Founders Feature #014 - somethingcreative
Creating digital products that change the way people interact
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 Samuel Frey, Co-founder of somethingcreative, a digital product agency based in Germany.
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Here’s what somethingcreative is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
Companies often see that there is a problem to be solved, especially when it comes to digitalisation, but often have no clue about how to get started with building those digital products, especially ones that have a high probability of being successful. Other companies might already be building a digital product on their own but need support in certain areas.
The Solution:
Somethingcreative is a digital agency of product managers and product designers providing services to established companies and startups who want to build digital products.
The Team:
I studied Product Management at university and I just found that I really enjoy doing that and want to stick with it. My two co-founders are very similar in that regard. We all really enjoy the process of creating something that actually creates value. This is definitely what unites us on this mission. I am a Product Manager and my co-founders are both Product Designers. We're currently a team of 10 people.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
A friend and I started talking about building something together, and on the side, we started doing some freelance work together. At some point more and more customers started coming to us, so we decided to just turn it into a business. At the time I also started studying Product Management at university, which is where we met our third co-founder. Over time we evolved from smaller projects to much more complex challenges around digital products, and we just had a lot of fun doing it and realised we were getting better and better at it.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
I think Germany really lags behind when it comes to digitalisation. There are a lot of established businesses who realise they need to change something and become more digital with their business model or even change their entire business model. These people often make the mistake that they find their own way of solving the problem and then just get someone else to do the coding. This approach is extremely likely to fail, and this is the gap that we are trying to address. We want to help people better understand the problem they are trying to solve and to identify whether it is even a problem in the first place, and if so how best to solve it. Right now a lot of companies are "waking up" and finding themselves in this situation.
Simultaneously, the startup scene is booming, and these often also face some challenges building their digital products.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
One of the biggest challenges we face is that building digital products successfully is not only about being good at the craft but also being faced by people with an existing mindset, and company hierarchy. It is not uncommon for people to want to build a feature simply because they like it, and this could not be further from the product mindset. Our job then also becomes about fighting these pre-existing structures and educating people. Moving people away from these well-established structures of thinking, managing, and doing things.
We recently had a client approach us with exactly this mindset, and from the start, we told them that if they want to build the product in their way that's fine, but not with us. This was obviously a big risk for us in potentially losing the client, but it was worth it in the end, and now we have built a great environment to do things in the way we believe is most likely to succeed. This was the first time we faced a client this directly, and we were quite proud.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
Another big challenge we face continuously is hiring. There are so many new startups entering the market and finding the right talent can be a real struggle.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
I think it's really important to find and hire people who match what you want to do as a company. As an agency, we don't have to scale, so we grow as fast as we want. So, in hindsight, I would be a little more selective in the hiring process. Today, we give ourselves the flexibility that, if we don't find a good fit, we just don't hire someone.
Also, we should have probably become clear on what we do and don't offer as part of our service earlier on. This meant we got held back by projects and clients where our service and what we want to do didn't perfectly match what we're good at and what they need. Today, we're much more confident in just doing what we're good at.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Recently, I struggled a bit with a personality clash with a client and my mentor introduced me to this framework about different founder types and how to deal with each of them respectively. Understanding this framework made it so much easier understanding and dealing with different kinds of people.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
It's crucial to understand that you don't start a startup only for the sake of reaching a certain goal. A lot of people are driven by wanting to solve a particular problem, make the world a better place, earn a lot of money, whatever it is that drives them to start the startup. But I think it's wrong to start a startup having only the end goal in mind. Starting a startup is nothing you just start and then at some point reach that goal. It's a long and hard journey, and if you don't also enjoy the journey then it's not worth it.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
If you're a founder you are constantly under pressure, and this makes you feel like you need to do a lot and always be busy. I think if you cross a certain level of how much you do, you increasingly lose your ability to distinguish between what actually deserves your time and what's not important. What makes you successful as a founder is not the number of hours you work but how well invested those hours are. I'm currently trying to work less, and I think that's making me more productive.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
There are a lot of people I find inspiring. For example, Ben Horowitz and his whole understanding of building a company culture and my mentor, who also regularly inspires me.
What book do you think everyone should read?
Essentialism - Greg McKeown