Scaling Mollie: SaaS growth, AI & fintech with Koen Köppen

0:01In one hour you're talking about go to market and maybe incentives for salespeople and the next moment you find yourself in discussing a cloud migration strategy or how do we obtain a new license in a new country it's just so broad and just the context switching is really really brutal it took me definitely a few months to get a hang of that welcome to the sas revolution show a podcast by sas.com here we interview sas founders from around the world who've been there and done that they share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses their operations their the path for securing investment and more.

0:39Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your wellbeing, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry. I'm your host, Alex Thumer, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. All right, welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thumer, CEO, founder of SaaS Stock, also general partner of BackFuture Ventures. Delighted to be joined today by the CEO of Molly, Kurn Koppen. How are you doing, Kurn? Well, thanks, Alex, for having me. Yeah, good to have you on the show.

1:12Are you in Amsterdam at the moment? Yeah, currently in Amsterdam, in our office here at the kennels in Amsterdam. Yeah, very nice. I imagine Amsterdam is lovely in the great weather, probably lovely in the not so great weather as well. But I've been to your office a few times. We hosted a SaaS.local uh, Amsterdam, I think twice there. So, uh, lovely office, something to aspire to on, uh, uh, on, on our sides. Um, but, um, but yeah, very nice, uh, uh, very nice location and, uh, um, yeah, good to, good to have you, you dialing in and, uh, having, um, having you on the podcast for the first time.

1:53Um, so Kurt, maybe we always like to start, uh, just getting to know, uh, our guests a little bit better as a person. So not bucking the trend there. Would love to know who is Kern Koppen. Yeah, so Kern Koppen is born and raised in the Netherlands, early 80s. From a very early age on, I was very fascinated by what computers could do and specifically around kind of business and process automation. So started coding at a very early age, had the benefit of having parents that were fairly entrepreneurial. So I got to kind of practice my skills at an early age. Then I was doing kind of studies very fascinated about marine engineering for some reason.

2:36My father was a photographer, would travel the world and document large projects for directing companies in the Netherlands that would build ports or airports in the oceans from Asia to the Middle East. So actually, when I finalized my high school, I decided to go and study marine engineering. But kind of kept on coding. And then eventually I actually landed up in starting a small SaaS company. And that then kind of didn't really work out. And that brought me then to kind of my work career at Klarna. On a more personal level, I have a few hobbies. I love winter sports, skiing, a bit of surfing as well.

3:20But to be very honest, there is not that much free time next to this job. So these moments are spares. And then, of course, spending time with friends and family is something I really love to do. Cooking, having a nice glass of wine occasionally. That's kind of how I spend my time. Sounds good. I'd love to know just quickly. So you mentioned there that you started a SaaS company. It didn't really work out. If you could pinpoint one reason as to why it didn't work out, what would you say that might be helpful for the listeners? So this was very early, 2005, 2006. And I think SaaS was not really necessarily that well known.

3:58We were building an enterprise content management system that targeted enterprises, specifically multi-brand enterprises. And a lot of companies from an RFP perspective still had the preference of owning the software, procuring the license. So they were more looking at you as a services company and we were more looking at ourselves as a SaaS company. and we're not good enough in kind of go-to-market to really explain why our model was better. I also think that our typical customers were not that forward-looking from that perspective. They didn't really understand the benefit of SaaS in kind of the early 2000s in this specific industry.

4:42So go-to-market was hard. I think the product was reasonably mature, but it was just really hard to get the right type of customers that actually appreciated the value-add. Sales cycles are extremely long in enterprise sales. Integration cycles are even longer. So in the end, it was just not worth continuing. And you joined Molly after key roles at Klarna. I think you were the CTO at Klarna, right? What drew you to Molly? And what was your vision coming in as CEO? So what drew me to Molly was very much A, in Klarna, I spent a lot of time in kind of B2C and B2B. And it was pretty obvious to me that I had a strong preference for B2B.

5:25So it was obvious to me that the next thing I would do would be a B2B only thing. And then I also really realized that kind of that earlier phase of the scale of time was the phase I loved most, where there was slightly more chaos, slightly more ambiguity. And that was clearly what Molly was like. Like when I left Klarna, it was like 5 ,000 plus FTE. It was a relatively large company, global footprint. And MOLLE back then was kind of like a 15th of Klarna's size. So I was really long to kind of go a few steps back from a size and scale perspective to do that kind of growth journey once more. What's been the biggest personal challenge for you as CEO coming in?

6:09How did you overcome that? I think the biggest personal challenge for me is still very much kind of how broad a job is. Just the amount of contact switching is brutal at times. It's like I'm an engineer. I'm used to lead larger engineering teams, set a technology vision and deliver against that. But all of a sudden you find yourself in a CEO role and it's so broad. All of a sudden you're expected to have an opinion about everything. And in one hour you're talking about go to market and maybe incentives for salespeople. And the next moment you find yourself in discussing a cloud migration strategy or how do we obtain a new license in a new country.

6:48It's just so broad. And just the context switching is really, really brutal. It took me definitely a few months to get a hang of that. Yeah. I mean, again, I think we operate at different scales, but the context switching is probably a familiar problem. Certainly, maybe in many roles, but in the CEO role when you're across everything. And we were speaking before we were recording about, you know, my perfect day or perfect week where, you know, blocked out my calendar and, you know, doing certain deep work in the morning on one topic and then deep work in the afternoon on another topic. But then there are days where you're just constantly context switching.

7:27And actually, it is so mentally draining, like, you know, the end of the day. And we work remote firstly. You know, I can come home. Oh, come home. I'm at home. I'll go downstairs and look to prepare dinner, but my brain has just turned to mush, and I end up probably much more tired those days when you're having such severe contact switching. So, yeah, constantly looking, I don't know, not necessarily for the escape of those, because I think it happens, but the minimization of days where you're constantly context switching but haven't haven't quite got the answer yet me neither i'm trying hard again i try to be quite deliberate my my schedule and really kind of try to create different themes around different days but it's not always possible sometimes reality kicks in and you have to free up your schedule and you ultimately have to solve the problems that are most urgent the most pressing And MOLLE operates in an intensely competitive fintech space, right?

8:33How do you differentiate yourselves in such a crowded market? MOLLE has a long track record of being what I would call very customer-centric. We really believe in great customer support and we believe in hyperlocalization. And when you ask our customers, that's typically the answer that you're going to get. like how do we compete how do we stand out it's great customer support being really really customer centric and it's not something that we say that's something that we really do and localization again europe is a beautiful ecosystem that is very dispersed different payment methods different languages different legislation and we see that europe as a market has great potential but it really requires you to truly localize your product offering and that sounds very easy and it's actually really, really hard.

9:28And that's something that we really do every single day in. Of course, it's beneficial that we were born and raised in the Netherlands, which is a fairly small country. So quite early in your growth journey, you're forced to go across borders and you start learning how to localize. I really believe it's a muscle. It's a muscle that we had to train very hard. It's a muscle that we are still training very, very hard. And I think these are really, it might not sound sexy, it's not innovation, is not the technology that we run our platform on. It's really these core fundamental things and values that we believe in that ultimately set ourselves apart.

10:00On the customer service and support side of things, this is kind of one of the functions and roles that people are seeing, but also people are saying that AI will kind of replace. How are you sort of viewing that? Obviously, because I guess kind of with this, you know, the AI era that we're living in and everybody trying to figure this out and sort of use the tools and look for the efficiencies. You know, on the one hand, it is driving this need for much more human interaction because we have all this great technology, but it does seem to be a, you know, a function, a role that's being affected.

10:42So how do you balance that and how are you thinking about that for Molly of like efficiency through AI, but still delivering great customer service? AI is definitely delivering significant efficiency gains. But not only by simply putting an agent out there that then tries to solve the simple questions and moves the hard questions to a human. Actually, the biggest value that we've internally seen of AI is really bridging the gap between customers and engineers. All of our customer interactions, whether that's phone, email, or chat, is ultimately analyzed by AI and we basically consolidate and aggregate that feedback.

11:22We know what the problem is that they are writing us about or calling us about and we know which team in MOLLE is ultimately responsible for that part of the product and we deliberately go and deliver that feedback back to the product team so that we can actually solve the root cause. Because yes, AI can augment your customer support organization but I fundamentally believe that most of your customers don't wake up with the intention to go and call you. They much rather have a product that actually works. And often calling customer service is a last resort because something is broken, you haven't thought through a certain workflow, you miss a self-serve capability in your portal, and the customer really has no other option than actually picking up the phone and asking you to resolve that manually.

12:05And of course, some of these calls can be resolved or some of these chats can be resolved by an agent and that works really well. We have that as well. and you can see deflection rates in order of 60, 70 % quite easily. But to me, the real long-term value is actually that you now much easier you can process all of that feedback from your customer and actually can really resolve the root cause so that the customer doesn't have to call you anymore because really they don't want to call you. They are ultimately forced. So internally, we track what we call contact rate. So like which percentage of the customer base contacts us on a monthly basis.

12:40and on the back of us implementing AI for the last two years, our contact rate has come down 3x in just over two years. And then the contacts that are still out there, probably 60 plus percent gets resolved by an agent. But the more complex cases that are still left, they very much require humans to actually resolve these issues. How do you see the evolution of embedded finance and payments impacting SaaS platforms? I think embedded finance is an absolutely great marriage with SaaS. I really believe that good SaaS ultimately provides you with an holistic set of tools and capabilities to solve your problem end-to-end.

13:23and in the past these lines were way too formally drawn so you would do something in your SaaS tool and then you would have to go and open a different tab a different application to basically execute the financial consequences of the work that you were doing and that led to a lot of inefficiency in companies that led to a lot of potential errors I ultimately see SaaS as automating business processes It's making companies more effective by having good software deployed. And effectiveness comes from automating business process end to end. So you should be able to go across boundaries that were historically defined by, for this type of automation, you need a financial license and then you need to be a payment service provider or a bank.

14:09And for this type of activities, you can be a software provider. I think that's not how customers should think. Customers think about business processes. I need to automate a certain process from A to B. And I want to do it with a piece of software that I'm using and it should just do anything end to end. And it shouldn't stop at a certain boundary because, oh, that's a regulated activity. So I think it's a very good progress that we're currently seeing. And I think embedded finance really is the way to further unlock the value of SaaS as a result of automating business processes. And we see it across various use cases, like whether you are an ERP system or an e-commerce shop, You need to accept payments, you need to reconcile payments, or you need to automate the payout of your employee salaries, payrolling.

14:57All of these problems are ultimately automatable. And having a good embedded SaaS capability really empowers SaaS companies to ultimately further automate the processes that they are supposed to automate. How do you think about balancing growth and operational efficiency as you scale? To me, they're very intertwined. I think the only way that you can keep on growing is actually if you have your operational efficiency under control. I've experienced hands-on that not prioritizing operational efficiency for a long period of time ultimately kills your growth. That's the very honest answer. Because there's only so many things that you can fix with duct tape.

15:39There's only so many things that you can fix with manual labor. It's like you need to be planning for growth. And if you're planning for growth, operational efficiency is key. Not too early, because in the beginning, you still want to focus on the smallest possible product, your MVP. And if you need to automate all the processes, the MVP often is months and months out. But as soon as you see that you start having traction, to me, it's key that you start planning for scale. And that, to me, is just an item on the roadmap. And that's something that you need to balance with new features, further improving features.

16:13Another thing that you would have on your roadmap is how can we ultimately scale the operational efficiency of what we're doing here? You mentioned earlier, obviously, about Europe. I can't remember the exact words, but obviously it's a great ecosystem, but of so many different countries and different cultures, different languages. But MOLLE has been obviously expanding across Europe. What lessons could the SaaS founders that are listening take from how MOLLE approached market expansion across Europe? So historically, we have made quite a few good mistakes when it comes to expanding. We have expanded too early, meaning that we deployed go-to-market resource before having product-market fit.

17:04And that was largely driven just by, I think, hunger for growth. And it's not helpful. if you invest in go-to-market prior to having product-market fit you're not going to get real solid revenue growth because ultimately your product is not ready you have a real risk of actually harming your brand reputation because the first experience that these new customers and prospects in the new market will have is not a good one and you create a very unhealthy internal tension you have sales people, go-to-market people that want to hit their target, that want to win customers, and you have a product that's not ready yet, and that creates a real tension potentially between your go-to-market organization and your product development organization.

17:50So when we kind of went back to the drawing board to redefine on how we internally launched new GOs, it became very evident that we first have to truly prove product-market fit. We do that with a small group, what we internally refer to as design customers. we work with them very closely we really ensure that they're happy with our product that the product is at least as good as what they were using before us and only once we have proven that like 10-15 times that's when we start scaling our go to market and when we scale go to market we try to be very focused on a certain size of customer or a certain vertical and as we start penetrating that vertical or that type of customer size we start to broaden our go-to-market effort.

18:37But it's very deliberate, very focused, and really ensuring that we have proven product-market fit before we start to invest real go-to-market dollars. Because otherwise it just results into a lot of inefficiency, a lot of waste of resource, and ultimately also internal friction. Makes sense, and a very sensible approach to doing that. How do you think about, in terms of the future, like the next phase of MOLLE, what that looks like, any bold bets that you're excited about? Yeah, there are a few exciting and bold bets that we're currently working on. So we've set ourselves a very ambitious target to completing our hyper-localized expansion plan.

19:17So by the end of 2026, we want to cover the entirety of the EEA. And that's a fairly bold ambition. A year ago, we were covering six markets hyper-localized. So we have to bring that six to 31 markets in just over two years. That has resulted in actually that we internally built almost like a factory line on how we localize these markets, how we deliver product-market fit. So that's one lever that we're working really hard towards. And then the other is really about diversifying and further expanding our product offering. We see that needs of our companies, customers, whether these are merchants or SaaS companies that we refer to as partners, are much broader than just online payments.

20:05So in the past years, we've significantly expanded our product offering. Our history is really online payments processing. We've expanded that into in-person payments processing. We started to provide capital to our customers, working capital. We've built a B2B invoicing solution. And we are now in the very early innings of going broader in business banking. Really ensuring that we can provide a whole range of products that ultimately facilitate the financial needs of our customers. Any thoughts on AI's role in fintech and how you're approaching that at Molle? I know we spoke earlier about customer service specifically, but in general, AI's role in fintech.

20:48So I think AI in fintech has a few different ways of delivering value. First and foremost, it becomes very evident that the product development cost as a direct result of AI has come down. I think every single function in a company, specifically in a fintech, significantly benefits from AI augmentation. whether it's my engineer that might use the code assistant my lawyer the customer support agent the sales rep everyone can gain significant leverage efficiency gains from embedding ai in this day-to-day basis so that ultimately means that building new products becomes more affordable that means that we can iterate faster and that we can do more things in parallel then very specific but that i would argue that applies to anyone that is ultimately building digital product software in today's day and age specifically the fintech and what we see is that onboarding customers in addition to of course supporting customers is a fairly extensive task like we have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to actually performing customer due diligence.

22:06And AI, generative AI, is really, really applicable to that problem space. It involves a lot of document processing. It involves a lot of risk assessment, fraud assessments. And AI is your best friend there. Not only can we onboard customers much faster at a much lower cost, but also we take better customer decisions. We are able to ultimately define the potential risk of a customer more accurate with the help of AI. And that really ultimately enables us to make a product proposition more broadly available, support merchants faster, and ultimately a better cost point, which is important. As we come to a close on the podcast, a few quickfire questions, Kuhn.

22:56So what book or resource has had a big impact on you as a leader? The resource that had the biggest impact was ultimately the internet. I think there is no single book that I, like there's many books I've taken things from, but just for me having so many books, so easily accessible, having so many different resources, so easily accessible has been really, really powerful. Early days, Stackhouse Overflow was really, really helpful when I was an engineer. Later on, management literature was really, really important. So I think throughout my career, I think the internet has been my best friend to ultimately get access to so many different resources but it hasn't been one specific resource that stood out it really came down to kind of the time in my career the challenges that I faced and the fact that I will have them at my fingertip that really is kind of for me the great unlock is chat gpt now your best friend it's definitely in the top there it is absolutely phenomenal I force myself every day multiple times a day to just what would CHPT say, what would CHPT do?

24:04Not all the results are perfect, but it's just really important to constantly challenge yourself to actually understand how capable this is. And sometimes you get positively surprised. Sometimes you might get a bit disappointed, but it's really liberating to constantly force yourself and actually see how you can augment yourself. What one SaaS or fintech company do you admire right now and why? As size or a fintech company. So I think that Toast has done a phenomenal job for a very long time. I think their product offering is world-class. They have truly penetrated the hospitality space. Less known also in the hospitality space that I think is really quite exceptional is a company called Seven Rooms that have built a really new take on kind of interacting for hospitality with their customers in an automated way.

24:57Your average restaurant or bar doesn't employ marketeers, but still there is a huge opportunity to actually engage. If you look closer at home in Europe, there is a company here out of the Netherlands called Booking Experts. They have built end-to-end software that really helps you run your campsites. They help you run your vacation park in a very effective way. I find it very admirable. the product is absolutely world class it's really amazing to see what you can do with a relatively small team I think there are 50-60 people and they're operating at a huge scale across Europe I think these are a few top of mind companies that I think have done an absolutely phenomenal job different geographies different sizes and scales but all very inspiring I think a good SaaS company ultimately truly understands how their customers are using their products in recent years specifically vertical SaaS has inspired me a lot really providing end-to-end solutions for very complex businesses to me is the way forward.

26:00Last question. What advice would you give to SaaS founders that are building in 2025? Definitely to embed financing or fintech. To me, it's really the way to ultimately automate flows end-to-end. It also, of course, unlocks new revenue streams. So that's definitely something that I would advise any SaaS sounder to think through out of the gate. And where can people find you and Molly online? Molly.com is the best way to go. I'm reasonably approachable on LinkedIn as well. So please hook me up if you have any questions. Awesome. Well, Kunt, thanks so much for being a great guest on the SaaS Revolution Show.

26:40Really appreciate you dialing in and sharing with the SaaS.com community. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the SaaS Revolution Show. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you learned something from it, check out sasdoc.com forward slash events to find all the upcoming sasdoc conferences around the world. Want exclusive SaaS content and actionable insights to grow your SaaS? Join our community of over 36 ,000 SaaS founders at sasdoc.com.