StartUs Presents: HAAARTLAND

Describe HAAARTLAND in 50 or less words.

HAAARTLAND is the go-to tool to build an audience for your business. By setting up niches, our algorithms find the key factors for marketing resonance. With these insights marketers can create marketing that really works, engage and connects with people.

What exactly can your tool do for startups looking for ways to grow?

HAAARTLAND makes it possible to understand what drives a target audience. For a startup this is crucial and the only way to be able to engage and connect with the people they want to do business with. Our tool is also the perfect match for running marketing tests, finding out where to effectively scale their marketing and growth. HAAARTLAND is really good match for startups.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dream instead of someone else’s?

You’ve got the answer to that in your question, I think. In our case, we really do believe marketers need and deserve a tool like ours. A solution using the power within big data and machine learning, to do more than showing stats and dashboards. We have seen enough of that. We want our users to feel relief in knowing instead of guessing. In more general terms, if you once have felt the magic within a startup, that special raw energy, you don’t want to be anywhere else. You simply don’t find that in an ordinary corporate gig. It’s such a wonderful thing creating something built on your and your team’s ideas. The work making it happen is truly rewarding.

7 years from now: how did your startup change the world?

We would be very proud if we could attribute ourselves to being the #1 solution for data-driven marketing. The thing is, marketing is still built upon guessing and assumption in some ways. We want to change that using AI and machine learning technology. An even bigger mission is to transform marketing into something people really want to engage with instead of something they feel is being forced upon them.

In what ways are you measuring success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

You know you have succeed with something truly amazing when your users become your most valuable “marketing resource”. When they recommend you and talk about you with their friends – it’s as simple as that. If you concentrate all your efforts to get there, you’re one step closer to your success. On your way to this “nirvana”, measure only the things helping you to get there as fast as possible. In our case for now, we focus on growing and retention mostly. We observe plenty more. Still, how fast we grow and how many of our users stay with us is most important.

Describe your typical working day from coming to the office to leaving it.

Running a startup means you’re constantly working. You think of your business all the time, you even dream about it from time to time. Just recently we introduced strict “daily focus areas”. It helps us prioritize and concentrate to maximize our outcome on particular tasks, one at a time. That change has put our creativity in place where it’s most needed at the moment and that has increased the quality and speed of our work.

Already pivoted? Do your customers use your platform as you thought they would?

We’re constantly tweaking almost everything in the platform built on the feedback we’re getting. Our roadmap for next year has been altered several times and that is a good thing. It shows we are moving closer to our product market fit. It’s clear that the agenda for a digital marketer is diverse and multifaceted, the insights our users are getting must be easily transformed into actions.

Bootstrapped or financed? What fuels your startup and what will in the future?

Both. We have a few angels in now and we’re in good shape until our next expansion phase.

What is your growth strategy?

Staying committed to our mission, keeping our focus and most importantly – build a superior tool. That’s the only way to break through. We’re also lucky to have a product that has a virality factor built into it. The data we process is super interesting for digital marketers and growth hackers, so when we connect a solid valuable product with smart viral growth hacks, we have a good chance to get the word out there.

What do you look for in team members?

We always say we want dolphins not sharks in the team. Wise people with ethics. We want builders not takers. And we don’t want fire-starters, we want cooks. People who can light a fire and also prepare a tasty meal. Who can pull things off on their own but also together with a team. Many people have ideas, but only a few can close the loop and these are the one’s we are after. So if you are a pro in machine learning, deep learning, UX, customer service and you want to work hard but wise – reach out to us. You should have an odd sense of humor too.

Why should a talent join your team?

If you want to be part of a team at the edge of marketing, where artificial intelligence is used to work shoulder to shoulder with human marketers, then you should apply.

What was your most memorable moment so far?

The most rewardable moments is when a user goes – WOW! It trumps everything else. Another biggie was when we first realized the quality of data! As we are deep into content marketing, we thought we had a pretty good picture upon how the industry looks like, at least in Sweden. We were literally blown away by the fact that we only knew about 15 % of the people. That made us understand our potential among other digital marketers.

What advice would you give fellow startup founders?

First, make sure your startup is solving a problem big enough for starting your business. Not every great idea is aimed to become a startup. Secondly, choose your co-Founders carefully, you’ve will be in this together for a long time, so find people sharing your passion and guts. If not, your team will collapse when it gets tough. And it will, several times. Finally, trust your team capability to make it happen. You only have each other.