Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Aaro Isosaari, Co-founder of Flowrite, an AI-powered writing tool based in Finland.
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Here’s what Flowrite is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Writing can be a very repetitive task and most of us spend a big part of our working hours writing. Even with plenty of advancements in the fields of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), existing writing tools tend to focus on only small parts of the whole experience like spelling and sentence completions.
The Solution:
Flowrite is an AI-powered productivity tool, used to supercharge your everyday communication. With our tool, you can turn small text snippets into ready-to-send emails and messages, and even social media content. Our browser extension integrates with the websites and platforms you're already used to using.
The Team:
I am the CEO and Co-founder of Flowrite. I used to run a startup accelerator, Kiuas, the #1 program here in Finland, so I've had a lot of exposure to the early stages of founding and building a company. I also met my CTO and Co-founder during one of the programs at Kiuas. We are now a team of 9 people and are looking to grow further this year.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
In my previous work, I used to spend hours each day writing, everything from emails to messages and content. A lot of this work was quite repetitive, and I was looking for a way to optimise. At the same time, we saw that there had been very little innovation in writing tools over the past few years, so the recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) really spurred us on to create something new based on that technology.
The idea for Flowrite then came when we saw the capabilities of OpenAI's generative language models, particularly GPT-3. What we saw was that with the right kind of prompting of the model, we can turn very short bullet points into coherent and comprehensive texts.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Building a product like Flowrite before these language models existed would have been extremely time- and resource-intensive. When GPT-3 was launched, we felt that we could use it as the backbone of the product, while also building our own proprietary technology on top of it.
Also, since we have been moving into this remote working environment due to Covid, people have been communicating a lot more in writing, which means it takes up an even greater amount of time during the day. So, the problem is even more pronounced now than ever.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
Since I had such an amazing experience working at the startup accelerator at Kiuas with exposure to so many early-stage startups, I think I didn't face many of the typical challenges of first-time founders. I had developed quite an intuition for how to deal with these challenges. Through this experience, I've also been able to build a great network of people to turn to when I do face a barrier.
In hindsight, it's easy to look back and choose certain situations where we could have taken more risks and acted even faster, such as when we started recruiting our team, but those changes would likely have made a very small difference.
We're currently in such an execution mode, that we really know what we need to be doing in the next few months.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Build something that you yourself would love to use. It can be quite difficult to come up with an idea that will solve other people's problems if you can't at all relate to it. Be the number one user of the product yourself.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
In Finland, where we are based, it can be quite popular for founders to build products that mainly serve the local audience, and not put much focus on being global from day one. If you want to compete in the global market, you should work on building a global product and global brand from the very start.
This advice is particularly relevant for people building in the tech space. But even if you're building a physical product that might be limited to certain geography at the time, you can still make the brand stand out globally.
Also, just make sure you build something that people love. Many startups fail because people might vaguely like the product, but not enough to actually fall in love with it and want to pay for it in the end. Make people want to use your product over and over again.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
I've learned to be much better at making fast decisions and taking risks. It's something I've had to learn along the way and just something you have to get comfortable with as an entrepreneur. Learning to make fast decisions with very little data is really much of what building a startup is about.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I'm inspired by many successful productivity and workflow tools and their founders, who have been able to build extremely beautiful products and significant brands around those products. For example, Notion (Ivan Zhao) or Webflow (Vlad Magdalin, Sergie Magdalin, Bryant Chou) and Figma (Dylan Field).
What book do you think everyone should read?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick