Learn more about Uros Mikic, Patrick Haede and Dan Leeman

Uros Mikic

Twitter: https://twitter.com/UrosMikic2 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikicuros/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UrosMikicFlowNinja 

Website: ​​https://www.flow.ninja/ 

Patrick Haede

Twitter: https://twitter.com/PatrickHaede

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickhaede/

Podcast: https://www.quickcoffee.vc/ 

Website: https://www.sonic.tech/ 

Dan Leeman

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nocodemedia 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-leeman/ 

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@danleeman

Website: https://www.automationhelpers.com/ 

‍

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introduction to Agencies Around the Worls

00:02:36 - Uros Mikic from Flow Ninja

00:03:05 - Flow Ninja's Origin and Growth

00:04:10 - Team Structure at Flow Ninja

00:05:33 - Flow Ninja's Services and Client Projects

00:06:50 - Focus on Marketing Websites and Product Development

00:07:13 - Technical Challenges and Third-Party Integrations

00:09:41 - Evolution from a Small Team to a Professional Company

00:11:39 - Acquiring Projects and Client Referrals

00:13:42 - Professionalizing Business Processes

00:14:34 - Client Acquisition Strategies

00:16:43 - Building Products for Clients

00:18:32 - Technical Challenges in Project Development

00:20:09 - Flow Ninja's Future Aspirations

00:22:14 - Utilizing AI in Business Processes

00:24:59 - Exploring New Tools and Technologies

00:26:44 - Advice for Aspiring Freelancers in Webflow Space

00:28:17 - Patrick Haede's Background and Sonic Agency

00:31:07 - Challenges and Learnings at Gorillas

00:33:28 - Sonic's Approach to Product and Tech Strategy

00:35:25 - Working with Startups and Larger Companies

00:37:57 - Balancing Scale and Quick Shipping in Product Development

00:39:39 - Importance of Early Decisions in Product Development

00:41:14 - Minimum Viable vs. Lovable Products

00:43:51 - Building Products for B2B Companies

00:45:38 - Challenges in Building for Enterprises

00:48:45 - Concept of Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

00:51:19 - MLP Relevance in B2B Products

00:53:38 - Transitioning from MVP to MLP

00:55:04 - Sonic's Ideal Customer Profile

00:56:22 - Sonic's Future Direction

00:58:40 - Overview of Automation Helpers and Services

01:00:41 - Automation Helpers' Approach to Projects

01:02:45 - Hiring and Team Growth Strategies

01:04:23 - Selecting the Right Automation Tools

01:06:02 - Typical Project Lifecycle at Automation Helpers

01:08:08 - Team Expansion and Growth

01:09:02 - Sourcing Talent for Automation Helpers

01:10:48 - Deciding Between Airtable and Smart Suite

01:13:30 - Technical Challenges in Project Execution

01:14:16 - Data Management in Projects

01:15:52 - Future of Airtable and Smart Suite

01:17:28 - Future Trends in No-Code and Low-Code Space

01:19:31 - Advice for Newcomers in Product and Automation Building

01:20:59 - Ideal Clients for Automation Helpers

01:22:01 - Future Aspirations for Automation Helpers

01:23:20 - Predictions for No-Code/Low-Code Industry

‍

Transcript

Mike Mahlkow (02:36)

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Happy Building, this time with the Agencies Around the World series and we have Uros from Flow Ninja here. Hey Uros, how are you doing?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (02:48)

Hey, thank you so much for inviting me to this podcast. I'm doing pretty well.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (02:53)

Good to hear that. Why don't we just start with you telling me more about Flow Ninja, give me a little bit of background, how it started, where you are now, and what you're focusing on.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (03:05)

Yeah, yeah, of course. So actually, I think I'm in Webflow for eight years this year, so it's been a while. I found out about no code in Webflow. At that time, it was mostly just oriented about Webflow and front-end development, not more about no code in 2015. And since then, I've been obsessed with the tool and obsessed with visual development. So I've basically had one full-time role for two years, then one full-time role for six months.

‍

and then after all of those things, kind of decided to open up Flow Ninja. And this has been our fourth year kind of working, like four and a half years currently kind of running the studio. And we've had a chance to work with some kind of incredible enterprise companies like Upwork.com, Checkout.com, and we've grown to almost 40 people currently kind of in-house here in our studio.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (03:57)

Got it. And then what is the team comprised of? Is it mostly Webflow developers? Do you have any kind of like split into design and developers? Like how would you say the team structure is?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (04:10)

Yep.

‍

Yeah. So I would say like we're maybe unique in terms of kind of looking at Webflow development because we had front end developers kind of maybe start hating doing kind of their usual kind of front end development and then slowly migrate to become kind of Webflow developers. So technically like all of our kind of no code engineers or whatever you want to call them, uh, come from like the technical background and they're using kind of the platform itself to kind of move faster, to iterate faster and just kind of to do a lot more things kind of better. And like, even if some of them were junior, they were able to kind of learn,

‍

like the whole concept of building online a lot faster. So that would be our core. Then on the side where we're gonna have dedicated designers, more from the UX side and just the design side, designing everything in Figma. And on top of that, we're gonna have the usual quality assurance. We're gonna have account management, project management. And depending on the size of the project, sometimes we're gonna assign a team lead, just like a senior developer. And in some cases also on top of that, I'm gonna be involved in some of the projects.

‍

where we need to have a lot of discovery, specifically like let's say for building no code products, it usually requires like a lot more discovery and like people usually talk about that you can build kind of no code products quickly, but in the end you don't if you don't have kind of the proper discovery phase. So I'm kind of also involved in some of those kind of discoveries initially.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (05:33)

Got it. Okay. So basically what you're telling me is you have some former developers, you have some junior people that you trained up and what kind of products or services are you offering to your clients?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (05:51)

Yeah. So we do offer technically an end-to-end service in terms of kind of implementation. So like anywhere from discovery, design, and then to development. When we come to the development space, it's like first the usual kind of marketing websites. So like we kind of work with kind of bigger companies on developing their marketing websites on Webflow. Like one of the things I always, I'm always amazed by is like how much big companies spend money on like implementation costs on some kind of some of the older platforms, maybe like Adobe. So like that's been like one

‍

Mike Mahlkow (06:01)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (03:46.4)

of our biggest revenue drivers is ongoing development for companies like that and continuously improving their websites. Then on the enterprise side, we do a lot of enterprise migrations over to Webflow and we've had a pretty great success towards that. And the final part, which is something close to my heart where we push the studio more and more as the time passes by, is product development and no-code apps development.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (06:50)

Got it. So you have marketing websites, you have migrations to Webflow and all of the websites you're building are in Webflow, I assume. And then lastly, you have more and more product development. And you said that you're excited about the product development side. Are you also using a low code stack there or are you using traditional code? What are you doing if you build products?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (06:58)

Yep, yep.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (07:03)

Yes.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (07:13)

Yeah, so we usually use Webflow for frontend. We use kinda Wized to connect to Webflow to the backend. And recently we've found out, of course, about kind of Fastgen and we're gonna try to implement that, but currently we're using Xano as one of our backend tools to go ahead and connect to all of the APIs and to have the no-code experience for the products themselves.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (07:38)

Got it. And what kind of products are you building? Is it usually the same kind of product? Is it different products? Maybe just describe a typical product that you would build.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (07:48)

Yeah.

‍

So lately we see a huge push and like even this week I think we have two or three leads kind of towards kind of marketing websites that wanna basically monetize their audience a lot more, but they don't wanna use the traditional tools like for courses and whatever, but they wanna create something specific for their audience. So it's not necessarily a content platform because usually they have like either really unique quizzes or they have like different communities. It's basically a way to kind of monetize their community if they have a book,

‍

or something along those lines. So that's where we come in and build custom platforms by leveraging Webflow and all of the other tool sets to go ahead and allow them to create a custom platform without spending a lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but still also give them flexibility to go ahead and have a custom experience which is gonna be dedicated towards their course. So instead of just serving a video, you can add maybe questions, quizzes, and stuff like that on top of that.

‍

have people typing in notes around quizzes. There are many different things that people have tried. So we've currently built, I think, two or three of those kind of platforms with low-code solutions. And they're one of the biggest priorities, I would say. And on the other side, we're also building kind of a

‍

MVPs for some of the products that people want to go ahead and test on the market. Currently we have something kind of like in the real estate niche that they want to go ahead and test to go to a new market and leverage kind of like some sort of APIs which are open-sourced and kind of connect them in a specific way into the platform. And also kind of in our studio we have a project management solution we completely built with no code that we use for our client relationship platform so that we can systemize all of our processes by creating our own software.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (09:41)

Got it. That makes sense. I would like to talk a little bit more about how you got to where you are and then specifically what the processes look like now. Maybe tell us about like one of the very first projects and how you worked back then when you were still a small team and how things have changed now that you are like a professional.

‍

or let's say a more professional company that has worked with some really big clients. So what kind of growth did you have to make in terms of the processes and checklists and all the other things that you've incorporated?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (10:14)

Yeah, so I sometimes think about like, how did the event clients work with us when we started studio like four and a half years ago? Just because like there were no processes like it was just a group of friends because I started a studio kind of First by myself then like with my brother with my best friend My brother had a full-time job at that time. Like he was actually working kind of in a surgery kind of as a radiologist And like one of my friends liked drinking a lot and going out a lot So I could not actually depend on him like we land the project and i'm like, okay

‍

out one night and he cannot recover for the next three days. So in the beginning we didn't have a team but it was mostly around my back and I aligned the project, I think that somebody of them is going to be able to help out and then I need to work longer days and longer and longer days to go ahead and fulfill that. So it was quite a messy process, we didn't have quality assurance, so there were a lot of bugs and clients were reporting bugs and there were our quality assurance. So it's not something that I'm proud of but I guess everybody has to go through a

‍

period like that, we always wanted to look like we care, like that we are always giving it our all. And I think that was a thing that actually pushed us true because like even clients could see like, maybe at that time we weren't so expensive, but they saw that they're kind of, we're trying and we're pushing to kind of make everything happen. And that kind of got us the first clients versus now where we're migrating to a more kind of serious studio. And like we're migrating to more kind of serious projects. Like we do have a lot of overhead and a lot of people

‍

to kind of build our clients for, but that kind of ends up with like a much better process and a much better product for our clients. So kind of with time as we grew, I realized, hey, okay, we need like dedicated project management. Then like we need a dedicated kind of quality assurance. Then for bigger projects, we need a team lead who's going to be leading the development of that. And like just worrying about like documentation, the technical aspects, looking into the future and kind of how the project is going to be

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (12:14)

having a junior developer on top of that. Then I think we added account management to make sure that we can have somebody actually taking care of clients. As we grew more and more, I could not be the only person to be the single point of contact for 40 clients, which we have currently active at a studio. So that was another thing. And then after that perspective, we moved into having C-level roles, which was one of the pretty scary parts on my side.

‍

was coming from marketing and then design and then development. I was always thinking that I can do everything and that I can do the marketing, I can do the sales, I can be involved into the development aspects of it. But then we invested into having an operations manager, a CTO, having a creative director, adding finance, administration, all those kind of supporting roles to create a company which is actually going to be running and which is going to be creating much better services for our clients. It might slow the process down.

‍

like just a little bit more to come to those products, but I think it's better that you have a little bit of a longer process, but in the end, that we ship good products, kind of specifically, because like with no code, I've seen that sometimes people compromise quality over speed, and that it might get some kind of bad, kind of public kind of press if you launch something which is kind of not working on mobile, which you didn't test a specific use case when a customer uses it or something like that.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (13:24)

Hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (13:42)

Got it. So to summarize, A, you have a more professional, like just hierarchical structure where there's more division of work. And since the company grew, you just needed like more people to specifically focus on their areas. And then also you have just like an actual process in place in contrast to when you started, you were just building and then trying to figure it out, which makes sense that's, that's how people start, right? And then now there's like way more focus on.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (14:04)

Yep.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (11:39.63)

a way more focused on just quality assurance and everything that relates to that. So that makes sense to me. Let's talk a little more about the actual projects. How do you usually find your projects? Do you do active sales? Do they come to you? Is it referrals? How does that look like?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (14:34)

Yeah.

‍

So I would say like 50 to 60 percent of our clients still come due to the referrals, just because I've been freelancing since 2015, and all of that needs to compound up. For the longest time, we were just a flat line and we didn't have any referrals. But I guess as you do good work, at one point all of that compounded up and people started referring us to their friends, started referring us to their new companies as they move roles, because that's been a pretty interesting game changer for me.

‍

realizing that if you work for an enterprise and you work with a marketing manager or VP of marketing, they're probably gonna reach their KPIs over a year or two years, and then they're gonna switch companies, and they're gonna want to continue to work with somebody who's good. So that's also been one of our biggest revenue drivers. So I would say that we still can operate a studio mostly from referrals, but on top of that, we also look at our studio website more of as a real business. So we invest a lot into blogs

‍

SEO part of the website. So that's where we kind of created a full on in-house marketing team. Currently we have a kind of full-time video editor, full-time kind of content person, full-time SEO person, and a media manager, and a staff designer and a developer, just for our studio website and for our ventures, as we do have some of the products we launched internally that kind of we sell to our customers. So that based off of that, we publish kind of one video per week, we publish short form content, we publish four blog posts per week.

‍

our website to make sure that we can give out free value and that we can offer a lot more. More of that and based off all of those kind of initiatives and all those people and eyeballs that see us, people come to our website and go ahead and kind of send over a project on our forum.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (16:23)

Yeah, I assume if you're building websites, you also have a lot of pressure to have a good website. I assume it needs to... Yeah, yeah, the bar is very high. You said that you build some products that you then sell to some of your clients. Can you give some examples of what type of products those are?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (13:52.33)

Yeah, yeah, that's the worst part. Yeah.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (16:43)

Yeah, yeah. So recently we launched DataGoat, which is a Google Analytics plugin for Webflow, which has been our first time actually creating a non-no-code product, which it has been built in React completely. So it basically allows our clients to have a dedicated layer for Google Analytics 4 on top of the whole website automatically, so that you can get some of the basic tracking out of the box by just installing a simple plugin.

‍

priorities and then on top of that we have our kind of six star platform, how we like to call it, that we use for our client relationship and that's probably one of the longest projects where we plan to sell that as a SaaS tool in the next year or two but we're heavily investing currently just to have that be the best tool we can for our clients and then slowly add features to expand it to the further market and then we also have some free resources we're creating around

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (17:43)

kind of used for Webflow websites, which is more on a free side than an actual product, but these two are kind of our babies. And sometimes, like, I spend too much time on those two products, I guess.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (17:50)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (17:55)

Yeah, I understand. So if you look at the products you're building, and maybe we separate between the websites you're building and the SaaS products that you're now building, what are the most challenging parts to build usually on a technical side? Because I assume you've worked with Webflow so much that all of the basics are probably pretty easy, but are there some things that you run into every now and then

‍

challenging always or is it always a different kind of challenging part per project?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (18:32)

Yeah, so I would say, even on marketing websites, we do have a lot of custom code that we write and custom JS that we write for websites. And all of that can be done pretty easily. But when you come to platforms, you start integrating with third party APIs. And that's where every single project is gonna have a really complex API you're gonna need to integrate into No-Code tool in order for it to have the edge over all of the competition. And that's where we usually see kind of most amount of problems. I mean, recently we finished a project which had a Stripe integration.

‍

to go live and the client just notified us, hey, we're not gonna go with a Stripe integration. We're gonna go with like a tool which didn't have any documentation, which was not unknown or something like that just because they got much lower fees for payment processing. And that's where we realized, okay, like we need to continuously learn a lot more about even maybe usual development in order to continue building kind of no code products because at this point we had to tell to the client, we don't know how to do it and we need to kind of find outsource help to go ahead and kind of implement.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (19:11)

Hmm. Yeah.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (16:57.34)

a completely new payment process that nobody else has implemented in the no-code space. And that's where some of the challenges can come up.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (19:40)

Got it. So it's often third party tools and integrating them properly, especially when they have bad documentation and it's not Stripe. Yeah. That makes sense. That makes sense. Let's look into the future a little. We talked about that you started on your own, then you got your brother and a friend on board. Now you're 40 people. So I would say the last couple of years have been very good for you. At least as in like neutral outside observer, but where do you see

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (20:05)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (20:09)

Flow Ninja in like four and a half years from now, if we just double the time, where do you want to be, what do you want to do, what do you want to achieve?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (17:43.07)

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, I would say technically, yes, when you say we're doing good from a people perspective, but I'm always thinking that there can be a lot better, and that we can improve our processes and stuff like that. I mean, I specifically chose maybe even this year to grow to this amount of people, even though we sacrificed our profitability a lot, and we could make a lot more money looking at it from a casual perspective. But my perspective was, let's start to build the best team possible, and a team which can actually work without me, because I felt all of these supporting roles were needed

‍

to go to the step forward. So I would say kind of the next step would be to kind of like grow the team just a little bit more. I'm like, my idea is like maybe 50 to 60 people would be the ideal sweet mark. I wouldn't go, I wouldn't want to go above that. And then just try to reverse engineer our processes and try to understand how can everybody kind of be as useful as possible. Maybe how can we use AI? How can we use maybe some boilerplate templates and whatever, just to help our clients leverage their ideas much faster and get to their goals much faster.

‍

and in the end work with a lot more fun companies. I have a vision board which is maybe strange for me. I want to work with Porsche and that's on my vision board. How can we create a team good enough so that big companies and cars and watches that I like, maybe Rolex or stuff like that, are going to work with us. So it's more of how can we create a stable company that maybe some other pretty fun companies are going to want to work with us and maybe get some benefits out of that.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (21:31)

Hehehe

‍

Mike Mahlkow (21:46)

Yeah, I can introduce you to a couple of my friends at Porsche, if that's high up on your list. But we can talk about that later. One thing that you mentioned is also one thing that I wanted to ask, because many clients, at least I've heard, or like many different, basically everyone's thinking about it, like how to incorporate AI into their processes. And there's like different levels of how you can do that.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (21:52)

That's gonna work definitely.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (22:14)

And I would like to hear your opinion on how you're using it currently. How do you think you'll use it in the future?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (22:22)

Yeah.

‍

So I think mostly, depending on the seniority of a person, if it's a junior person, it's like a buddy. It's like two junior persons just talking together. Because I feel like you need to understand code, really. And you need to understand logic in order to use it to the full potential and to use it to actually get any benefits. So we see the most amount of benefits in the development space. Because if you know what you want to write, you just tell to AI, hey, I want to write this in this use case, in this use case, in this use case. And then it's going to help you out. And then you're probably going to be debugging that on your own.

‍

that's the place where we're kind of going the most is kind of how can we make AI our body that we don't spend time on GitHub and like kind of stack overflow the whole day on trying to find the perfect solution, but that we use it as our buddy. Because in the end, kind of if you don't know the usual concepts of developing or like you don't know how like products are built or anything like that, it's not going to do anything and like it's just going to produce templated work and it's going to be compared to like the usual templates. So like if people want templates, like they can buy templates currently like on market

‍

places and with AI they're going to be able to create something similar like which is templated. So like my opinion is currently that I don't think that it's gonna kind of replace us but it's more that the bar is just going to get higher and higher of the things like even studios or like even freelancers are going to need to do in order for clients to pay for that because like I guess the junior and junior kind of things are going to be maybe replaced by AI like people who are maybe higher up are going to be able to do even more incredible things and then they would be able to do previously kind of by leveraging the technology.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (23:54)

Got it. Since we only have a couple of minutes left, I would like to dive into tooling, because you see a lot of different tools, I assume. And let's exclude Fastgen because of the bias. What kind of tools are you currently excited about? What do you think is something that you wanna spend more time with? It doesn't even have to be strictly...

‍

like related to like building the core of your business. But have you, have you discovered anything that you, that you think is a tool that people should check out?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (21:53.75)

Yeah, I mean like personally just because I guess we're in a different stages of growth currently I'm kind of playing around with HubSpot because as an agency usually see clients paying for HubSpot incredible amounts and like we were never at a position that we Kind of have enough leads or anything like that if we need a software like that But when you start kind of scaling your sales operations and stuff like that I see it can kind of become pretty useful the downside is that is pretty expensive So waiting for somebody to create a much cheaper version of that Kind of on that front

‍

Mike Mahlkow (24:58)

Hehehe

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (24:59)

More from the sales perspective. It's that but in general I think it's kind of mostly Webflow just because I really like where they're going and kind of what we're able to create for that So I'm like really in depth kind of trying to find out all of the use cases that Webflow can kind of offer to The clients and also maybe on the other side Dive really deep into the tools which are a little bit outdated Because as we work with more and more enterprise companies like we are tech people and we're consistently kind of really excited about all the new stuff

‍

Mike Mahlkow (25:06)

Hmm.

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (25:28)

But when you realize how slow some of the processes are, maybe with Adobe Experience Manager or some other tools that we had a chance to see our clients using, it's more about, how can I know more of what's bad there so that we can leverage the newer technology a lot better and that we can save those people from a lot of the hustles they're having currently.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (25:45)

Hmm.

‍

Yeah.

‍

Got it. Then as the last question, we talked about the history, we talked about the future, we talked about tools that you're looking into. And you also said that you are specifically excited about your main tool, Webflow, and how it basically is still evolving after...

‍

such a long time, right? Because that's not always the case with tooling. Sometimes it actually digresses, but apparently you really like the direction it's going into. Let's assume we, like someone who's listening is like a freelancer who wants to like work in the Webflow space. Or like just in general, let's say they wanna like build products, services for technical service for other people. Where would you tell them to start? Like what is a good starting point?

‍

Uros Mikic @ Flow Ninja (26:44)

I would say if they want to use Webflow and they want to go that direction, definitely the Webflow University, just because one of the things they've done incredibly as a company and probably they've grown to this point is they created a lot of free tutorials and a lot of free content to actually get you on board. Because usually the tools are, they need to become popular, then you need to have influencers pick them up, then they create courses that are paid and the process of going maybe viral with a tool is a lot longer, versus the Webflow side because they created a lot of

‍

free community kind of items online that you can just kind of browse completely for free. So I just recommend going there. There's a lot of challenges. There's a lot of kind of different videos. Spend a lot of time there. Like I'm sure that you're going to be able to come to a good place maybe in like six months or so to actually start accepting freelance work.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (27:34)

Got it. Okay, Webflow University it is. And I think that's it. Thank you so much, Uros, for your time. That was very interesting to hear. And I'm very excited to see where the next four and a half years lead you, and we should get you back. Maybe not in four and a half years, but at some point to see what progress you've made. And until then, everyone was listening, and also to Uros, happy building.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (27:59)

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Happy Building. This time I have my good friend Patrick here. He has been a founder. He was the head of product for one of the fastest growing startups of the last couple of years. And now he's running his own high quality software agency. He will explain all of this in way better words, but first of all, hey there, how are you doing?

‍

Patrick Haede (28:17)

Hey, yeah, super cool. Great to be here and great that we are now finally, we're finally doing our first podcast together, even though we've been, we've known each other for years. So, so super cool to do this.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (28:37)

It feels very good. Yeah. Maybe to start off, can you just very quickly tell us about your background, the startup journey, the Gorilla's journey, and then how you ended up building Sonic, the agency that you're currently leading.

‍

Patrick Haede (28:51)

Yeah, definitely, definitely. So I'll make it as short as possible. Um, we, we launched our first venture backed startup, um, back in the, back in the days, I think 2017, this was Mapify building a travel company, raised capital for it. Um, I was before a student visiting student at MIT in Boston. And, um, we also got our first funding from MIT. And then after half a year dropped out there and, and with our founding team, kind of met all met in Berlin, moved to Berlin.

‍

and then set up the company there and then built Mapify for three years. We had quite a difficult half a year a year with COVID, of course, as a travel startup, that was a whole story in itself, and then actually managed to sell the company to Home2Go and Home2Go acquired the social and content platform of Mapify and it was kind of for us an unexpected outcome, unexpectedly positive.

‍

outcome because of course when you had looked at the travel space in that time, most companies were basically going to zero. And then I noticed this application kind of being featured on Instagram. People were taking videos of their smartphone with a stopwatch, 10-minute delivery. And I was living in Prenslauer Berg at the time.

‍

And I heard about this app Gorillas and what's happening there. And I downloaded the first app and the first Gorillas app, the first ever app. It wasn't, it wasn't live for a long time, but maybe a couple of months, um, was really a very simple app and they had kind of taken like a third party software stack and made like a logistics app to be the first Gorillas app. And, and coming from this, um, mobile app background, I thought like, okay, there's something that can be done here. Right. And apparently people are kind of celebrating this concept and they're sharing it on social media and everywhere.

‍

So I met with Kagan, the founder of Gorillas at the time, shortly before the Series A, and we very quickly agreed on me and one of my co-founders, Magnus, joining Gorillas, me as the head of product and him as the head of backend, really as kind of like the first people on the product and engineering side, next to Ronnie, the CTO. And then what followed, of course, one and a half years of hyper-growth product and tech building.

‍

Patrick Haede (31:07)

a lot of learnings and incredible amount of new experiences for me, especially learning that ultimately the customer app that I had seen in the very beginning was one of the easiest products to build in the context. And we actually realized, okay, there's so much more that has to be done on the supply chain and kind of back and side to make this business happen. And then left Gorillas in summer last year. So that was summer 2022. And I spent three months doing a product consulting project in LA.

‍

with a company, Same Day Health, also founded by a German founder who we know, or founders. And then it came back to Germany and we were thinking, you know, with the Mapify founding team what to do next. And it kind of got started organically, right? People were reaching out like, hey, you know, you have nothing to do right now. Can you help here with our startup? We want to build an MVP. We want to build a product. And that's how we got started with Sonic. And

‍

And what we built with Sonic is we kind of call it like a product and tech studio, really with this character of like having a small, very focused team, very selected, very focused projects. And I think it's like three main areas. It's really product and tech strategy. So really working even with startups in the earliest stages to learn like, what, what are you actually planning to build? What should you be building for your users and customers? Then it's the second phase of

‍

actually building things, right? So really making sure that from the first MVP to like a product that can hyper scale, you, you developed the first application of whatever that might be. And then this third area, which has kind of arisen, you know, over the last, I would say six months, which is kind of like organizational design and organizational development with the companies that we work with. And it's quite interesting because of course, when you have an, when you have an external

‍

partner kind of join you on your product. Um, I think what's, what's very often happening is that founders then ask themselves this question of, okay, but what, what is after Sonic, right? Like, I mean, they can help me like very quickly in the first half year, but what do I do with the product afterwards? And so we want to help them find the right people for their team to actually, you know, be able to take over the product and move it forward. And that's how this kind of third, I would say area of consulting and supporting companies has come about. And.

‍

Patrick Haede (33:28)

It's now been a year, a lot of interesting, challenging projects, and I think something, a journey that we all enjoy a lot.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (33:37)

That was very helpful context and I have a couple of follow up questions already. So basically what you're saying is you saw the very early stages, right, with Mappify, where you started from scratch. Then you joined Gorilla's pre-series A, so they already had some good traction but then really exploded afterwards in a good way at first and then things got a bit chaotic, let's say. Yes.

‍

Patrick Haede (33:54)

Yes.

‍

Patrick Haede (34:02)

Definitely, definitely a wild journey.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (34:05)

And then you basically switch to consulting and out of that, like people just asking for help, you started building Sonic. And now you have these like three separate areas. And like most of the team is still based in Berlin, I assume.

‍

Patrick Haede (34:14)

Yes.

‍

Patrick Haede (34:19)

Yeah, most, I mean, we are, we're a small team, right? So 13 people, most of the team is based in Berlin. Yes. And we have a small, we share an office space there with, with design studio Blossom. But then everyone else is kind of a little bit all over the place in Germany, and then two of us are in Amsterdam. So I'm, I'm myself also in Amsterdam. Although these days I'm in Berlin every, every two weeks, most companies that we work with are based in Berlin. And so I think for us, what we found quite early was that being

‍

Mike Mahlkow (34:23)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (34:43)

Hmm.

‍

Patrick Haede (34:48)

you know, being on site, literally like spending time with, with the people that we work with, um, in their office or, or in our office, it's really helpful. So that's what we, that's what we try to do on a regular basis, because ultimately you're, you know, you're working on very intense product and tech projects. You want to make sure that you have a great relationship and you can really build great stuff together.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:09)

Mm. Got it. And you alluded to it a little bit earlier. You mostly work with startups, you said, but I think you also do a couple of projects with bigger companies, right? So how do you think about your customer base?

‍

Patrick Haede (35:25)

Yeah, yeah, it's quite interesting. It's developing now. So we have, we have one project with a with a very large enterprise actually. So it's GLS, the logistics provider in Europe. And they're really all over Europe and have a huge, huge company. And we're working with the newly created digital unit in Germany. So that's I think, you know, from a company size, our largest customer right now.

‍

Then we work with startups, I think across the stages. And what's quite interesting is that I wouldn't say that we have like a clear type of company or size of company that we like to work with. It's really about the challenge that a certain company has, right? And they could take it. Could be, it could be a team of three people wanting to build their first MVP, or it could be a corporate larger enterprise that wants to do corporate, you know, corporate innovation and new venture building. And they have the same challenge of, of building.

‍

you know, their first MVP or finding their first people on the product and tech side to run things internally. And so it's really, I think, this specialization of how can we get a first product to market with the highest possible quality and this perspective of you want to operate as a startup, you want to move really fast. That's that's why we ultimately named the company Sonic. You want to move very fast, but you want to make very deliberate choices on

‍

product and tech in the earliest days so that when your product actually scales, you can really profit from that and you get that going. Because that was one experience that we made at Gorillas was that, you know, you were you actually when there was the moment in time and it really exploded in terms of customer growth and demand on people wanting to order.

‍

That's when you want your tech to be very reliable. And of course, I mean, at this kind of hypergrowth, you will always have scaling issues. But it became very clear to us that you can create enormous value in the company when in the earliest moments you create, you really make good decisions on product and tech. And you're very wise about it. And that's really, I think, one of the core benefits that we bring into these projects. It's not that we just build something.

‍

It's really just kind of working very closely with the founders and leadership team in terms of like, how should it be built so that it works not just in the next six months, but it actually can work in like four or 10 years. So that's kind of the thinking behind it, I would say.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (37:57)

Got it. Quick interlude, I think I was probably responsible for half the Gorilla's orders in Berlin in the early days. If you still remember. Yeah.

‍

Patrick Haede (10:06.19)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. We were, I remember we were messaging. We were actually messaging about, you know, the experience. Yeah. It was such a crazy time. I mean, I have never seen a growth curve like this, you know, like literally like doubling week by week, um, like week by week, right? So this is really, really crazy.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (38:19)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (38:23)

Yeah, it was this weird time for everyone listening during COVID. I was locked out of the US because I couldn't renew my visa because all the consulates were closed. So, basically what I did is I got myself, we had a Berlin office and we had a San Francisco office back then for our last company and I got myself like a, an apartment, like literally 20 seconds next to our office and then just slept in the apartment and worked in the office most of the time, but Gorillas kept me alive because

‍

Patrick Haede (38:31)

Oh wow.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (38:52)

I even had a note in the like Gorilla's Delivery usually when I was still in the office that they should just knock at the window because we were at the ground floor. So basically I ordered some food, they knocked at the window, I opened it and I could immediately just continue working. It was definitely a big productivity driver for me back then. So thank you for that in hindsight. So basically one thing that you say is an interesting point. Like you said, you said making good decisions early on.

‍

Patrick Haede (39:09)

Yeah, incredible, incredible.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (39:20)

to then not regret them later. And I do agree, like making early decisions can save you a lot of time later on. But on the other hand, there's also the problem that you might over optimize in the early days, right? Because most companies, let's be honest, don't hyper scale like Gorillas That's like a one in, I don't know, one in a hundred thousand, probably even more type of story. So how do you balance building for scale versus still shipping quickly and being able to iterate quickly enough.

‍

Patrick Haede (39:39)

Yes.

Yeah, it's a super good question and it's probably one of the hardest problems to solve when you look at early stage product and tech challenges. So I think the first thing that I would say is that you never want to lose focus of the actual product and customer value that you're creating. So I think ultimately what's very important is that...

‍

It's rarely ever about the specific technological solution. It's really about like whether what you're building actually creates value or not, right? Like that's how you bring a product to product market fit. And it's like never, it's basically never happening that your customers would ask you, how are you hosting or what language is your backend built? Like customers couldn't care less. It's really about like, does the product actually work for them? However, I think it's important that

‍

You create this overview and understanding of what things do I have in my toolbox. And then you can apply them. And when I think about, we were talking about like no code tools, and we're talking about Fastgen and we're talking about like different options that have arisen, it's very interesting because now you have more possibility to quicker get a learning in where beforehand nothing was available to you, right? And so.

‍

like one very concrete example. Usually when I encourage, you know, when I work with early stage founders, or we think about a very early product and an MVP or something like that, I'm thinking like, okay, the best way to, or the fastest way to validate is like not building anything, right? The fastest way to validate is like, you have a design prototype and you put it in someone's hand. Now, the interesting thing with that is that you can of course go to a coffee store and you can, you know, do 10 user interviews and you can kind of do this research.

‍

But the reality is you will never really know until you put the product in people's hands, because they could always be just be nice to you, or they would forget about it the day later. So what's interesting about the no-code space, or the low-code space of what has been created over the last years, is now you have this option to very, very quickly put an actual product in someone's hands. And it kind of bridges this gap between

‍

Patrick Haede (42:14)

I need to develop the whole app, but I also don't just want to test with the design. I want to have something in between that I might actually be able to develop from. And I think what's the interesting thing to internalize here for founders or for people kind of thinking about an early stage product is the better you make these kind of choices, the more likely it is that you can actually...

‍

use part of that infrastructure for a very long time. And I think that's what it's about. It's not necessarily about for me, thinking for four months, how am I gonna build the product? Because in this time, you could already collect user and customer feedback. But it's kind of thinking about what kind of companies and tools do I wanna use for different things? And now I have this overview over my stack, and now I can decide when I actually get closer to product market fit.

‍

I don't have to kind of rebuild everything, but I can actually build on the building blocks that I already have. And I think that's really what for me it's about in terms of like thinking, you know, kind of imagining, hey, what if this prototype that we now have, what if it's scaled? What kind of decisions would I have to make? And optimizing for that can be like super good because that's your goal, right? You want anything that you put out there. Ideally, it kind of skyrockets and you have like a hockey stick growth curve.

‍

You want that. And so you want to be ready for that as well with your tech stack.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (43:42)

Yeah, yeah. I think that's a, it's a very good philosophy to have just seeing what the actual job is that you need to solve. And then trying to find the best tool set for that. And once you have a tool set, if you look at a new problem, see, like look at your existing tool set first and then see, can it be solved with that? And if not just explore, see what the best option is and then move on from there. Um, one thing that you, that you mentioned, I find very interesting, like the

‍

Patrick Haede (43:51)

Exactly.

‍

Patrick Haede (44:05)

Exactly.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (44:12)

the bridge between, okay, is this something that people even want to then people using it and then hyper scaling it, right? Like scaling, hyper scaling. So you encounter very different problems across this whole spectrum of growth, right? But then there is, this is like when you build for startups usually, but then there is building products for bigger companies who already have distribution usually, right? So there it's not about, can we even get this out? It's about optimizing.

‍

the existing set of users and delivering the value to them in a better way, in a more efficient way, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a very long-winded way for me asking, can you explain a little bit more about the details between building for startups that don't have distribution and then building for companies, let's call them enterprises, right? Big companies, whatever, that already have distribution because I assume there's a lot of differences.

‍

Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's a lot of differences that you have to pay attention to. But there is a couple of things that you also ideally don't want to be different. So, so in an in an ideal world, what I would say is, you don't want your speed to be much different, right? Like, only because you're working in like a larger context. Ideally, when I think about like, you know, enterprise, corporate, large scale innovation projects, company building for larger initiatives, like there's

‍

Mike Mahlkow (45:18)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Patrick Haede (45:38)

new venture building for larger companies. Ideally, you want this new venture in like a larger corporate context to move as fast as a startup, right? That is usually when you talk with boards and you talk with the stakeholders involved, that's what they're wishing for. So you want to apply kind of like the MVP or minimum lovable product MLP mindset in terms of like, okay, let's get something to market as quickly as possible. However,

‍

What of course is a big difference is that there is already a certain technological system, right? There's already a tech stack. And if the company has gotten over the years very big, then that tech stack is also quite, you know, it's been there for maybe 10, 15, 20, maybe more years. And so you need to pay attention to how you interface with that. Now, I think what's important is that it's kind of like, you know, the other day I was talking with someone and it's like,

‍

You can imagine it like a planet, you know, going around another planet, like, like a moon going around the planet. You don't want, like, you need to have the perfect, you know, perfect gravity for it to work, right? You need to be quite close to the actual organization so that your venture kind of uses the distribution advantage. You, you actually are connected to the main system, like you're, you're actually driving a business impact, right? Like this is really important, but you also want to be as far away.

‍

that you're not getting sucked into all the kind of longer, more extensive processes and you don't get anything out. And I think this is actually where the internal evaluation of what makes sense on the tech side is even more important. When you think about a startup, like most things, like of course it's great to think about your tech stack, like definitely do that. But it's like, yeah, even if you have like a fundamental mistake, it's probably, you can change it in a month or so. It's not as if you...

‍

Mike Mahlkow (47:21)

Mm.

‍

Patrick Haede (47:34)

lose a year. Now, when you think about like a larger initiative and larger company, and you really want to build something new, and you want to connect it to their system, that's really when it when it when it can really take a long time to correct the mistakes. I think there you want to plan longer ahead in terms of how your tech stack is going to look. And once you have made that kind of foundational decisions, then you can actually then you know, what I was always aimed for is moving as far as a startup in that context.

‍

and making sure that you innovate and innovate on behalf of the customer. But, um, but that's really, I think, I think what it comes down to, it's really just more, you have to have more focus on the technical, um, decisions that you're making early on.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (48:03)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (48:17)

Yeah, there's just more stakeholders involved. There's more existing systems. So you need to be interoperable with those systems by definition because otherwise it won't work properly. Or at least you won't be able to use a distribution advantage that we already talked about, right? You used one very interesting acronym that I assume people who listen to are very interested in. You said minimum viable product and then you corrected yourself or at least.

‍

Patrick Haede (48:22)

Exactly.

‍

Patrick Haede (48:33)

Exactly.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (48:45)

added MLP minimum lovable product. Can you explain the differences from your perspective and when should you use MVP and when should you use MLP?

‍

Patrick Haede (48:45)

Yes.

‍

Patrick Haede (48:54)

Yeah, yeah. So I actually believe personally that we're kind of out of the MLP time, right? Or like, if there ever was a time where this was like a very present concept, I think we're actually out of that time. And there's like a very specific reason for that. So the reason why I nowadays use this minimum lovable product, even though it's like a, it seems to be like a small difference, but it's, it's actually pretty big difference when you think about the product. So the way that I think about it is

‍

It's not just about getting any product out there that has the functionality that you would think would create value. It's actually about whether it is from a quality aspect at a point where it can be loved by the user. And I think when we think back, usually what an MVP kind of was is like the shittiest first draft version of your product, of your features.

‍

you want to just somehow make the user experience work. Now, the problem is that over the last 10 years, when you think about any consumer product, any app that you're using, the quality has gotten so high. And the products are so great. They're incredibly stable. They're incredibly reliable. They are designed from start to the end. And there are so many of these products that now when you bring something new to market for an end user,

‍

Now you're competing with all of the apps that these people use on a daily basis that are incredibly polished. And so that doesn't mean that you have to build your first product version for like two years, right? Or three years. Like you should still aim to get to the market very quickly. But I think for me, the core difference is that with this small user journey, that can even lack a couple of features that you wanna ship later, but this initial feature set,

‍

It needs to have a certain level of quality so that people can fall in love with it. And that's really the, that's really the difference. It's really not about like, you know, shitting that, you know, shipping that, that shitty first draft. It's really about, you know, is this a product that can, from a quality aspect with the, with the features that you have, compete with all of the different products that people might already be using. And it's very, very hard to do that. But that's something I believe has, has become necessary.

‍

Patrick Haede (51:19)

over the last years.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (51:19)

Hmm. And is this something that's only true for consumer products or would you say the same is also true for B2B?

‍

Patrick Haede (51:27)

So that's where it gets really interesting. I actually believe that there's two reasons that it, that it, that it's true for B2B as well. And, and so the first reason is every B2B product is still going to be used by consumer, right? Like that's, I think, like there's, you know, at least not, not yet there's like robots, robots sitting inside the company, right? So even like you, in every company, the end user is going to be a consumer. It's going to be a person that's going to be a user interacting with that interface. And now the interesting thing is that.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (51:33)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Patrick Haede (51:56)

This is why a couple of B2B products people have fallen in love with. Because when you think about a company like Linear, they have become incredibly famous for the way that they build their product. Now, when you think about it, it's like, this is a tool that some people have to use in their job for many hours during the day. Right? And so think about how much more they enjoy their work because this application is crafted incredibly well. Right? And so...

‍

When you think about it, it's like there's an end consumer there that really loves this tool and that's gonna, you know, on a B2B level, they're gonna work really well. And then the other reason is if you look at the B2B market, like there has been such a strong movement of consumerization of B2B software. Like it's just not okay anymore to ship something that people cannot use. Right? It's like.

‍

You know, I think earlier in the days, like if a company made a decision, like, okay, we're going to use Salesforce or we're going to use like any like super clunky, like crazy UI that you have to, you know, learn for half a year, like you had to use it. Right. But today more and more, there's this movement of like people saying like, Hey, I don't want to use JIRA. I want to use linear and I'm just going to do it. Right. And I'm going to go to my manager and say like, Hey, I'm, I want this software. Right. And they're going to be like, yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah. Then try it out. And.

‍

you know, before you know it, the whole team uses it. So it's like, really you have to appeal to the end customer because otherwise they're just gonna use something else and it's like very easy to switch. So I think that's why it's at least as relevant in the B2B space as well, yes.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (53:38)

Yeah, I agree. And I think it depends a little also on what you're competing with. Right. So if you are competing with very archaic enterprise solutions, then just making it somehow usable and adding some keyboard shortcuts is already the biggest innovation for, for many of those people who are slaving away in these 20 year old systems where like nothing, like everything kind of works, but it isn't really.

‍

Patrick Haede (53:48)

Of course.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (54:05)

enjoyable to work in. And I think that's a very fair point that you mentioned. And I hear that a lot from different kinds of people that I'm talking to, that once they actually find the tools that they like working in, that work becomes way more enjoyable. And that's something that we focus a lot on as well at Fastgen, just making the, what we call the developer experience just much better. One other thing that you said earlier when we were talking about it, I want to quickly follow up on. So,

‍

You have the minimum level product, you have the minimum viable product, and there's a couple of issues there, right? It's not like super well-defined, like what does lovable even mean? What does viable even mean? There's like so many different assumptions about it, but how, like if you build an MLP, so the minimum level product, does it mean you skip the MVP?

‍

in your mind? Or do you still ship the MVP and use that to get to the MLP?

‍

Patrick Haede (55:04)

That's a very good question. That's a very granular question. That's a question that I could be, that I probably will be even thinking about after the episode. That's a very good question. So from my gut answering from just, you know, the top of my head, I don't think you skip the MVP, but you don't go public with it anymore. So what I would mean is when I think about a product launch, you might

‍

launch internally for like a selected number of people. Like, you know, you're not launching public, you're not, you're not putting anything on the website. You might launch internally with your MVP version. And the reason is that the MVP from a tech perspective, this might be the product where like, it's not designed, there's like not a lot of thinking around user experience. There's like just bare bones. The feature is working. Right.

‍

And you can still make sure that that's the case, right? So you could have, like, you could imagine like the MVP and you have like an internal beta phase with like 30 users and people know that that's not gonna be the first product version. And that's why they're kind of sticking with you, but it doesn't hurt your brand, right? It's not that it's like out there on the website and people now start, you know, signing up for the product and they are thinking like, oh my God, what is this? Right? And so I don't think that you need to skip it.

‍

And I also think that you can bring people to it, but I think it should be closed in a sense of like, you, you very selectively know who is going to use this product and these people also know that this is not your first version. It's like the first workable version where you're just testing stuff. Right. And so now when you're then moving to the MLP, I think that's where for the first time you can have like random people that you've never met or spoken to in your life use your product. Right. But that's when you kind of.

‍

try to elevate the MVP to this stage of, okay, this is something that, you know, it's not gonna hurt my brand, you know, people are not gonna look at this product and be like, okay, this company, you know, what are they even doing? It's like this first version where you put craft in to a certain extent. And this, I think, you know, and people might wonder, you know, how is this possible, right? Because if you really wanna craft something, it takes a long time. Like, I think it doesn't necessarily mean that you're building like a lot of features, right? It doesn't necessarily mean that this is like a large product.

‍

Patrick Haede (56:22)

But what it means is that what you have really works well. And that's when people can realize, hey, they might have this very limited and small feature set, but it's crafted, and they care about quality. And then they associate that kind of product quality with your brand, which helps you. The way that I think about it is the worst thing that can happen if you have 10 features in your product, and they all kind of work.

‍

And they all kind of, they're a little bit like, you know, the response time's a little bit too long. It's like, it doesn't feel right. It's much, much better if you have like seven of them saying coming soon, and you have like three that really work. Because then people come into a product and they know, wow, they made these three really, really nice. They're also gonna do that with the remaining seven. Right, and so they might not immediately use it, but at least they will kind of keep your company in mind. And after three months, they'll come back when you ship another update and you have...

‍

post on X or LinkedIn or whatever. Now they come back and they know, hey, I saw this product was really cool when I first tried it, now I'm gonna come back and I'm giving them another chance. And I think this is really kind of the difference if I had to answer it spontaneously. But it's a good question. I think it's really relevant to think about.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (58:40)

We can always dive deeper at a later date, but we are already over the time we had on the calendar for you. And I know that you have to move on to your projects. So maybe as a last question, where can people find you and who should reach out to Sonic in case they need support for their products?

‍

Patrick Haede (59:04)

Yeah. So people can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter slash X. And you can always send me a message there. You can send me an email to patrick@sonic.tech and Sonic.Tech is our domain. And I think, you know, I mentioned these three areas in the beginning, right? And I think this is really kind of what's core, right? If you're a founder, early stage, if you're a larger corporate, you're thinking about, you know, a new venture that you want to build, you want to have a strong partner in kind of setting up your first.

‍

MVP, MLP, whatever you want to build for your customers users, then you can connect with us and I think it could be an interesting partnership. So yeah, that's basically how I'm reachable. I think it's really across the channels. I try to monitor it all and respond as quickly as possible always.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (59:53)

Okay, great. Then thank you so much for your time and insights. Have a good rest of your day. And I'm excited to see what the next projects are.

‍

Patrick Haede (59:58)

Thank you. Awesome. Thank you very much for the invite, and exciting for the future. Ciao.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:00:06)

Bye bye.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:00:07)

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Happy Building. And this time, we are talking to Dan from Automation Helpers. He is running a pretty cool company that he'll tell you about more. And it's a part of our series that we call Agencies Around the World, where we talk to lots of different owners, CEOs of people that build great products. And those products can be.

‍

end-to-end products. Those products can be automations, as we will talk about later today. But yeah, without further ado, hey Dan, how are you doing?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:00:41)

Hey Mike, great, thanks for having me.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:00:43)

It's a pleasure to have you on. And maybe you can just give us like a quick insight into what automation helpers is doing. And I would love it if you could add a little bit of context of your background and why you even started this company.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:00:58)

Yeah, for sure. So Automation Helpers is a no-code agency. And we work both on kind of the automation, automating business processes. We're also building applications that our clients can use. We tend to focus ourselves more on kind of the internal tooling for companies. So there's a lot of agencies that focus on building MVPs for companies that are getting started with their products. We tend to work with companies that are a little bit more established and have internal processes that they need.

‍

automating as they scale up. And you can imagine in kind of the economic climate that we're in, they've got some companies that have to go through the hard processes of layoffs. And you have others who are trying to gain market share during this time. And kind of on either side, they're looking for automating to help them in that process. So in terms of our background, I've got a couple of co-founders with me. I tend to be more on the marketing and sales side. We got our start. Two of us worked at Zoom together.

‍

And so we were working more in the enterprise space side of things. Two of my co-founders happen to be developers, so we say no code, but we end up, you know, writing a fair amount of code for what we're doing to with our clients. But we got our start because we saw kind of a gap in the industry in terms of we were doing a lot of things with enterprise type clients and we wanted to bring some of that down market a little bit to SMB, you know, some midsize customers, too, that don't necessarily have

‍

all of the resources, all of the tools internally to be able to do that. And so kind of be able to harness some of that expertise that we developed over the years for clients who are saying, hey, we know there's a better way to do this. We're kind of doing things on spreadsheets and making it happen, but we don't have the resources in-house to necessarily automate those processes ourselves.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:02:45)

Got it. So if I can rephrase, basically you build applications, but you also build automations and you mostly focus on internal tools for like slightly more established companies. So not really that many startups, but just companies that have a clear plan of what they're doing. They know their processes, but now they want to get them to the next level by using you as a helper to actually get all of that set up. That makes sense. And then, is it correct?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:03:18)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And some are, you know, smaller companies, some are larger companies, but they've been in the weeds for a while, right? They've been handling their sales process a certain way and they realize there's probably some functional gaps and that's kind of where they identify that need.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:03:36)

Got it. Okay, and then how do you find those customers?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:03:41)

Yeah, so for us, we've been doing a lot of YouTube video creation. So I've spent my time building out lots of videos. Airtable and Smart Suite are tools that we use a lot. We work with iPass tools like Zapier and Make to be able to do that. So we find that by creating content, we make it so it's not really salesy focus. It's more here's how we can help and we build these things out. And if you're the kind of DIY type person, you could enjoy doing this yourself.

‍

And if you get halfway through and you realize, oh man, this is a lot of work and I'm a small business owner, I don't want to do it myself, that's where we get kind of that initial connection for folks who reach out on our website for that.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:04:23)

Got it. So it's a lot of content marketing and was it, was it a, a decision that you made or was it just something that grew organically or like, how did you think about it in the early days? Because like using content as an acquisition machine is not something that you can necessarily rely on.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:04:42)

Yeah, so I actually started before thinking, oh, I'm going to go out on my own and start this company. I actually started just purely with the content. When I was working my corporate job, feeling kind of the winds of change coming with the economy and everything else, I thought, hey, here's this time. Everyone talks about building your personal brand and all of that. And so I decided to spend some time creating this content. And I thought, hey, if nothing else comes from this,

‍

uh, people see me building and I can use that to kind of establish myself maybe for another corporate role that I might enjoy. And it was within a month, I think that a first lead came in. They said, Hey, can you build this out for me? And I wasn't putting in any kind of call to action or anything. It was just, you know, here's, here's kind of the power of no code and building. Um, and then I think another month or two after that, I had so many leads coming in that I was like, well, either I have to.

‍

quit my job or make this happen. So for me, it was a pretty organic approach where the content came first. And because we found success in that, we've just been using that kind of as our main lead generation mechanism since then.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:05:55)

Got it. That makes sense to me. And then can you lead me through a typical project from the beginning to you finishing it?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:06:02)

Yeah, so I mean, in all honesty, the projects vary quite a bit by scope and size and everything else. So what we find is that a lot of clients have a specific need right away. You know, they have a reason that they're contacting us in the first place. So a use case might be that they want to automate their invoicing process. And so they might reach out to us. And for that, we give them, you know, kind of an estimate of what this looks like.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:06:08)

I bet. I bet.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:06:31)

We tend to do most of our projects hourly because what we find in the no code, low code space is everything is so fast and so iterative. You know, I remember working for big companies, CRM companies in the past, and it would be like, oh, you want an integration to that system, sure. Well, that's gonna cost you $30,000 and we'll get it out to you in three months. And, you know, to be able to cook up an integration in a matter of hours and deploy it in a matter of days is pretty powerful. So what we find is that the...

‍

Initial cadence for projects can end up being pretty quick. You know, some clients are coming in new and they say, oh, we want to adopt a new platform and look into all these processes. Some are saying, we just have a specific need. Can you help us out there? But I think because we're able to deliver so much so quickly, then people kind of start to look at us as being a partner, where since they don't have those resources in-house, it's like, oh, great, we've been able to capitalize on

‍

the ROI for that invoicing project, and then they come back a few weeks later and say, hey, let's engage on this other thing. And so what we found is we thought early on that our projects would kind of be knock them out, you know, high volume, move on to the next thing. And what we found is like, very few of them actually end up closing because it's not build an MVP, be done with it. It's like, hey, automate this. Oh, you got a bunch of value from it. Well, let's look at that next process for you. And so we found that these relationships are evolving and becoming more

‍

ongoing. Some of them are still, you know, quick churn and burn, get it done, but a lot of them end up being kind of flexible over the long term.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:08:04)

that makes sense. And how many team members do you have right now at the company?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:08:08)

Yeah, I think we're at 14 or 15. We just brought on another four folks on Friday getting started, getting those consultants on board and ready. So we've been growing at a pretty quick clip since we started as a team officially in June.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:08:25)

Okay. So you basically grew from like three or four people to 14 within just like half a year, like less than half a year roughly.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:08:34)

Yeah, I'd say that's, that's about right. Yeah. I was doing this on my own, uh, starting about a year ago. So it's a November now. That's kind of when I started putting out my first videos, got those first leads we started working with in January and then brought on my co-founders in June.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:08:43)

Got it.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:08:48)

Nice. Okay. So definitely growing at a good rate. That's good to hear. And where do you find the people that you hire? Because that's something that I often hear is not that easy to do.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:09:02)

Yeah, I think this is another positive side effect of the content marketing that we do. Because even, you know, Mike, like we got to know each other, I think, through content, like you guys had seen some of the stuff, or seen us listed as an agency partner. And so what ends up happening is we build a lot of these relationships. We do webinars, we build videos for different software vendors. And so almost every single person has come through some, just kind of organic connection. I do a webinar.

‍

I used to be a music teacher. One of our consultants also happened to be a music teacher and was a no-code operator, and that relationship was forged from it. And so I think, you know, what we see is that, especially in the no-code space, people come from really diverse backgrounds. One of the consultants on our team was a COO of a company, and he sold off his stake in the company and wanted to get into automation and came over. We've got some people who are traditional developers, and they see kind of this...

‍

and opening of additional capabilities within the space and they come over. So I think the good part is that it's such a broad market, but I really think for us driving those relationships and then the content side means that almost every opening, we're not just kind of twiddling our thumbs. It's like we've got 10 people lined up that we've had conversations with.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:10:23)

Got it. One other question that I always like to explore is how do you choose the best tool for the job? Like a lot of the stuff that you're doing, you said is automations, right? So let's maybe start with the automation side and you mentioned both Zapier and Make. So how do you decide whether you go with the Zapier or Make for a specific job? Is it your choice? Is it the client's choice? Who is deciding and how are you deciding?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:10:48)

Yeah, great question. So we work with some clients who I would say are really kind of top of funnel in the decision making process and they're looking for guidance on how to find the right tool. And then we have others who have a predisposition towards some tool set. So maybe they've used it in the past, maybe they used it at another company that they were using it for. And so when a client typically has a predisposition to a certain tool, like Zapier has huge name recognition. If they've used Zapier, great. Let's use Zapier for that.

‍

I'd say when it comes to the ones who are looking for guidance, we do a lot of comparative stuff. So on our YouTube channel, we probably have talked about, I don't know, eight different no code portals, you know, tools that you can build client portals off of. And so it really becomes what's kind of the nuance behind that. So in the automation side, like Zapier has name recognition and they have the largest variety of connectors. I think they've got...

‍

5,000 or 7,000 or something like that. So almost always, if you're Googling like integrate X and Y, chances are Zapier can do it. Typically for most clients, Make ends up having a higher amount of cost savings when it comes down to it because of how they handle charging per operation compared to the entire run and things like that. So sometimes it's a cost savings play. We also find that we can do a little bit more from

‍

higher configurability. So, you know, there's a lot of like straightforward automations where it's like, oh great, a lead comes into this and then move it into that application. But most of the integrations we're doing are a little bit more complex, like check to see if this thing exists and then pull the record ID and then use that and augment and push into this system and pull it. So when we have all of these different touch points, then make usually ends up being a better fit there and then

‍

Even beyond that, we've got tools like Pipedream and N8n, which are really good when we do need to write some code. So an example I like to give is like, if you're doing any kind of reporting, both make and Zapier, it can be really operationally expensive. Because if you just imagine writing, you know, rows to a spreadsheet, and let's say you have thousands of rows because you're analyzing transactional data for a report. Well, that ends up costing a ton of money because there's no real easy way to be able to iterate that through.

‍

code. And Zapier has some more capabilities for code now, but I find that typically we go to pipe dream and we're paying just fractions of a cent to be able to run those reports. So it's kind of a long-winded answer, but you know, we kind of gauge the project through the lens of what's needed there and looking at cost savings and things like that for the client too.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:13:30)

Nice, but that was exactly what I was looking for. Hearing external perspectives, and especially from people like you who are using these tools on a daily, weekly basis for all these kinds of different projects, always interesting to you. So let's actually continue with a very similar question. You also mentioned Airtable and Smart Suite, I think. So I assume you use at least Airtable and then Smart Suite to some degree as well as your data storage layer to some degree.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:13:50)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:14:00)

How are you thinking about the data aspect? How often is it that they already have a data layer? Maybe like it's in a CRM or they have spreadsheets or maybe even a database. And how often is it that you have to set up the data site for your clients as well?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:14:16)

Yeah, it's probably a mix. I'd say most of the clients we work with are looking for that Airtable or Smart Suite to kind of be the source of truth. For our higher-end market customers, that's where, like, hey, we've got a Postgres database, and we want to use that and be able to bake out something on top. So that definitely happens. But I'd say that usually is more on the upper side of the market for the clients that we're working with. For other clients,

‍

It might be, hey, we've got a CRM like HubSpot where we've got some data and we've got some Google Sheets with some operational data. And so we try to treat then Airtable or Smart Suite as kind of a centralized hub where we can push certain data into. So we don't need all of the transactional email marketing stuff that might be happening in a HubSpot, but we want to say, hey, at the point at which a lead converts, that's when we write it into the database. And then Airtable becomes kind of like the...

‍

customer master source of truth for our customer data, especially if you're working with smaller size organizations in that regard. So what we find is that it used to be the big ERP systems, and this has all of the data, and we've got to do everything out of there. But what we found for a lot of clients is they don't need something that massive, that data layer can really be authored inside of Airtable being that primary source.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:15:41)

Yeah. And then if you had to compare air table versus like smart suit or like other options, what would you say similar to how you explained it earlier?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:15:52)

Yeah, so Airtable, I think, is really, you know, there's been a big pivot where they're going all enterprise and they're kind of all in on that. They've done a great job at really being able to scale the automation side, their interfaces, if you're familiar with that, being able to create, you know, kind of an app layer experience on top of the data, I think is probably their strongest feature that we do a lot of work with. Tools like Smart Suite have a lot of crossover with Airtable,

‍

than more geared at work management. So something like an air table, if you have a number of different projects you're working on and different tasks, and you have different bases that you have for internal tasks versus client tasks, there's no kind of aggregated view where you can say like, what do I have to work on today? Where are all of my tasks? So it's really good at the database side, but Smart Suite really adds on a lot of that additional functionality around managing work and tasks.

‍

things that you would find in solutions like ClickUp and Monday, kind of in that realm of things. So I think Smart Suite's kind of a good... Smart Suite and Monday we kind of see as these hybrid tools between the database application building and the work management platforms.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:17:08)

it's interesting. Is there, like, if you look at all your projects, is there like a specific thing that is most technically challenging for you when you build the projects? Like, do you run into like similar issues over and over again? Or is it different for every single project?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:17:28)

Yeah, I'd say it's different. There's certainly some themes like the automation platforms like we were talking about before. I think one of the annoying pieces is that most of them, each scenario that you have essentially needs to be duplicated for like each individual user. There's not great like, hey, how do we manage this in aggregate across an organization? And then you've got, you know, authentication that has to keep happening. And so people say, why is my scenario not running because of that? So there's some things that like,

‍

I wish we could tweak about the tools. And so one of the things we've been doing is we're actually building a product around email syncing because we built it, I don't know, maybe 100 times or something in make trying to do that. And so we're productizing some of that. Now, of course, we're not gonna productize everything that we do, but there's certain things from a technical management standpoint that you're like.

‍

It's great. These tools are easy to be able to click and drag and drop and add all the automation functionality that we need. But the management side of it becomes more difficult. And that's why I think tools like Operator and NCScale, which are doing some dependency observability stuff, I think are going to become more and more a part of the holistic automation picture going forward, just because right now there's not a lot of that kind of tracking and seeing what changes need to be made and things like that over time.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:18:50)

Yeah, I agree. Like I've, I've chatted with both of them about like their vision and why they're building the companies. And I think it makes sense that there needs to be more observability, especially if you have a no code stack or no code stack and not just like a single tool that you're using. Interesting. Um, so since you're growing like reasonably fast and some of our listeners, maybe some of them will probably be freelancers or people who just start their agencies.

‍

Other than the content that you already discussed, is there any other piece of advice that you would like to give to someone in the early stages of building products or automations for other people?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:19:31)

Yeah, I think the human piece is huge. And I think oftentimes us as techies and builders, we get so focused on the technology. And if we build this amazing thing, if you build it, they will come kind of scenario. But I really think it's been the people part that has helped us equally as much as the content side. I think it's working really closely with software vendors. So in our case, we're on the services side, but working with the software partners.

‍

Um, being able to work really hands on with our clients and drive referral business through that, I think it's huge. Um, cause at the end of the day, you know, these are relationships that we're starting now in our first six months that are going to carry us years into the future, both as their platforms grow and as we grow as a company. And so I, I think that can't be stated enough is just, you know, really growing your network, um, to be able to have those relationships because you never know what comes from it. It might be.

‍

A podcast, a webinar, it might be referral business in the future, but I think that's something that really helps drive businesses.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:20:36)

Got it. And then who should come to you? Basically what I understand is someone that needs to solve a business problem and thinks that automation might be the right way to do it. And then people in SMEs or like all kinds of companies, like who is your like ideal customer right now if you even have one?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:20:59)

Yeah, it's really funny because I looked at our last, I think, 20, 25 clients, and we probably had 20 or so different industries represented. So, you know, we've got some great friends at other companies who have said, Hey, we're, we're just doing this for accountants, or we're just doing this for real estate. What I think is almost any business can benefit from it. What we see right now is, is probably, you know, small to midsize companies are kind of our bread and butter of what we're doing.

‍

Just because we can help in that internal process collaboration and getting started and observing that. So, you know, anywhere kind of from, we've got some solopreneurs, but a lot of like 5 to 25 person companies even, where it's like, hey, we've been doing this, we've been churning and burning and making all this stuff happen. But now is the point where we need to prepare ourselves for scaling. I think that's where we're able to help a lot.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:21:53)

And if you look a couple of years into the future, let's start with automation helpers. Like where do you see it like five years from now?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:22:01)

Yeah, so automation helpers as a whole, I think we're going to kind of see this hybrid where we're partially a services company and partially a product company with the email tool that we're building. I think on the services side, we'll probably, I mean, we find ourselves kind of biting off a new layer of the onion, be it a new tool that we're working with or as we're finding new ways to incorporate things. So even, you know, Mike, as we start talking about Fastgen and how we can kind of plug in.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:22:09)

Mm.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:22:29)

to what we're doing, I think we're going to see the market expand a little bit in terms of there's such a broad adoption of no-code tools for now mid-market and up to enterprise type companies. So I think we're kind of feeling those changes happen. And some of the things we talked about in terms of observability and security, I think that infrastructure is going to be built out in the next few years. And so I think a lot of us who are on the agency side are kind of prepping ourselves for

‍

that expansion that's gonna happen.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:23:00)

Got it. And that was actually a great transition to my next question. Where do you see the overall, I mean, since you mostly focus on no-code, local tools, let's just stick there because sometimes I go a bit broader, but where do you see the, the local space? And I include no-code tools in that. And like five years from now.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:23:20)

Yeah, so one of the big things that I see is that there's going to be, I think, quite a bit of consolidation that happens. Right now, there's so much specialization between, hey, here's a back-end tool, here's a database tool, here's an API automation layer, here's a front-end tool. And so it's how do we integrate with these? But we see more players that are coming up who are building that functionality in-house. I also am hoping we actually see some big acquisitions in the space, because I think, you know, if you combine a couple of those,

‍

Right now, it's so all over the place in terms of, yes, you've got 50 choices to choose from a front end, and you've got 15 choices to choose from a back end. So I think some of that consolidation will happen. And so we'll be able to offer some more end-to-end solutions with fewer partners in play than having to rely on this entire arsenal to choose from. So I think that's one thing that will happen.

‍

As I was kind of alluding to before, I think we're going to see the demands of enterprise for what needs to be there in a feature stack. Like the whole idea that like, oh yeah, anybody can come in and tweak anything. You know, like, eartables start from the premise of like, build anything that you want and anybody can update it and change it. But as you move up market, you need to have controlled features within that and who can build it and who can maintain it. And so I think that is going to be better supported in the no code, low code space.

‍

I also think tools like Bubble right now are investing in making it scalable. It's like there's no reason that no code, low code shouldn't be as performant as code. But I don't think it's been that much of a focus right now. Initially, it was on how do we build an MVP? And then, yeah, later on, you might have to use code to be able to get what you're doing. But I think we're going to see that line blurring a bit in the future, just as the technology develops.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:25:16)

it. Okay, well, do you have anything else that you would like to mention? Any shout outs, any specific piece of content that you really enjoyed to close us off?

‍

Dan Leeman (01:25:27)

Ooh, that's a good one. Uh, so I've been so heads down in, in creating content that I probably can't think of a one day shout out for now. Yeah, you can just search for my name. It's Dan Leeman. I think it's at Dan Leeman. If you're looking for the, the channel for it. And we post a lot of it on LinkedIn as well. So feel free to reach out there. Um, one of the things that we're doing that I think is kind of holistically helpful for people is we've got a no code newsletter and that's at nocode.media.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:25:34)

What's the name of your YouTube channel then?

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:25:53)

Hmm.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:25:54)

And we put that out once a week, and it kind of gives the rundown of everything happening in the no code, low code space. Um, so it's really not to, to focus on us or showcase us. It's more just, you know, what's happening in the space and how we see it evolving. So definitely feel free to sign up there.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:26:08)

Yeah, plus one for me, it's very helpful to keep up to date with everything. If you don't have the time to look through everything yourself, which we're all definitely put myself in that kind of camp. But yeah, thanks so much for your time, Dan. That was, that was lovely. I appreciate your insights. And as we just said, it's at Dan Leeman on YouTube. It's nocode.media for the newsletter. And we'll have to chat a year from now and see where you are then.

‍

Dan Leeman (01:26:32)

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me, Mike. Really appreciate it.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (01:26:35)

Thank you.