Hello there! I'm Jarek, born and raised in a small town near Wroclaw, Poland but currently living in Copenhagen, Denmark. 10 years ago I arrived in Copenhagen Airport with nowhere to sleep, $100 in my pockets and my head full of entrepreneurial dreams. I was determined and ambitious but unsure where I wanted to go. A decade, an education and a few failed startups later, I am now the Co-founder and CPO in Contractbook - a Danish legal tech company that is on the verge of taking over the Danish legal industry. So... how did that happen?

This is the story of how I built a startup and flopped, swept up the ashes from my failed project and turned them into something useful. Finally, that all led to Contractbook which is now growing from being a promising start-up to a fully operational legal tech-company directed towards lawyers. 

The following text is also a part of my quest to figure out how I maintain the spirit, agility, and independence that I adore in young businesses while the company is growing and targeting a group of users that value precedence over innovation. 

I really hope you are able and willing to share your insights! 

How did I begin, and how did I fail? 

The strive for independence has always been the main driving factor in my life, and going abroad was the first major decision that I made to achieve just that. I've been used to take responsibility from a relatively young age, so it felt natural for me to leave Poland and go abroad on my own.

During my first months in Denmark, I took a job as construction worker renovating facades in the outskirts of Copenhagen and a bit later I also found myself in the gardening business while studying Digital Concept Development at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. It is quite evident that such jobs did not give me the independence I was looking for. Nevertheless, I was able to live, and the studies stimulated me while I was not nurturing plants and polishing facades.

I was shortly involved in a quickly capsized dating app startup. However, my entrepreneurial life really started when I met my current partners while they were trying to hack the tourist industry with a preference-based city guide called wouworld. It all started out great; we designed and developed a product we were proud of, got a solid preliminary investment, and we also managed to get covered in the national news. We really thought we had hacked the market when we reached 30.000 downloads in App Store. We hadn't. 

Before we could prove to our investors that the product was actually profitable we ran out of equity. It sure was fun to make but two years without a salary is a heavy price to pay for independence so we had to give up. But as with most failures, there was a lesson to learn. Most importantly, I found out that the startup way of doing things was really motivating for me.

How did I manage the failure? 

Besides getting some invaluable insights on how to navigate in a market with a ruthless eat-or-be-eaten logic, we had proven to a lot of people that we were a group of talented concept developers with a flair for attracting a lot of attention. Furthermore, I was still eager to create something that would enable me to be my own boss, work in a self-chosen environment and nurture a work culture I enjoyed. 

Since I first entered my entrepreneurial path and left the rigid hierarchy of the construction sites and restaurants behind me, I have always sworn to the startup way of doing things: flat organizational structure, informal communication, fluid work-life-balance, quick decision-making, and total flexibility. That was what makes me genuinely happy.

In order to keep that spirit alive, we consolidated the team to found an interactive agency and design solutions for other companies. It worked. It would never become a crazy unicorn business but we created some awesome websites and business was going fine. At least I had more than $100. 

As months went by, my partners and I slowly realized that we missed being part of the decision processes and we longed for a product that we could truly call our own. We did not feel as alive (and independent!) when we were helping others to achieve their dreams as we did when we were pursuing our own. We, therefore, turned the agency into a digital products studio and began taking equity in the products we created. Our hope was that it would lead us in the right direction.

It did, but not in a way I had ever imagined.

How did we get the idea? 

One winters day in 2016, a good friend and collaborator came into our office. He said something like “I'm so f***ing tired of spending hours and hours on handling basic legal work. Guys, how would you solve my need for a more efficient system for managing my contracts?” 

My partner and I looked at each other, a little stunned by the outburst. Yet, we immediately understood the hassle. We had experienced losing money because we weren't able to show the sufficient paperwork to prove our rights, and we could identify with the annoyance of the printing-signing- scanning-sending-printing-signing-scanning-sending routine. To make a long story short(er), we decided to take the challenge.

Why did we bet on Contractbook?

The first sketches were rough, but we understood from the beginning that this should be more than just another digital signature tool. People don't want to use (and pay for) too many platforms which they will then have to check, update and understand. They rather prefer one flexible platform that covers the whole process. So instead of building a simple tool, we created the whole toolbox which includes the option of creating, signing and storing contracts. By the end of 2015, we published the first prototype and raised a fairly good FFF-round. In 2016 we launched the first beta version based on the insights of our first users: Contractbook was born. 

Based on the first customer's feedback we quickly realized that we stood at a crossroad; Contractbook required all our attention if we were to succeed. The product was inflexible, clumsy and unstable but we won a loyal group of super-users which made it clear to us that we were solving an actual problem for a lot of people. We also found out that there was a vacant slot in the market since no other contract management platform covered the whole process for a reasonable price that small and medium-sized businesses were actually able to pay.

All this combined made us realize that we had to put our agency on hold. By the end of 2016, we transferred our equity from woumedia to Contractbook and started working full time, full speed. 

Contractbook from the inside
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How did Contractbook evolve?

Now it's 2018 (obviously). Our user base is growing steadily and the product is expanding with more and more features. We now have a little more than 25.000 users in more than 50 different countries, and we have established ourselves on the Danish SMB-market thanks to a fairly good seed-round last winter. I am now the CPO in a team of 20 people with a Copenhagen-based business team and a remote product team which is mainly based in my native Poland.

I've acquired the independence I wished for as my partners and I we have founded a company with the company culture I have always sought after: We have as flat an organization structure as possible. Everyone self-organizes their work, is responsible for it and is encouraged to make decisions. Everyone is free to choose where and when they work. And most importantly, we have fun along the way!

We enjoy being quirky and a bit provocative in our external communication as well. Our brand is light and modern using drawings and bright colors, we apply an amused tone in our written communication by making our GDPR-information witty and doing PR-campaigns were we compare data ethics to organic food. We've even had great success with a “Kill The Printer”-campaign where we used baseball clubs to smash printers at tech festivals.

A few months ago, we launched a new product called Contractbook Suits which is an advanced extension of the current platform tailored to the legal industry. We have discovered that there is a huge market yet to be digitalized and that the lawyers are actively searching for a client-centric product like ours. In a few months, our MRR has doubled, we have hired a handful of new employees and the pipeline is set for a growth I have never before experienced.

Our young startup is suddenly grown into a fully operational business.

And why is that a problem?

It is not! I feel super privileged to be in this situation, and I basically don't have anything to complain about without coming off as a bit spoiled. Yet, the growth of the company and the new type of users forces us to evaluate some of your core values - even those dearest to me. 

It is becoming a challenge to maintain the things I like about being a startup and simultaneously expand the team. I'm really anxious to find out how to maintain a relatively flat structure where everybody can speak their mind and organize their work without losing agility, speed and flexibility.

The same goes for our external communication. Lawyers are extremely prone to bullshit and they value trust and precedence over quirkiness and move-fast-break-things hype. If we are to convince them to join us we can't be acting like a startup. We must take upon us to act like the mature business that we have actually become. 

There are exceptions, of course. I have always taken a lot of inspiration from companies like Slack as they are able to stay cool and still attract some of the major players. Yet, I am still not sure how they do it and why it works so well for them? 

So what was the question, again?

What are your experiences (or intuition)? How do you maintain the flexibility, quirkiness, and independence that is my drive and that I have always searched for while transforming from a startup to a growing business? What the hell is Slacks secret?