Press enter or click to view image in full size
Last year, I found myself chatting to the CEO of TWICE about helping them out with some data-related tooling.
Half-jokingly, he suggested I visit them in Helsinki and crash at their office.
He didn’t have to ask me twice — I took him up on it.
Two days later, I was in Helsinki 🇫🇮. We had a chat with him and the CTO, went for dinner, and I got a test dataset to prove our worth with.
I got back to their office at 11pm, using the CEO’s key card to get in.
Over the next few hours, sitting on an office couch, I built a prototype of their brand-new customer-facing reporting — using Supersimple’s API (context: I’m one of the founders of Supersimple).
Press enter or click to view image in full size
Around 4am, four Red Bulls later, I was done — and it was working beautifully! ✨
Because I need my beauty sleep, I set up camp in one of their meeting rooms. Out of pity, the CEO had brought me an inflatable mattress from home.
Two hours later, their team started arriving into the office, and I got up in order not to traumatise meeting room users too much.
We ran through the live demo of what I’d put together overnight, and they agreed it checked all the boxes.
🤝 At exactly noon, we agreed on the commercials & shook on it. We had just >doubled our revenue — it was our second-ever paying customer.
So. What’ the lesson here?
1. Sometimes just going there in-person is all the magic you need
2. My shoulders are wider than that mattress
3. I should have probably brought a pillow or a blanket