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 Ece Kural, Co-Founder of Scrintal, a visual note-taking tool based in Sweden.
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Here’s what Scrintal is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
When you're doing research or studying, you need to use so many different kinds of sources. Just to create one idea and write one paragraph, you get inspired from at least 5 different sources. Managing all this information puts a strain on our brains. Existing tools are trying to put a structure on our minds, rather than letting our minds shape the software
The Solution:
We're creating Scrintal as a visual notebook where you can quickly capture information from different sources, visually connect the information, and organise everything without folders. We're aiming to build a digital extension of our minds.
The Team:
We're a team of seven people. We are three co-founders. I am the CEO and responsible for product development, our CTO is in charge of all things software development and our third co-founder is focused on marketing and growth.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
Around 3 years ago when I was doing my PhD I had to do 60 interviews for one research article. Getting all the information from all the transcripts and videos, sharing it with my supervisors, and then turning it into something concrete was very difficult. This is when I had the idea to make audio and video content more searchable and easily turn it into information. This was our first MVP. From here, I found my CTO, Furkan, got a grant from the innovation office of Stockholm university, and started working on it as a side project for about two years. When I finished my PhD I started to take it on full-time.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
Now that most of us have experienced working remotely for an extended amount of time, we are more used to trying new and different products, and always looking for better ways to make remote working easier for ourselves and others. Also, there is a real trend in the software environment of making existing tools even smarter, even simpler, and even more intuitive. This is where the idea of trying to replicate the human mind rather than create a new software comes from.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
A recent success I am proud of is growing our team. It's very difficult to find like-minded people and learn how to work better. I would say that building a team is the hardest and also the most rewarding part of building a startup. It's a key factor in determining the success of the startup.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
I think for every young startup, goal-setting and finding good success metrics is a big challenge. If you set ambitious goals, you might think it's unachievable, but it's just achievable enough to inspire you and your team. But if the goal is too unachievable, then it will actually decrease the motivation again. Similarly, if the goal is too small, there will also not be enough motivation to work more efficiently.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
There is so much information available online about startups and how to work better as a lean startup. While I could still list you those best practices, I wish I had known that it's so much harder to actually implement these things in action. So, what I wish I had done differently from the beginning is to not wait for perfection, but to divide the project into smaller tasks and just work on it piece by piece. Now, we aim to set weekly goals and weekly one-on-ones with a non-related team member to best work through any bottlenecks that arise.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
Start small and think simple. Every action has an MVP, and you should roll out every action's MVP first.
Another piece of advice I was given is to be content with your success and look at the positive, and then think about how to optimise it. For example, when we rolled out our website, a certain amount of people signed up, and we were questioning whether this was a good number or not. I was told to imagine all those people coming up to you in person asking for a sign-up. Then suddenly it seems like a lot of people. Just because the people are online, you are underestimating your success. I found that quite powerful.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
There's a balance between doing your research right and knowing all the competitors and the ecosystem, and trusting yourself. And this is a really hard balance to maintain. Of course, you should always be on the lookout for what's going on in the environment, what new tools are coming up, and get inspired from them, but this should never demotivate you about the value of your idea. Don't let what's happening in the market around you doubt yourself.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
I never knew that hiring was so difficult. It's definitely the biggest lesson I've learned. I spend at least half an hour a week networking with new people to get to know potential future candidates. For example, I'm not looking to hire a Product Owner just yet, but probably in 6 months. So I want to use this time to get to know as many people in product and to understand the space better, to better inform my decision along the line.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I find Josh Miller very inspiring. He is the CEO of the Browser company. The vision of this company is mind-blowing for me, aiming to build an infrastructure for the new internet. I really value Josh for having such a big dream. I also find Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion, very inspiring.
What book do you think everyone should read?
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins