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A SaaS product design podcast for non-designers. The Love At First Try Podcast explores how SaaS products become unforgettable.
We unpack the idea of taste in product and brand design, deconstruct what makes beautiful products beautiful, and show how to merge growth with delight.
If you’re a SaaS founder, CEO, or developer building products people love, this is for you.
Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.
Jim Zarkadas (00:27)
So yeah, welcome again to the podcast and thank you for joining me. As I mentioned, we always start with a brief intro, who you are, what you're building and a bit of the story of Moneybird in this case as well. So yeah, I'll let it, yeah, you can kick it off.
Edwin Vlieg (00:44)
Yeah,
I will look forward to your questions.
Jim Zarkadas (00:47)
⁓ So yeah, this one, ⁓ yeah, feel free to make a brief intro. I think you're more into, you're not the technical person on the team, if I remember correctly, right? You're more into products, strategy and sales and marketing. yeah. Okay. Okay.
Edwin Vlieg (01:03)
I'm into everything actually. I'm software engineer by trade, but I do everything.
⁓
Jim Zarkadas (01:09)
Okay, yeah, feel free to start with a brief intro of ⁓ your background and also of the story of Money Bird. We can start from there.
Edwin Vlieg (01:16)
Yeah.
Sure. So I'm Edwin. I'm one of the co-founders at Moneybird. We started in 2008. I have a background in software engineering. ⁓ Met my co-founder at university. Already had a...
freelance business running and saw that there were some issues with invoices and sending invoices on time and with the correct text to correct text code and invoice ID etc. So I moved away from Word and Excel and decided to build something myself ⁓ and that's the really brief start of Moneybirds which kept growing over the years mainly by listening to other entrepreneurs using our software and seeing what they need for their accounting. ⁓
Nowadays we are with almost 80 people in Enschede, the eastern side of the Netherlands. Servicing over, I think we surpassed 400,000 entrepreneurs. ⁓ Yeah, a lot of customers. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (02:11)
400,000, wow. Really cool.
Edwin Vlieg (02:15)
A lot of users, not everyone is a customer. We are using a freemium SaaS model. From day one, we had this model expanded over the years with different packages, of course, but still the basic package like you can send three invoices a month for free is used by a lot of people starting up their business. So it's for more than 400,000 users we are servicing.
Jim Zarkadas (02:19)
Yeah.
Hmm
really cool and he said you started 2008 right? Back then I'm curious how was the market like in terms of competition because I've seen some alternatives like I think ⁓ Maniwong is one of them for example so like there are a few bookkeeping solutions but back then were you like one of the first or was it also that you you already had some alternatives?
Edwin Vlieg (02:38)
Yes.
Yeah, saw that coming, yeah.
Yeah,
there were alternatives, but the market was completely different, but also it was a different time.
Jim Zarkadas (02:59)
Hmm
Edwin Vlieg (03:03)
We were growing up in a time where we did everything online. On the university, course, everything was still on-premise software and we learned about Java, et cetera. But the world we were doing, and also my freelancing, was a web development. everything was online. Everything was a website or a web application. The existing competition was mainly on-premise. So you needed to download software, install it on your computer. You couldn't cooperate in your accounting solution
Jim Zarkadas (03:07)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
I see.
Edwin Vlieg (03:33)
because the software was on the server of the accountants. So it was really different world. There was some competition, most of it doesn't exist anymore because it wasn't really that big. We saw also inspiration in more the...
Jim Zarkadas (03:45)
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (03:50)
the US back then. And one part from more the SaaS businesses like 37signal with Basecamp and Campfire etc. So that was little bit of an example and inspiration for us. But on the other hand there was also a tool that's still existing called Freshdesk, which is a Canadian business that's also doing comparable things with invoicing. And we saw this type of software and we thought, okay, we want something but then for the Dutch market we really would love to use this software.
Jim Zarkadas (03:58)
Yeah, I love them. Yep.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm
Mm-hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (04:20)
focused on the Canadian businesses of course. So there was competition that in other countries were successful with this type of business and we translated this to more to the Dutch ecosystem.
Jim Zarkadas (04:34)
really cool and that's the beauty with bookkeeping software is that it's really local because there it's always related to local kind of regulations and integrating to the tax system and so on so yeah that's that's that's a cool story and yeah timing is always important right when you're building a business it's like it's not just the idea it's the context also and the time of where you're gonna launch this this idea
Edwin Vlieg (04:39)
Yep.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, and if we
would have started with on-premise software then and moved into accounting right away, we probably wouldn't have been there, we wouldn't have been successful because accounting is very complicated. You need a lot of features. But we started small, really with invoicing, selling to entrepreneurs. But we were entrepreneurs, so we knew what to build. So we were more catering toward the primary business processes of the entrepreneurs than really the accounting process.
Jim Zarkadas (05:10)
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (05:19)
But over the years, given that there were ⁓ still more feature requests for the accounting features, we moved more into accounting. And currently we are on par with the big accounting solutions like an X-OCT and a SnaleStart and a TwinField.
Jim Zarkadas (05:34)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like one thing that I always like with Moneybird, for example, talking as a user and entrepreneur is that, for example, when it to accounting, assets depreciation. Now I get it. It's a simple concept. It's not rocket science. In the beginning, everything feels strange in accounting for some reason, like new terminology. It feels like an entirely different world. And what I like with Moneybird is that it's not that it's just easy to use. It feels that you can also learn about accounting. Like assets, you make assets feel like something
simple is like hey did you get a new laptop here's the button to add your laptop into the the assets and here is like i remember like at some point like money bird who helped me understand concepts of accounting like how do you depreciate assets what are the ways and so on which is which is pretty cool ⁓ honestly because i yeah
Edwin Vlieg (06:21)
And it's something also quite complicated because Asset is a
very interesting example. We recently added this to our software after a lot of feature requests because for most of the entrepreneurs you need Asset application sooner or later. ⁓ It's possible to do this in an Excel sheet, but it takes extra time. We need to still enter it into the accounting. So it was a really logical feature to have.
Jim Zarkadas (06:32)
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (06:44)
But we didn't find the right shape to add it to our software that was really workable for our entrepreneurs. And that's always something we intend to do is with even the more complicated accounting features, we want to find a way that even entrepreneur can understand it and use it. Because if we only build something for an accountant, then you're still relying on the accountant. And for the deprecations is very interesting because now you have a ⁓ monthly overview of your deprecations.
Jim Zarkadas (07:04)
Hmm.
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (07:14)
instead of something that's only updated every year when the accountant has time for it. ⁓ But that's really challenging and as a deprecation and as it's in general something we took years to get the right shape that we were really happy with it and find a way to release it in an easy way.
Jim Zarkadas (07:32)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, on this, like now you mentioned something which is related to my next question as well is that you said that you wanted to be a tool for entrepreneurs and not for accountants, which explains a bit of how the high level product strategies, like how do you define success, what good design, for example, looks like. So I wanted to ask, actually, before we dive into that, like your product strategy and product thinking, I wanted to ask another question on the business side, which is, what is like your positioning?
on your market the way that you see it. ⁓ One way to phrase the question is what is a unique perspective you have ⁓ and a unique kind of approach on the product when it comes to the market compared to alternatives and also what kind of makes Moneybird ⁓ different. Maybe if you find it useful I could also say my interpretation as a user, like why Moneybird?
Edwin Vlieg (08:24)
That's great to start with and I will hook into how I see
it.
Jim Zarkadas (08:27)
Okay, super. That would be interesting. So for me, why Manibert and why I also want to discuss is, first of all, is that the name and the brand. So it's not just about the product. For me, it's also something really personal, right? Like I'm a product designer, I'm into branding as well, and I want the tools that I use to inspire me. That's a rule that I have when I buy products for my life in general. And with Manibert, I just feel that it makes me a better designer way because I feel there is a team that truly cares. Whereas if I think about competitors,
I've seen, don't need to mention names and stuff, but they feel more kind of a salesy, more cheesy. don't know. They don't feel like Bannerbird feels more elegant. That's one of the reasons for me that I like it. It feels cleaner. And then on the product UX, it's a very well implemented frontend, I have to say. Like small micro animations, clean navigation. I remember you had like a...
That was, think like three years ago or something where you were working on a new navigation and you have this talk when you were like excited about the navigation, like, that's a cool company. They're excited about improving the navigation. It's not just about just shipping features without really thinking about the overall experience. So it's the UX and the brand that really attracted me because yeah, I can invoice, I can create invoices with other apps as well. Right? Like now I'm paying for Manipert, but I'm using ExactOnline for my accounting because I have a holding BV structure and
have like mainly I'm being paid in USD dollars because we work with companies in US and with Moneybird it would be like my accounters were saying that yeah it would be too complex to work with Moneybird on this let's do better exact online but I'm still paying just to create the invoices because I don't want to use exact online it's freaking yeah it's not nice let's put it this way in a polite way it's a yeah it's really ugly ⁓ and with Moneybird it's just yeah easier to kind of do everything reporting
and so on. yeah, this is kind of my experience and why I am personally into Manu Bird.
Edwin Vlieg (10:26)
think it's a great example and it's embodies a lot of the thinking I'm also having about our positioning. We initially catered mainly to more like the ZZ pair in Holland, the freelancers, the small sole proprietorships. But we saw that even these small businesses can grow over time and they get more complicated requirements. They involve an accountant, they get a team. And it's actually the process we are also being able to do in Moneybird ourselves. We started with QF.
Jim Zarkadas (10:38)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (10:56)
We've
got a co-founders, we have expanded the team, we got more requirements. And we always had the goal to dog feed our own system. We still use Moneybird, although we have many millions of revenue with a large team, we still manage to do everything in Moneybird. But a lot of features are actually coming also from our own dog feeding and knowing that we need stuff. And your USD transactions are very interesting thing because we are currently in the process of ⁓ building a USD ⁓ business account.
features which is also something that's accounting wise is very complicated and we luckily found a way to make this much easier.
And that's the thing we really envision. We want to sell to entrepreneurs because we want to help entrepreneurs. That's also something in our branding, in our DNA, we are really into helping entrepreneurs. And this can start really small. So it must be easy, it must be usable, it must be friendly, it must explain accounting features. But then I also want to be able to cater to the larger businesses because...
We have the thought out solution. have easy user interface that's also very interesting to use for ⁓ people running a bigger business. So we want to cater to everyone.
Jim Zarkadas (12:02)
you
Edwin Vlieg (12:13)
We see lot of competition that either caters to very small businesses, niche businesses, which is great to start, but sooner or later you get this requirement that's not fitted in this system. And on the other hand, you have the really accounting solutions that are really into the accountant. And we challenge ourselves to make it really usable for the accountant, but also keep it simple for the user without needing to introduce two different kinds of user interfaces, which is always a really interesting challenge.
Jim Zarkadas (12:22)
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (12:42)
I
think we managed quite well and then you really emerge these two or combine these two worlds. And there is nothing worse than having to send the invoices you created in Moneybird to another.
accounting solution where the accountant is going to do things that you don't see anymore because it's happening in different software, you don't have access to the software, you don't know what's happening over there. We believe in this integrated world that you can start small, grow big and still get the best support from your service providers like the accountant or tax advisory or others within the same system.
Jim Zarkadas (12:57)
Yep, yep. Yeah.
Yeah, it kind of blows my mind that I have to download PDFs every month and send them to the account. I have an assistant for that because I'm like, no, I'm not going to spend time on this. This is not a good use of my time. But yeah, it's kind of a while. And I've seen like, I think it's your CDO that has been posting about...
Edwin Vlieg (13:21)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (13:31)
What is the, I remember the acronym, like where you get automatically the invoice. You don't really need to send it. It's like a protocol. Yeah, yeah, this one, like talking about it and how important it is and so on. Yeah, it's kind of a...
Edwin Vlieg (13:37)
Yeah, purple.
That's actually a very interesting
story too and also a little bit of a product story. When we started, we were very small. We were sending invoices to our SaaS customers, of course, from our own software. And these customers said to us, it's weird that you have at some point in the database an invoice that you sent through email with PDF file. And then I need to reenter all this information that's in the same database, but it's just in my administration, in my account.
Can we do anything about this? So we set up a system that you can say when you receive an invoice, please add this invoice to my account. So this really the start of the Pebble network and the first philosophy of really enhancing this experience and not needing to re-enter information. That started really small at Moneybirds and that's something we kept on improving and now the protocol, et cetera, is completely different because there were already existing protocols that were way better. But the thinking about this was really,
early days that was really interesting because we could really help and save time there.
Jim Zarkadas (14:44)
Yeah, and I like kind of the high level product strategy of how, like what is your North Star and like your compass that we're for entrepreneurs, simple people, not technical kind of experts, like accountants, and want to save time for them. So everything like you have a very specific KPI you're optimizing for is like, what is the impact of this design idea or like product idea that we that we have. ⁓ On this one.
I'm curious about the design culture and rituals in Manibert. I'm not sure what is the... You said before you have a team of 18 people or 80? I think 18, you said. 1,8. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Okay. And what is the size of the product team, like the dev and the design team?
Edwin Vlieg (15:21)
80. Yeah, we're nearing 80, yeah.
Definitely designed, it's almost half, I think, 40.
Jim Zarkadas (15:35)
okay okay and the design
team is it around let's say 10 people or less more
Edwin Vlieg (15:40)
They are working really close cooperation with the engineering team, so we also have engineers in the product team that's more to do more technical research. I think we are around, I think eight or ten, I'm not sure about the correct number, but yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (15:43)
Yeah.
Nice, really cool,
really cool. And this one, are some, when it comes to structuring the team, actually, how do you, what is your product development process? From what I understood already is that you have like the, we call them pods, they're different kind of words that you can find a line for this, but you create teams, multidisciplinary teams of engineers and designers, owning a specific domain. That's kind of a classic setup that I've seen. But yeah, I'm curious about how do you kind of operate internally on building the product?
Edwin Vlieg (16:21)
⁓
We are mainly running on ShapeUp, the ShapeUp pattern. So ⁓ we run cycles of eight weeks, six weeks of project work, two weeks cool down. ⁓ Everything starts with framing ⁓ ideas. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (16:24)
Nice, nice.
Mm-hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (16:40)
If an idea is good enough, we shape it into a ⁓ pitch. Shaping can be done by anyone, but mostly it's a combination of a product designer and an engineer. ⁓
Then we have the betting table, is kind of a hands-on, of an all hands within a team to really discuss the priorities and see what we're going to do. And then it's six weeks of work for the team. And then we create ad hoc teams for the project. So depending on, it's actually some kind of a master Excel spreadsheet with all the projects we are going to run, all the people we have, holiday planning, of course. And then every project has competencies.
that need to be fulfilled and every team member can say, okay, I am an expert in some domain. I want to put my expertise into projects. But a team member can also say, I'm not an expert in this, I want to learn from this. So they can join teams that maybe dive into a specific side of money, but they don't know yet, which enables them also to learn. So we try to balance out experts and more learning team members.
Jim Zarkadas (17:45)
Hmm
Edwin Vlieg (17:50)
Most of the time it's like two or three engineers, one product designer, four of them working towards the end goal. And I think we're running about, I think now eight or 10 projects parallel, which we want to expand of course, because we have more ideas than we can build, it's already great that we can do eight parallel tracks.
Jim Zarkadas (17:59)
Nice.
Yup
Well,
okay, that's really cool. yeah, SayPop, I'm really into it. I'm a big fan of Basecamp as well. And what I really like with SayPop, and I'm curious if you relate to it, is that I've worked with companies in the past, like with a classic kind of a Scrum methodology where you do weekly sprints and you have a standard team that owns a specific domain, but it kind of gets boring and it creates a bit of silos within the company because...
you're like this team of three people and you almost operate as a sub company within the company and you own a specific domain and you really need to put effort to stay connected with other parts of the software. So there is no knowledge transfer state. ⁓ Like it also gets boring because if let's say you work for the payments domain of the app, like at some point, like, you know what, at least on the design, I don't want to design payments anymore. I want to get exposed to other ideas as well.
Edwin Vlieg (19:01)
No,
Jim Zarkadas (19:04)
So we save up something that a person really cool, find really cool and interesting as a product person is that you get to understand different parts of the software. And at least on the design side, you also understand users better because you understand more of the customer journey. You're not laser focused in one specific part that makes you blind in a way. So I'm curious, like from your experience for the team, have you seen like a really good impact we save up on that part ⁓ for the team?
Edwin Vlieg (19:29)
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's not really ⁓ defined in the shape of methodology that you need to ⁓ rotate the team members. You can still work with silos and give them work, of course. It's something we do and I think it's really beneficial. we also see it, some projects are larger and we call it the train of projects. So we have multiple cycles within the same domain, but we still switch out team members.
Jim Zarkadas (19:37)
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (19:57)
or some team members. And it's really interesting because you get new discussions about things like the choices that are made in the first project in terms of software architecture or maybe design choices. With new perspective, new people, you get new discussions about what's the better approach. And it makes it easier also to... ⁓
to not have something that's really ⁓ your thing, but also be open to input from others. And I think in general that makes our product better because we are looking at a wider range of the domain.
And also it's also something like the guarantee or the warranty you're giving on your products. ⁓ There are, I know teams that are, something called support engineers that are solving all the bugs, et for team members or for clients. We have a relating team of support engineers. So besides all the Shape Up tracks, there is a support engineer track with a few ⁓ people relating there, also engineers, designers nowadays.
Jim Zarkadas (20:36)
Hmm.
another lane yeah
Edwin Vlieg (20:58)
And
this is of course not work that's most interesting for people because they want to build new stuff. But if you know that you are building stuff in a project now and there is a chance that next cycle you're the one that's fixing bugs and solving issues, then you are thinking more about the quality of the product and solving it right away instead of shipping half stuff because you want to finish your product and shipping the shit to the next team that does support engineering.
Jim Zarkadas (21:13)
Nice.
Hmm ⁓
Edwin Vlieg (21:28)
work.
Jim Zarkadas (21:29)
Yeah, fully, fully agree. And it's like personally as a designer, I love removing design depth. There is something really unique and it takes like some serious skills to actually be able to fix something versus to design something from scratch. Like I work with teams that have like a messy UX and our goal is of course like build new things together that people are gonna love and use, but also fix what is already there.
And I've seen that starting from a white canvas compared to having a clunky broken UX and figuring out what's wrong about it and how can I fix it is a different part of your brain you need to tap into. So it's a, it's always a very, interesting challenge. And I really, really love how you structure everything. Like the rotation, like everything is very, very thoughtful in a way, like, and it makes sense. I love, I love the deep thinking. It's like you think about the details on how to structure the team. I have a saying personally that I.
Edwin Vlieg (21:58)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
Jim Zarkadas (22:18)
Like it's something that I strongly believe in too is that the process can have a massive impact on the end product. And I see the process as the product that builds the product, right? Like, and I've seen, for example, which is going to be the next question on the design process. One thing that we did, for example, with ZenMate, ZenMate is one of the teams we've been working with the last year. It's a scheduling software for clinic businesses in the United States. So a very niche SaaS in the United States. We...
The story is that we had this team retreat in the Netherlands, in Zandvoort, two years ago. We came all together and Ammar, the CEO, was like, ⁓ I should invite Stephanie. Stephanie is a customer of ZenMate, ⁓ one of the most successful users. She built a million dollar cleaning business. And we already had a bit of a partnership on the marketing side. I was like, okay, I can invite also Steph to join us on this team retreat. And during the team retreats, we do workshops and hackathons trying to build new stuff, get creative and strategize all together.
And it was a very interesting experience to have a customer in the group to design with them. And at that point, we, ⁓ one of the projects I worked on during the retreat was to prototype the new booking forms. So it was like a pop-up widget, maybe, know, for Metabool where like many restaurants use it in the Netherlands. So it's a similar pop-up widget, more market oriented with a bit of video in it, like to really help cleaning businesses get more leads from their website and convert more visitors.
Edwin Vlieg (23:31)
Yeah, ⁓
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (23:43)
I was prototyping with Steph and I was like, okay, let's build for your website and I want to add a welcome video here. So Steph would go with your phone, record a video outside of the house and then send it to me. It was one of the most beautiful experience that I had in my life when it comes to design. And what we learned there is that the speed we could move with, because we had a customer that is a good ambassador of our user base, right? Like, because also you can have customers that are give you wrong kind of direction and feedback, massively improved our efficiency and quality.
Edwin Vlieg (24:07)
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (24:12)
And after the retreat, we invite Steph to every design call. So she's now part of the product team. ⁓ And that has been a big change in our process that now we have a user at least in the design call that we can actually directly ask questions to. And we, I'm still the same designer. I still know the same things about design, but the tweak that I made on the process had a massive impact on my output. It's not that I suddenly became smarter. It's just that I found a way to access higher quality of knowledge. ⁓
Edwin Vlieg (24:16)
Yeah, I know.
Jim Zarkadas (24:41)
And that's why you see me getting excited about how you work with SAPO and everything, because I'm a strong believer that process is like where you should start and then like this is going to have a massive impact on the product.
Edwin Vlieg (24:51)
It wasn't
there from the beginning, of course, and it's something we found out over time that we needed this. At a certain scale, I saw that...
I as a product designer and software engineer was also running the business on other fronts of course. And I wanted to be able to have my say in what we were doing and share my experience without being involved in everything. But it was important, impossible. I think on our last betting table there were 16 pitches that could be executed. I don't want to be involved with the preparation of everything.
When you don't have a process then there is at any moment of a day there might be a very important ⁓ Decision being made by some team member that's going to impact money birth in a huge way We didn't want this to happen because we we are losing control We need we need a way to make important decisions in a structured way so we can think about these in the shaping phase Have a really thorough review of everything and then I know for six weeks there
Jim Zarkadas (25:43)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (26:00)
not going to be any big decisions that are not in shape because that's something we discussed in... ⁓
the shape up cycle in the shaping phase. it's also a little bit about you need a rhythm to shape the team and you need to scale the team and to scale also the operation. And I think we are still optimizing about this and shape up is not really something we fixed in concrete and say it's working like this, it's not changing anymore. We are still optimizing, we are still doing retrospectives with the team every cycle to improve small things. But I really like where we
Jim Zarkadas (26:26)
Yeah. Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (26:34)
gives me the right control as a CEO with a completely different schedule nowadays. But still being able, I read every single one of the pitches, gave my review comments on several of them to just share my experience that I saw in the past or maybe link some things together that I see as a CEO or more the general front. And I think overall it's really helping us to create better products.
Jim Zarkadas (26:39)
Hmm.
Hmm.
love it. Yeah. I really like how you phrased that. Everything is a solution to a problem. Like essentially when it comes to building a company and decisions we take. like in your case, was, I need to keep control and like make sure that I manage where Moneybird is heading to in terms of products, right? And so on. And then just need a structured scalable way to do it. Yeah. Yeah. Makes full sense.
Edwin Vlieg (27:22)
It depends
on the depth you're going into. You want to go deep into, or broad into solution thinking and options thinking. But also, and that's the other side we saw, before we did Shapr3D, we did, for example, ⁓ quarterly cycles. And we didn't shape things. It was like, we are going to focus for one quarter on this part of Moneybird. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (27:28)
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (27:43)
good luck team, fix something and we see you in three months. And after three months, of course, there was not really a great outcome because one, we didn't think about what we wanted to do. It was just like, we need to fix something and we have user feedback. So there is something to fix. We know that there is a problem there. And we didn't really specify the outcome. And the products could fail on basic things like we didn't have API access in time and we needed to negotiate the pricing with a partner.
Jim Zarkadas (28:13)
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (28:13)
something that's rabbit hole in shape up of course that you need to have the API access because a project that's starting with API access will fail. ⁓
always. this was really something where we were feeling pain about adding ⁓ valuable time from engineers to projects that were just going to fail anyway. And then the shape up was there and if the book wasn't written then we probably would iterate towards this because we felt the pain completely. when we were at the shape up book it's like okay this is really something we were heading towards anyway. Let's pick it up fully and iterate from there.
Jim Zarkadas (28:42)
Hmm.
Yeah, and I love like what you said is that you, like, shape up is more of a direction and not like a, it's not like the Bible that you kind of fully follow whatever. It's more like, this is kind of a direction and some core principles and we have to make it ours. Like we have to find our version of shape up. And I'm curious about the design feedback. So ⁓ when I'm...
Edwin Vlieg (29:08)
to you.
Jim Zarkadas (29:16)
What I mean with design feedback is I'm curious how you save your roadmap. Like how do you decide what to build next? You have like all the other page, for example, but maybe ⁓ like some teams, for example, have internal tables where they highlight the most important features, the most requested ones. Other ones have public boards. Other teams have nothing. And I'm curious about how does the roadmap get saved in your case? How do you decide what to do next? If there is any kind of a
framework that you follow. And the other part is user feedback in the design process. So when you build something, how do you kind of test the performance from an experience point of view and if it actually moved the needle.
Edwin Vlieg (30:01)
I think everything starts with user feedback. we, since the beginning of Moneybird, we were really into talking to customers. We did our customer support ourselves for the first.
I think only a few years ago I stopped doing customer service. Of course we had a larger team so the amount of questions I was answering was minor compared to in the beginning. But talking to customers is just the best thing you can do because you know what they're doing, you can think about better solutions to things.
Jim Zarkadas (30:17)
Nice.
Yeah. Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (30:35)
But you need to scale this up, with talking to 400,000 customers, it's just not possible. So we are scaling this up in several ways. ⁓ Still talking to customers on the customer service team, of course. If they see ideas or patterns that they share with the product team, they can put it on the framing board. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (30:40)
Yeah, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (30:56)
but also we ⁓ do speed dates with customers every now and then to get ideas. We do surveys when needed. We have actually ⁓ a few UX researchers on the product team, so they are really experts in surveys, in ways to research what the customers need. But in the end, I think most of the time we quite know what's needed, where we are heading, what's important for the product. Then there are always too many things to
Jim Zarkadas (31:08)
You
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (31:26)
to do. So one of the things that's not in the initial shape of book but it's more in recent versions. Also if you follow Ryan Singer and his podcast it's more mentioned it's the framing ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (31:27)
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (31:38)
of things. So there are a lot of ideas and what we saw and when we started with Shapr3D, that everyone was shaping but not every pitch that was shaped was really something we wanted to do as a business. So we said, okay, it's a waste of time to shape things that we already know that's not really in the direction we're going. So we added the framing. Framing is like, if you have an idea and it's most of the time just a few paragraphs of problem and a small appetite, why we should do it. ⁓ Then we have a framing meeting with the
product team, where everyone can join if they want, it's mainly product team discussing about what the opportunities are for Moneybird, how we're to do things. And then we assign on the things that we want to execute. We assign a product engineer and a software engineer. And they are going from the frame, the outline to the really shapes the solution. But then again, during framing and during shaping, of course, there is also the option to talk to customers. ⁓ And most of the times we know what an engineer,
Jim Zarkadas (32:27)
to it.
Edwin Vlieg (32:38)
was an entrepreneur lead. So the large user base we know quite well over the years. It's not really something we need a lot of input from.
It's more like the more complicated features ⁓ also for accounting, for example. We have a lot of Moneybird experts that are using Moneybird a lot. They are accountants, bookkeepers, fiscal advisor, cetera. We have people there ⁓ that want to think with us. We really engage them in the shaping process and help us ⁓ make decisions. It's not like there is a fixed way of working in that case. Input is coming from everywhere.
to bundle it towards the framing and shaping cycle. That's the points we make choices about. Shaping in the batting table is more like prioritizing than really choosing what to do. ⁓ then during execution, ⁓ it depends a little bit. We work with feature flags a lot. ⁓
We have always seen if you present someone with a mock-up or a Figma file or something, they say it looks great or they are looking at pixels, but you need to see it with your own data and really interact with it to really get feedback. So we moved away from really these kind of design discussions and really moved towards ⁓ clickable prototyping. And most of the time it's better they can activate in their account. Something actually you can do too in your account, there is a better feature flag.
Jim Zarkadas (33:46)
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (34:06)
Okay,
I want to test certain things. And then we have a rollout strategy that we start small with a few customers and ask for proactive feedback. Sometimes we do also small surveys to ask if the user interface is more easy to use or it took less time to do things to get an idea about the direction. And then we scale up and usually get more feedback, then scale up to 200 % in the end.
Jim Zarkadas (34:31)
Hmm.
Yeah, the phase rollout is something that I've seen also like when the user base gets big, it's like, it's one of the most kind of a scene. It's like very simple and very powerful in the same time, because you don't create a lot of noise in support. You don't create a lot of frustration. And yeah, you can kind of a, it's still like the pool of people is small so that it can actually monitor feedback because what you said, like with so many customers that you need a way to scale it like.
What I've seen as a problem is that I've been always enthusiastic about having design team to do customer support so that can be close to the user and so on. But the problem is that there is a lot of noise and not every customer support interaction is worth the time of an expensive resource like a designer or engineer. So it's finding the balance and figuring out what are the high quality interactions to focus on is always kind of a tricky one. Like one idea that I had about it, haven't managed to test yet is to have
Edwin Vlieg (35:19)
difficult.
Jim Zarkadas (35:27)
design team members to do onboarding calls to customers, like they can book a one-on-one optimization call. it's very interesting. My assumption there is that to design a great onboarding experience, you really need to understand the full value of the product. And sure you can understand it, but if you can sell it to a person, then you have a different level of understanding. If you can actually...
Edwin Vlieg (35:45)
you
Jim Zarkadas (35:46)
lead a call and present to a customer, this is why you should buy and pay for money, but let's say, ⁓ so yeah, that's a topic that I'm always excited about to kind of find the right interactions and the right places to have these understand engineers to kind of interact with customers.
Edwin Vlieg (36:04)
What I'm also seeing is that ⁓ most of the team members, they are of course working for Moneybird. most of the time they don't have their own business. Sometimes they do some voluntary work, et cetera.
But the interesting thing is they almost always know someone that's an entrepreneur and that's using Moneybird. And these use cases are very valuable. Also, they have a more stronger voice in the company because they know someone so they start, okay, we should really do this. And it's also, really like getting direct emails from my clients every now and then. I'm very happy that the majority of the conversations are happening to our customer support team. But sometimes there is just something that the customer support team
Jim Zarkadas (36:23)
Mmm, true.
Edwin Vlieg (36:48)
doesn't get right or something. Someone I know personally, they just sent me an email. And this also feeds my idea about what we need to do. And I can also make some adjustments in the prioritization maybe. ⁓ But it's really input from everywhere. that's...
Jim Zarkadas (37:06)
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (37:08)
That's the most interesting thing. If you grow, there is inspiration everywhere. You just need to make sure that you have a process to capture everything. Because if we are going to follow every idea we have, then we have an idea every new hour and we go everywhere. So we know now, okay, if I have an idea, it needs to go in Framing Ward. That's the place where we start working again every two months to think about if this is the direction you want to go in. And if everyone is enthusiastic, then we commit to adding resources.
Jim Zarkadas (37:13)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (37:38)
to it. But most of the time there are also things on that we say okay that's not something we're going to pursue now because it's not the right timing or there are more other things that are more valuable for Moneybird right now.
Jim Zarkadas (37:50)
Yeah, yeah, true, true. And like one quick question on this just to make sure I understand it fully. You said like the framing, then you go into the pitch phase where you everybody writes like a document where they pitch the idea with some high level sketches and wireframes to make it like more concrete. And then you create a project that actually the team is gonna work on. I'm curious like about some details on the process. The full team, like the product team is busy either with projects or.
being the support product team, right? Like that they're gonna do more of customer support work. For the first phase, is it part of like they do the projects and then they have to write the pitch and so on, or do you allocate a team to just kind of a refine PTs or do the framing? guess framing should be pretty simple so you can do it whenever you have like the idea, can just write there, it's not that you need to allocate a week to write something, but the pitch.
is almost like a mini research project where you do a bit kind of a high level R &D. Yeah, so I'm curious like how do you approach this at the moment?
Edwin Vlieg (38:47)
Take time,
It's always difficult and we really rely on the personal ⁓ time management skills of the team, so to say. So most of the time research work for projects or design work for projects is in the beginning of the project and a little bit on the end if there needs to be some review work.
So it's not like ⁓ most of the time the product designers are not really full time into a project. So they have time to also do the research part and write pitches.
Jim Zarkadas (39:26)
I
Edwin Vlieg (39:28)
But we also see, especially for more engineering heavy projects, that there needs to be done a lot of research indeed. So sometimes also an engineer says, okay, I'm only available for 50 % of the time for this project cycle because I want to shape things. And that's something people can, based on their own... ⁓
judgment can decide on how to spend our time. But it's not like we have a specific team that's only shaping or doing the execution. We try to mix this and also that's again valuable because then they get a lot of different experiences and most of the time when you're working on a project you get ideas to shape new things. So it works hand-in-hand to also be in the context and find the next project that needs to be done. So it's something they need to do to judge for themselves.
Jim Zarkadas (39:50)
get it.
Makes sense. Yeah.
get it.
Yeah, yeah, makes makes that all sense. And on what you said before, like on what to build next, that sometimes you just kind of know, which is pretty much the intuition and that you like your your brain absorbs all the signals and input and then somehow like you feel and you know, okay, this is what would be the next priority. Like Alex, the serial genmates, I like the term that he used in one of the retrospectives, we're discussing about this, the process we have on the planning.
Edwin Vlieg (40:33)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (40:42)
And said, yeah, like I feel what we're essentially doing is vibe planning. Now that vibe coding, vibe designing is a term. I'm like, yeah, it kind of makes sense because it's, kind of, yeah, like go with the vibe. Like the vibe is pretty much like the signals and what's cam has. I think the way that they phrase that they don't track customer requests because the good important ideas, they have the tendency to bubble up. They're going to always come up. You're going to keep hearing them.
Edwin Vlieg (40:46)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (41:09)
So you're not going to forget them. So you don't need to have a backlog of ideas to make sure you're not going to forget. For some reason, maybe it's the engineering brain that I have from the past that I feel like you need to track things and you need to kind of score things. That's more of the old gym, like my old self, where I thought that there is a formula for everything. But nowadays I feel more building a company product is more of an art and intuition thing. Of course you have to be experimental, look at the data and so on, but it's more I treat them like nowadays signals.
Edwin Vlieg (41:10)
Yeah, it did.
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (41:38)
and then you have to build a really good intuition and gut feeling on what should be next. Yeah. ⁓
Edwin Vlieg (41:43)
Yeah, absolutely. But there are challenges there. We also don't have a
backlog of feature requests. We know where things are going. And of course, when we get invaluable input from customers, then we write it down because it's very important to have this information when we are framing or shaping. Nowadays with AI, it's also easier to, and we don't do this yet, but to just look over all the customer conversations and find patterns over there. Something we really would love to do. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (41:51)
Mm-hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (42:10)
But there are also meetings in the product team about customer feedback. also, they are talking to the customer service team directly to get a feeling about what kind of requests are there. The thing with the no roadmap, no feature backlog thing is that there are some things that are important, but are small and they don't bubble up. So for example, we have time tracking and money bird, which is working for say 80%. We introduced this, we did a couple of cycles, but there are things
Jim Zarkadas (42:29)
Hmm. Hmm. Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (42:39)
that are just bothering people. So we should assign a cycle just to fix small things. And if it doesn't bubble up in feature request lists, then every single thing is not important enough to really be a vibe planning thing. So that's something we see as a challenge with the way we work and we have ways to fix this now. there are small things that together are big for a certain feature.
Jim Zarkadas (42:48)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (43:09)
And we, for example, we challenge ourselves every now and day to say, we have this specific menu item for.
for sales advisors, example, which is some parts of the UI, for example, are quite old. So we should put focus on this. We have ideas, but so let's focus on this part and let's find out what we can shape for it to fix things. And then you give attention to all the parts of the application instead of only thinking about the big things that are top of mind. Because as an entrepreneur, especially, I have big ideas about the future, but sometimes fixing the small stuff
Jim Zarkadas (43:30)
Mm-hmm.
That's a good one, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (43:46)
is also important and fixing the onboarding is important, making sure that everything is working smoothly or the performance is great. That's also stuff that's really important.
Jim Zarkadas (43:51)
you
Yeah, it's very true. It's like also balancing new stuff versus improving existing stuff because what's going to bubble up is like, yeah, it's usually new stuff, but also like things that are super annoying and almost kind of broken in a way, but the quality improvements, it's more of like the something that you have to kind of pay attention to on yourself and kind of keep track of and so on. Yeah, that's a good point.
Edwin Vlieg (44:15)
And
For us, the
support engineer track is also very important in this because small bugs are fixed by support engineer. So it's not like if the really small stuff is fixed right away. We had a time that we had just one or two support engineers just filling the backlog with small bugs to fix and it was never fixed. Now we said, okay, let's add capacity to the team and they are now fixing stuff. So every day, Moneybird is getting better with small fixes. And of course, the big things are happening, but there is a little bit of a middle ground there
Jim Zarkadas (44:21)
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (44:46)
things that are too much work to do for the support engineer track and are too small for a really big batch project that are sometimes hard to really combine and then we are combining them into more like ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (44:52)
you
Edwin Vlieg (44:59)
I think around banking, for example, we are running a project now that has, I think it was a list of 20 small annoyances in our banking offering. And every single one was small, but very, very logical. it was, every single one of them was not really suitable for support engineer. But it's something we want to spend three weeks on with a couple of engineers to just fix them and have a better experience altogether.
Jim Zarkadas (45:24)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, fully may make sense. And on this, I wanted to ask, like now that we're discussing about new features, so I want like to jump into the next part, which is like the last kind of a chapter of the agenda as well, which is the AI stuff. ⁓ So AI is like used in two ways. Like the one is you use AI to...
improve your workflows and how you work. then the other things like as a software company, you think how AI could have an impact and create value for your customers. I would love to dig deeper into both parts. The one is how do you use AI within Moneybird, but also how do you see AI in Moneybird ⁓ as a product? ⁓
Edwin Vlieg (46:07)
Yeah, so we were actively looking into both parts of course. It helps that I as a software engineer and we have a lot of software engineers, we know how this works. So we know how to make judgments about when it's valuable and when it's not because there is a lot of hype nowadays. we need to look at what's really valuable. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (46:26)
Yep, yep, exactly.
Edwin Vlieg (46:32)
In terms of using it for product development or in general in the business, there are a lot of small optimizations we see everywhere. Supporters using it to answer questions better. I think around 60 or 70 % of the customer questions are now answered by our chatbot.
which is at first I thought, okay, but then we are missing personal contact. But when you see what type of questions are answered, it's mainly because we have quite a complicated product. We have a very large knowledge base and finding the right answer in a knowledge base is complicated. So asking a question to a large language model and having a great response is just very valuable. And people are using our chat board more also to find stuff easily instead of using the search function or knowledge base, for example. So there's also a change in user behavior. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (46:57)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (47:19)
And the interesting thing is then the support team, which is still the same size, is now able to handle the more complicated questions, but have more time for it. And that's, course, very, very beneficial. But we also, in terms of our product development, we see, of course, we are using ⁓ Cursor and Cloud Code to generate codes more easily. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (47:30)
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (47:39)
which also helps the product engineers. We have also some designers that know how to code, but they can do it much easier now because it's just faster. It helps in all these ways to just get a general sense of what Moneybird does as an application. can research code much easier. it's faster and it's helping on several different ways.
Jim Zarkadas (47:47)
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (48:04)
It's not like one breakthrough thing that we are five coding everything now. It's just helping on the way. And I think that's helping along the way is also how we see it in our products. There are many things an entrepreneur and an accountant need to do. That's, it's not something we can magically replace with just one big AI agent that handles everything.
Jim Zarkadas (48:08)
Yeah, exactly.
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (48:27)
And accounting is also very complicated in terms that it needs to be correct. It's not a large language model. The most recent developments in AI is it's really, it's not deterministic. So it can respond to different ways, which is something that's very valuable in terms of sales letter you're writing, but it's not valuable if you want to a certain invoice in the same way every time. So we are balancing AI with more rule-based engines, which we are already doing for many years.
Jim Zarkadas (48:40)
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (48:56)
But AI is helping there also. So reading in voices, ⁓ finding ⁓ structure in things, that's something AI is helping us with. But it's really...
we decided to take time to see where things are heading and how things are working. We see really impressive results now, especially with purchase invoice recognition, which is running really, really well and recognizing a lot of invoices. But in the end, if you see how many...
AI is really in it and how many ⁓ other developments, product development is around it. The balance is not like AI is changing everything. It's more like AI made us start thinking about, we do things differently? And then all of a sudden we saw that AI was possible to do better suggestions. So the user interface was really less important because people needed to change those things. So it's more like confirm the suggestions we already did. So there is 10 % AI.
Jim Zarkadas (49:33)
Yeah.
Exactly, yeah. ⁓
Edwin Vlieg (49:57)
There
is a lot of rule-based engines and then there is 60 % of really changing the way how people interact with our system, which is now possible due to the fact that we can automate more and we're thinking about automating more now, given that AI is more common now.
Jim Zarkadas (50:06)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah, actually on this, before we start recording, you mentioned that there is a part of the software that you're gonna redo with AI and it's an interesting design story. Now you mentioned the purchasing voices and I'm wondering, is it the ad document on the incoming page that you're referring to probably because you have a banner that this page will look different soon, read about what will change. And I saw this like last week and I'm like, now I'm curious.
Edwin Vlieg (50:23)
Yep.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, but that's not the thing that's changing. This is in terms of product development. These are two separate tracks. In the beginning of this year, we said, we need to make sure that handling the purchasing forces is done much more easily, easier for entrepreneurs. Something that entrepreneurs are spending the most time in currently at Moneybird. So, we see a lot of opportunities to improve this. And then you have things like, more like the,
Jim Zarkadas (50:43)
Mm-hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (51:11)
Rhythmic sides the AI side. Okay, we can detect more things We can suggest more things but that goes hand-in-hand with changing user interface to not have a full form with all in all fields that are already pre-filled but just like more an interface that checks Okay, this is the information we are almost sure that everything is correct Just press next or confirm and you can go to the next one because the user interface is also very Important part of the speech that you can handle information. So that's why we are changing the
interface,
which is also very interesting because we know that the ⁓ recognition side is working. That's something we can track. We know what we suggest and what is changed by our customers. We see very, good results scores. But on the other hand, changing the user interface of a major part of Moneybird where a lot of customers are using, then we get into ⁓ a lot of discussions about the number of clicks that it takes now to change things, for example, which we think is less important because
Jim Zarkadas (51:56)
Nice.
Mm-hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (52:10)
If the suggestion is right, you don't need to change anything. And of course, for the lower number of things that you need to change anything, then the number of clicks is more. But also, we learned a lot of use cases of people that people created based on our own user interface on our...
previous user interface, but also on our previous logic about suggestions that we didn't anticipate it. We saw people still using their paper ⁓ invoices besides their computer and expecting things to be in the same order, for example. But now, because we can read the invoice date more correctly, the invoice date is already pre-filled.
Jim Zarkadas (52:46)
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (52:58)
It's
not in the order you upload it to AMIM. Now it's in the order of the date. But that's not compared to the physical files they have on desk and want to check things in. And you wouldn't expect as a product designer.
Jim Zarkadas (53:01)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (53:09)
with 18 years of Moneybird being fully digital and moving away from the paper invoices that there are still people using Moneybird in that way. so that was a really eye-opener also for the team that, we are fully behind this move. We really need to do this. This is the future. the use cases people thought of are way more than you can initially anticipate.
Jim Zarkadas (53:14)
Yeah, yeah.
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (53:39)
Even though we did a feature flag rollout, fixed a lot of feedback from early adopters, still have our learnings new stuff. Now we are moving towards the 100 % rollout. was really interesting to see. Again, for me was new. It was something we saw in the past again for the newer product engineers in our team. was really an eye-opener that there is way more than the eye can behold based on just the user interface, but there is also a usage.
completely different than you expect.
Jim Zarkadas (54:12)
Yeah, yeah, it's like how people, yeah, that's a, think maybe the most interesting topic in terms of design for me is like how you think people are gonna use it versus how actually use something. And like, yeah, and even like with Moneybird, like you have these kind of new learnings, even if it's a pretty standardized software where you upload documents, you just kind of scan the information.
Edwin Vlieg (54:24)
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (54:36)
add them in your records and that's it. Like how creative can people get? But yeah, you never know. Yeah. ⁓
Edwin Vlieg (54:40)
Yeah, very. Given a user a text
area or a text input field and they do something within this field that you wouldn't expect. And we've seen it over and over again. And that's very interesting, of course, because we...
Jim Zarkadas (54:45)
Exactly. Exactly what he said.
Edwin Vlieg (54:56)
We believe in the direction, we know that we can save time to the people. And of course there is valuable feedback there. So we need to incorporate this and we are running a new project now to fix these things. It's not like the user is always correct in this case. So they came up with workarounds and use cases because we are lacking on some other parts, of course. So that's something we are fixing, but it's very fine line with
Jim Zarkadas (55:16)
Yeah, exactly.
Edwin Vlieg (55:25)
moving forward in the direction we believe in as a company and as product designers and also ⁓ learning about the users and incorporating their feedback without stepping away from the vision we have, of course.
Jim Zarkadas (55:28)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah, balancing these two. Yeah, that's a really, really good point. Really good point. And I also personally fully agree on what you mentioned before, like with that there is a lot of hype on AI. And for me, honestly, I'm not sure if you spend time on LinkedIn in general, like if you read content or not.
Edwin Vlieg (55:56)
Yeah, I do.
Jim Zarkadas (55:58)
I kind of do as well, I feel like sometimes I ask myself, Tim, why are you doing this? Like I also publish content of LinkedIn. Like I believe in the idea of creating useful content and so on, but there's so much noise and so much bullshit on LinkedIn, especially when it comes to AI, like people hyping stuff because of course in the end you see that they want to sell something. That's what they're trying to create this kind of a FOMO or fear and so on. And with AI, these kinds of conversations is where I feel like I can truly understand what's going on with AI in the world. It's like you hear like you list
Edwin Vlieg (56:08)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (56:28)
to all these kind of crazy statements online, but then you talk with founders and you're like, yeah, it's useful, but it's not that it's a groundbreaking thing that is going to completely revamp the product. like with design, they say, yeah, the future is bot, like there won't be any interface or anything. And I'm like, I don't get it. Like I believe into the idea of conversational UI. I see a lot of audio used to GPT every day, but it's not a one size fits all kind of solution. Not every product can work this way and it's not the right...
type of interaction for every product for users.
Edwin Vlieg (56:56)
No,
We've seen also this, that a lot of ⁓ competitors in our market have introduced a chatbot in their system. ⁓ We have more users now using chat GPT cloud, et cetera, and we don't get the feature request that often. If you have a good user interface, it shouldn't matter that much. On the other hand, we launched an MCP, so the API connector between Moneybird and an AI agent.
Jim Zarkadas (57:19)
Good point.
Edwin Vlieg (57:25)
And this is something that is very, very popular now because people are ⁓ thinking about new use cases to automate things on top of Moneybird with AI, which was previously not possible. And of course we can do this with our own chatbot if we wanted to, but the pace of development at JetGPT and cloud and name it is way higher. So why should we invent this ⁓ by just relaunching an MCP, which was on our engineering side?
Jim Zarkadas (57:45)
yeah why reinvent the wheel right yeah yeah
Hmm
Edwin Vlieg (57:55)
Cool.
relatively small project because we already had an API and a good API specification, which enables a whole new world of opportunities. people that were following the hype with a chatbot are probably not that successful. And we weren't following the hype with the MCP. was really literally an engineer that said, OK, we have an open API specification. I think an MCP is not that much work. Shall I fix it? I'm not sure if it was a project, actually, if it was something, some cool down project for someone. And they said, OK, let's do it.
Jim Zarkadas (57:57)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Nice, it was that small,
Edwin Vlieg (58:25)
see
how it works and everyone's blown away. So you need to really be careful about what to do with AI. Then the other hand, but I'm positive about is that when I started Moneybird in 2008, we were in a bubble with SaaS, with cloud. Everyone was starting businesses, solving in a specific domain, something that was really needed. And there are still a lot of unsolved solutions, also problems in domains, very specific domains that are still using
legacy software where there is room for disruption. Then there came a generation that was a generation of also younger entrepreneurs that were not really into software, they were more into dropshipping and social media, getting rich fast, etc. They were not really solving solutions or solving problems, they were not really looking for solutions. Now again, because with AI it's so much easier to build software, I see a lot of entrepreneurs just
going headfirst in some really complicated domain because they think they can fix things with AI. And of course, version one of the AI is not what's going to be in the end, but getting into a domain, learning about the domain and pivoting into something that's working. I see a lot of great businesses starting now. And I think AI is enabling this because they can do things much easier than before.
Jim Zarkadas (59:32)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. On ⁓ this, I just wanted to ask a quick question ⁓ on the MCP integration, like the integration with TadwBT. Is there any kind of a use case that kind of comes to your mind, like as a really cool one? Because you said people do all kinds of interesting things, and I'm just curious to kind of hear like some examples of like things that you saw that you did, yeah, maybe you didn't even expect.
Edwin Vlieg (1:00:13)
Essentially, the NMCP enables you to just ⁓ have interactions with money birds that you normally would do with either a fixed API or with any user interface. And it can combine things. So for example, if you have an event and you have an Excel sheet of 50 people that are coming to the event, they all need an invoice, then you can just upload the Excel sheet, spreadsheet to...
agent and say, okay, create invoices for all these people. This is a feature, of course, that we don't have. We don't have this. We could build an import feature, but we don't need to offer this. You need to build every invoice separately. But AI can combine this and just can iterate over all the spreadsheet rows and.
create the, fetch the correct information and create invoices for this. Another example was of a friend of mine, he needed some kind of different insight in the payment behavior of his clients. So he just said, okay, fetch all the payment information and create me a report about the payment behavior. And this is reporting again, which could build this as Moneybird. It may be too niche for his situation. So he created this report and got the information out in another way.
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:19)
I see. I see.
Wow, that's cool.
I feel like it would be cool to even promote it within the app. Like for existing users, hey, you could do these cool things because you describe two types of features here, right? Like the one is more of BI, like that you can do like more robust reporting that is really unique to what exactly you're looking for. And the other one is bulk actions and more kind of efficiency related stuff where you can save time. ⁓ Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. I haven't worked, like I've seen many comments degraded with HGPT, but I never really connected any tool to work with it so far.
But this sounds cool. Yeah, that's pretty cool.
Edwin Vlieg (1:02:04)
It's
still interesting, ⁓ especially in Europe, the privacy is very interesting still. So we are...
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:12)
Yeah, right.
Edwin Vlieg (1:02:14)
We are happy with the early adopters that are mostly very known in AI and also known to the privacy thing. We are still reluctant to really promote the MCP to more the unskilled AI, unskilled people. So, I can also see a future where we have a chatbot which enables these things to do because we, and then we can of course, like the AI we are running on the background in Morningbird, we can make sure that the privacy wise everything is okay.
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:20)
Mm.
That's a good point, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (1:02:44)
always read our AI models in European data centers, for example, never train on data. These are things that you need to check and it's possible with your own Chetch CPT account. yeah, I think most many people are seeing the benefits but not really thinking about privacy. That's something we also want to be a little bit ⁓ precautious about, but what we promote is as Moribert.
Jim Zarkadas (1:02:52)
Yeah.
Hmm.
That's a really, really good point. a really good point. OK, because I see we're towards the end of the time. I have one last question that I always ask every guest in the podcast, which is, what's your favorite SaaS product? In this case, Advan Moneybird. And why? What are some products that really, or one product that comes to your mind that you really
Edwin Vlieg (1:03:25)
Absolutely.
Jim Zarkadas (1:03:32)
love it or it be an app. doesn't have to be a B2B SaaS, could be something that you're using daily. And then I would be interested to go into the why, like why does it feel like as your favorite?
Edwin Vlieg (1:03:34)
Mm-hmm.
There are many and not so much. I really like the approach ⁓ 37signals is taking with Fizzy now. ⁓ I'm not using it and we are probably not going to use it because we have other software running already, but I like their open source idea. So I love reading the source code and getting to know how other people are using Ruby on Rails and writing software. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (1:03:51)
Mm.
Edwin Vlieg (1:04:06)
I'm really ⁓ fascinated by the ⁓ terminal UI movement. ⁓ We are using Cloud Code, for example, which is completely based in the terminal, completely UI in a terminal, which is a really different way of writing software. Giving props, getting snippets back ⁓ instead of using an IDA, which I was used to, like Visual Code CD or something. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (1:04:24)
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (1:04:30)
And then you see that there is a terminal UI world where you can do a lot of things in the terminal UI. Like if you're working with Git, you ⁓ can use Lazy Git, which is a really great Git client. So that's something I enjoy using more and more lately. It's not really SaaS products, it's more like apps on your Mac. And B2B SaaS, then I should really look at my bookmarks that I'm using.
In the end, we are also, for example, using the Google Workspace Suite for...
Jim Zarkadas (1:05:00)
Yeah, if you did.
Edwin Vlieg (1:05:07)
for good email, good calendar and of course it's Google, some people have an opinion about this but it just works and for people, for a team of 80 people you need to have stuff that works, that's integrated. You're valuing these things over time and the interface is acceptable. I like for example the Hey email app way better than Gmail but ⁓ Gmail has
Jim Zarkadas (1:05:14)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (1:05:32)
expectable patterns that every user can work with. He has a little bit of a learning curve, for example. So that's why we are with the business still on Gmail instead of He. So there's not a lot of apps that I've been using recently that I'm really blown away by. say, okay, this is really groundbreaking stuff, so to say.
Jim Zarkadas (1:05:35)
Exactly.
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but what I see in you is like that you really like the more like with Fuzzy if I remember the name correctly from Basecamp like the bug tracker kind of a tool they released like or like with HeyEmail is that you appreciate like a different take on a product like you that's what I feel like from what you've described so far is that you like to see new ideas and new approaches to solve existing problems. Yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (1:06:17)
Yeah, it's also inspiration for our product again.
and not everything
is working right away, but the approach people have and 37signals is great. It's beneficial in two ways because they have product approach, but they also have an engineering approach. Because we are on Ruby on Rails, we can use also the engineering approach that they bring. But the terminal UI is the same thing. There is a complete different take on how you work with things, but where we are coming from. I saw this lately, it's also very interesting. I was buying a couch in a
Jim Zarkadas (1:06:34)
Hmm... ⁓ okay.
Edwin Vlieg (1:06:52)
in a large shop and he was putting our order in and he was
fully using the keyboard and said, what kind of software are you using? And he was still using some kind of DDoS interface, terminal UI, which he completely memorized with all the shortcuts, but he was very fast. And that's something you see coming back now with the terminal UIs that you all of a sudden have UIs with which you can't use a mouse in. So you need to learn the shortcuts. But if you know them, you are very fast in the things you need to do.
Jim Zarkadas (1:07:03)
Wow.
Hmm.
Edwin Vlieg (1:07:25)
And of course that you can translate again, that's the inspiration again, you can translate it again to your web application and make sure that you have keyboard shortcuts for the right things to make sure that the interface is very fast. that's, yeah, inspiration is big thing there, but I like different approaches to get inspired.
Jim Zarkadas (1:07:41)
Nice, and with terminal UI, I understand correctly, it's not an app, it's more the idea that you use just the terminal and prompts to write code, right? Yeah, yeah, more of the interaction model, yeah. Go see, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (1:07:47)
Yeah, yeah, I'm for example using Ghosty as a terminal now and then you have things
like ⁓ Cloud Code is one example, Lazy Git, Lazy Docker are for Git commit messages, et cetera, but Lazy Docker is for managing Docker. Yeah, there are more more examples of these things nowadays that I saw an example. Sure, once again. yeah, like. ⁓
navigating a database, proscus cruel, a client, also fully into terminal. But these things are fast, they often have a, it's a little bit of a nerdy edge of course on it, but they really focus on being fast and efficient. And it's a comparable design pattern again, so you recognize things instead of having completely different apps you need to learn. But it's more like a recent movement and I like it, I like to use it, but I'm not a typical.
Jim Zarkadas (1:08:23)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (1:08:40)
end user of course, because I'm a software engineer so I understand these things. But it's more like the keyboard approach is something that we take back again to the Moniput app and improve things over there.
Jim Zarkadas (1:08:44)
Yeah.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. Really, really interesting. One quick comment on this. is an app. I had a podcast ⁓ episode yesterday. I was recording the episode ⁓ with Mitel from Kondo. So Kondo, if you know superhuman for emails, is like the superhuman for LinkedIn. If you have a lot of DMs and you feel you hate LinkedIn, Kondo is the way to go. So it's like a inbox tool for LinkedIn to kind of be efficient and have a clean UI. So, and it's always see like...
Edwin Vlieg (1:09:04)
Yeah.
⁓ okay, nice.
Jim Zarkadas (1:09:16)
There's a whole tribe of people that are into keyboard shortcuts. I would describe it this way. So yeah, there is a market there for sure to kind of build for these kind of people that love this interaction model. So, cool.
Edwin Vlieg (1:09:20)
Yeah, yeah,
Nice. And then
again, if I'm hearing about LinkedIn and DMs, I have a DM situation in my LinkedIn also, given that I'm a little bit of a known person. But I found a way in LinkedIn to fix this.
Jim Zarkadas (1:09:38)
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
Edwin Vlieg (1:09:44)
And by muting conversations and moving them to other and I don't see them ever again and I'm also but also maybe that's something that comes with age I used to use a lot of different apps and and trying to connect everything But now I also like just being focused on okay. This is working for me That's to go to stick with it. If there's a little bit of pain now then okay, but having too much apps also on your Mac or
Jim Zarkadas (1:10:05)
It's fine, yeah.
Edwin Vlieg (1:10:10)
A little bit of focus there is something I like. And it's also the approach we take with Moneybird. We try to incorporate everything into Moneybird instead of for really basic stuff, needing to connect to other software, need to pay for other software. It's getting too complicated, too cluttered, too easily.
Jim Zarkadas (1:10:16)
Hmm.
I fully agree. And it's like a bigger topic in the SaaS industry that people end up like using 10 different tools, then paying other tools to integrate all these tools like software. It's like it's becoming a bit of a madness. And then you see products like Leakup, for example, where or like Basecamp is similar, which is like all in one kind of approach that it's getting more and more popular. The idea of like, stop using 10 different tools, just keep your focus on sanity and use one instead. So cool. Thanks a lot for your time. Yeah, it's been
Edwin Vlieg (1:10:33)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it is. Yeah.
You're welcome.
Jim Zarkadas (1:10:54)
really really interesting conversation.