Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The product idea was based on what you were doing for Nokia and what you wanted to bring for the other mobile operators, right?

Hannu Verkasalu: Exactly.

Sramana Mitra: This is now the post-iPhone era.

Hannu Verkasalu: Yes. Now more and more companies were interested in mobile being a medium for content and services. Of course, Nokia was no longer the dominant company. The business case and the case for me as an entrepreneur was the fact that I needed to build a product. I didn’t want to sell my hours. It didn’t scale.

I wanted to build a product that could be sold to many other companies as well. I wanted to own the product with the team. That was my second step in the three steps that I have done in transforming the business model that I’m running.

Sramana Mitra: What was that product? What were you going to do with it?

Hannu Verkasalu: It was a tool. It was an app that people could install on a mobile device. This app could do two things. One was, it could provide service to consumers. Carriers like Verizon were able to use the capability to ask consumers if they’re happy with the network quality. It was a way to collect feedback from mobile consumers through a mobile app. In the old world, this was available on the web but not on the mobile.

Sramana Mitra: So your app is going to be built into the device by the device manufacturers and carriers would be able to tap into it, right?

Hannu Verkasalu: That was one of the goals but at the end of the day, we found a different model to do that. The other piece of the tool was that it was available to quantify some primitive data regarding device usage.

Sramana Mitra: You can’t expect the consumer to install this thing. There’s nothing in it for the consumer. It’s all serving the benefits of the carriers.

Hannu Verkasalu: Correct. The challenge was to get that service to consumers. One of our failures with the business was that we failed to build a consumer service. We felt that we would be able to build the data collected from the mobile into a service that consumers want to install. They can use the data to get automatic feed. There were many companies like Foursquare who did that quite well. We didn’t have the right design or the right capabilities to build consumer-facing services. That was a failure.

We probably spent two extra years trying to make the consumer service better. It didn’t happen the way we wanted it to. Instead, what we did was to pivot the business and started providing the service to companies. They already had panels where consumers were willing to respond to surveys, and we started licensing that tool.

Sramana Mitra: This is the genesis of your current company?

Hannu Verkasalu: Kind of. We hit a challenging period in 2010. We had some really good clients like Google and many of the market research companies, but we weren’t able to convince the investors to see that as a scalable, huge business. We were talking about raising more money. There were a few companies interested in acquiring the business. We decided to sell to Arbitron in the US.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo
1 2 3 4 5 6