#38 Martin Kõiva & Kair Käsper 🇪🇪 (Klaus) from coding the prototype in a shashlik bar to raising $7M + Customer Service practices you can copy, Pipedrive effect, and the good & bad about VCs

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva are co-founders of the Klaus app - a conversation review and QA platform for support teams used by globally known names such as Wolt, SoundCloud, Epic Games. They have known each other for more than 20 years, have run several business ventures together as well as both have the ex-Pipedrive tag on their resumes.

In our first-ever 2-on-2 episode we discuss the challenges startups face in customer service quality assurance, cover best/worst practices as well as talk about the overall value of investments into customer support. We also talk about creating a business from scratch, raising seed funding, and the “Pipedrive effect”

The topics covered in this episode with Timestamps

[02:00] - INTRO AND THE ORIGINS OF KLAUS

• Doing business together for 20 years
• The idea of Klaus coming out from Pipedrive customer service experience
• Main challenges if customer service that started the company

[07:00] - ON CUSTOMER SERVICE BEST/WORST PRACTICES & MAIN CHALLENGES

• How to measure the quality of customer support communication
• What should companies pay attention to in CS QA
• The benefits of doing CS QA at all
• “No bad conversations”
• Mistakes companies make in CS
• Best quality agents are counterintuitively also the fastest
• Types of QA processes companies employ
• Peer review as a common form of QA

[17:40] - FIND OUT WHAT BOTH THE PORN INDUSTRY AND CHURCHES HAVE IN COMMON

• Hint - they care about their customer experience

[20:20] - 40% OF CONTACTS COME FROM TRIAL CUSTOMERS

• CS as part of sales to trial customers
• Looking at CS as a revenue vs. cost center
• Customers don’t care about your org chart, all interactions matter

[25:30] -  ON BUILDING A STARTUP & STILL WORKING IN PARALLEL

• Is it possible to build a product/business on the side?
• Finding a balance for product readiness and live customers
• Scrappy beginnings and getting first paying customer
• Switching from side project to main business

[29:35] -  STORY ON ‘ACCIDENTALLY’ GIVING DISCOUNT TO THE FIRST CUSTOMER

[31:15] - ON RAISING SEED INVESTMENT & GOOD / BAD THINGS ABOUT VCs

• Raising while not working full time
• Finding a champion-investor
• Bad encounters with top tier VCs

[37:45] – ON THE PIPEDRIVE EFFECT

• Effect of Pipedrive experience on fundraising
• School of company building
• Pipedrive founder support for employee startups
• Concrete lessons from the Pipedrive experience
• Get good people on board even if not hiring
• Hire slowly and test for values

 {43:05] - ON BEING A REMOTE-FIRST COMPANY ‘BEFORE IT WAS COOL’

• Main motivation to hire globally
• Team diversity

To reach out to Kair and Martin use:

Linkedin Kair: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kair/ 

Linkedin Martin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martinkoiva/  

Website: https://www.klausapp.com/

Find out more on https://www.pursuitofscrappiness.co/ 

Support for this episode comes from Nexpay > https://paynexpay.com/

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