Solving the World of Remote Workshops

We talked to Jakob Knutzen of MeetButter about running remote workshops, and he had the following to say:-

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Jakob Knutzen: The pandemic has been tough on all of us, although my wife and I are thankfully quite ok. However, we’re all looking forward to going out of the lockdown.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded MeetButter.

Jakob Knutzen: Started out my career in strategy consulting (Bain & Co) – was there for 4 years. Then got the opportunity to go to Indonesia to start up a digital marketing agency, which we built to some 40 people in Indonesia, and after 2 years exited the company. I stuck around for 1½ years and returned to Denmark in 2018 to be closer to the family.

I then started up StreamCrux, a game streaming startup, together with Chris, who is now my co-founder, and Adam, our third co-founder, joined half a year later. It didn’t work out – mainly due to us being too far away from the users, and we shut StreamCrux down in January 2020.

We knew we wanted to stay together, and subsequently worked on a number of projects, with remotecamp.io being set up right after COVID forced most of the world into lockdown. We ran online workshops to help companies with their remote work processes – mostly as a way to identify remote work challenges. So we could build a tech solution to solve these.

It turned out that we were the ones that were having the problems running the workshops – hence MeetButter was born.

We’ve experienced the pain of running remote workshops firsthand plus have run hundreds of workshops throughout our careers.

How does MeetButter innovate? 

Jakob Knutzen: We have a very rigorous insights process and have spoken to hundreds of workshop facilitators to understand their pains. We use these insights to guide our product roadmap, and continuously ensure that we’re solving a real problem for workshop facilitators.

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?

Jakob Knutzen: We started during COVID, so it hasn’t affected us.

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

Jakob Knutzen: We’ve only grown during the pandemic, but we have already now had to make difficult decisions. We believe that to solve a problem as complex as the one we’re attacking, we need extremely motivated people – and it’s been tough to identify the right people in our hiring process.

Furthermore, we’ve focused a lot on building the right culture – which is quite difficult for a remote team. But have hopefully so far succeeded.

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

Jakob Knutzen: We focus a lot on building super close relationships to our users and have been in very close contact with all our power users. We’ve done this directly through MeetButter and also used Intercom a lot.

Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?

Jakob Knutzen: Yes, we received an InnoBooster grant from the Danish Innovation Fund to help fund us in building a solution for Covid. They’ve been amazing!

Your final thoughts?

Jakob Knutzen: I believe Covid has accelerated the world of remote work by decades – and we’re doing our part in building MeetButter, which we believe will allow the world to run complex, collaborative meetings remotely.

Your website?

https://meetbutter.io