Building a Global ERP Company from Estonia: Katana CEO Kristjan Vilosius (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you first started getting into the Shopify ecosystem, was Shopify’s marketplace effective in getting you in there? Were you able to put in an app in the Shopify app store to get into that market?

Kristjan Vilosius: We did put up an app in the Shopify App Store. That is how we launched back in 2018. Back then we were nothing more but just an inventory and manufacturing app for Shopify merchants who have in-house manufacturing, which is just a subsegment of all the Shopify customers.

Building a Global ERP Company from Estonia: Katana CEO Kristjan Vilosius (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The entrenched competitors are heavy duty. So that’s my next question. What did you do positioning-wise and go-to-market strategy-wise? So that’s where we’re going to spend most of our time now, on what you are doing, on how did you break in and what was the positioning? How did you navigate the market?

Kristjan Vilosius: I think how we started and how we got into the market was a very important part of our journey. So I’m happy to expand on that.

Building a Global ERP Company from Estonia: Katana CEO Kristjan Vilosius (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about thewe. You said you were three co-founders. Tell me how you guys came together, how you met, how you decided to get together? And secondly, what was the idea around which you came together originally? What happened then? What was the state of the union? What was the state of the market? And what did you see as the opportunity to latch on to at that time?

Kristjan Vilosius: Great question. I’ll first start with the co-founding team. Both of my co-founders, Priit, our CTO, and Hannes have been leading our customer facing teams for many years. I’d known both Priit and Hannes for 15-20 years as friends, although Priit and Hannes didn’t know each other very well. I kind of kept them separate.

Building a Global ERP Company from Estonia: Katana CEO Kristjan Vilosius (Part 1)

ERP is an entrenched category full of incumbents. Katana is a wonderful story of excellent positioning and strategy work to find market foothold.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Kristjan, let’s start with your personal background. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of circumstances?

Kristjan Vilosius: Firstly, thank you for having me here today. I’m the CEO and one of the three co-founders at Katana. And my personal story starts in the early eighties when I was born in Estonia, which was part of the Soviet Union back then. I don’t remember much of it since I was very young, but I spent part of my childhood in the Soviet Union.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down and talk about your validation process in this company, given what you experienced in the previous

RJ Talyor: One thing that I’ve done is structure contracts. I found that everybody loves to be cheerleaders for startups, but ultimately, startups are measured by revenue. We have structured all of our engagements with these early customers around revenue, meaning if we’re gonna work together, you are committing to paying us for that.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So let’s go to the point where you’re starting the first company. Tell me what was going on in the market, what product angle did you take, and why?

RJ Talyor: At that time, there was a huge proliferation of social channels. We had Facebook and then Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit. Then there were all these other social channels that were coming out, and marketers were trying to experiment with their dollars. At the time, there weren’t any rapid experimentation tools on the market to help marketers figure out which ones worked and what messaging worked.

Bringing a Generative AI Product to Market: RJ Talyor, Founder CEO, Backstroke and Pattern89 (Part 1)

RJ talks thoughtfully about product idea validation in two AI companies, Pattern89 and Backstroke.
Backstroke is operating in the cutting edge of Generative AI and delivering clear ROI solving a very specific problem.

Sramana Mitra: All right, RJ, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

RJ Talyor: Thanks for having me. I’m born and raised here in Indianapolis, Indiana. I always thought I’d leave, but I graduated from college with an English degree out of an entrepreneurial honors program. I ended up in this entrepreneurial fellowship right after school here in Indianapolis. It paired Indiana grads with leaders across the state and I got into a role at ExactTarget, which was, at the time, a small startup. We grew to be a $2.7B acquisition by Salesforce and became the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So my career grew there over that ten years.

Long Bootstrapped Journey into Cutting-Edge Generative AI: Jeff Kuo, Founder of Ragic (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Yes, it is tough. I have a slightly different kind of question as my last set of questions for you. No code, right now is a very attractive terminology in the industry, and part of it is coming from the fact that AI is automating everything, including coding. So no-code, AI-generated software is the future that we are going towards. What are your thoughts about this evolution? How is that impacting your business? How does that impact your product roadmap etc.?