DN #9: The Death of SaaS, AI Coding & Decentralized Startups (w/ Melker Pasternak Ivarsson)

Niklas:Hi and huge welcome to you, my lovely listeners. So glad you're here. Today you're joining me for a chat with Melka. Melka is an entrepreneur, system thinker and innovation builder focused on decentralized networks, collaboration platforms and eliminating bureaucratic constraints in business. So nice to have you, Melka.

Melker:Thank you very much.

Niklas:I think you come from philosophy in the first place and are now bridging the world to software. How does this go hand in hand and how did you end up here?

Melker:Well, so roughly at the age of 13, so it started quite early I was very fortunate enough to have entrepreneurial parents I once asked my stepdad like what how do you become a good negotiator? Like how do know if something is a good negotiation and he went when both parties leave the table saying thank you and Most people I assume just think okay. That's good fair enough But I was like there was it kept on boggling my mind. I was like, hold on a minute. Wait, wait, wait, wait if this would be a Zero-sum game if someone wins and someone loses everyone can understand that we play a tennis match We have a winner and we have a loser But now all of a sudden there's a constellation of parties joining each other coming together Where everyone leaves with more than they came with where the stat value come from and then that just spun me off into all the rabbit holes of business and entrepreneurship from a You can call it philosophical level or just a macro level, trying to understand how it works and basically the situation it has in our society and in our economy. And then from there, it just spun off into all those different side paths. And one of the... One quote I try to live by is creativity inspired by curiosity and I think that kind of summarizes myself quite well I don't really have a plan. I don't like planning that much. Some people are opposed to it. Some people love it I don't really plan that much. I just go wherever my nose points me towards and then that's usually curiosity driven so The path towards where I am now has been very squiggly. It has had a lot of detours, but I'm very fortunate to have gone through all of them. And yeah, I guess we can throughout this podcast talk about the journey I went through from thinking of business from a philosophical level and now building platforms such as, ⁓ or Donna, for example, and how I got here. But I guess that's the, that's the summary. That's the TLDR or yeah, execution summary.

Niklas:Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting. think we are largely a product of our environment. So obviously we shape ourselves somehow, but it's so much easier to just put you in a room with the people you want to be like and become like them. It's so much easier than, trying to figure things out on your own. And I think you, you were lucky in that sense that you got a lot at home as a background. ⁓

Melker:Mm.

Niklas:How strongly did that influence you and how strongly did it drive you to build your own business?

Melker:It's very interesting that you mentioned that because I had a very interesting upbringing, a very interesting childhood. So basically my parents divorced when I was four already. And then my mom and my dad, if I say polar opposites, that's an understatement. Like we're talking two different lives, two different people, two different worldviews. And I got to live one week with dad and then one week with mom. And then that's how I lived my entire childhood. And then each of them found their own new partner. it had like, I had four different parents throughout my childhood. Every single one of them. you, don't know how many, let's say we take Jung as an example, like psychology wise, you have 12 different archetypes. I can bet you that the four different parents were all on different sides of the spectrum. Like they were as far away from each other as you can possibly imagine, which meant that growing up, I was surrounded by so many different personalities that I kind of got to pick and choose a little bit. What do I like about the life of planning? What do I like about the life of going linearly? What do I like about the life where we know that five o'clock every night we have dinner and then it's the same dinners versus the crazy chaotic life of on my mother's side. It has its charms as well. So. Yes, my mom and my stepdad growing up were business owners and that influenced me tremendously, mostly with the perspective of this is how you can kind of live life. And we were also fortunate enough that it went quite well for them. we, I was super fortunate enough to live in five-star hotels and eat nice restaurants. Then I had, you know, we have months and years where the fridge was empty, but that's just life, know, ups and downs. So I got to pick and choose basically what I liked the most with different lives. And The way it shaped me isn't in the one way I see life. It kind of changed me to see life as so multifaceted that you kind of, you can never really fully wrap your head around it and you just have to get out there and explore. So that's, think, where the curiosity really comes from of why I have worked in so many industries, why I've done so many businesses, why I have met with so many different people, worked in so many different constellations, have new strategies all the time. and can often relate to more people than I would say the average person. But yeah, it was a very interesting question.

Niklas:It's really interesting. it's also, I would like to understand how much drove you to building something like Ordana because Ordana is also a very different idea from, from many other ways of fractional hiring, I would say.

Melker:So the way it started is the story behind it was that, like we talked about, I had the philosophical interest of what a business is and what it does in society. Then through pure chance, I came across blockchain when that became a big thing. I was like, this sounds really interesting. Then I had a mentor essentially that taught me everything about how blockchain technologies work. And that essentially opened my eyes to realize that there are... systems and designs for decentralized governance. And that then caught my interest as well, just as much as business did. And then my mind naturally started wondering, and keep in mind, I was like 16, 17 at the time, so I knew jack shit about business. I didn't know shit about business. If you ask me how a manager operates about Taylorism or how the different silos work, well, HR is no clue whatsoever, but I figured just, I wonder what would happen if you decentralized the business. If we now have this design for decentralized governance. How could that be applied to business? And I started using the terms when I was, so that was kind of the initiation of let's try to build something where using blockchain, you can decentralize ⁓ organizations, but I had no clue how to do it. And I started using the phrase, what if you were to blur the lines between an organization starts and the market starts? So you blur the lines between an organization and the market. Then again, through just pure chance, there was a book in our bookshelf that my mom bought years ago that has just been collecting dust that no one opened. And I was bored. We lived in a temporary apartment because we were renovating our toilets. It was the only book we had there for some reasons. I figured, me pick it up and read it. And that book covered an organization called Hire, which was fascinating. I read through page five and I realized what this was about. And it hooked me completely where Hire is a Chinese a white appliance manufacturer, and they're currently the biggest one in the world. And their organizational structure is a phenomenon that all the management experts right now are trying to figure out how it works and how can we now replicate it. Because what they did, the former CEO was that he got rid of this management layers. He got rid of this typical, hierarchical structure, and he instead essentially built an organizational model, built... and operates it as a fleet of startups collaborating with each other. And then again, I didn't know what the normal structure looked like. I just know that this sounds really, really interesting. So I guess from there, was just trial and error, learning as much as I could. I've been fortunate enough to work with the author, Zohar, of the book I picked up, which is called Zero Distance, which I highly recommend reading to all the listeners at home. I've learned as much as I could about it. I've fiddled with blockchain technologies and all other technologies, really trying to bridge the gap of how can we build the engine and build the vehicle. for the rest of the economy and the rest of the organizations to kind of tap into the same magic that that higher managers tap into where they essentially went from, I can talk about this for hours, but I'll try to summarize it. They essentially went from brink of bankruptcy to the biggest white appliance manufacturer in the world through doing this structure. And the numbers they have is just incomparable with anything else that we know. So my favorite metric from them is that, They're essentially a startup machine because like we talked about, they operate as a fleet of startups and In doing so, it's kind of like an open market. So any employee, anywhere in the organization can essentially come up with their own idea and they can post it internally and then they can collaborate with everyone else within the organization to kind of bring it to life. So it's like a very capitalistic internal market that they have within their organization because they're so big. So it's like a mini market. These ideas within Hire has amounted not only to their own startups, Not only have they amounted to spin-offs, not only have three of them, as of I know, as of my knowledge right now, gone to IPO, but they've created an additional $3 billion of market value from their simple internal organizational model. So the fundamentals we can now see and learn from this organization is that we know that it works. If you've set up a sandbox playground internally within the organization where essentially trust is there from the start and you have the infrastructure for it, where new ideas starting from nothing can essentially assemble the resources they need to launch and scale it in record times. One of the companies IPO'd I think in 18 months, if I'm not mistaken, like mind blowing figures and numbers. We know that it works fundamentally. How can we now export this to normal startups? to the everyday startups that we see here in Europe, for example, or like the startups we see and scroll past on X. So it essentially stems from the fact that now after having gone through all this research, learned everything about it, and even I think from the get-go, how I kind of saw business from this philosophical perspective, I now have, I am now naive enough to think that the world should function in a certain way, which it isn't. And I now want to try to... mold the world to fit more my perspective and hopefully it becomes better.

Niklas:I think we have seen, so the Decentral Autonomous Organization evolved very strongly in the blockchain space. How much have you copied from that idea? How strongly are you related to these ideas and where are you different with Ordana?

Melker:Great question. So if you look at the centralized autonomous organizations, those are still very blockchain driven. So the first thing that I've learned from my previous venture and Ordana is that blockchain is currently not quite there yet to be mass adopted. So if I now were to bring in a bunch of blockchain technologies and ask anyone to use it, it's very niche and it's very limited and it's just isn't quite there yet. Essentially if we want to manage money, especially if we want to do rev share, ⁓ splits automatic. Blockchain isn't really quite there yet. So the first differentiation is Ordana doesn't use blockchain. But when it comes to decentralized autonomous organizations, the most interesting fact is, you know, the fact that everyone can have a say in what to do with the assets and everyone has a say in governance, but it's still a centralized body operating. The way Ordana works is that it doesn't really have a central, like the way we have built our infrastructure for the startups to hopefully onboard it, is that we don't really have a centralized infrastructure or a central body that makes the decisions that sure everyone has a say in, but it's just an open place for startups to collaborate with each other once they see fit. And then the governance is mostly handled in the collaboration contract between the startups more than. from a bigger perspective. So you can still have all the different visions, all the different micro strategies, all the different directions from the platform that won't at the end affect any larger idea at larger scale. So for example, just to put it into words and give an example to make it clear what I'm trying to mean. If if Ordano would be a decentralized autonomous organization, a DAO, we can have, for example, as a vision that we just have projects that help us make the world more environmentally sustainable. That would be a very large vision. Then the question becomes, we now need a bunch of startups to come on board, but they all have to align with this vision. Then I think something like a decentralized autonomous organization would be a very nice fit because then everyone can have a say in, here we have a new idea. Does this actually align with the vision we have or not? And then that's where I think the sweet spot of the technology lies, but that aspect doesn't really exist on our data. I hope that answered the question nicely.

Niklas:I think it's really interesting because you can think in different directions, right? You could say we make, I think there are a lot of fractional hires and that economy is growing. ⁓ We have, you can pay cash. So then we have the idea, okay, we pay with revenue share agreement later on. They have no say, but they get some of the upside they create the people and then you.

Melker:Yeah.

Niklas:Then you have a, I would say more change oriented view where people also get a vote in the company. How do you feel, especially startup CEOs are looking at this picture, having real new shareholders in the company versus just paying?

Melker:That's a really interesting question. There's obviously this strong sense that many of the decision makers at companies, no matter the size, always want to remain in control of their own idea and that will not disappear. I don't think, and you know, for better or for worse, I don't know the answer to whether they should let loose of control or not and what would happen, especially, for example, you could argue that they're right now giving up a lot of control to artificial intelligence when they're asking Chachipiti to write their proposals for them and everything. The most efficient way though to get this working based on the data that we have from looking at the most successful decentralized organizations is that you have a leader of a project and then that's who the buck still stops with. So you have the CEO that takes the decisions. The problem is at what level is the CEO within the organization? So you have, sure, the main CEO, but then the reason why Hire, for example, likes to position themselves and explain their organizational model as a bunch of mini startups, because each little startup has their own P &L. Each little startup has their own CEO, essentially, and he makes all the shots. He takes all the decisions. Now they have voting in place to see who will be the CEO. So it's a democratic process to remain the CEO. But even when they have collaborations, even when they have people working on a rev share or profit share basis, it's still the CEO that takes the decision. And if they don't like what the CEO says, they leave the collaboration and go find someone else. So that's the most efficient way to do it. ⁓

Niklas:Yeah, think there's, Ben Horowitz has famously said very often there's one CEO in a startup. We don't want to. because I think in an early stage startup, you have to make a lot of decisions at uncertainty. at the end of the day, someone has to call the shots. The more you decentralize, and I think that's a strongly different model. The less you end up in this, you can still have one CEO, right? But you end up in a more decentralized decision organization. Do you feel that this works better in an early stage firm and a later stage firm? How do you feel about that?

Melker:So the reason, if we compare, now essentially the variable of bureaucracy comes into the question. Because when you have the larger organizations, you have bureaucracy. So the problem, the bottleneck is more the bureaucracy handling the information and decisions that the, essentially. Let me rephrase that. The problem with large organizations, I would say, is that it's the bureaucracy's job to make sure that the CEO doesn't become the bottleneck. Versus a startup, the biggest benefit that they have is that they're so small and they're so agile. So yes, there always has to be one CEO or one person to call the shots. Because if something breaks, you need that one person to point to. Otherwise, it just becomes a mess. And what we saw looking into this was that a sweet spot is around 12 people in a startup. That's where the balance is best between a small team that can move quickly but still have enough team members to do something of value. You're not really as limited and as constrained by human capital. So the reason, again, looking at higher because they have the absolute, they have the, at the moment, the best solution to this. When they broke up their organizations into mini startups, they keep it at 12. So a startup can start and then they can hire up to 12 people. And then once you go more than that, it splits like a cell splitting into two, know, a cell duplicating itself. So then it splits into two micro enterprises, each with their own little focus. So. A startup is the most agile, but then the problem is the startup is a startup, they don't have capital. So how can you now balance the fact that a startup that it's small and lean, which allows them to move fast, but because they're small and lean also means that they don't have resources to do, they don't have a lot of power, if we put it that way. So then that's really where also Ordana comes in and what my vision for Ordana is. And that's how we can give that to startups because how can they get the power if they're only, let's say 12 people or even smaller teams? Well, they don't need to acquire the resources. Maybe they don't need to hire all the extra people they need. And then to hire all the managers, to manage the managers, to manage the frontline workers, what if they can access it through collaborations instead? ⁓ So yeah, it's an interesting balance to find.

Niklas:Sounds very interesting and I would also be very interested in understanding how this works at Ordana itself. So how have you implemented these models when you think about Ordana, for example?

Melker:So we practice what we preach. We only work mainly on rev share. So for example, the way we have it set up actually is we have our advisory board that kind of advises me. I am the CEO, I'm the one calling the shots. Then we have developers working that's kind of still a part of the core project, but. the rest of the people that we have, example, if someone comes in, instead of someone, whenever someone comes to me and say, Matthew, can you hire me with Ordana? Can you give me a hire or salary or whatever? I instead say, you know what? How about you set up your own mini startup under Ordana, just like the infrastructure we've built up for. And then, okay, what does this mean? Let's say for example, that... The reason you wanted me to hire you is because you think that you can help me implement this at, let's say you can use it for restructuring larger organizations, just theoretically. What if instead of me hiring you to do it, you create your own little mini startup within Ordana, you go and sell it, and then you have your own P &L, you have your own mini bank account, it's your responsibility to earn money, but you have all my resources to do it with you. and then the revenue comes in and then we work out an agreement ourselves.

Niklas:And these agreements in the legal frameworks is that part of O'danah that this is provided as a service?

Melker:Yes. So we have automated governance and legal through the governance. It's fairly simple to automate with the fact that a lot of it comes down to what you write down in the collaboration plan and that's templatized. So it has everything for you where you simply enter it in. then we have this safety rails and guard rails to make sure that no one can kind of play the other person to make sure that it's safe for both parties to collaborate. And then once we have the collaboration plan, which kind of becomes a single source of truth for what the collaboration is, we can put that into a templatized collaboration contract as well that works across jurisdictions and everything. So you can sign it from the platform as well. So everything is taken care of.

Niklas:Really, really interesting. And when you look at your first customers, what are you aiming at? Are you aiming at larger organizations, smaller organizations, really early stage startups? What is it that you're targeting?

Melker:So we're targeting, it's kind of twofold. the, one of the main value, like unique selling points that we're done has is the network effect. And this just as a side note for the listeners, speaking of, know, there's a lot of talk now regarding flawed code and building everything with AI and what tools will. live and which SaaS tools will die. know, everyone is talking about the death of the SaaS tools. And I actually on the side also have an agency where we build software for companies. So I am in that realm as well. And what I want to say here is that the, as we know, we can assume that the cost of building software will essentially move towards zero eventually. Right now it's very cheap. So it's virtually free. We can call it. And knowledge-wise, it's practically free because you don't have to know much about programming anymore to build SaaS products. But the moat that you still can have is the network effect. Because even if I were to replicate a Facebook, no one will use it because everyone is already on Facebook. The value proposition that Facebook and Instagram and TikTok has is the user's already dead. So even if I can build a technical product using lovable or cloud code in two weeks, no one would use it and that wouldn't help me. And that's not really an Instagram killer because of the network of faith. So for that main reason, that was also baked into the design of Vordana regarding the mode of how to survive in the era where software is becoming free. So on one hand, our ICPs are the startups. to make sure that we have startups, the bootstrap ones, technology-wise. So if you're selling low ticket, high volume, you're early stage, you're bootstrapping, and you're right now limited by the fact that you don't have the resources you require to get to the next step, whether that next step is launching or next step is scaling. Donna can be a good fit for you where you can access resources on a rev share basis instead of having to save up money or fundraise to acquire them. On the second hand. we have innovation departments at large organizations. Because right now they still have the problem of bureaucracy as we ⁓ mentioned previously, where they have innovation departments and they have a bunch of projects and they want these projects to succeed because they're investing loads of money in these innovation departments. The problem is though, you have to remain agile, that we talked about previously as well. The biggest... benefit of being a startup is that you're so small that you can move quickly and that's the reason startups succeed because you try you iterate and it's basically how short can you make the loop of taking customer feedback and improving based on there to kind of reach product market fit, get your first order and scale from there. You have to be fast. But when you're operating as a project with an innovation department, you're still kind of bound by that red tape. You're still kind of stuck by the bureaucracy and the management layers and the sign-offs and hey, we need actually a little bit more money than we thought because we realized this from our customers. Now we need to figure this part out and ⁓ is it all right if we go and collaborate with that partner? Or ⁓ is it all right if we do it like this instead? Urdana is supposed to be a way out where without having the innovation projects have to go through the red tape to make changes to their strategy and get the signups and approvals for the extra budget to acquire those extra resources, they can simply access them externally through startups as safely where both then the goal is that the innovation projects will be able to access the resources they need faster to scale and launch. whilst the cost per innovation project for the innovation departments goes down so that they can kind of spread out and have more shots, know, shoot more bullets, be able to throw more dirt at the wall to hopefully have more stick.

Niklas:So the idea is the startups that are founded within these departments ⁓ use the Ordana model to save costs in the initial development, for example, ⁓

Melker:Yes.

Niklas:And maybe going back very quickly to ZAZ, so I'm not 100 % sure about the outcome yet. What I think is always also worth mentioning is that there's something called Jevons paradox. Most of the time when prices go down for things, the demand actually doesn't decrease but increase. So it's actually...

Melker:Okay. Yeah.

Niklas:So while we agree that software development will get a lot cheaper and has already become a lot cheaper, especially for early prototypes, MVPs, that this has changed a lot. Overall, I'm not certain that the market for this will not grow. To the opposite with cheaper software. I can actually imagine that the use and software will rise, productivity will increase and the overall market will actually increase and not decrease. So I, I've heard a lot about these and it might be that for some companies that changes also revenue numbers, but overall I am on this one. I'm not sure if it's actually true because also if I'm a company. I think I've said it before. It just makes zero sense for me as a company to build something that is not core to my business where I don't understand the processes myself. It's so much better to buy it if be it the accounting program that I use. So, so on that side, I'm not sure if it's core to your business. Yes, I can follow that. Outside of that. We will see how it goes and I might be terribly wrong and this might age badly. I can also see this scenario where we just use more software than today. It becomes cheaper per software, but the volume increases and overall market size increases. think that's also a very valid scenario next to everybody just builds their own stuff, which I'm not sure that that will happen.

Melker:It's very interesting that you mentioned that. don't remember, what was the name of that specific paradox? Because there's two things I wanted to say. What was the name of the paradox? Jevons. Jevons paradox. It's so true that you mentioned that. And it's one of the, if we go back to my fascination of business, one of my favorite.

Niklas:at Jevons. Yes.

Melker:Entrepreneurs, so to speak. My favorite business cases is the one of LVMH where he kind of utilized this specific paradox to become the essentially richest man on the planet, which is Bernard Arnault, where he essentially realized that not only does not only isn't it a direct correlation between demand and supply where in an instance you lower the price, the demand shrinks, but in the Like in the industry of luxury goods the more you increase the price the more demand increases Which basically becomes just a money printing machine, which he has demonstrated to the world quite fascinatingly Regarding what you mentioned about SAS. I absolutely agree with you that the industry as a whole I think will grow because another important point that I want to touch on is essentially what all the software engineers that exist today what will they spend their time on if the time they need to spend on building code decreases when AI takes it over? And this kind of brings us back to what the purpose of a software engineer is in my eyes at least. And the purpose for me of software engineers is finding problems and then applying solutions to them and writing code was their tool to do so. So now even when I have my own developers, I am begging them. with my entire soul and heart to use as much cloud code as possible. I'm like, call me your sugar daddy, I'll pay for it, I'll cover the credits, just go nuts and use it as much as possible. Because this now allows them to spend 90 % of their time, or maybe still a bit less, but let's say 80 % of their time focusing on the problems they need to address, and then what solutions to apply to the problems and not. waste that much time, or I shouldn't say waste, and not spend as much time building the code to get there. So now that we have code and cloud code that essentially lowers the costs across the board of getting software out, what happens in the SaaS market? And I absolutely agree with you. I think it will go up because now these software engineers and even everyday people that can just use Lovable will be able to spend more of their efforts and time and energy finding locating problems and then applying solutions to them. where software now becomes a tool to do so. So the market will absolutely increase. Now the interesting part is like you mentioned, if you have a non-core technology in your operations that you're right now paying for, when does it make sense to build it yourself? And when does it make sense to just use a finished solution of it out there? And that's, think, where the world, the future will kind of show us the right answer. We cannot, I don't think we can do much. more else than just assuming what will happen.

Niklas:Yeah, I mean, can. So I've thought about it a bit and I think it makes sense to build something when your internal processes are lot better than anything you can buy on the market with standard product. Then you've built some, you would now introduce a piece of software that changes your processes, but your internal processes are just better. Then they would obviously get worse. So you can quantify that effect. You can put a number to that, to the inefficiency or quality.

Melker:Yeah. Hmm.

Niklas:And at that point in time, you can make an investment decision and either build it or not build it. And I think that's also the point where people leave the workplace and build a startup to build a software that is better than what exists in the world. In all other cases, and I think a lot of the big software manufacturers build their applications together with the market leader. So when you buy the software, you get the

Melker:Yeah.

Niklas:process of the market leader. And in these cases, if your process is worse than the process of the market leader, you could also once again, quantify that, put numbers to it. But there's, there might be strong case for buying, depending again on the solution. What you don't want is to have somebody ⁓

Melker:Yeah.

Niklas:spend a lot of time that they could spend on something that is core to your business, on something that is not core in the business, figure out a process, build something that works there to save the money of the software costs that from a competitive market that seems not such a great idea. So that is the basic thing. And going back to Javan's paradox, you actually mentioned and very interesting one where resources got cheaper, tokens got cheaper over time. And what you see a lot is in LLM usage, the cheaper it gets to use the models and the cheaper the subscriptions get, the higher the adoption. If you can run eight agents in parallel, you will run eight agents in parallel for the same cost. It's just how fast can it be? How much can I run in parallel? How expensive?

Melker:Yeah.

Niklas:And this is, I think, a very interesting example where we can have a live view on this paradox in reality.

Melker:Absolutely. And I think that the most, the more interesting part of the question where my mind is drifting towards right now, regarding the aspect of again, when to build your own version of an internal software, when to just buy it. I'm wondering how much the cost of transferring the data. ⁓ is applied to this. So for example, let's use ClickUp. I've had actually multiple people, multiple businesses come to me and say, we right now only use ClickUp. We have everything on ClickUp, but we only use like 20 % of the features and we have some things that we want to do that are critical to our processes, but we can't have them on ClickUp. So we want to build our own thing. But then how do we now migrate all that data over? And now I... I'm waiting almost for the market and for some smart entrepreneur to come out there and come up with some really cool solution to use AI to kind of migrate data over from one, let's call it operating system to another or whatever it might be, migrating data over. Because I think once that barrier also decreases and reaches close to zero, we will see another bump in transitioning. from one to the other. So I think it will be, very interesting times for living.

Niklas:Yeah, this is really interesting. And I agree that the more solutions that you have, the more it gets attractive to decrease this friction in the market to offer these services. If you look at ⁓ Audana again, I think you also build software, you also sell. How do you spend your time and what do you feel is more important currently?

Melker:When you say most important, what do you mean specifically? how I allocate the hours of my day or my efforts?

Niklas:Yeah, what you prioritize.

Melker:I'm quite good at spending every hour of my day, believe it or not. I live out every single one of them to start off with. And a lot of them are allocated towards work, which I think is fortunate, but I'm running essentially two businesses simultaneously in parallel, which doesn't allow, doesn't leave many hours left for sleep and anything else to do. So my priorities have shifted now slightly. I was reflecting over this just a few weeks ago that if we would have had this chat, for example, eight months ago, most of my time would be put into essentially getting the wheel spinning on both businesses, drawing up that momentum, making sure that we get the first clients, we get the first product market fits, we get the first launches going. And then we were a much smaller team. We were much smaller people. It was me and a few people helping me out. Now, It's a total of eight people that are managing across both companies. this is very recent. All pretty much are new people. So now the way I spend my time is actually more in maintenance and management mode and maintaining the momentum and thinking, how can we now make this bigger? How can we now... get this to scale more? How do we now strategically position ourselves to not only get something working but become the best at something? ⁓ And that applies to both companies.

Niklas:A very interesting and I think a classical shift that startup CEOs go through. You have talked about decision fatigue as well. How did that change over time?

Melker:decision fatigue. I've used basically to-do lists for my entire working career, so to speak, because I know my strengths and I know some of my weaknesses, but I do know that one of them is my memory. I have the memory of an absolute goldfish. I can't even remember what I just had for lunch. So I just knew that whenever I do come up with an idea and come up with something I need to work on, it's just to write down in a to-do list quite quickly. The problem I started to realize lately was that I had two problems stopping like hindering my productivity quite tremendously and one of them was decision fatigue I had so many tasks written down on my to-do list that I had to spend so much time and mental energy figuring out what to do next that it was draining and then the second one was even when I did have all the tasks I was so focused off ticking them off instead of wondering which one actually moves the needle So I was working a bunch of hours, still keeping the same 13-14 hour work days, but it felt like nothing really happened. I was tired at the end of the day, I worked a lot, and then someone asked me, what did you do? And it felt like I didn't have a clear answer to it. So then I realized that maybe I should use the fact that I have a memory of a goldfish to my benefit and kind of use that as my filter to figure out if something is important enough to work on or not. So basically, if I don't open my tasks, if I don't open my click up, if I don't open my to-do lists, what are the things I remember I have to do? And then those are kind of now the things I focus on first. And only when I've completed the stuff I remember doing, I can open my to-do list and make sure I don't catch anything else important that I've forgotten. So that's basically, use my own horrible memory as my filter to decide now what to work on and it's working quite well.

Niklas:I think everybody has to find their way that works. think that people are also different. For people starting out, aspiring builders that are now starting, what should they avoid and what should they definitely do?

Melker:I think decision fatigue is fantastic there that we just talked about it and it summarizes it quite well. I usually live by the rule that there's no such thing as wasted efforts. And it bothers me when I essentially hear people giving me reasons not to do stuff because they think their efforts will be wasted. It bothers me tremendously. And I'm a Gen Z-er. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm quite young. So I have a bunch of friends that are also young and they're right now actually starting out in their career. We're talking a lot and they I am the go-to guy that they call whenever they want to have career advice and decide what they want to do and we talk and we talk and we talk and they talk and they talk and they talk about everything they want to do and wish they've done and Don't know what to do and they want to have the security but they want to be rich and they want to be successful how do they know which path is the best way to walk and My answer usually to most of it is try everything You had five paths, go and try everything. If you're that clueless, try all of them and you'll figure out the rest as you go along. And then they go, ⁓ but I don't want to waste my time. What would you use it for anyways? Playing CSGO? Fortnite? Watching Netflix? Like what else are you doing with your time? So I want to reframe everyone's thinking. If they're stuck, remember that there's no such thing as wasted efforts, but you can absolutely waste your time. And you know when you're wasting your time. That's why you're asking yourself, how can I stop wasting your time? Sorry, wasting my time. But you're still asking, how do I make sure to not waste my efforts? And I find that very fascinating that people get stuck in that loop. So to basically summarize it, what to think about. You know that starting a business will be hard because no one has ever said it was easy. You can assume that it will be hard. And... However hard you think it is, before you've tried it, you realize that even if you imagine the hardest possible outcome, it's even harder than that. So the only way to prepare yourself mentally is to walk into business with a mindset of, have to do so many reps, I have to do so much volume, I have to do so many hours of work that it becomes unreasonable to not see any success. I still hear people say to ⁓ I sent out 50 emails and I didn't get a response. For my agency to get our first client, we needed to send out 1,500 emails. And they go, ⁓ my God, but isn't that like a waste of efforts? They basically revert back to it. Wasn't that a waste of efforts? It's like, it actually isn't because you know what? I learned so much about what not to do. I learned so much about what doesn't work. So just go in with the mindset of you cannot waste your efforts. If you work an hour, that's an hour worth and you'll keep that hour in your hour bank forever until you die. and you just have to do so much volume that it becomes unreasonable for you to fail. It's kind of like Ramosi says, Alex Ramosi is fantastic at this. Like he's one of the best people out there online talking about this. And that's just, you have to reframe your mindset. Yeah. I think, I think that's to not get me stuck rambling. I guess I'll cut it off there.

Niklas:Nah, I agree. I think ever tried, ever failed, no matter. Try again, fail again, fail better, sums it up really nicely. Malka, thank you so much for being on this episode ⁓ with me. It was a pleasure having you.

Melker:Thank you so much.