We took a tour around their POV on anything from leaving the 9-5 world, creating a culture among early employees, and forming a resilient co-founder partnership. We can already now reveal that they’re not much for anything that goes with buzzwords or bureaucracy, but everything they do rhymes with product.
01 They say that your first 10 employees are definitive for the future of your startup. How do you go about hiring?
Kasper: First and foremost, we’re trying to find people who’re passionate about technology, coding, and turning the internet into a better place. That’s the first step. If you don’t have that spark in your eye, then you’re not what we’re looking for.
Andreas: You don’t realise it before you start building your own company, but then suddenly, you understand that you’ve spent your whole career building a catalogue of potential hires. We’ve utilized our network, especially for early hires in our engineering team. But while you might know the quality of people in your network, you need to make sure that they believe in what you’re building. And passion; they need to be passionate about their craft and contribution.
02 Building a startup is not for the faint-hearted. Not saying that you’re faint-hearted or anything, but… How come you’ve chosen to become founders?
Kasper: I’ve experienced both good and bad management up close. It has inspired me to build something from the ground up and to try to be the manager I always look for myself. We’re building a company and a management that always puts product and users first. Too many products are built on the basis of egos and wild imaginations. Products should be built for the user and with their perspectives in mind.
Andreas: My drive comes from the desire to build a company rather than having a regular 9 to 5 job. To me, it’s all about creating something that other people want to become a part of. It’s certainly not the easiest way to make money, but if you’re into exploring the unknown and riding waves of risk, then it’s for you. Building toddle is the most fun I’ve ever had. It’s the idea of building something from scratch and making the product serve actual users instead of some demanding manager.
Kasper: For long, I’ve had this dream of building a product that a core set of users would truly love. It’s easy to divert from your product-led agenda for business reasons, but that’s where many make the wrong turn. With toddle, we do our utmost to focus on having a hands-on approach where we stick to our users’ needs.
03 History tells us that all industries are subject to disruption. How can your industry be disrupted – and are you its disruptors?
Andreas: Throughout recent years, the term “disrupted” has become somewhat of a buzzword. It’s here, there, and everywhere. I prefer to say that toddle is changing aspects of the software industry by bringing deep field experience into play. We want to fundamentally change the view on coding and remove the barriers to enable everyone to code. With toddle, you’re not just drawing pictures of UI. You’re shipping an actual product. We’re not in business to change aspects of software that already works well or break down the industry. Instead, we want to help the industry do much more, much better.
04 Rome wasn’t built in one day and neither is a strong and loyal community. How do you build a reliable community from scratch?
Kasper: It might sound like textbook entrepreneurship, but right now, we concentrate all our energy on helping, supporting, and sparring with the people who love our product. We’re less focused on growth hacking and more on helping and equipping people with the skills to solve any obstacle they might encounter in toddle.
Andreas: Valuing community-driven growth, as we do in toddle, the core of our growth is the product. People must deeply understand our product before they can start to love it. There are no shortcuts here; just build a really great product that solves a really real problem and then offer users all the help they need. As our users begin to like the product, they also begin spending more time using the tool. That’s also why we choose to spend so much time responding to questions from our users. Spending so much time on calls with our early users has been awesome, helping them get started and teaching them how to do things. It has been crucial in building an extraordinary community of what we call “toddle Heroes”: advanced, long-term users. Each and every one of them has taught us something new about how toddle can work or could work in the future. And the greatest thing about it is that these Heroes now help the next generation of toddle-developers to learn and build quicker.
05 To code or not to code – but to still build web applications… It’s a brave new world. What can the world expect from the no-code wave?
Kasper: We can expect a world with more and more developers – and that’s exactly the change that toddle is a part of. I’m a designer myself, but toddle has enabled me to transition into also being a developer. We estimate that there are around 26 million developers in the world, and that’s too little compared to the workload. We need more people to engage in the development process, and that’s what we make possible with toddle.
Andreas: Our marketing person, Vakis, came up with a good phrase for what the world should expect: “If you’re in the business world today, you ought to speak English. If you are in the application world, you ought to learn how to code.” It’s a big mistake that we haven’t pushed programming further forward in school, as it would reduce the barriers to learning to code. To code is simply being able to communicate with computers, and that’s a handy skill in a digitalized world like ours. In toddle we predict that programming will be a more widespread competence. While the world will still need hardcore developers, we think that coding will be a tool for many professions like designers and marketers. Not everyone should be a developer, but everyone should be a programmer to some extent. We interact with computers every single day – it’s odd that most of us don’t speak their language. toddle is providing people with the language.
06 A co-founder partnership has very high highs and very low lows. How do you build a resistant partnership that will last to the bitter end?
Kasper: While Andreas and I have similar personalities, our skill sets are quite diverse. It allows us to easily collaborate on common visions and beliefs as our abilities are complementary and not too alike. We disagree on many things, but it’s always with the same vision in mind and with the product as the only thing we serve.
Andreas: It’s true; we disagree quite often. About a lot of things. But fundamentally, we agree on where we want to take toddle. We know where we want to go, but we might have different ideas on how to get there. And that’s only a good thing. This way, we always challenge each other in our way of thinking. We embrace feedback and constructive criticism as we both understand that it’s the strongest way to build the best possible product. In terms of skills, we know where we overlap, and we know where we’re different. Kasper can do a lot of things that I simply can’t do and vice versa. Generally speaking, our partnership is founded on respect. I can disagree with Kasper on design, and he can disagree with me on technical matters. The mutual respect allows us to discover that there are things we need to explore.
Kasper: It might sound cliché, but in toddle we always seek to let the strongest argument win. We’re not ruled by seniority but only by good ideas. That’s why we embrace disagreements – they almost always lead to an even better way of moving from A to B.
Andreas: Sometimes, our disagreements even tell us when to work on something and when to stop. It’s almost impossible to predict where the world of software will be in just a couple of years, so it’s difficult to know what features will be most relevant in the future. It requires agility and speed to constantly adapt your product to new standards – and that’s exactly what disagreements and constant evaluation enable. With this said, it doesn’t mean that I love when Kasper is wrong and vice versa… And we enjoy being wrong ourselves, admitting to it, and learning things we didn’t know. That’s how you let the best idea win in an organisation.
Kasper: But it’s only natural to be wrong in an organisation with so many great minds. I was wrong this morning and I was wrong yesterday. I quickly admitted that someone’s solution was better than mine, and we went off to build that. People need to put down their egos to let the product reach its true potential.
07 Startup life is a roller-coaster ride. It’s ups and downs, lefts and rights. How do you rediscover momentum and keep up the pace when running fast?
Kasper: The most difficult part of being an entrepreneur is when people don’t seem to understand your vision. When you believe so much in your product as we do, it can be truly frustrating if people don’t get it. But more often than not, it’s because our communication isn’t spot on. That can somehow motivate us to act and think differently, to make the design better, to make an explainer video, or simply just be creative. I want everyone in the whole world to understand and see Toddle for what it really is – and that requires creative thinking.
Andreas: Our motivation hasn’t really been an issue. Yet. But it’s obviously impossible to constantly keep accelerating, even though you might want to. Like with any other thing in life, you will always have ebbs and flows. Even in times when we might be less busy, it feels like time to innovate; now it’s time to solve some of the more tricky puzzles and not just fix trivial problems. And when we’re going fast, we just tell ourselves to keep going.
Kasper: Another reason it’s easier for us to keep momentum is that we’re building toddle in toddle. Whenever we build something, we ship it shortly after. We don’t have to run it by a design agency or some type of management team; we just do it. If it looks cool, push it. If it works, keep it. It helps us stay agile and reduce the time from idea to reality.
08 Why is experimentation so important for toddle?
Andreas: Usually, when working with software, releasing once a month is common. Sometimes every sixth month. But with toddle it first became once a week, then once a day, and now we’re releasing little updates multiple times a day. It’s extremely valuable that we can adapt and change our product in real time when we receive relevant feedback. Our record for fixing a bug is seven seconds from when we got the report. It’s much easier for us to validate whether an idea is good or not if we ship it fast and get useful feedback. And when you have success with experimentation, you want to do it more.
Kasper: Recently, I pushed around 10 times. In any other software company, that would have taken weeks to get through. We’re doing everything we can to limit bureaucracy and enable everyone in toddle to experiment toddle towards a better product where we can implement feedback fast and effectively.
Andreas: If we want to ensure this culture on a scalable level, we must push a culture of experimentation and remove the fear of failing. On a more practical level, we use what’s called “Feature Flag,” which basically allows us to control who sees new features and when. It makes experimentation less risky and much cheaper. This won’t have to change whether we’re five or five hundred developers.
09 When taking over the world, a startup needs funding. It comes in all shapes and sizes. What does your ideal investor look like? Be honest…
Andreas: We bring in investors that are in it for the long haul. We view our investors as our partners, and first and foremost, they need to understand the vision of toddle. We’re trying to make a fundamental change to the way you build software. Quite a few wealthy software companies are stuck in the past, and we wouldn’t like to be acquired by any of them as it could destroy our vision. That’s why it’s so important that our investors also buy fully into the vision and the impact that we’re trying to make.
Kasper: I can only agree. It really works well if they have the same sort of passion for the tech industry and for what developing web applications can become in the future.
