. You can read it here.

“I would have done this in combination with meeting some users that are really knowledgeable that would end up being almost advisors – for us it turned out good, with Lars Nordwall, the COO and VP Sales at Neo Technology in San Francisco, becoming one of those.”

Strength and weaknesses

When it comes to building a startup, getting the right people on board is crucial. Here Hampus had some interesting insights as well: that a person’s strength are also always the person’s weakness. When it comes to hiring and deciding who should be on what team, this was important.

“All people have skills, strengths, and weaknesses. What I have found is that mature people realise these are all the same, just different sides of the coin. A person’s strength is also their weakness. I know that I myself am very quick to reply, but that doesn’t make me the most thorough and prone to quick decisions.”

Those seeing Hampus teams in action say that it is like watching a smoothly running machine, so we take it that his efforts to build good teams has payed off.

If you want to read more of Hampus insights, he writes interesting blogpost about different details every now and then, such as the one about the ‘Asking for success’ method above, or a recent one about ‘How-do-you-feel dinners’, about how to align the core team. Insightful lessons.

Read the entire post here: Hampus Jakobsson on Dexplora, GetSalesDone, Brisk.io and lessons as a serial entrepreneur

It was held over lunch at CreativeLab, the creative event concept at the SHIP co-working space. Because we have a policy of livecasting whatever we do, you can watch the recording above (Our new Bambuser channel can be found here).

If you want to download the slides, I have made them available on slideshare but there are quite low resolution there, so can be found as pdf here as well.

I am probably describing some of the startups a little bit wrong (sorry for that), and I missed some things in the presentation (corrected in the downloadable versions). But I hope it creates some value for you as the viewer anyway.

Update 1: Some have asked why so many people are walking around and the background noice – the location where the presentation was held is the auditorium in the CreativeLab, called “trappan”, and is just that: the main stairs between the first and second floor. It is designed to be in the middle of the entire place, so that any presentations held there can have drop-in / drop-out flow. A somewhat special enviroment, but I love it, often with a lot of student from Lunds University sitting around in the open areas, and the business and entrepreneurs on the stairs themselves…

Update 2: I should of course list the top 50 startups mentioned as well! Here they are (in the order presented, i.e. in alphabetical order after category):

Series A + B

B2C

• Billetto
• Miinto
• Vivino
• WatAGame (GoSupermodel)
• Zmags

B2B

• Codesealers
• Falcon Social
• FlatFrog Laboratories
• iMotions
• Neo technology (Neo4J)
• Octoshape
• Opbeat
• Serstech
• SimpleSite (123hjemmeside)
• Tradeshift
• Trustpilot
• Unity
• Vopium

Seed level

B2C

• Bownty
• Click-A-Taxi
• Coolstuff
• Flattr
• Foap
• Tasspass
• Retevo (Roliga Prylar / Alphageek)

B2B

• Anyfi
• Atosho
• Conferize
• Crunchfish
• Deskwolf
• Dexplora (GetSalesDone and brisk.io)
• Firmafon
• GameAnalytics
• Graduateland
• InRiver
• Insurance Business Applications
• OneRecruit
• Sepior
• The Eye Tribe
• Wallmob
• Zaplox

Other prominent startups

• 23
• Echo.it
• Kvittar
• MovieStarPlanet
• Momondo
• Planeto
• Riidr
• Zendesk

Read the entire post here: Øresund Startups: Top50 and state of the region

Back in August 2012, it was reported that the duo were up to something. That something is Dexplora, and the first order of business for the new enterprise is GetSalesDone.

GetSalesDone is an enterprise software app with the sales reps in mind. It’s an app to help communicate customer demands through organisations and back to the developers. Born out of frustration with existing reporting and planning systems, Dexplora created the user-friendly ‘to-do’ list style planning and analysis tool for mobile. It is an alternative to CRM systems that can leave sales teams in a bubble – without control of the product, and unable to pass on what the customer wants to the production team.

GetSalesDone can only be paired with salesforce.com systems for now, but support for other systems is on the way. According to Jakobsson, the app will work with most corporate installations without any need for changes.

“This is just as much for us to get feedback from users” says Jakobsson.

Dexplora plans to launch a paid version later this year.

Read the entire post here: GetSalesDone revealed by former TAT team