The following interview is a conversation we had with Finnur Pind, CEO & Founder of Treble Technologies, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $10 Million Raised to Build Next Generation Sound Simulation and Spatial Audio Technology

Finnur Pind
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Finnur Pind
Absolutely. So as you said, I’m one of the founders of Treble Technologies. My background is in the world of acoustics sound. So I’ve been spending the last, I don’t know, in 20 years basically obsessing about sound, first as a musician, then kind of somehow ended up doing engineering because really wanted to understand how this equipment that I was playing with works. So the amplifier, looking at guitar effects and all that. And from there I ended up doing a PhD actually in sort of sound simulation. And for many years that’s been my main thing. Very inverted thing to spend here all your time on, but also very dumb thing to simulate sound starting to come to Europe.

Brett
Where did that passion for sound come from? 

Finnur Pind
Good question. I feel like it’s like blood, actually. My dad is a professor in acoustics or sort of psychology and perception of sound. He spent his career on that. So some of it must be kind of just genetics or whatever. But ultimately it was the music interest that really got me going about sound. And I was always super interested in technical side of music, how sounds were made and so on. And then yeah, as I said, that kind of led to this path of engineering and all that. 

Brett
Nice, that’s super cool. And I’m excited to dive deeper into that. And I want to also call out to where you’re calling from today. So you’re not in Silicon Valley, you’re not in London, you’re not in New York City, you’re somewhere else much more beautiful. So can you tell us about where you’re calling from today? 

Finnur Pind
That’s right. I’m calling from Breakeven, Iceland. All the places on earth. It’s a great place, actually, to start a startup. The ecosystem when the startup scene in Iceland has just exploded over the last ten years. And there’s lots of exciting things happening here, so it’s fun to be here.

Brett
You must have nice weekends as well. There’s so many fun activities to do in Iceland. I’m very jealous of you, it must be.

Finnur Pind
But I’m also jealous of you. You’re in California and you always have good weather. We certainly don’t always have good weather. So there’s pros and cons. 

Brett
Yeah, pros and cons to everything in life. 

Finnur Pind
Right, right. 

Brett
What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on? 

Finnur Pind
So actually, you know, around the time I sort of left doing research and was more calling more to this entrepreneurial side, even though we certainly do research in what we’re doing. But I started reading a lot of books on that side because I felt like I needed to educate myself a bit on not just the hardcore science and technology of what we’re doing and many great books around entrepreneurship and so on that I’ve read. But we’ve got three that pinned mind, first of all, which is kind of maybe an old classic, but Dan Carly book of communication. I actually really like that book. It’s maybe kind of appreciated, but it really sort of helped me as a manager to think about how to best communicate with people and get the most out of people. And then couple of classics, which I’m guessing have been mentioned many times in this podcast, believing Startup book and Zero to One, both quite inspirational. 

Finnur Pind
So if inspire nice. 

Brett
Yeah, I love those books and a few people have mentioned those maybe once or twice. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive deeper into Treble and everything that you’re doing there. So could we just start with a high level overview of what the company does? 

Finnur Pind
So the core of it all is sound simulation. That’s this idea of having a computer model of something. It could be something that you’re designing. Let’s say you’re designing a new car or building or a new product, television, whatever. And you can use digital twins or computer modeling techniques to know how the thing that you’re designing is going to look. But there hasn’t really been a lot of technology to know how the thing that you’re designing is going to sound. So if you want to know how this car that you’re designing is going to sound, you kind of have to build the car and test it. And the same goes for buildings. If you want to be sure that this classroom that you’re designing or this open to an office that it’s going to be a comfortable sound environment to be in, then you kind of just have to guess and build with it all for the best. 

Finnur Pind
But we are introducing sound into computer modeling, into the twins so you can actually test helping sound, use simulation design and optimize sound for all kinds of different industries because sound kind of is a part of so many products and services and so on. And yeah, that’s what our technology enables. 

Brett
And can you give us an idea of the types of companies who have this problem and experience this problem and want to solve this problem?

Finnur Pind
So we work across different sectors because, again, soundness is kind of phenomena that happens in many different industries. So it can be, for example, architect firms and engineering consulting firms in the building industry. They’re designing some buildings and want to be sure that noise is kept at appropriate level, sound environment is comfortable and so on. It can be, again, as mentioned, car companies or automotive industry demanding product manufacturers. We work quite a lot with big tech companies, for example, designing all kinds of devices and so on. And then actually, the technology also has applications over on the virtual world side of things where you want to design virtual experiences to also have authentic, realistic sound. 

Brett
Got it. Now take me back to it looks like you launched or officially formed the company in May 2020. What was it about this problem and this product and this company that made you say, all right, let’s do it, I’m going to build a company around it.

Finnur Pind
So, first reason is just a pure interest in the sound human technology. And that’s something I will deal with or thinking about for on. But additionally, after I finished my master’s studies, I was working as an acoustic engineer in the building industry. My job was basically to help architects design buildings for acoustics. And there were essentially no tools that I could use to do that or very limited tools, which meant that it was just really hard to design the sound park building and communicate that to architect and client. And so it was really tough. So I was quite frustrated about this and what is better design tools for sound. And I actually got this opportunity to do a PhD on exactly that, to kind of research methods that could be used to create a digital tool for designing sound with acoustics. And that research worked quite pretty well. 

Finnur Pind
I was very fortunate to work with some great scientists and ended up with like a prototype of new technology, which chapel is then built upon. When we started, were maybe because of my previous experience, were very much thinking about only the buildings. But then as I got going, we quickly realized, hey, being able to simulate sound that’s useful in so many applications, all kinds of companies kept knocking on our door like, hey, we have this problem we’re trying to test tossing and sounds before it’s actually built. Can you help us? 

Brett
Super interesting and a couple of keywords or buzwords I could say maybe that I’d love to have you explain for us. So these are words that I’m seeing more and more I should say phrases that I’m seeing more and more everywhere. And I’m sure the audience is as well. So if you could maybe just provide us some definitions on them, that would be perfect. So the three phrases are spatial, audio, digital, twins, and virtual worlds. So maybe if we can just go through those one by one, and if you can explain them just in like simple super basic terms. That would be awesome. So maybe let’s start with spatial audio. What is that exactly?

Finnur Pind
That is debated what exactly that is. But if I try to give a simple explanation, there’s this idea of essentially taking sound from two beat to three. So we have had stereo for a long time where you can kind of sense how sound can come either from the left or from the right, but especially on your it moves all around you, essentially. And that’s incorporated into all kinds of products and services. For example, Apple released these head tracking headphones so you can move the head around and all your tracks in real time as you move around and feels more surround. And that leads to a more immersive experience, opens up opportunities to create new types of experiences. And this is quite related to what we at thread up do. We inherently are simulating the spatial characteristics of sound, our simulation. 

Brett
Now, what about digital twins?

Finnur Pind
Digital twins, that’s essentially a computer model of something that’s being designed for the physical world. So a classic example which has been around for way longer than the word of the trace digital twin is just a 3D model of a building. But maybe in the difference between digital twin and just a drawing of a building, even though it could be a generally try to incorporate some simulations and kind of performance analyses and metadata and things like that into the digital twin. So it’s more than just seeing the thing, this drawing of your thing and.

Brett
Final technology or buzword or phrase here. 

Finnur Pind
Virtual worlds, video games is something that you can call a virtual world. And it’s been around for a long time, obviously, but I would say that could be then expanded. And talk about virtual applications, metaverse applications such as virtual training, virtual conferencing, video conferencing, even going over to augmented reality, that’s maybe not a virtual world, but still it’s kind of an augmented world on top of augmented virtual world, the real world. And obviously that’s a world that you want to see stuff in and you want to explore stuff, but also there will be sound. This virtual world too. 

Brett
Yeah, it’s super helpful to have an explanation on these terms. Like I said, they’re everywhere now. And I feel like they’re those types of things that a lot of people don’t really understand what exactly they are. And a lot of the definitions that I’ve seen out there, they hurt my brain a while ago when I was trying to read about digital twins. It was some very technical content, like I don’t understand this stuff. So appreciate you explaining it in simple terms here. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. 

Brett
To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now I’d love to talk a little bit about acquiring customers. So obviously for every startup it’s hard to acquire customers, especially those first customers. So take us back to some of those first deals where you’re able to secure and get paying customers. What did you do to acquire them and what was that journey and experience like?

Finnur Pind
Yeah, it’s been quite a journey, not always easy for sure and like you say, I think we’ve managed to kind of spark some interest with the content that were putting out. For example, me personally I’ve just been active on LinkedIn for many years and even before starting know, just as a researcher and so on. So in this field that, you know, by keeping people updated of what’s going on then people are interested. So we’ve been getting solid amount of inbound and that’s then just increased over time as we put out more and more content, are becoming more COVID and so on. But there’s a difference between having valid interest in someone saying this is pretty cool or it’s interesting to actually starting to buy. And I think a big target for us, a big challenge was we’re a new company with new technology, we’re claiming to do things faster, more precise than what could be done in the past and often for engineering purposes people understandably and just very naturally had some skepticism and needed to be absolutely convinced quality these things. 

Finnur Pind
We had to go above and beyond and collect, improve case studies and so on to really showcase that the value, what we’re offering that is totally robust, that’s just taken a ton of effort on our side. But also what’s really helped is to kind of work to find the customers or the clients who are open to experimenting, do it together with them to help somebody pilot, project and so on. Maybe not even getting any money from them, but just to kind of code, develop some things or research together, demonstrate the value. And over time then we’ve been collecting proof of the quality and value of our products and then that helps more and it becomes easier. Easier? In addition to all of this, just customer acquisition channels, processes around sales and support that all of this is just something that pricing models and so on. 

Finnur Pind
It’s just something that you can think about as much as you want but at the end of the day you just have to go out there and experiment with it and get working with it and then it’s probably going to be wrong first time and then it just improves.

Brett
And I see on the website that there’s a 30 day free trial. It looks like you can sign up there easily. Is this a product led growth sales motion or what’s this look like for you in terms of your go to market motion? 

Finnur Pind
Yeah, that’s actually a great question. This is a good example. This 30 day free trial, when we started, when we launched and we added kind of rather hands on process where people get in touch with us, we’ll have like a meeting with them to introduce them to the product. We recognize that this wouldn’t be scaled forever, but at least in the beginning, or do it like this to get people off on the good foot on using the product. But then we sort of quickly realized that this was just a massive hurdle and not adding any value. So instead now we go on to this process where you can automatically sign up to get going, get some good guidance and so on in tutorials and so on, but making the whole process more automated as it provides.

Brett
And when you were making that transition, what did you have to do product wise and organization wise to adapt to that change? Because I imagine it’s not just a matter of changing the home page, right, and adding that big button that says start your 30 day free trial. There’s probably a lot of other changes that had to happen behind the scenes. So can you maybe talk us through some of those other changes you had to make? 

Finnur Pind
There were, of course, just some kind of infrastructure programmatical changes that we had to do so that you could actually sign up. So that’s maybe just the formality, but still, we had to take care of a lot of technical matters so that you can actually sign up yourself and go into our system and everything be set up for you and so on. But then I think most of the work went into designing this first user journey. And to be honest, that’s still something that we’re only improving, where we try to give people the best possible experience, a personalized experience, where they feel that they have the option to be in contact with a person travel and not just talking to the void or the paper shredder and they’re sending us an email. And I’ve designed this user journey so that people can get going themselves, that can have a quick service from us and support. 

Finnur Pind
It’s a technical product we’re putting out. It’s very often that people need something, interpreting results and so on and so forth. 

Brett
What’s the job title of someone who’s typically signing up for the product and playing around with that free trial? 

Finnur Pind
It varies, but it’s often engineers. And then typically there’s some kind of engineer who’s working with sound and acoustics that can be across different sectors. Again, automotive products or buildings or whatever. It also be architects, it can be sound designers, it can be also musicians, people who are designing their home studio. It can be all kinds. 

Brett
And in terms of growth, are there any metrics or numbers that you can share that just demonstrate the traction that you’re seeing? Our audience loves to hear metrics, so any numbers would be awesome to share. 

Finnur Pind
Right. I think in terms of user growth, I don’t have the exact numbers on top of my head, but we’re growing. The users count is growing really fast. We’ve onboarded, I don’t know, something like 700 customers now since we launched on March 1 of three months. And each customer is worth quite a bit because it’s kind of another engineering product, so it costs some money to use it. And yeah, I think maybe that’s the best metric I can give is just that, the number of users growing very fast in our product. 

Brett
And what do you attribute to that growth, having that many users in such a short period of time? That’s what a Founder dreams of. So what do you think you got right and how’d you pull that off so far?

Finnur Pind
Yeah, I mean, we’ve been iterating on the product for a pretty long time and we’ve been iterating with clients and adopters and so on. That’s been the key. Plus maybe our own prior experience in the field. Me and my Co-Founder Jasper Were, both a couple of guys, have been working in this field for many years before we started. So we had pretty decent feeling for what would be needed to build things. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And if you reflect on your journey, what’s been your greatest go to market challenge so far and how’d you overcome that challenge? 

Finnur Pind
Maybe I was referring to this already earlier, but I think the biggest challenge and maybe what we underestimated was just how convinced people need to be of the quality of the product, how much work we’d have to go put in to do that, how many case studies and annotations. Maybe it’s because it’s an engineering product, so the amount of work needed to convince people of the quality of the product was something that we underestimated and we’re still working on improving it further. Sure. I think that’s another mission. 

Brett
And if you were just starting the company again today from scratch, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d have for yourself based on everything that you’ve learned so far? 

Finnur Pind
Be even more aggressive in sort of focusing, separating the wheat from the chaff, drowning out the noise, and be more laser focused. It’s both kind of a benefit and a challenge. This widespread applicability of what we’re doing, it can be used for so many different things. And you can spend quite a lot of time thinking about joy, we could do this or that. Wow, that’s cool. And then someone else comes in and hey, can you do this? Yeah, we actually can, blah, blah. So that can take up a lot of energy either ultimately it might make to like very large business speakers. We can do a lot of things. So this focus thing is just so important. Maybe something could believe in more of although in hindsight, it was also Anthony to explore all these different options and understand use cases. 

Brett
And final question for you, let’s zoom out into the future. So three to five years from today, what’s that high level vision for the company and what are you looking to achieve over the next three to five years? 

Finnur Pind
Well, growth, of course, continue on this growth that we’ve been on, and I had a specific number that we’re aiming for in terms of revenue or a number of staff or whatever, but just to continue growing at a fast rate. I’m very excited about a use case that we’re seeing growing very fast, which is synthetic data generation. So AI is kind of booming these days. And sound, having AI be able to understand sound, that’s like speech recognition and Siri and those kinds of things, but also all kinds of other applications where it’s useful for Brayact to be able to understand sound, it’s a booming thing. But a major problem back in that field has to do with lack of data. Here we come. Simulate sound properly for the first time. So I’m very much hoping that we can be instrumental enabling all of your AI to the next level. 

Finnur Pind
That’s something that I’m super excited about. And yeah, just maybe opening new offices beyond Iceland, that would be a fun thing to do. Not that we above being here, but just spread out across the world, that’s something that we want to do as well. 

Brett
Well, we’d love to have you here in San Francisco, so hopefully you can make it snow day. All right, VINNER, this interview has been a lot of fun, but we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they follow you? 

Finnur Pind
LinkedIn will probably be the best option there. Awesome. 

Brett
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about what you’re building and share these lessons from your journey. I really enjoyed the interview and I know the audience is going to as well. So thanks so much for making the time. Really appreciate it. 

Finnur Pind
Thank you for having me. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B, two B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you. 

Finnur Pind
On the next episode.