Learning 1: Your mission and values should drive your product

Nico (my co-founder) and I really wanted to create a product that would help employees feel valued at work. We saw alarming statistics about how much of the global workforce is disengaged at work—around 85%. If nearly 9 out of 10 people are unsatisfied in their jobs, that’s not just a massive social problem, it’s a massive business problem too. 

Drawing on my own experience as CFO at Tradeshift, I knew some of the pain points of internal office expenses. The first option is you give people access to the company card. I personally tried to empower people to buy what they needed, but it becomes difficult sharing one company card with the whole team, and trying to reconcile everything.

Alternatively, you let people pay for things themselves, and claim it back. But there’s a kind of awkwardness that comes with making people pay out of pocket, file receipts, log everything into spreadsheets, and then wait for reimbursement. 

Pleo was originally intended to save money and time through automating all of these internal finances and expenses. But soon it became symbolic of a certain culture you had in a company. We wanted organisations to move away from this painful process of paying out of pocket, towards something that was not only smoother, but also inspired trust in people.

“Pleo was originally intended to save money and time. But soon it became symbolic of a certain culture you had in a company.”

This mission definitely feeds down from our team into our product. We’ve always been drawn to people with entrepreneurial instincts, who make their own decisions and have autonomy. This has clearly developed into a product that empowers employees to feel the same way. 

We always like to say, Pleo turns CFOs into heroes. You don't want to be that CFO that spends their whole time chasing everyone for receipts. We’ve actually started to realise that companies underline the fact that they use Pleo as a recruitment point. It’s like they want to show what sort of company they are. There’s certainly something to this.

It may feel too early to set a vision and mission, but with multiple stakeholders (e.g. larger team, investors) it’s all too often that everyone has a slightly different view of what’s the goal and what should be prioritised to get there. Your vision and mission are the foundations for your strategy and wider objectives.

Read: The Do’s and Don’ts of writing effective Vision and Mission Statements

Learning 3: Raise funds before you need to

Advice often differs on when you should raise funds. Some founders argue that you should stretch initial capital as far as possible, so that you then raise when you have a clear idea of what you really need the investment for. 

We actually always raised funds earlier than anticipated, usually around six months before most companies might have. Some might say this was a conservative approach, but it’s always worked for us - we can keep moving ahead at full speed, with less worry that we’re going to run out of cash.

When you are starting to raise funds, I’ve learned that there are two very important things to think about. 

First of all, think about the completeness of the team. Do you have the right talent in the right areas? Are you missing anyone critical? Secondly, think about the problem you are addressing. Is the market big enough? Is your vision clearly defined and, more importantly, appropriate? 

If those two things are there, then there's a good chance you can raise money. I’ve seen great teams fail because their vision isn't bold or big enough, and vice versa—great ambitions, poor teams. 

Read: Founders Factory's fundraising manual (pre-seed to Series A)

Learning 5: There is a formula for expanding into new markets

Even before the product had successfully taken off in Denmark, we were already thinking about the future possibilities of expanding into new markets. Fintech companies like Pleo have the capability to expand quickly across different countries and continents—but they come with a whole package of considerations. 

We learned that there’s actually a formula for selecting the right market to expand into. Our launch team created a methodology of criteria that we’d need to evaluate for new countries, in order to determine whether launching was both achievable and worth our time. Criteria included:

• The size of the market - the population, in particular the size of the target audience

• The competitor landscape - where there other products or companies doing something similar who we’d have to compete with? If there weren’t, then why wasn’t anyone doing something similar?

• Product options - what would we need to offer specifically to that market, and how easy would that be to deliver?

• Team - do we have people on board in that country already, or would we need to recruit?

• Fundraising - do we have enough capital to fund the launch? How easy would it be to raise capital there?

The UK was actually the first new market we launched into. For us, launching in the UK was incredibly important, both from a strategic point of view but also in terms of what we could achieve. For fintech businesses, the UK is the toughest market from a maturity level, and we knew it would be an incredible challenge. But if we could do it successfully, this would prove to investors that our product was sound and had great potential.