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Hampus Jakobsson might be one of the most active entrepreneurs and business angels, not just in this region but the Nordics in general. Having co-founded and run The Astonishing Tribe , often referred to as TAT, he made his biggest exit in 2010, when they where acquired by Blackberry. We catched up with him, about how his current startup, as well as insight into his thoughts on building a company. Starting Dexplora
Knowing what his latest startup should be was a strategic decision for Hampus and his co-founder Mikael Tellhed . They wanted to be in a business where they could learn about sales – real “high velocity sales” and not the kind of “elephant hunting” they did at TAT. They were both in love with data visualisation (and had plenty of skills from their learnings at TAT in it) but didn’t know where it could be put to really valuable use. The startup became to create a tool to help salesmen in the corporate world get an better overview over their prospects and general sales insight. It got a name: Dexplora – for Data exploration. “We wanted to create a tool that enabled salespeople to understand and easily manage all the data they had. A great looking and user friendly CRM (customer relation management).”
Pivots and micro-pivots
After a while, and the addition of two co-founders ( Alfred Gunnarsson and Andreas Pålsson ) and the departure of one ( Henrik Been ), the team realised that Dexplora was however not the best solution to the problems. “We found that visualising the data was useless as most of the data, frankly, was crap. Salespeople did not use the CRM at all or at least not as intended.“
Dexplora pivoted to be a “data cleaning tool” – where the idea was to increase usage of the sales tools (the CRM) so that the information in it could be used to forecast, see the competitor landscape, and material to train new sales people. The new product was called GetSalesDone. For the sales person it was a task manager with a heavy focus on UX and design. However, after building a working solution and integrating it with the CRM Salesforce, the product still was not the right one. another pivot was done – Brisk.io was created. Brisk.io still has the Salesforce integration, but this time it was a merge between Dexplora’s top-down managment focused approach and the ease of use and users from GetSalesDone. The company could now design an ideal way of working with customers and the salespeople would get a tailor made tool. The result was not just happier salesmen but better insight for management. Naming: Dexplora -> GetSalesDone -> Brisk.io
“We just made it easy for ourselves and saw the name as any agile process. When we started the company we knew that we wanted the name of the company to be that of the product, and Dexplora was both. When we changed product to GetSalesDone, we didn’t change the name till the product had proven itself, and it didn’t. And when finally Brisk.io proved itself as product we changed the name of the company to that too.”
Lessons learned
“In the beginning we just talked to sales managers and salespeople – if I did it again today we would have structured this a lot more. I would find 10 people every day on LinkedIn or something and I would ask them what their headaches were and whatever they answered I would proceed with asking ‘why’, ‘why’, ‘why’’. And after that, ‘why’ again, till we got to the core of what the problem and its consequences.”
He recently made an excellent blogpost about this method, which goes into it in much greater details. You can read it here . “I would have done this in combination with meeting some users that are really knowledgeable that would end up being almost advisors – for us it turned out good, with Lars Nordwall, the COO and VP Sales at Neo Technology in San Francisco, becoming one of those.”
Strength and weaknesses
When it comes to building a startup, getting the right people on board is crucial. Here Hampus had some interesting insights as well: that a person’s strength are also always the person’s weakness. When it comes to hiring and deciding who should be on what team, this was important. “All people have skills, strengths, and weaknesses. What I have found is that mature people realise these are all the same, just different sides of the coin. A person’s strength is also their weakness. I know that I myself am very quick to reply, but that doesn’t make me the most thorough and prone to quick decisions.”
Those seeing Hampus teams in action say that it is like watching a smoothly running machine, so we take it that his efforts to build good teams has payed off. If you want to read more of Hampus insights, he writes interesting blogpost about different details every now and then, such as the one about the ‘ Asking for success ’ method above, or a recent one about ‘ How-do-you-feel dinners ’, about how to align the core team. Insightful lessons. Related posts:


Hampus Jakobsson on Dexplora, GetSalesDone, Brisk.io and lessons as a serial entrepreneur

Entrepreneur who sold business to BlackBerry secures VC and angel backing for new venture
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Hampus Jakobsson has secured the backing of two venture capital firms and a host of angel investors as he looks to launch his Dexplora business in the UK and the US. Software start-up: Dexplora team with Hampus Jakobsson second from left
Date: 04 June 2013
Article: News
Creandum and DN Capital are leading a $1.2 million (£785,000) investment into software business Dexplora alongside angels including the Chris Perret, the former founder and CEO of enterprise mobile management company Nukona. Having sold his previous business (TAT) to BlackBerry for $150 million in 2010, Hampus Jakobsson has now set up Dexplora. The funding round precedes the launch of the company which builds tools for sales organisations. Its first product GetSalesDone, which is available on iOS devices in Apple's App Store, integrates with Salesforce.com to 'maximise' data quality and efficiency. Also joining Perret as an angel investor in the business is John Taysom, one of the first investors in Yahoo!, and ZenDesk senior vice president Adrian McDermott. Jakobsson, co-founder and CEO of Dexplora, comments, 'After years of working in sales and ourselves, we felt that there was a real need for a tool that is intuitive and intelligent, and so after months of development and working with over 50 test companies, we're happy to announce the launch of GetSalesDone – the best way to be mobile with the essentials of Salesforce.com. '
Malmo, Sweden-based Dexplora will now use the capital raised from its VC and angel supporters to launch GetSalesDone in the UK and US and to expand the range of support for the enterprise services it provides. New backer Steffan Helgesson, general partner at Creandum, says that enterprise software is traditionally an area where 'good design' hasn't been a priority, but is an area he sees as 'ripe for change'. He adds, 'The proposition of GetSalesDone has the ability to not only transform CRM systems, but improve how many companies do business. '
The track record of Jakobsson and the Dexplora team is the reason for DN Capital getting involved, both of which are described as 'extraordinary' by Tom Bradley, a partner at the British VC firm. Share:


Entrepreneur who sold business to BlackBerry secures VC and angel backing for new venture

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We caught up with Hampus Jakobsson, founder of Dexplora, a Swedish startup that focuses on CRM systems, to discuss about its new product, GetSalesDone, as well as why Scandinavian countries are so prolific when it comes to startups. Hampus is also well known for being the co-founder of The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), which was acquired back in 2010 by the company formerly known as RIM. He left the company back in August 2012 . Can you tell us more about your recent investment? We are announcing funding of $1.2m from two VCs – Creandum and DN Capital – and 14 international angels as well as launching our  GetSalesDone  product to the public. Essentially, the app means that businesses can spend less time on reporting administration and start spending more time with their customers. We know that a large proportion of large organisations spend around a quarter of their time updating CRM, which isn’t the best use of their resource. Saving time and money is one of the main challenges for businesses and GetSalesDone offers the opportunity to do both. If sales people have a seamless app to input their data into it speeds up the administration part of their job, allowing them to focus their efforts elsewhere. This, of course, will help the bottom line of the business as they focus on customer relationships. You can see more on the app within the  GetSalesDone demo . Why should SMEs care then? Many companies face issues around trusting their data – and they are spending on average $150/month per user – and not being able to use the data means it is unviable and unable predict forecasts and create evaluations. On top of this the sales representatives know that the data is often this way and they therefore don’t update the system as often as they should, rendering the CRM relatively useless. We are seeing that both SMSs and large companies have CRM fatigue, which needs to be solved and fast. We are launching our product to the public – a mobile client which is tailored for fast input and a server side component to find errors or things you should prioritised which are then pushed to the mobile device. CRM systems is probably one of the least user friendly systems that are widespread. And prone to human error makes the data untrustworthy; GetSalesDone allows users to input the data in a quick and concise fashion to help minimise that error. One of the key usages of CRM data is for forecasting and evaluation purposes. The data will outline necessary sales planning, for example if you know what areas offer stronger results you can focus resource into those areas. Both forecasting and evaluating the CRM data will help the SME improve their overall sales process. Don’t most of them already have CRM software? It’s true. Many SME’s already have a CRM data software package. The issue with CRM software packages at the moment is to do with usability. At the very core of the issue they are not friendly. When you couple this with unfriendly CRM data the SME is faced with a mammoth issue which has ramifications for the overall sales process. GetSalesDone adds to the existing CRM so that the company doesn’t need to change any of their existing infrastructure. What are the three main USPs of the service? 1. Management or teams can now set up KPIs on what needs to improve and can trust the data. The reason being is that they can set up rules that generate notifications. This will directly have a positive impact on the sales process and data input frequency, we see them as reminders. 2. The sales representatives can get their CRM on the go in a way they’d expect to as a user. We have kept consumer sites in mind, such as Facebook, when creating the app. 3. The sales reps can update and use the CRM so easily making it a companion instead of a nuisance. . What makes it Salesforce-friendly & How is it different from the competition? It is built for companies with Salesforce.com and therefore integration is seamless – you log in with your Salesforce.com ID. The benefit of this is that the customer does not need to change their package but instead increase usability through the GetSalesDone app. At the moment there are no CRM packages that sit on top of Salesforce.com. The alternative to GetSalesDone is using an existing CRM and being satisfied with not knowing what your sales people miss. How can you back that claim? We have been working with a number of test companies to trial the system before it launches. Right now more than 20 companies actively use GetSalesDone, and so far we have received really positive feedback. On top of this feedback we have also seen the app spread within organisations – people are recommending it to their colleagues. As usability is one of the key factors of success for us, we see this as a sign that the app is solving issues that SMEs are facing. How techs savvy do you need to be to use it? Could my dad do it? We like to think that your dad could, perhaps he could try it for us and offer feedback? After designing 100+ devices, including AndroidOS and the first devices that shipped Android, we know that good design has very little to do with the graphics and how things look, but more on what they can do and how easy they are to understand. We would prefer that the user understands the context – CRMs. Creating original Android UI has really helped us to understand what works and what doesn’t work on the mobile platform. If a solution doesn’t work for a consumer it is definitely not going to work for the enterprise. We wanted to create a solution that ticked all of the boxes for the enterprise but could be used by a consumer. It makes sense to do that, there is no reason to block people using a service because of poor usability. Scandinavia is offering a lot of startup technology at the moment, why is that? Scandinavia is extremely exciting at the moment. We’re from Sweden and as most swedes see that the domestic market is too small to serve its own needs, this means that businesses are born globally. That’s quite unique in the global start-up market. Education and welfare is also having a huge impact on how start-ups survive, both look after the needs of a start-up and offer strong prospects for entrepreneurs. We see the UK and particularly London’s start-up scene as one of the hotbeds of talent at the moment. The area is certainly leading and is an interesting example of how investment is having a real impact on SMEs. London is a key focus for our investment and growth over the next couple of years.
 


Dexplora’s founder Hampus Jakobsson on GetSalesDone, the art of VC funding and challenges facing a startup

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Thomas Ohr
The Swedish startup  Dexplora today announced a seed investment of $1.2 million to support its drive to improve enterprise tools and empower sales organisations. Its first product, the intelligent task app GetSalesDone , has been developed to improve sales workflow and eventually make CRM input obsolete. Investors include well-known VCs Creandum and DN Capital and twelve angel investors. Dexplora was founded in 2012 by the team behind The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), which was acquired by BlackBerry in 2010. With the passion for developing great user interfaces and the knowledge gained at TAT for getting the right experience for consumers, the team is now using their design expertise to improve enterprise software and provide smarter, customisable solutions for companies looking to maximise the efficiency of their sales data. “Traditional CRM systems don’t seem to be designed with the end user – the human – in mind. This means that no matter how powerful a tool it may be, companies aren’t getting the best out of it,” said Hampus Jakobsson, Co-founder and CEO of Dexplora. “After years of working in sales ourselves, we felt that there was a real need for a tool that is intuitive and intelligent, and so after months of development and working with over 50 test companies, we’re happy to announce the launch of GetSalesDone – the best way to be mobile with the essentials of Salesforce.com.”
Dexplora will use the funding to support the launch of GetSalesDone in the UK and US and to further expand the offering available including support for additional enterprise solutions. Watch the following video to learn more about GetSalesDone:
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CRM: Malmö-based Dexplora raises $1.2 million

Sales Task App 'GetSalesDone' Raises $1.2 Million From Creandum, DN Capital And 14 Angels
by Dmitri Sarle
17:29 CEST on 04 June, 2013
When we first heard that two VC's and 14 angels jumped on an investment into GetSalesDone by Dexplora, it got us more interested than the pitch itself. In fact, at that point the pitch did not really matter as the investors included the likes of Adrian McDermott (Zendesk Product Management lead), Frank Meehan (Former board member of Siri and Spotify), Chris Perret (Founder and CEO of Nukona, acquired by Symantec) and John Taysom (One of the first investors in Yahoo!). Not to mention Creandum and DN Capital . To be completely honest, we are still not sure what is the bigger story here, the company itself or the complexity of what started out as an angel seed investment round. After all the CEO and co-founder - Hampus Jakobsson tells us that "the development cost of the app and the system was less than legal costs to close the round. " Talk about complicated Term Sheet Battles. So what set all of these investors off to invest into Dexplora and GetSalesDone? Well, for one - the team. Jakobsson and Mikael Tellhed co-founded TAT which was acquired by Blackberry in 2010 for $150 million . Then there is the vision to make CRM inputs obsolete using a clever combination of user experience mechanics and artificial intelligence. There are two sides to the story the client side and the server side. The client side is currently an iPhone app that basically acts like an intelligent task app for sales. As Jakobsson told us: "a normal task app, they always have the good and the bad side, but they do not know what the context is. If you are writing 'don't forget to call Hampus', it doesn't  know who Hampus is. What we have done is a task app which has the context of sales. When you are saying 'Ham...' it says Hampus Jakobsson. You click 'yes'. It sees the context. " In essence it is a task driven way of creating content on CRM's. This allows for an extremely fast way to create tasks and get them logged. The server side is a bit more complicated and ambitious. For instance one of the main features is an ability to create rules for notifications and changes and then compare the efficiency of those rules. If you are familiar with 'If This Then That' then GetSalesDone provides similar functionality but for the enterprise. You will also be able to set KPI's, goals and measure data quality, forgotten opportunities and more. So all in all, the idea behind GetSalesDone is to bring what is the most important right now and allow users to act on it. In my opinion what is most interesting about the premise is that it might actually end-up being a tool and not a reporting system, which is what most CRM's currently are. Coming from a sales background, I can safely say that 95% of CRM systems out there slowed me down, with a possible exception of Pipedrive . Currently the platform only support SalesForce and iPhones however they are planning to expand to other CRM's, introduce other platforms and also go Desktop. When asked why the company chose to focus on mobile first, Jakobsson tols us: "Of course we will create desktop products around this. We started TAT in 2002 and we met so many companies that started with a desktop experience and tried to get it on mobile. A couple of years ago it was a hype saying 'mobile first' but I think its so easy to say mobile first and its another thing living and really understanding it. We really feel that the only way to do this is to create something mobile and take that desktop because then we are getting the right focus. "
There are already 50 companies using the system and I am told that they are happy campers and the video does look like something I would use, so perhaps the 14 angels and two VC's did in fact all jump to the right conclusion, time will tell. Hopefully the tie to already existing CRM's is a strategic move and not a lifelong strategy as CRM's really need to be fixed and/or proven obsolete. To get an idea of how it works, here is a video:


Sales Task App ’GetSalesDone’ Raises $1.2 Million From Creandum, DN Capital And 14 Angels

BlueYard Capital

Dexplora is the developer of GetSalesDone, a sales companion to the CRM - to enable the sales people to plan and execute their days on mobile devices. Built on top of an existing CRM makes it easy to adopt and robust and secure to use. GetSalesDone supports only iPhone and Salesforce.com.

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Dexplora

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Dexplora Management Team

4 Team Members

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Name	Work History	Title	Status
Alfred Gunnarsson		Founder	Current
Andreas Palsson		Founder	Current
Mikael Tellhed		Founder	Current
Hampus Jakobsson	BlueYard Capital	Chief Executive Officer	Current

Name	Alfred Gunnarsson	Andreas Palsson	Mikael Tellhed	Hampus Jakobsson
Work History				BlueYard Capital
Title	Founder	Founder	Founder	Chief Executive Officer
Status	Current	Current	Current	Current