On May 28th, 2021, Mikko Kesti was the star guest at the Customer Value Club, discussing ‘Creating Customer Value from Finland to American Desks.
Interestingly, many startup founders are named Mikko, and one of them, Mikko Kesti, founder and CEO of LoupeDeck, shared his remarkable journey of high-growth business focused on customer value. It’s amazing how LoupeDeck has consistently placed customer value at the heart of everything they do.
LoupeDeck creates consoles and software for editing photos, videos, and streams. Their market is global, employing 40 people of 13 different nationalities. The metrics for customer value are evaluated for every employee, from the CEO to developers.
Mikko Kesti has a long experience with stable publicly-traded companies and founded LoupeDeck after realizing the need for something that was missing: an enthusiastic amateur photographer couldn’t find a simple tool for editing images.
It all started with meeting customer needs
When I opened a photo editor recommended by friends in 2013, I didn’t understand a thing. The program had too many features, and user-friendliness was forgotten. I thought, there must be a mixer for photo editing, like a DJ. When I couldn’t find one, I decided to make it myself, Mikko says.
First, it was necessary to confirm if the problem was genuine, so we quickly started making prototypes and seeking crowdfunding. Crowdfunding was a great success. We got pre-sales of 75,000 euros in 30 hours. That’s when we knew there was a genuine demand for this product.
Seven months after the crowdfunding campaign, the product was already on the shelves in the USA. Those were incredible times: after the product launch, we achieved a million euros in revenue in six weeks. Even after that, LoupeDeck’s growth trajectory remained steep, with 34% growth even during the challenging year of 2020.
Customer value permeates everything
Our goal is to have every device receive five stars in every review. For that to be possible, customer value must always be at the center of every employee’s work. It genuinely permeates everything.
How do we stay close to the customer? We constantly review feedback, including from Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, and various LoupeDeck user groups. Additionally, we have a group of 250 beta testers who provide continuous feedback, constructive criticism, and praise for successes.
When comparing the mentality of a publicly-traded company and a startup, the keyword is courage – the ability to even challenge the customer. Our secret to success has been creating an entirely new product category, a genuinely new way to solve the customer’s problem, giving them a wow effect. So, not only do we listen to the customer, but we are also innovative. Our guiding principle is to always try to see more broadly than the customer themselves, so they feel they are receiving more and better.
Momentary ‘speed blindness’ made us forget customer value.
Many IT companies fall into the trap of becoming a ‘feature factory,’ where engineers get excited about development, focusing too much on features, thus neglecting usability and customer value. We also have to be careful with this, and at one point, our ‘speed blindness’ made us forget about customer value.
We realized this when customer feedback turned negative. We immediately put the brakes on innovation and decided to focus solely on usability for a year without introducing any new features. It was the right decision, and now the feedback has been positively encouraging again. Simultaneously, we hired a Head of User Experience who sits on my team, bringing usability expertise to the entire organization.
Competitive advantage comes from customer value
We constantly measure customer value, but competitive advantage is trickier. We don’t have a direct competitor, or in a way, LoupeDeck’s competitors in the photo and video editing space might include larger displays, more powerful computers, better mice. Thus, our competitive advantage comes from customer value: why does the customer choose us, a completely new device, over something like a better mouse?
One reason is flexibility and personalization, which LoupeDeck achieves in a way that the customer creates a personal relationship with the device – it’s entirely theirs. We keep the console interfaces open, so everyone can develop their own macros and even integrations. Yet, we don’t forget about ease of use. When a customer buys the device, it comes with a ready workflow to start comfortably and efficiently.
This combination of ease and openness brings value, and in turn, it brings in revenue.
