From wantrepreneur to entrepreneur: My first year as Aivan’s CEO

This is a recap of my first year as Aivan’s CEO (now known as Zefort), and a story of how a young, aspiring software startup finds its place in the market.

For the past 15 years, a small entrepreneur had been living in the back of my mind. During this time, I had several excellent (biased statement 🙂) business ideas, some of which I have even worked on with my good friends.

However, even though we worked on ideas, they never turned into reality. Not before last year.

I finally mustered my courage and took the step to become an entrepreneur. Letting go of the security and luxury of an executive position to start something of my own was not an easy call.

Looking back, I am really happy that I took that step. The past year has been a really interesting and motivating journey, and I do not expect anything less from the upcoming year.

Signing that very first MRR

When I started in August 2018, Aivan’s founders, Ville and Juhani, had just released the MVP version of Aivan.ai. My first priority was to reel in the very first customers for the solution.

Artificial Intelligence was a hot buzzword at the time. The media was filled with articles on how AI will dramatically shape the future and everyone’s role. However, almost none of these stories gave any concrete examples of how AI can actually help companies.

Aivan’s “contract management like magic” pitch was a positive exception. We were able to show a concrete example of how AI can help companies manage their contracts more efficiently. This helped us a lot when booking sales meetings. Many companies wanted to see AI in action.

Getting the very first customers on board is always a challenge. A young company with no references and a product with some missing features –  this naturally causes hesitation.

Last fall, we found three bold companies, Lyyti, Lukander Ruohola HTO, and Huntteri, who all saw that the potential Aivan offered far exceeded the above-mentioned risks.

Having the first customers on board naturally had several positive effects, but one outcome stood out above the rest: we started to receive extremely valuable feedback from actual users facing real-life contract management challenges. We began prioritizing our solution roadmap based on this feedback to further improve our product-market fit.

With customer references, a more complete offering, and a better understanding of the market, our sales started to pick up speed. Today, we are proud to have many great companies as our public references.

Aivan.ai’s top development priorities

As we learned more about our product-market fit, we also started to see more clearly what the top priorities for Aivan’s development were. Two items became our top priorities: user experience (UX) and security.

Aivan’s vision and ultimate goal is to build a “zero-effort contract management solution”. Zero-effort builds on great UX, which to us is the sum of a great User Interface (UI) and top-notch AI.

Our goal is to use AI as much as possible to minimize the boring routine tasks in contract management. Our UI must be fun and logical to use. In addition, zero-effort includes an extremely simple onboarding process – new users should be able to start using Aivan.ai without any extensive training.

Security is our other top priority. Contracts are confidential documents, and information security for customer data had to be top-notch. We also needed a way to reliably prove this to our customers.

Achieving top-notch security was actually built into Aivan, as our co-founder and CTO, Ville, is a top professional in this domain. Naturally, getting there meant a lot of hard work, but our team knew from the very beginning how to build a secure system. There was no need to learn the hard way.

But how could we ensure our customers that their data would be safe with us? As with many other roadmap items, we received valuable input from our customers for this case, too.

Following an extensive pilot phase, we landed a publicly listed company as our customer. As their final requirement, they required us to obtain ISO 27001 certification (ISO 27001 is a specification for an information security management system, ISMS). We had already implemented a formal ISMS for Aivan, but now we needed to make it ISO 27001-compliant and obtain an official audit.

Again, one of the co-founders stepped forward. Juhani has a background in Quality Management and has been involved in several certification processes. He has been leading our ISO 27001 project successfully, and the audit will take place in the autumn.

Our goal is to have ISO 27001 certification for Aivan before the year ends.

Getting your picture in the papers

When AI was a hot topic across all media, it was very beneficial to be a company with a concrete, easy-to-understand example of how AI can be used for practical business benefit.

This gained us good coverage in the media during the past 12 months. Articles about Aivan were published in Talouselämä, Tietoviikko (Tivi), Turun Sanomat, and Yrittäjät magazine, for example.

For example, in the news coverage of our cooperation with Senate Estates, one practical benefit was saving 7 years of manual labor with AI (read the full article in Finnish).

It’s all about teamwork

The year has not only been hard (although interesting) work, but has also included some less artificial and intelligent events.

One of such was Aivan’s summer kick-off for the full team. As there is a small rally and/or formula driver living inside each Finn, our agenda also included a karting session. One achievement I value very highly from my first year as CEO was setting the fastest lap in this session 💪🏁🏎.

Activities like this are important for nurturing the most important assets of a growing startup – its team. As shown earlier, having the right people in place helps build the product and take it to the next level.

What’s next?

Now, we at Aivan have one year behind us, hopefully several in front of us. The speed of business is accelerating all the time, and as our team grows, my role as a CEO will also change.

I will not go into details of our future plans now, but international expansion will definitely be one of the top themes for the coming year. Stay tuned!

Jussi Karttila

This article was originally published in August 2019.