How We Grew Our Customer Base By 38% And Got Acquired
This is a follow up story for Viima. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 3 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Jesse Nieminen, one of the three co-founders at Viima, the most widely used and highest-rated innovation management software. As I explained in our previous discussion, our product helps organizations systematically collect, develop, and manage ideas through to innovations.
Currently, we have more than 18,000 organizations of all sizes and from every industry across the world on our platform. The last time we spoke, that figure was 13,000 so our growth has continued along quite nicely despite the challenging macroeconomic situation that’s affecting our industry.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
Well, probably the biggest news since last time is that we were recently acquired by HYPE Innovation, and we’re excited to join forces with them since we’re so well aligned on values and vision. We’ve just published our new vision of “Empowering every organization to excel at innovation” for the larger group.
Joining forces has led to several cool projects and opportunities for us, and we’re excited about what’s coming up down the road. The bottom line is that we can continue going after the same goals as before, just with more resources and a bigger reach.
For growth, we’ve continued focusing on the same strategies that have worked for us so far, and just improving our game bit by bit across the spectrum. We’ve still kept growing very nicely, but the uncertainty in the market this year has also led to somewhat longer sales cycles and some canceled projects from prospects, which has impacted our business a bit. Nevertheless, we’re just as profitable as before.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
Being acquired was of course a big change. While we’re still making all the day-to-day decisions for the business, we no longer have the same level of control as before, for example in terms of setting goals and controlling our budgets. The team at HYPE has been very accommodating and supportive, and they’ve given us a lot of room for making decisions, so it hasn’t been so much a practical challenge, as it’s been a mental one.
And just getting to know the people, business, and other products at the HYPE Group has been an exciting challenge for all of us, but as mentioned, the team has overall been very welcoming!
In terms of day-to-day business, I know this is a bit of a boring answer, but just trying to do more with world-class quality, and still, a very small core team is of course always a challenge, but one that we enjoy.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
You might spot a theme here, but these have mostly been related to being acquired too. Regardless of how well you think you’ve aligned yourself and discussed the practicalities during the acquisition process, there will always be surprises and things that didn’t quite go as you had planned, and the same was also true for us.
We, fortunately, had had very open and honest discussions already during the process, so we had gotten the big picture right.
On a more personal note, as we’ve been able to strengthen the team, I’ve transitioned from spending most of my time on growth and marketing-related matters to product management, and I’ve enjoyed that transformation.
I had been doing product management already for a long time, so I knew how to do the job well, but I just hadn’t had enough time to do it, and there are naturally many things you get better at the more you practice them.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Well, for the rest of this year and next year, we’ve got tons of cool updates coming to our product, which our customers and team are super excited about, and we’re also planning a bigger pricing overhaul that’s designed to be even simpler and better meet the needs of customers of all sizes.
Viima’s mission is still the same: we’re looking to democratize innovation by helping every organization have access to the tools and information needed to excel at innovation. A big part of that work is simply to keep doing what we’re doing to improve our product, keep creating more accessible information about innovation, and pack all of that in a more easily usable and practical format.
And of course, now that we’re part of a bigger group, we’re looking forward to making the most out of the leverage the bigger group has provided us with.
In five years, our goal is to have an impact that’s an order of magnitude bigger than it currently is across the board.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
As I’ve re-oriented myself towards product management, I think Marty Cagan’s Inspired and Empowered were good refreshers for getting back to what matters, and the same goes for his colleague Martina Lauchengco’s Loved, which is focused on product marketing.
But the two books I enjoyed the most this year have been Build by Tony Faddell and The Ride of a Lifetime by Bob Iger. Both share plenty of great stories and lessons from the figurative trenches.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
Well, my top 4 from last year still applies, but I’ll try to add something a little more specific to that.
There are three universal reasons why a company isn’t growing fast enough:
- Your offering doesn’t create enough value or isn’t competitive against alternatives
- Not enough people know about your product AND the value it could provide for them
- Not enough people have the problem that it tries to solve in the first place
In the end, it always comes down to these three. For most startups, you can just focus on the first two, but if you're aiming to become a unicorn or are going after a super specific niche, you need to consider the third one too.
And, while you can spend an endless amount of time and money trying to scale the business, most of that’s a waste if what you sell just isn’t good enough.
So, the bottom line is, as long as you excel at number 1, you’ll probably do fine as a company. But, if you have high ambitions, you also need to get 2 and 3 right.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We don’t have any open positions right now, but we are looking to hire talented people for sales and engineering roles in the near future. If you’d love to help us with our mission and are looking for a culture where the bar is set high, we focus on delivering real value for customers and have fun in the process, we’d love to discuss the opportunity with you!
Please feel free to contact our team via [email protected] to ask for more details, or reach out to me directly.
Where can we go to learn more?
The best place is to go to viima.com. If you’re looking to make more innovation happen, give our software a try, and if you’re just interested in learning more about innovation, subscribe to our blog!
We’re also on most social media platforms, but perhaps the most active on LinkedIn and YouTube.
And of course, if you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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