IAM1190- CEO Runs a Global Messaging Platform

Lauri is a salesman at heart and is currently the CEO and founder of Messente – a global messaging platform used in millions of micro-business transactions every day in Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Contrary to a typical tech startup, Lauri and his co-founders bootstrapped the company from day one and have taken it to close to 10mEUR annual revenue without ever raising any outside investments.

• CEO Hack: (i) Regularly scheduling time for thinking (ii) Not scheduling things more than one week ahead
• CEO Nugget: Don't be concerned about imposter syndrome, it's an ever-present feeling
• CEO Defined: Bringing clarity and faith

Website: http://messente.com/

LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurikinkar/detail/recent-activity/posts/

My last actual live stage talk (pre-covid :)) at Startup Day Estonia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC1gm4NdSOE
https://www.startupday.ee/news/lauri-kinkar-key-principles-for-effective-sales

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Transcription

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00:23 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:51 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Lauri Kinkar of Masinte. Lauri, it's great to have you on the show.

00:59 – Lauri Kinkar

Yeah, great to be here, Thanks.

01:02 – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on. Before we jump to today's interview, I want to read a little bit more about Lori so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Lori is a salesman at heart and is currently the CEO and founder of Mesinte, a global messaging platform using millions of micro-business transactions every day in Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

Contrary to a typical tech startup, Lori and his co-founders bootstrapped the company from day one and have taken it to close to 10 million euros in annual revenue without ever raising any outside investments. Lori's super excited to have you on the show here about all the awesome things you're doing and building. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:34 – Lauri Kinkar

Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it.

01:36 – Gresham Harkless

Let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on it a little bit. I wanted to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:45 – Lauri Kinkar

Well, I think that takes me back to the year 2001. I went to the university in Estonia where Mesenta is based. During my first year, I met a guy who had just founded a company providing telecom services, mobile payments, and this kind of stuff. This was way before smartphones. So super innovative back at that time. So he persuaded me to join them and I became their first salesperson.

I didn't really know the first thing about sales back then. We both studied public administration at the university, which means that we were destined to become public officials, basically government officials. But I read a couple of books and kind of got going. As it were, I did well. This was one of the factors that enabled the company to take off as well. I had no family back then, obviously, being a college student, and this kind of enabled me to work at a pretty fast pace. Back then, everybody at the company did.

Especially, I remember being in Maastricht in the Netherlands as an exchange student at some point, which was pretty much supposed to be a five-month-long party. I ended up spending that, doing lectures and seminars during the daytime and then sales work for that company in the evenings over Skype and email back then. So I kind of kept selling, became a partner pretty early on, and then managed their sales teams across 2 or 3 countries. Then when the company turned into a group consisting of, I think, 7 to 8 tech companies, they started investing in Estonian startups.

I also occasionally consulted a few other associated companies in the group, everything about sales. At some point, we used different messaging APIs and SMS messaging software, but they were never transparent enough and kind of lacking in the service side of things. So we felt that there was a gap in messaging, which we could fill and do better than the companies we worked with. So this became a challenge that I sort of took up. I was joined by 2 great co-founders who are still my co-adventurers today and 2 people that I work the closest with every day. We kind of got going. Mesenta has been growing month over month ever since, and this is about for 7 years now. So this is sort of my story till here in a nutshell.

04:43 – Gresham Harkless

Could you take us through, I know you touched on it a little bit, take us through a little bit more on how Mascent works and how you serve the clients that you work with?

04:49 – Lauri Kinkar

Well, basically, Mascent is an SMS messaging platform. So it's software that connects your service to all the mobile networks in the world directly or indirectly so that you can send SMS to any phone in the world. So basically, it is a building block or sort of like a Lego block for building digital services. If your digital service needs to be able to deliver business-critical reminder notifications or alerts.

You don't need to figure out how to do it yourself or build it from scratch. You integrate us and we take the complexity out of it. As I mentioned, the telecom landscape in the world or internationally can be quite tricky technologically, legally, and in other ways. So we want to be, we want to create transparency for our clients in this sort of complex landscape.

So we translate all this complexity into one simple API that everybody can use. Just to give you an example there, what kind of messages that we dealing with or what are we delivering? You know, Your bank might send you an SMS when someone transfers your money, or your airline sends you an SMS when your flight is delayed, or a courier might send you a heads up when he arrives, this kind of stuff.

06:13 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, absolutely love that. So what would you consider to be what I like to call your secret sauce? This could be for the business itself or you yourself as an individual. What do you feel kind of sets you apart or makes you unique?

06:26 – Lauri Kinkar

The reason we started Mesenta was not that there were no similar tools out there. It was the lack of transparency and the lack of reliability that we found. Companies that were providing similar tools were black boxes. You had very little idea of whether your messages got delivered or not. If not, then what happened to them? We set out to change that. The attempt to provide this full transparency and also great customer service is something that we're still 100% committed to.

If there's a secret sauce to what we do, then that is probably it. There's one thing that I'm super proud of actually, that now 7 years later, Mesentes first customer who trusted us enough to basically pay what we do, right? They're still with us. By no means are they a small account. So that to me is sort of illustrative that we might have gotten a few things right.

07:25 – Gresham Harkless

Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

07:40 – Lauri Kinkar

Especially in the last few years, I've been very mindful about how I plan my time and how I manage my schedule. I have a few principles that I use and at least me, they have served me well. The first is I regularly schedule time for thinking. That sounds a little bit basic, but I find that if you're in a position, if you're in a managerial position, or if you're a CEO of the company, then there's a lot that you put into your schedule and you'll very soon find yourself doing back-to-back calls, back-to-back meetings, and then with sort of no time to digest things and perhaps process some of your ideas.

I very consciously schedule time for that in my calendar. The second thing is that I'm very mindful of when in the day I do my best creative work or when in the day I do my best administrative work. For example, I'm an early bird, I do my best creative stuff in the morning and my brain and my thought process pretty much shut down from 06:00 in the afternoon. Also the two-hour slots after a workout or if I do any sports are great for creativity as well.

So, I'm pretty mindful about which meetings or which calls I schedule where. So I work on my inbox, perhaps in the afternoons, but if I may have to make a decision, then I usually schedule this stuff to a morning slot, because there I feel that I see more combinations perhaps, if you will. Then the third thing that I try to follow and I frequently fail with following this principle as well is I try not to schedule anything more than one week ahead. That is extremely tricky. But the thing about why I try to do that is that I find that you get a lot of things which need your attention.

You'd want to give this attention to all the things that are happening in your company. So you're tempted to book things 234 weeks in advance sometimes because you run out of slots in your calendar. When that time arrives a few weeks later, those things might not be super relevant anymore, or they might not be of the highest priority, but they will change your focus for that day. I believe that you know, the ideal scenario for me is if I get to start each of my week with a more or less empty calendar to be able to say, okay, here's what looks important right now. This is what I'm gonna do.

10:30 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice and by piece something you would tell a client or if you happen to be a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

10:41 – Lauri Kinkar

The first thing has to do with mentality or how you approach the CEO role or, or any managerial role for that matter. I see managerial roles as being support staff for others. This is a reversed hierarchy based on which I try to understand what my role is. There are salespeople out there doing calls, meeting customers, bringing in business. There are customer support people in your company that are talking to clients. There's the tech team who's building the software that I sent their lives on. I think that on a day-to-day basis, the CEO's job or any manager's role is really to eliminate obstacles from the paths of these people and let them do their best work.

So if I had to pick one main thing, perhaps that would be it. A second thing, which is really super simple. So I'm not even sure whether that's worth mentioning, but it kind of, we had a discussion the other day with one of my colleagues. The super simple tip is to say thank you a lot. Why I'm even bringing this up is that I think it's overlooked as a management tool. When I say thank you, I don't just mean saying thanks superficially like we all do a hundred times a day.

I mean expressing genuine gratitude and acknowledging that what you did was really important to the company. We all truly appreciate your contribution. Thank you. I think that this is sometimes overlooked, especially when the schedules are hectic, and especially when there's a lot on your plate. You mentioned the time machine. If I really had to have the chance to visit my younger self, perhaps I might tell him that, you know, don't worry about the imposter syndrome, it's not going to go away. It's an ever it's an ever-present feeling.

12:49 – Gresham Harkless

And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Lori, who has been a CEO means you

12:59 – Lauri Kinkar

I've heard A great quote by someone who went something like this, that the job of a CEO is to make sure there's money in the bank and the right people doing the right jobs. This kind of sounds pretty true. But these days, when I have thought about the role of a CEO, then what I would perhaps add to it is that the CEO needs to bring clarity and faith. What I mean by this is that what I mean by clarity is that life is full of complexities and business is full of complexities.

Bringing clarity for me means being able to distill what's actually important right now and what's just noise, ensuring that the company moves where it needs to move. By saying this, I have to admit that I'm not a big fan of long-term visions. Or, you know, for me, anything beyond 6 months of looking into the future becomes just guesswork, really.

But I mean, you just have to have this reality check. What are we doing here right now, basically? This is what clarity means for me. About bringing faith, for me, faith in this context means simply showing or demonstrating that the thing that we're doing here, firstly, makes sense. Secondly, it's possible to achieve what we're aiming for. So bring clarity and bring faith.

14:34 – Gresham Harkless

Laurie, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do was just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. Of course, how best they can get a hold of you, find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

14:49 – Lauri Kinkar

Yeah, Mesenta is growing. We're hoping that our footprint in the messaging industry is getting bigger and bigger and that more and more companies will trust our building block to build awesome digital services themselves using it. Obviously, technology allows us to do so much more than we're doing right now software-wise. During the next year, we are adding a lot of machine learning-based features to our platform to have the platform make decisions, the more simple decisions that currently are made by people.

So I'm super excited for what's ahead. For Mesenta, you can always find me on LinkedIn. I quit Twitter a while ago, so I'm not really super active in social media channels, but LinkedIn and email. My email can be found on Missenta's homepage, missenta.com. So feel free to ping me and have a chat.

15:56 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we truly appreciate that. We will have the links and information, the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you. But I love hearing about all the awesome things that you're working on, looking forward to having you back on here, the progression, and all the things that you, you, and your team have been working on.

But I think we sometimes forget that there was once a time, the things that we're experiencing from a technological standpoint, were once just somebody's ideas. So really getting an opportunity to think about all the things that we'll see as innovations and the things that your team is working on is really exciting. So thank you so much for reminding us of that and doing that as well. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of

16:29 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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