The following interview is a conversation we had with Tine Karlsen, CEO and Co-Founder of Vev, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $7 Million Raised to Power the Future of No-Code Visual Design.

 

Tine Karlsen
Thanks for having me. 

Brett
No problem at all. So before we begin talking about what you’re building there at Vev, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Tine Karlsen
Of course. So I’m 31 years old, I’m from Norway, so Vev is based in Oslo, where I’ve been living for a bit over ten years. I don’t have, like, a cool, long career behind me before starting Vev, which I always find interesting when I hear other founders stories. I’m like, wow, that’s a lot of experience compared to what I have to bring to the table. But I studied creativity, business development, and innovation. So that’s sort of where it all started, where I met like minded people, and I pretty much learned a bit of everything. So when you study this, you sort of become a jack of all trades, master of none, or like a potato, as we call it in Norway, because it can be used for a lot of different things. 

Brett
And on the topic of Norway, can you tell us about the tech ecosystem there today? What’s that like? 

Tine Karlsen
I would say that Norway is quite technically advanced, and I think this is also a big part of how the idea of web actually emerged. And we can come back to that. But I know that Norway adopts technology early, and yeah, we’re fans of innovation automation, and I think that has made Norway a really good starting ground for web. 

Brett
Nice. And what I’ve seen know we’ve had some founders on from Norway, and a lot of them build hardware, which in Silicon Valley, at least in the previous years, that’s been something they’ve been very afraid of. Is that just a very Norway thing or Norwegian thing to tackle hardware businesses? 

Tine Karlsen
It’s a good question. We are a country that is built on oil and fish. So I think that a lot of the skill sets and type of knowledge that we have here is very much related to those industries and therefore maybe connected to hardware. But I also know that there’s this movement of software that is booming in Norway now. So I do think that it’s a shift going on. But I also think because of our traditional industries, I think it’s also just a natural thing for someone starting a company in Norway. 

Brett
And Norway, just at a very high level, is also undergoing a big transition. Right. I believe it’s very similar to what some countries in the Middle East are doing, which is shifting from oil wealth into technology and trying to shift that wealth and shift that focus. Is that correct? 

Tine Karlsen
Yeah, definitely. There are incredibly high stakes and a lot of development going into more green solutions. Yeah. 

Brett
Nice. Super interesting. Now, two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and entrepreneur. First one is, what CEO do you admire and what do you admire about them? 

Tine Karlsen
Yeah, interesting question. I wanted to say Elon Musk is a joke, but let’s skip the jokes. So I’m currently sort of fangirling over Ben Horowitz, but I think that’s because I am currently reading The Hard Thing about Hard Things, I’m probably late to the party. But I would say that I love sort of his point of view of the world, where nothing is really that black and white and that resonates really well with me. He also motivates me to bother with developing myself, because he does motivate me to think that I am the best leader for the company that I’ve founded. 

Brett
Yeah, I think that’s such a powerful book, especially given the crazy market that we’re in now and everything that’s going on. I think it really prepares you for the pain and the challenges that come with being a CEO. Before that book, it seemed like a lot of books were written by management consultants or people like that. But that Ben Horowitz book is just very real. And honestly, it paints a pretty dark picture, or it highlights some of the dark parts of being a CEO and being an entrepreneur, which I think is very important to get out there. 

Tine Karlsen
Yeah. But I also think that he talks about a lot of the things that makes those dark things something that you can cope with. I especially sort of felt empowered because I felt like personality traits, like actually being capable to handle those tough things, is such a huge foundation for the journey that I’m on, but also everything that I will probably meet in the future. 

Brett
One of the big things he talks about in that book is the idea of a wartime and a peacetime CEO. So do you consider yourself a wartime CEO, or how do you think about that? I guess Norway I consider to be, like, very peaceful place. So that may be, like, intense language there. 

Tine Karlsen
Yeah, Norway is peaceful, but I also think that we have always thought of ourselves as underdogs. Like, we’ve had to look at whatever happens in Silicon Valley, but also anywhere else that are miles ahead when it comes to the startup ecosystem, being able to access talent and so on. So I feel like coming from Norway, you always have to have that mindset that you’re competing with the big dogs, but you are miles behind in having access to the same sort of resources when it comes to money, but also talent. So I would think that we’ve been at war since the start, I would say. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. And are there any non business books that have been very impactful for you? So books that really changed how you think about and view the world at a personal level? 

Tine Karlsen
Oh, my gosh. There’s one book that I always have people read, but it’s a Norwegian book about hunting this shark in Norwegian waters. 

Brett
Sounds very Norwegian. 

Tine Karlsen
It’s the most random book. But basically what I really love about it is that it tells a really horror story about how hard you have to fight to actually catch this shark. And then it explores the history surrounding the coast of Norway, and it also explores what happens underneath the ocean and how big whales are. And it’s just absurd, but I love it. 

Brett
Nice. And do they have an English version, do you think? Or is that just in Norwegian? 

Tine Karlsen
It’s called the Ocean Book, so I’m sort of guessing that it’s only in Norway. 

Brett
Got it. I’ll check it out and see if I can find an English version online. 

Tine Karlsen
Yeah, but it’s amazing, so you should I hope it does. 

Brett
Yeah, it’s amazing. Cool. Well, let’s switch gears here now and let’s dive deeper into the company. So I know we touched on what you do a little bit there in the intro, but let’s expand on that. And maybe if you can take us back to the early days and the founding of the company and talk through the origin story. 

Tine Karlsen
Sure, I can do that. So when I studied, I met this guy that I wrote my bachelor’s thesis with, and he asked me if I wanted to join him working for a company that he started working for because he wanted me to write business plans and stuff that they needed to apply for government funding and such. They wanted to convert PDFs to digital publications. So, for example, enable the media industry to publish their print publication on the web. So this is where I was introduced to startups. And long story short, I learned everything not to do in the initial stages of starting a company. But I also met my two co-founders. One being the current CTO of M, brilliant developer, and the other guy, a product guy, very much into design tools. So we sort of end up in a bad situation together. But we also stumbled upon how hard it is to produce something original on the web. 

Tine Karlsen
So just going back to 2013, when companies were looking for ways to bring their print publication to Web, that tells me that large companies, they are so stuck with their original workflow that they started doing absurd things like converting PDFs to digital publications when that format is definitely not suitable for the web. So this is what threw us into thinking about how we would like to solve production on the web. And at the same time, this was in 2016, there were a couple of trends happening that sort of formed into the idea of Vev. So we had website builders like Webflow wix Squarespace emerging. They’re monoliths where you can build websites, but they also serve everything from providing you a CMS, hosting services, pretty much an all in one platform. But at the same time, we saw the emergence of headless CMS, which is there’s actually a lot of Norwegian companies building headless EMS. 

Tine Karlsen
And the Norwegian market is adopting headless EMS at an incredible pace. And the thing with headless EMS is that they streamline the back end production, but you still have to hard code front end. And as a large company, you can’t go from a headless CMS into a no cone builder, because there you have to give up flexibility, coding opportunities, everything that you need to build that edge case that a large company needs. So we wanted to create a web builder that enables teams to build front end visually. And by front end, I mean anything visual on the web. Websites, landing pages, micro sites, but also niche products like scrolly telling pieces, embeds, Paywalls, anything that you have on your website. So we envision the world where you could have a website built on a headless CMS or even an old school CMS like WordPress, but build the front end in a separate tool. 

Tine Karlsen
And this is where web comes in. 

Brett
Nice. Very interesting. And can you talk to us about traction and adoption and the growth that you’re seeing right now? 

Tine Karlsen
Yeah, so we actually started focusing on creating a really flexible design tool, enabling you to create interactive sites at a very fast pace. So we started our go to market motion by selling to the media industry because they produce custom content at a high scale. So we started selling to the first client that we landed was actually Shipstead, which is the largest media house in northern Europe. And they use Vev to produce anything from articles to custom content, typically called content marketing. And these pieces are stuff that were really hard for them to produce on their CMS, because if they wanted to produce these types of sites in their CMS, they would have to hard code every single piece. So with Vev, they actually reduced the time to market for these types of sites with over 90% from three weeks down to now being 30 minutes. 

Brett
Wow. 

Tine Karlsen
And now we see that more and more companies want to produce more content in house. So we also sell to marketing departments and agencies that produce on behalf of these enterprise clients. 

Brett
And going from three weeks to 30 minutes is substantial. So it seems like this should just be a no brainer for every company. So when you’re selling this? And as you’ve brought this to market, what are some of the obstacles you face? What’s some of the pushback that customers have, and what gets in the way of adoption? 

Tine Karlsen
Would you say this has changed over time? But our biggest challenge at the moment is that web is so new that we have to sort of compare web to very well known platforms for someone to understand what web is, if that makes sense. So, for example, no one is searching for a web creation platforms that they can use in combination with their existing CMS. So our biggest challenge is positioning and communication. But that’s also something that we are getting better at every day. 

Brett
And just to understand the difficulty of use here on a range, let’s say, like Photoshop to Canva, where does it land in terms of how hard it is to use the product? Because I’ve tried to use Photoshop and I’m not a super creative person, but it was hard. But Canva I can crush it. Canva is very easy. So where does this fall on that range? 

Tine Karlsen
So we like to think of web as very inclusive. The design process is very similar to design tools like Figma or InDesign. So we cater to the professional segments, designers that have been using design tools previously. We also see marketers that have enough design skills to be able to use Vev. And a big part of the principles behind Vev is that we want to cater to designers that doesn’t necessarily know about the standards of HTML, for example. It’s a drag and drop visual canvas where you can just focus on design. And we take care of all of the rules that you need to have a structured website to publish on the web as an end result. But we also have different access rights. So if a designer sets up something in Vev, for example, a template for a blog post, a marketer can access that template without having the right to change design, but only change content. 

Tine Karlsen
So it’s a platform that involves all stakeholders, but also protects the design process with these access rights and what’s the. 

Brett
Competitive landscape look like. And even if there’s no direct competitors, what are the alternative options and solutions and what would they be doing if they’re not using you? What’s the status quo? 

Tine Karlsen
The most well known status quo is to use your CMS. So that would be sticking to templates in your CMS for everything that you want to produce in terms of marketing material, blog posts, or every time you, for example, want to change the look and feel of your front page on your website. You would either have to use existing components and designs and just change the content, or you would have to hard code the entire front page again. So the most common thing that we replace is the traditional workflow of prototyping in Figma, and then a developer hard coding it and then the marketing team or the brand team are very limited in what they can change and how fast they can change their existing websites. 

Brett
And is there a segment of the creative population that would look at this and say, whoa, I don’t need a tool to do this. You can’t do it this type of way. It must be done like the old way. Do you see that there’s a certain segment that feels that way about making these types of changes and shifts? 

Tine Karlsen
We have talked about this a lot because we cater to designers. We see that designers, they rarely change platforms. So you sort of see the entire group of designers changing from envision and then to figma, and then they stay there for, let’s say, five years before they even think of putting in the effort to change platforms. So I think that is the biggest hurdle that we have to get through is the cost of learning something new, and therefore we had to make like the difference between figma and Vev is very small. The only difference is that in Vev, you actually design for different screen sizes and devices. So we had to build in functionality that would support designers in building four different screen sizes without having to learn how to code or having to learn. 

Brett
Responsive design fully makes a lot of sense. And how do you think about market categories? Do you have an opinion yet there? And do you consider this part of that existing or some of those existing design categories? Or is this a category creation play where you’re creating a totally new category from scratch? 

Tine Karlsen
I would say that we are more transforming an existing category. I don’t want to be that ballsy and say that we are totally changing or creating a new category. But the thing with Vev is that the output from Vev so the websites or content that you produce in Vev isn’t the unique point. The unique point with Vev is the workflow behind getting to the end result, because the workflow is faster without compromise. So you get to the same value or quality of end result as you would with hard coding, but you move the process from being dependent on developers into being owned by designers. 

Brett
Super interesting. 

Brett
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Brett
And if you have to unpack some of the tactics that you’re currently using, what are you doing to rise above all the noise that exists in the market and connect with designers and really convince them to give the platform a try. Are there any specific tactics that you’re seeing really work and resonate with the design community? 

Tine Karlsen
So I actually want to turn that question a little bit around because we cater to teams, so we have to get through to both the designer, the developer, and other stakeholders on the team. And that makes the task incredibly complex. Typically, we see that the designer becomes the hero user in Vev. They are sort of quick to understand that they save a lot of time and resources by switching to Vev. So the biggest tactic that we had to figure out was how would we make dev acceptable for the It team as well? Because typically, when you look at a no code builder, the case that you typically meet is that what about the edge cases? Because a no code platform does have limits. So this is something that we had to build into the platform, pretty much making the platform limitless. And the way that we did that is enabling developers to build new react components for the platform. 

Tine Karlsen
So anything that you can code, you can build within Vev, but developers are there to expand the capabilities of the platform. It’s not like you have to move away from them. Whenever you have a very unique edge case that you want to build, you can just build it into them using code. 

Brett
Super interesting. And as you’ve brought this product to market so far, if you had to pick one challenge that you experienced and overcame, what would that challenge be and how’d you overcome it? 

Tine Karlsen
I have to think long and hard. One challenge in the vast pool of challenges in the startup world. But there is one challenge that I always come back to. We typically see that whenever we get the luxury of demoing our platform, that’s when typical clients understand the value of the platform. So the biggest challenge that we’ve had is I go back to communication, like how to sell such a big concept with few words. And this is a challenge that I think that we are sort of consistently iterating on, but I think that we have now found the right buttons to push when it comes to understanding what the client is looking for and then adapting our messaging to their language and their understanding of the world. But I think that is probably the hardest thing about bringing a new solution and a new way of thinking to the market. 

Brett
Yeah, and I think that’s something that every innovative and ambitious startup faces is how do you communicate this in the language that’s going to resonate with the market? So, along your journey, as you’ve really honed in on your messaging, did you use any specific frameworks or were there any books or resources that you used to really get communication right? Or what have you done to really get it to this point that you’re feeling confident in it. 

Tine Karlsen
I think that we have done the traditional routes of talking to agencies and external agencies and such, but actually what led me to that ha moment is actually sort of less bullshit and less marketing swagger when it comes to our communication. I’m now getting closer more and more to trusting that our user group understand what we’re saying, if that makes sense. We have, for example, tried a lot of nice ways to communicate what Web does, which ends up as more concepts, more than just saying directly what we do. So for me, it’s going back to the basics and simplifying, but the way to simplify is just saying things exactly how they are. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. And what would you say motivates you day to day and what excites you most about the work you get to do every day? 

Tine Karlsen
For me, it is the thing that always and continues to excite me is that three people, myself and my two co-founders, we can come up with an idea. And the fact that people buy into that idea and decides to start working with us, that investors decide to invest their money in us, that is what fascinates me the most. So I think that the team is what motivates me every day. And you could talk into a black box, but the fact that talented developers decide to join our team because they believe in the vision, salespeople work day and night to tell people about that vision, I think that is what brings me the most motivation and makes me really humble about getting to do what I do. 

Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And something else that we like to shine the light on here, just to continue to raise awareness, is the major gap that exists between male founders and female founders when it comes to fundraising. So in the US, the numbers recently came out, they’re super depressing and they haven’t really changed much in the last few years. And it was 1.9% of venture capital went to female founders, which is not good, very bad, obviously. Is it similar in Norway, I’m guessing, or is it better numbers there? 

Tine Karlsen
Would you say the same conversation goes on here? I don’t know the statistics exactly, but it’s also like, I think 3% of founders are in tech are female. So naturally there’s not that much money going into female founded companies. So the story is the same everywhere, I think. 

Brett
And from your perspective, what needs to happen and what do investors and others in the ecosystem need to do to see these numbers change and not be so low? Because I feel like this has been an active conversation for what, like five or six years now and it seems like there’s a lot of talk, but if you just unemotionally look at the numbers, it doesn’t really seem to be changing. 

Tine Karlsen
I think it’s very strange as well because there’s also numbers proving that if you have a variety of genders and people on your team, you’re more likely to succeed. So it is incredibly strange, but I do think that if someone had answer, then we wouldn’t be where we are, and I definitely do not have answer other than that I’m trying to view myself as just a Founder, and I try not to be intimidated by anyone. I actually recently came, I had an investor meeting with two men, and they started the conversation really aggressively because they were new to investing in startups. They’re a pension fund here in Norway. And I thought it was an incredible meeting because he started aggressively questioning me. And I loved it. Just said, let’s calm down. We’ll get through this. I’ll take it step by step. And at the end, he said, okay, you have to excuse me for my attitude. 

Tine Karlsen
I’m a 50 year old man. And I said, well, you guys are everywhere. I’m used to it. So I think for myself, I can only manage myself in the way that I meet the world, and then hopefully, I can help change hidden biases that people have. Because I think a problem is that a lot of the way that we view gender is based on biases that you don’t even know that you have. And that’s something that I try to be conscious of when I meet someone. They don’t want to discriminate women or have a certain attitude because you’re a woman or anything like that. So if I have a feeling of people viewing me as just a girl, I try not to let that affect me and just continue being me, if that makes sense. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes complete sense. And that’s such a logical way to frame it and think about that. Did you have to teach yourself to think about this problem in that way, or is that something that you were just naturally able to do right away as you were founding the company? 

Tine Karlsen
So both my parents are in the army. My mom has been working with gender specific questions when it comes to running warfare, actually. So, yeah, I’ve been surrounded by feminism since I was a child, but I’ve also seen her, my mother, that is, succeed in the armed forces. So I think it comes natural to me in many ways because of my background, and I’m not very easily intimidated. 

Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. And I think that’s a really important message for founders to hear, especially female founders. I think what you described just makes perfect sense, and I think you being out here doing podcasts like this and putting yourself out there, that is going to inspire others to do the same. And to me, I don’t know how to fix this problem, but I have to imagine that helps, right? The more female founders we have that are out there spreading their message and leading by example, I feel like that has to do something and I have to be hopeful that’ll start to move the needle in a more meaningful way. So I think it’s amazing what you’re doing. 

Tine Karlsen
Of course, seeing is believing. 

Brett
Yes. All right, now, last question here for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. Three years from today, what’s the company look like? 

Tine Karlsen
So when it comes to the product, which I of course love talking about, we want Vev to be the front end builder that you naturally think of no matter what CMS you have chosen. So for the future, I’m envisioning that all websites consists of some sort of CMS solution and Vev is the natural step to building front end. And that market opportunity is so huge that I don’t even want to put a number on it, but we’ll try to grasp that market. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. All right, Tina, unfortunately, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go? 

Tine Karlsen
They should go first and foremost to our website. Them design, of course, built in Vev. But I also think that Twitter is a good place to follow us. 

Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story, sharing Vev’s story and talking about everything that you’re building. This has been super fun and exciting and we’ll be rooting for you and hope to have you back on in a couple of years. 

Tine Karlsen
Thank you. Thank you. It’s been a good combo. 

Brett
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