How Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva Co-Founders Of Klaus Raised $17M To Build A Conversation Review And QA Platform For Support Teams?

Kair Käsper has spent his career in marketing, most recently building and running Product Marketing at the SaaS company Pipedrive. Prior to that, he co-founded and sold a leading digital agency in Estonia.

Martin Kõiva has had a mixed background in PR, marketing, general management, and customer service. His role prior to co-founding Klaus was scaling their customer service function at Pipedrive as Global Head of Customer Support.

Klaus is a conversation review (QA) tool for customer support teams that makes giving internal feedback systematic.

Klaus measurably improves customer service quality by making internal feedback easy and systematic. Connects seamlessly with your help desk. Used by companies like Pandadoc, Changebee, Soundcloud, WordPress, Doodle and Wistia.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Kair and Martin says:

Our formula has been to gain deep insight into an area and then apply ourselves as entrepreneurs in that area. That would also be the advice – become an expert in something before venturing out on your own because having that deep expertise will help you get through uncertain times. 

Whatever your starting point, the situation around a new startup will change many times over, and if you do not possess that domain/industry expertise, your journey is not likely to last very long.

• Delivering value to others is a better goal than trying to be happy. If you create value for others, happiness will follow but not the other way around, and only focusing on happiness may not even yield that
• Keep in mind that there will always be more things that you do not know than what you do know. Overconfidence is a recipe for failure
• Being serious 100% of the time a bit boring, and being boring doesn’t benefit you or anybody else

Read on to know more about Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva and his journey.

Please tell me about your personal background and What motivated you to get started with your company?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Since high school, we have both wanted to start businesses and have done so – from selling beer and t-shirts to building our previous SaaS as a side project (applicant tracking system Jobkitten, which is still live). 

In this case, we worked at Pipedrive where Martin came across a particular problem that Klaus now solves. That problem was managing customer service quality if you are growing fast and using a modern SaaS help desk software.

What is your current main product, and can you share any previous product pivot story to the current product?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Klaus is a SaaS platform for large customer support teams that want to improve the quality of conversations systematically. It connects to your helpdesk software (like Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, or any of the 14 other integrations) and enables you to start giving systematic internal feedback to your service agents. So it’s a bit like measuring customer satisfaction, but it’s your team that gives the feedback to agents. This process exists in most large support teams and outsourcing providers.

Klaus is used by large global brands and companies like Chargebee, Piktochart, Automattic, Soundcloud, Wistia, Epic Games, Doodle, and many others. 

Luckily we have not had to pivot at all this time.

How much money have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round? 

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: We have raised a total of more than $7M over two and a half years. The most recent one we just closed, led by Global Founders Capital and totaled 5.4 million USD.

What were the internal decision processes in determining when to begin fund-raising, and what were the logistics for this? And how many investors have you met so far, and how did you meet these investors, and which channels worked best for you?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: We mostly looked at the timing and our plans for the coming few years and determined the start by that. We talked to a few dozen investors, and the best contacts come through our network.

What are the biggest challenges and obstacles that you have faced in the process of fund-raising? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? 

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: We probably would not do much differently. The challenge is always what you have to offer and whether the company is attractive in terms of the substance and fundamentals. 

What are your milestones for the next round? And what are your goals for the future?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Klaus is going upmarket. The problem that we are solving is very clearly bigger for bigger companies. So have taken many steps to service much larger companies and continue to do that at a faster pace. Currently, we serve customer support organizations as large as 5000 service agents.

How have you attracted users, and with what strategy have you grown your company from the start to now?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: It has been very much a product-led growth. Our core belief is that value is not created through sales but through the product. Therefore, we have put heavy emphasis on making the product great and the user experiences seamless.

We aim to be the thought-leaders of the industry by providing unique and valuable content for potential users. By educating the industry, instead of selling to it, we’re building and growing a knowledgeable base of people aware of the problems they are facing and the potential solutions. 

Which has been the best marketing software tool for the growth of your startup, and why? 

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: We use a wide mix of tools to support our marketing efforts, from marketing automation software like Mailchimp to SEO platforms like SEMrush. Even our own tool, Klaus, is not just used by our Customer Success team, but also in Sales and Marketing. It provides a valuable stream of user insights from what our user-base appreciates most to what language they use to speak about Klaus, their problems, or suggestions.

What do most startups get wrong about marketing in general?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: The biggest issue, especially when it comes to B2B companies, is forgetting that it’s people who you’re marketing to – not some anonymous company. Keeping the interactions human makes the sales and marketing process much more relatable and transparent. No one likes to be sold to, but it’s a win-win situation when done personally and solving the users’ problems. It’s too easy to lose the personality and character when the business gets serious.

How do you plan to expand globally?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Luckily for us, we already have a global team, global customer portfolio, and SaaS, in general, is rather global in nature. So we plan to maintain this direction and not focus on any single market but building and developing as “global by default.” 

Part of how we became like this is that we got started in Estonia, which is tiny, and there was even no domestic market to speak of. In hindsight, that has been an advantage – even if it didn’t feel like it in the beginning.

What are the most common mistakes companies make with global expansion?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: It’s doing it too late. It’s much harder to turn a big ship, once it has been heading in one direction for a long – into a single geographic market, for example. So our recommendation would be to go global sooner.

How do you handle this COVID-19 outbreak situation for your company’s survival in the future? 

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Klaus has been remote-first from before the pandemic, so there hasn’t been any change from an organizational standpoint. 

For our customer base, it has been extremely tough in many cases. Companies have even gone out of business, and many were in crisis mode for months. We tried to support the latter by postponing payments, and we have been very happy to see most of them come out of it alive.

Simultaneously, certain industries like e-learning and gaming saw tremendous growth, so the situation has been balanced by that.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company? 

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Putting too much emphasis on the idea is very common. As somebody put it, ideas are the multiplier of execution.

While it is absolutely possible to have a great business with an average idea, it is impossible to have any business with a brilliant idea but lackluster execution. 

The world is filled with amazing businesses that are conceptually nothing special but have been executed well.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Our formula has been to gain deep insight into an area and then apply ourselves as entrepreneurs in that area. That would also be the advice – become an expert in something before venturing out on your own because having that deep expertise will help you get through uncertain times. 

Whatever your starting point, the situation around a new startup will change many times over, and if you do not possess that domain/industry expertise, your journey is not likely to last very long.

What are the top-three books or movies (TV series) that changed your life and why?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva:

• Ray Dalio’s “Principles
• Ben Horowitz’ “The Hard Thing About Hard Things”
• Jocko Willink & Leif Babin’s “Extreme Ownership”

All because they are both succinct and practical books by practitioners that have achieved amazing things. 

How do you keep yourself motivated every day?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: One major motivator is the feedback we get from the customer, which reminds us of the value our work creates. That makes you want to get stuff done because you know there are people out there who appreciate the things we do. If anybody appreciates you or your work, focusing on them can do wonders for your motivation.

What are the top- three life lessons that you want your (future) sons and daughters to know?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva:

• Delivering value to others is a better goal than trying to be happy. If you create value for others, happiness will follow but not the other way around, and only focusing on happiness may not even yield that
• Keep in mind that there will always be more things that you do not know than what you do know. Overconfidence is a recipe for failure
• Being serious 100% of the time a bit boring, and being boring doesn’t benefit you or anybody else

What would you like to be remembered for?

Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva: Awkward use of penguin GIFs, https://i.gifer.com/uTT.mp4. 🙂

You can follow Kair Käsper here.

You can follow Martin Kõiva here.

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