Newsletter #20: People at Work

What is the common denominator between all our companies? Is it that they all work on software? Is it that they work in B2B? Not quite. For us, what truly ties our projects together is who they are building for: people at work.

The difference may seem insignificant, but it changes everything: it changes the projects we choose to launch, the problems we want to take on, and even how we bring them to Product-Market Fit. The past few months have been a case in point:

Building for everyone

This year marked a first for us: we teamed up with an existing company. We shared in this post how we ended up joining forces with Yousign to build a European eSignature leader. But perhaps we didn’t share why we felt like this opportunity was one that we simply couldn’t pass on…

We’ve been building products to help teams in their digital transformation. And we feel that eSignatures are one of the most obvious starting points of any digital transformation process. We believe that reinventing the eSignature experience is key to helping all teams — whether they are up-and-coming startups, or traditional mom-and-pop shops. And improve the way they work.

Building a better way

The studio has hit a new record these last few months, with 8 projects in the works. We already shared the first 3 companies to join our eF19 batch (Bonjour, Swan, and Chilli), each offering a fresh spin on how to help people at work make the most of their time in their jobs.

We also shared a little sneak peak into some of our other upcoming projects this year. What drives each of them is looking at what people struggle with in their day-to-day, and trying to build tools they actually want to use. Unlike some of their current solutions: I’m looking at you PowerPoint, Contact Managers, and Jira. More on that very soon…

Building for people first

There’s a lot of literature on selling software to businesses. We won’t repeat some of the very valuable advice that exists about how to successfully go about building and distributing SaaS. But we feel something too often goes under-appreciated: you’re helping people first, and companies second.

This bottom-up approach — as we like to call it — is more than a strategy to encourage fast growth. It offers a new way to look at delivering value and pricing. It lays out a roadmap to challenge large incumbents. And it’s at the center of everything we do and everything we are. We build software for people who happen to use it at work, not the other way around. And we like to think it changes everything.

Want to build the next big thing? We’re hiring people who want to build for other people, join us.

Get the future of work straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our newsletter: