Peter: So first of all, we're why did you take the time to be here? Take part of it today?

Nichlas: Oh, yeah. I mean, we have a large following on LinkedIn. This is a chance for me to go down and meet people face to face. It's really amazing.

Peter: And people can actually see that you not only exist on LinkedIn, but also exactly.

Nichlas: He is real. The hair is real. It's not photoshop. Exactly.

Peter: One of the things that quite a lot of people talk about here at the conference is SaaS businesses. And there's a lot of passion and love around SaaS businesses. What is it that is so amazing about SaaS businesses, in your perspective?

Nichlas: From my perspective, I would say that we used to build the B2C marketplace and it was sort of the way that we segued into the enterprise SaaS model. Instead, we experienced that when a customer contacts you in the B2C world, it's for you to fix a problem. When your B2B customer contacts you, it's to develop the product with you. You enter a sort of co-creation process and a willingness to fix things together and build things together that I just never experienced in the B2C segment. And that is just magical. I cannot put it anywhere. It's just a magic feeling building with someone.

Peter: And from a business perspective, your service is now delivered in a SaaS business model. What does that do? From a business perspective?

Nichlas: Yeah, from a business perspective, recurring revenue is gold. In many ways, it's very easy for us to predict versus the marketplace model we had before, where we never know exactly how many sales would be in a given month. We know pretty much, no not pretty much. We know exactly how much we're going to make within a month. Right. Yeah. And that is peace of mind. That is easier to sort of develop the business from that sort of perspective. Meaning that we know who we can hire, when we can hire them without making terrible mistakes. So having that predictability, I would say North Star thing, it's a really comforting thing to have.

Peter: It's an amazing business model when it works. Sometimes, and a lot of times, people talk about this. Your SaaS business, is it a must-have to your customers or is it only like a nice-to-have? Yeah, and of course must-have sounds a bit better. What are the things that you should really focus on and succeed with if you want to be that must-have?

Nichlas: That I think is very much depending on the sector you're serving. Yeah, but also a matter of what moves out there in the global trends, for instance. Maybe you would think in the old days, what we do is we sell language learning software and language learning to international employees. It's very often the local language, the Danish. In the old days, maybe you'd say, oh no, everyone speaks English anyway, so where's the necessity?

That has changed because the businesses know that if they want to retain their international talent, if you want people to stay in Denmark, there's no way around learning Danish and learning about the culture because you will not get under the skin of the Danes if you just don't take interest in the culture, in the language. The businesses know this, so they are willing to invest massive sums in this.

Peter: So actually you build the business around that specific, or at least that was one of the insights that you say, okay, that's my insight. That's the kind of value we actually deliver to my customers.

Nichlas: Exactly. The good thing for us in that case is that the sort of need of the end user is universal. We don't need to customize the product very much. And then we go into Germany now and there it's different.  that will be German for the international employees in large corporations. But they have a different challenge because in Germany, corporate English is not corporate English. I mean, we talk with a lot of employees in the largest German companies and they all say the same thing. We have never seen even an English document or be a part of an English conversation. Everything's in German. So it's not just necessary for them to thrive in Germany to learn German, it's to survive, it's to fulfill your job. So there the need is different, which means that we're going to have to actually focus on creating more profession specific content as well.

Peter: When I look at this from a conceptual level, I come to think about business strategy, which is like around these choices and tradeoffs and so on in your business that absolutely drives the direction. What is your perspective and your definition when I say business strategy? What is business strategy to you?

Nichlas: Business strategy, to me it's a very broad thing. But I think it always comes down to the core that if you are you truly solving a real pain, I think you really need to find your specific niche. We really needed to find a specific niche to answer that question. Are we truly solving someone's pain? Maybe we weren't solving the old pain very well, but we're solving this pain extremely well for enterprises. So business strategy is sometimes making the hard choices. Trimming your product to the core, trimming your target group to the core and then focus on that specific niche. That is the most important thing that we ever did in building swap language. 

We made the hard cut and said, okay, we are going to throw this old platform in the trash and then we're going to build something completely new

Peter: And what role do these choices and trade offs have? Like trimming down. What role does it play right now in your business and how does this materialize from an employee perspective?

Nichlas: It materialized. I would say that what we did was we actually just made a hard cut and said the B2C model feels like driving a car with a hand brake on. It will become a mediocre business. It already was, but wasn't really what we set out to do. So we made the hard cut and said, okay, we are going to throw this old platform in the trash and then we're going to build something completely new. And my CTO was going to strangle me when I told him, but he understood why we had to do it. So how did this translate into business results? Well, the profit margin tripled the stability in the company. In general, it's a stable company now. We broke even in May. How does it translate? It's much easier to serve one particular customer than 1000 different customers. It's just so nice to make a really rough decision. Although it is hard to kill your baby. 

Peter: Priority number one right now for you and your business, what is that?

Nichlas: Automation. So we are a four person team that has built something that is serving literally some of the largest companies in Denmark, right. Danfoss, bestseller conglomerate. Google, Denmark, trustpilot. All these things. Right. It is actually quite impossible to do when you're four people. So if you don't have tech that can do it for you, you need to build it fast. And we are constantly building more and more automation into the process in ways that does not eliminate the human interaction because it is important, but complements it or eliminates the tedious tasks. Automation.