The Evolution of TheoFlow: A Startup Journey

Duncan Riley (00:00)

Hello and welcome back to Build Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on exciting and often chaotic world building successful technology business. I'm Duncan, your host, and for this show, we're in every episode, we'll bring you the stories, strategies of people who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Jens. Jens is the CEO of TheoFlow, revolutionizing how marketing agencies on board.

their customers. So buckle up, grab your headphones and get ready to dive into the world of digital products. Jens, welcome to the show.

Jens Bjerregaard (00:37)

Thank you so much Duncan, appreciate you having me.

Duncan Riley (00:39)

Great, great. So, Jens, so with the Oflow, what's the biggest problem that you're trying to achieve? What's the Oflow's big problem you're trying to solve?

Jens Bjerregaard (00:50)

Well, you kind of spoke into it at first there. What we're trying to do is help marketing agencies onboard their clients in a way more efficient manner, a faster manner, essentially, and just better in general. At its core, our product is a client onboarding automation software, which helps agencies build these custom client onboarding portals that lets their clients

basically grant access to all their ad accounts with just like one click, sign contracts, pay the agency, answer relevant questions, upload relevant documents or add creatives, relevant inputs, all in one centralized place. This results in these marketing agencies being able to onboard their clients within minutes instead of weeks.

Literally, an onboarding flow can be taken down from four to six weeks to essentially within the same day of closing the client. That's essentially at its core what it is and what we're trying to solve.

Duncan Riley (01:54)

Yeah, fantastic. It's a really, really interesting concept and I've worked a lot with marketing agencies in the past and onboarding seems to be a key challenge to getting their clients up and running. Traditionally, what were marketing agencies doing and how is TheoFlow filling that gap?

Jens Bjerregaard (02:15)

Right, so at its core, a lot of marketing agencies already have a set infrastructure in place. They have their CRM system, they have their project management system, and all these other different systems. For example, some marketing agencies also have client portals, which they can share with their clients. So the thing is that when they onboard a new client, they have internal systems for that.

Like they have different SOPs and different tasks that they can follow, which is essentially a structured system, right? But they still need to do different things in different softwares. Things such as signing, sorry, building contracts, setting up payment, building these guides that they can send to their clients so they can gain access to their ad accounts. The problem with that is two things. There's an operational issue.

in that their internal softwares don't speak together, which means even though they have a solid process in place internally, such as making these contracts, all the systems are not talking together. So that's an operational issue that costs a lot of time and also causes a lot of issues, especially for the bigger agencies. Then There's a different side of it, which is actually the worst part of the onboarding, is that the marketing agencies don't have a set

structure for the external part of the client onboarding, aka what the client receives. So when you have all these different parts of a client onboarding, the client doesn't see that. The client just receives hundreds of different emails for hundreds of different things without any structure. And what we're trying to do is centralize that essentially, right? So the way it works is basically that these agencies integrate their current CRM systems, project management systems,

and all add accounts to TheoFlow. So when they add a client to TheoFlow, all the operational part will basically be automated because all the agency does is that they fill out essential information when they add a new client. It all automates that in their contracting software, their payment software, and even in their Ad accounts, which means that when they send this link to their client, so this onboarding portal to the client,

One thing is that the client can literally just be onboarded and grant access to everything in one place, but it's also automated on the internal side of things like the operations part, which saves the agency a bunch of time and resources internally and gives the client a more centralized and personalized experience. And, and one way we're combating this problem is also by building it.

as a white-labeled solution, essentially. So the agency can have a completely custom-branded onboarding portal to them, essentially. And we'll probably get into this later, right? But at its core, the red thread of our product and service is that we're trying to help these marketing agencies build better client relationships from the get-go, right? A good client onboarding is a good first impression. And a good first impression

is building trust, right? But yeah, at its core, it's just a bunch of unstructured systems that we're centralizing and automating so everybody can have a better experience.

Duncan Riley (05:32)

You know what, it's a fantastic idea. seems like some of the simplest ideas are the best ones. And where I see Theo Flow going is not just assisting the marketing agency with streamlining the gathering of information, but providing their client with a fantastic onboarding experience that essentially gets their marketing agency up and running faster.

And that's obviously like the problem with a lot of companies is there's essentially like a few weeks on boarding time. And so, you know, those few weeks can be crucial for a business that wants to get to market quickly, get their ads running, get their services running. And so, yeah.

Jens Bjerregaard (05:56)

Yeah.

Exactly. Well, yeah,

that's one part of it, but there's also just another part of it, like the experience wise. mean, the thing is that the marketing agency industry is insanely competitive, right? And mostly of these clients that sign onto the agency has probably had an agency on before, right? So giving them that quick, fast experience of getting them up and running is crucial for the long lasting relationship, right?

Duncan Riley (06:38)

Yeah, of course, absolutely. Yeah, I can definitely see how that would provide a better experience from the start, definitely. It's great, and I know that you're launching as of today or tomorrow in a few hours anyway, so I'm very thankful to get some of your time, but it'd be great to sort of give the audience a bit of a background about Theo Flow, where you guys have come from, your story, and even the idea of how it all came together.

Jens Bjerregaard (07:08)

Yeah, great question. essentially, the idea started like a year ago. To preface, I work as a marketing consultant and I actually help some of the biggest brands here in Denmark, where I'm from, with their digital advertising, especially on like platforms like TikTok and stuff like this. And we are working with big clients, right?

I've always just seen the onboarding finding it so tedious, to be honest. So I started building these Sapio automations to try and just streamline it to some sense, which kind of also worked, to be fair. But I didn't really think more about it, to be honest. I don't have a technical background. I work in the marketing industry and I've done that for years.

And I guess I just kind of have a entrepreneurial mindset. So when I see a problem, I try to find a solution. But I kind of indirectly started finding an interest in programs like Y Combinator and Antler and all of these accelerators and these programs are just getting a general interest in the whole entrepreneurial thing.

more actually building startups. So I moved to Citi here in Denmark and I was like, hey, I need to make some new friends, meet some new faces. So I participated in like a startup competition slash hackathon where you would get the idea, build a demo, build a business plan behind it, and then pitch it to a large group of like investors and a panel.

Now there were hundreds of people there and I met my two co-founders there, which are highly technical software engineers. yeah, essentially they loved the idea. They wanted to help me work on it. We worked our asses off that whole weekend and we ended up coming on second place in the competition. Unfortunately, not first place, but I guess we're not like that, like sustainable of a business model that kind of tops off usually in those competitions.

Duncan Riley (09:01)

Yep.

Jens Bjerregaard (09:04)

But either way, we ended up coming on second place. And that was kind of like the beginning of the journey, I guess. The funny part about that was the thing that we pitched back then was a CRM for marketing agencies. That's kind of like where you start where I want to fix everything in an agency. And then it kind of narrows down when you start finding the real pain points. So yeah, I met my two co-founders.

we actually found out that we were kind of neighbors in the neighborhood that we're in. everything worked out, and we had a very good chemistry, and we literally just started building. Over the last two, three months from there, we started building this CRM. We got on actually a lot of clients, and everything seemed quite good. But then we asked the golden question, would you actually pay for this?

and nobody said yes. So we started narrowing down on what people actually wanted to pay for, and we found out that it was this onboarding solution that we were building. And yeah, so basically like two months ago, we rebuilt the platform, started narrowing down on onboarding. And yeah, it's been an intense journey, but we're finally at the point where we can do our first soft launch to our first pilot users. So basically like a beta version.

where we can actually start testing out the product, right? Yeah.

Duncan Riley (10:19)

Fantastic,

fantastic. And most people will be curious about where the name came from. You might want to.

Jens Bjerregaard (10:24)

Yeah, but it's actually kind of random, right? Because honestly, it's completely random. just thought Theo kind of sounded good. I was like, Flow, that kind of makes sense. But the funny thing is we were called Theo Flow when we built the CRM system, right? But now it's kind of like the Oflow, so the onboarding flow. So that's kind of weird how that worked out. But I guess it works. Some people call it the Oflow.

Duncan Riley (10:43)

Yep. Brilliant.

Jens Bjerregaard (10:51)

others call it Theo flow. It's just random to be honest, but it kind of works out when we're doing onboarding systems,

Duncan Riley (10:58)

Definitely, definitely, no I love it, it's really good. No, it's fantastic on where you've got to your journey so far. I guess, know, my background's in product and I'm always about validation, you know, how do we validate the idea? And so have you gone through that sort of validation process at the moment with, you know, a few range of your own or current customers in the marketing space?

Jens Bjerregaard (11:18)

Yeah, so that's been a journey to be honest. And we're definitely not at the point at complete validation. I think that's a continuous thing all the way to product market fit. I think that's important to have in mind. And we're definitely cautious of that, that we don't have a fully validated idea until we have X amount of customers actually paying us to solve their problem. But I mean, the core thing is that when we started

I literally just started cold calling people up and saying, Hey, would you like this? And the problem was in the start, I was probably asking the wrong questions because in reality we were building something that didn't really exist. So it was kind like the CRM for marketers. It sounded very attractive, right? So everybody was like, yeah, I'll sign up for the wait list. This sounds cool. Right. But that doesn't mean that it validates the idea. And that's kind of where we went wrong because that really cost us.

multiple months of development and wasted time. We were building a platform that people didn't really want. So when we started asking people, not even asking people, like actually demanding that you'll, you need to pay for this, right? We started getting much more clear on where the pain points were. It's kind of like the Y Combinator philosophy where it's like, if people's hair is on fire, they'll do anything to try and put it out, right?

So doesn't matter if you have water or freaking brick, right? They'll buy it from you at any cost because they're in so much pain, right? And that's kind of what we noticed with this client onboarding process. So yeah, mean, the validation part so far has been a roller coaster. We're at the point now where the idea is validated. Now we're moving into the concept validation phase.

Duncan Riley (12:37)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jens Bjerregaard (13:04)

We've actually consciously built up our MVP. We've intentionally built up our MVP as bare minimum as possible. It literally only can do one single little feature of what we ultimately want to do. But we've done that intentionally because we want to iterate with the customers and pilot users that we have on the platform because ultimately that is the right validation that you need.

I think a lot of you hear a lot of people talk about validation. You need to hear more about what kind of validation you need. Right. There's the first stage where we went through, which is like idea validation. Then you need market validation and problem solution fit. Right. And then product market fit in the future. But that's a whole nother story. But so it's like the approach that we've taken to validation is that we validated the idea enough for it to be worth.

working on but only to the point where we can just break into concept validating so we can iterate the product as fast as possible so it essentially validates itself if that makes sense right.

Duncan Riley (14:10)

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, it absolutely does. And time will tell. I'm pretty excited to see it after launch. In a sort of world of so many products being released and so many tools to choose from, I'd say. And as a young founder, have you made those decisions to bring technology into your business to get it off the ground?

You know, have you? Have there been any challenges in that space?

Jens Bjerregaard (14:38)

Yeah, so I mean, the number one thing to mention here is obviously AI. I mean, you can't, there's no way to walk around it. I mean, the funny part is that because we're two technical co-founders and one business co-founder, I've not been as much over the development process, technically wise.

But I didn't notice that my co-founders in the start weren't using software like Cursor and all of this. And once we started implementing those softwares that helped us code way more efficiently in reality, we cut our time in half. Actually, what's funny about this is that one month ago, we didn't have a working product in any sense. Now we have a completely working product, not just because of AI, but utilizing

that essentially. And that's really important to mention that when it comes to development, especially development, because that is the stage we're at. We're not a real business yet. We're a startup and we're building. It's important to mention that these AI tools are completely key to the workflow, not because it makes it

perfect and it does it for you, but it makes you work in such an agile way that you can focus on launching fast rather than launching perfectly. And essentially launching fast nowadays is launching perfectly, right? So that's kind of our core focus is to get it out as fast as possible. And the tools that we are using for that is like programs like cursor.

Duncan Riley (16:08)

Yeah.

Jens Bjerregaard (16:18)

That's probably the number one thing. Obviously, we are using project management systems like ClickUp to manage all our scrum workflow, but that's just to keep structure internally so we know what to focus on. I would say AI is at its core of it.

Duncan Riley (16:33)

Yeah, excellent. Do all your teams work together or do you work sort of agnostically? I'm seeing a lot of teams around the globe working asynchronously in different locations and it's amazing what people can achieve. Are you guys all together in Denmark?

Jens Bjerregaard (16:51)

Yeah. So I mean, we're like essentially almost neighbors. We can see like each other's apartments. So we're pretty close to each other. and we, so the thing is this is actually a bit fun, right? Because there's two parts of it. I think it's absolutely essential in the start to have like this solid team feeling of like inspiration where you can kind of inspire each other. So to meet up, spar on ideas and.

basically just be together. It's such an essential part of the startup journey, in my opinion. So that's one thing of it. But the thing is having too much meetings and being there in person is such a big waste of time and distractions. And that's kind of hard to admit because it's nice being with each other when we're just building all the time. So it's a balance, right? Usually we meet up once a week.

physically in like a big meeting room with a whiteboard and a screen so we can spur on ideas, structure our sprints and basically just like a big overview. We're not a big fan of like the standing scrum meetings and stuff like this. We just want to spend our time most wisely because it is important to mention that my two co-founders are studying on the side and I also have a job on the side that I'm...

Duncan Riley (17:55)

Yep.

Jens Bjerregaard (18:07)

I'm not full-time in that job, but I'm full-time in TheoFlow. So we have to prioritize and invest our time wisely.

Duncan Riley (18:14)

Yeah, absolutely.

Fantastic, fantastic. And with that, you know, there's challenges that come your way inevitably. But I would ask, what's the sort of biggest challenge in your journey so far that you've come up against? And how have you overcome that?

Jens Bjerregaard (18:32)

Yeah. I mean, the journey so far isn't that far yet, if that makes sense. I mean, we're very, very early stage and that's okay. But I think it's really the validation part that you briefly talked on before. So we do have two mentors on our team that helps us kind of guide us in the right direction. One of our mentors, has actually like bootstrapped his first company to five

billion in valuation. So it's pretty cool. But the problem is that we didn't really take in that advice that we got from the mentors, probably because we were too biased of our own product. And that really put a roadblock into the validation part. And the problem is you need to be building on the right thing.

I mean, that sounds funny. It's not just about building it perfect, building it fast. It's also about actually working on the right thing. And you could make that down to the feature, but when it comes in the early stage and it comes down to the core concept, the validation is everything, right? It's basically what guides you in building in the right direction. And that cost us several months of basically development that we were building the wrong thing.

Duncan Riley (19:49)

Yep.

Jens Bjerregaard (19:52)

We were building a CRM that nobody, well, people thought it was cool, but nobody really wanted to use it or definitely not pay for it. So I think at this stage that we're at, what I can at least touch on is the validation part. That has been our, I wouldn't say biggest challenge necessary, I would say biggest roadblock. And I guess you could call that the challenge part. So the way we overcame it is kinda actually by...

by removing our ego. mean, we have to be honest with ourselves. We were in love with our product, which is very dangerous to be. So we needed to basically cut out the filter and just find out what are these people willing to pay for. And yeah, we quickly found out. And yeah, we lost a lot of people on our wait list, but that's okay because they were never going to pay anyway. They were never interested. So that's fine.

Duncan Riley (20:33)

Yep.

Jens Bjerregaard (20:44)

So yeah, that's probably the biggest challenge in Roblox and how we overcame it.

Duncan Riley (20:48)

And

that's fantastic. And that's all part of the validation piece, right? It's all about identifying your ideal customer and really honing in within that sort of sector. Because as you know, the CRM space is so competitive. Around the world, it's very, difficult to break into. But I feel like the onboarding space is obviously not so competitive. And I think if it's done right,

which TheoFlow looks like you're going in the right direction, I think it would be very, very successful. So without jumping too far into the future, what is your vision for TheoFlow? Where would you like to get to next? I appreciate you've got the launch coming up, which is very exciting, but what's your ultimate vision?

Jens Bjerregaard (21:30)

So I'm actually scared to answer this one, especially because of the validation part I just talked about, because that can literally change tomorrow. People would jump on the platform and say, this sucks. But no, I think the long-term vision at this point right now is obviously to build a software that's more than just like automation software for an

Duncan Riley (21:35)

Yeah.

Jens Bjerregaard (21:52)

for onboarding agencies. The ideal scenario is that in the future, it's a complete adaption software. So it's not a replacement for anything. So for example, as a marketing agency, have a CRM and then probably a project management system. We kind of want to be in the middle without replacing any of them. So imagine you have a CRM where you handle all your sales. Ideally, we would be like a plugin. So when you close a client in your CRM, it automatically adds it in TheoFlow.

And then you'll be able to onboard the client. it's not a replacement, but an adaption to the workflow. So that's like, that's really, really important for us that, that we're moving into that direction where we, where we don't just become another software in the tech stack, but we actually adapt to the agency's workflow instead of them adapting to the way we do it. That's, that's one part of it. That's very operational based. Long-term is that we can, we can

get some good data on the fact that we're actually lowering churn. I mean, that's at its core what it is. We really want to be more than just this onboarding automation software. As I told you, we want to be this client relationship builder, where it takes care of the onboarding process and it's data backed.

that it lowers churn because you build more trust. So somehow build up some great cases on the fact that we're lowering the average churn in the agency. Yeah, because I work in the marketing space. I know how competitive it is. So that's the main goal. And for everybody, For the clients of the marketing agencies, for the agencies, and so on.

I think long lasting partnerships is the core vision of it long term.

Duncan Riley (23:40)

Yeah,

And I was just thinking there whilst you're explaining that, different avenues in which you can go into, especially around the CRM space. If you've got like HubSpot, for example, obviously their partner ecosystem is huge. And so their main key role is to onboard HubSpot.

Jens Bjerregaard (23:50)

Mm.

Yep. Yep.

Duncan Riley (24:02)

clients effectively and ensure product adoption fast. And you know, I own a HubSpot partner agency, HubScale, and you know, definitely some of the key challenges is getting the information from the client, you know, in a structured manner, all at once. And there's definitely double handling of data. So I think a tool like Thielflow would be excellent to fill that gap.

especially in the partner space around CRNs, which is very exciting.

Jens Bjerregaard (24:26)

Absolutely.

Absolutely. There's multiple applications for the platform in the future. We're narrowing down on very specific marketing agencies in the start, but that's because we want to solve one problem at a time, but the adaption for the product is on a large scale. There's a bunch of opportunities, but I don't want to get drowned in shiny object syndrome. I just want to keep a narrow focus on one thing at a time, but you're completely right.

There's also a bunch of applications for freelancers and consultants and everything within data collections from external partners you could use TheoFlow for. There's a bunch of these applications and that's a dangerous route to go down because, I was looking at KYC consulting financial management onboarding system the other day and I was like, yo, this is cool, but it's a completely different direction.

Duncan Riley (25:20)

Yeah.

Jens Bjerregaard (25:21)

Trying not to get drawn there, but you're completely right.

Duncan Riley (25:23)

Yep, exactly. Solve for the problem first for your product group and then let's look at that in the future. Well, Jens, it's been great chatting with you today. I'm very excited for you and for the future. And we're really looking forward to following you and your journey at Deal Flow. And we wish you all the best with the launch and we'll be definitely following your journey.

Jens Bjerregaard (25:31)

Exactly, exactly.

Thank you so much, Duncan. Appreciate your time.

Duncan Riley (25:55)

No problem, thank you mate. Bye.