S1E15: How Learning to Code Can Help You Build Your Startup With Karin Nielsen

Laurence:
Hey, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I'm your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's final episode of Season 1, I have a special guest, Karin Nielsen. Karin is the former founder and CEO of the startup Fluently. Before starting Fluently, Karin attended Makers Academy, which is a coding bootcamp in London. She then later went through the Entrepreneur First, or EF program. EF is Europe's leading pre seed investment program for technical founders. Inside this episode, Karin shares why she learned how to code, how it helped her start her startup, and so much more.

Quick note before diving into the show: Fluently has since closed up shop. However, the conversation we had was so great, I still wanted to publish it. Just please keep this in mind as you listen.
As always, the shownotes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can found at learntocodewith.me/15. Enjoy the interview and make sure to stick around to the very end of the show, because I have a special announcement about Season 2 and a few other things. Enjoy!

Hey guys, I'm here today with Karin Nielsen. Karin, thanks so much for sitting down with me.

Karin:
No worries, Laurence, it's a pleasure.

Laurence:
So I would like if you could introduce yourself quickly to the audience.

Karin:
Sure, so I'm Karin Nielsen. I'm a German living in London and I'm the co-founder and CEO of a translation marketplace startup called Fluently.

Laurence:
Awesome. I connected with you first because I was writing an article about coding bootcamps and I spoke to you about your experience at Makers Academy.

Karin:
Yeah.

Laurence:
So, when did you go there again?

Karin:
I was there for a duration of 3 months and it ran from September to December, 2014.

Laurence:
2014, okay. Is that over 2 years ago or almost 2 years ago.

Karin:
It's about 18 months ago.

Laurence:
Got it, cool. What were you doing before that? What made you decide to go to Makers Academy?

Karin:
Okay, it's kind of a strange story, really. I spent the 11 years leading up to my joining Makers, in quite a successful career in the localization industry. For those people who've never heard of that before, it's basically helping companies to translate huge amounts of content into foreign languages. I've done all kinds of executive roles in that space, mainly in sales, selling both professional services and sort of enterprise technical solutions to customers ranging from software companies to e-commerce and even manufacturing and financial services.

I guess I had a great career, great salary, great lifestyle, but I eventually quit my job, literally sold everything I had and moved to London to build my startup, much to the surprise of my friends and family, as you can probably imagine.

Laurence:
Oh wow, so what year was that in, when you moved?

Karin:
I literally moved to London like 3 days before I started at Makers, so it was all pretty hasty. I think I had about 2 weeks between quitting my job and actually starting the program, so it was all pretty hectic, to pretty much sell up my household and put everything in boxes and move.

Laurence:
Geez, wow. Well you know what? Sometimes you just got to do that. You just have to move quickly or else you're just not going to do it at all, you know what I mean?

Karin:
You snooze, you lose.

Laurence:
Yeah, exactly. So what did Makers Academy teach again? What technologies, or what frameworks and so on?

Karin:
Makers Academy is a web development boot camp. So really what they set out to teach is to take complete amateurs like me, so mainly career changers. A very small number of people on my cohort had done a little bit of coding before in their spare time or maybe they did some marketing and had some exposure to like HTML in some aspect of their job but most people are complete noobs.

So what Makers Academy set out to do is to help those people pretty much switch their career track entirely. I had investment bankers on my cohort, full time stay at home moms, all kinds of people who decided they either wanted a new, more challenging lifestyle, and they were really into tech and excited by all the possibilities that coding has to offer, or they wanted more flexibility. Obviously one of the great things about coding is that you can do it from anywhere as long as you've got a WiFi connection.

Laurence:
Yeah, definitely. Okay, so you were doing localization, you were living in Germany, you had a good job, everything was going well, you decide kind of spur of the moment to move to London and attend Makers Academy. I guess I'm just really curious, what made you want to learn how to code?

Karin:
Yeah, it's a great question. I guess, to start at the very beginning, from childhood I've always been super interested in computers and tech. I guess you could say I've always been a bit of a tomboy so where most of girlfriends would play with Barbies and sort of fancy dress and makeup, I was on computer games or building remote control cars or later, I'm giving my age away a little bit here now, when we finally got a proper computer that was connected to the internet, I pretty much spent all my time on that. I've always had this interest in technology and I guess always regretted that there weren't so many possibilities to learn to actually build tech when I was a kid. When I was at school, it just wasn't a subject that was taught. That was coupled with the fact that I guess I kind of saw the writing on the wall for the business model that I'd been working in. In a translation agency, you effectively have a bunch of human beings doing lots of very manual tasks. I guess I'd begun to see that this was not a very future-proof way of providing this type of service to big companies.

I had an idea for a disruptive business model, but no idea where to start in terms of actually turning that vision into reality. That's why I figured I should probably learn to code. I guess I started by getting myself heavily networked into the startup community. I did a program called Lean Startup Machine, which is all about customer development, so validating your business idea with real life people and potential customers of your solution.

One of the judges on that weekend boot camp was Evgeny, who's the CEO at Makers. We had a chat, I actually ended up winning that weekend and he basically convinced me pretty hard that I should probably come to Makers and actually do the stuff for real.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow, that's really cool, and congratulations on winning that. It was some kind of competition in person, it sounds like?

Karin:
Yeah, so basically you break into teams, you pitch a different idea, people come and join your team and then the competition's all around how much validation you can get around your idea. It's kind of quite growth hacky, going out and actually seeing people, showing them mock-ups of your product and then also trying to get traction through social media and stuff like that.

Laurence:
That's so interesting. It's kind of like a hackathon, but you're not actually building an app, you're just kind of trying to, as you say, get customers to use it.

Karin:
You're basically hacking customer validation, it's exactly that. It's a growth hackathon.

Laurence:
That's cool. Alright, so then you went to Makers and you were there for 3 months, correct?

Karin:
Yeah, 3 months, day and night, 7 days a week.

Laurence:
So, while you were there, were you already starting your startup?

Karin:
Yeah, I was a little bit different to the majority of people on Makers, although I know of lots of people actually who've ended up coming out of Makers and are now doing their own startup, whether that's their own web development agency or whether they've actually gone and done something a little bigger, like what I ended up doing. I guess I was one of the few people that actually came into Makers knowing that I didn't want a career as a developer, I only wanted to learn to code so that I could basically go out and build my company.

Laurence:
Yeah.

Karin:
I already had a pretty good idea of the kind of product I wanted to build, but no idea what stack we should be using for that or really what the user experience would be like. I went to Makers not only to learn how to, strictly speaking, write lines of code, but also to get a much better understanding about how that whole development process works, right? Like what do you do before you even sit down and write your first line of code and how do you make sure that what you're building is something that a customer's going to enjoy interacting with?

Laurence:
Yeah, so what I'd love to know, and I'm sure the audience would as well, is how your experience at Makers, or I guess for someone even, just more generally, coding bootcamp, how that impacted where your startup is today. Did you leave then did you build the project yourself, or did it help you make better hiring decisions? I don't know, if you could speak a bit about that.

Karin:
Yes. So, I guess all of those things. Doing Makers kind of set off this sequence of events that I didn't really foresee. Initially my plan was that I would go and do this bootcamp and that I would then be able to hopefully have acquired enough skills by the end of it to build a working prototype of my product so that I could get more validation around the business model and I could use that as traction to also find a CTO co-founder. I never really saw myself as the CTO in our company. Also, what I wanted to build I already knew was technically a lot more ambitious than just building a website. I never really had that ambition of being the CTO but I wanted to be able to at least build a working, clickable prototype.

In actual fact what happened was that I obviously completed the program and I did indeed on day one kind of start thinking about and planning what the app was going to look like. I did write a few lines of code, but I then got headhunted by a deep tech incubator called Entrepreneur First. For the American listeners in your audience, it's very similar to Y Combinator, they're the best deep tech incubator in Europe and they saw me looking for a co-founder, a technical co-founder on a social network, like a startup network here in London and they approached me and said, "Hey, why don't you apply and maybe you can meet your co-founder and build your startup on our incubator?"

So this was something that was completely unexpected and out of my original scope. I didn't even know this things existed. I applied, and it was a really, really rigorous testing process and then eventually got in. Had to start that a few weeks later and eventually met my co-founder on that program as well. I guess what I initially envisioned and planned didn't quite come off but I ended up with a way better result in the end.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's great. Are you still in Entrepreneur First right now or did that wrap up?

Karin:
That wrapped up. Our demo day was in September 2015 and we subsequently raised some money and now we're obviously in the process of building out the product. That's a 6 month program and I don't believe I would have A, got onto the program in the first place. I think I was in only 2% or less of accepted applicants who are non-tech. Everybody else comes from sort of top tier universities like Imperial College, Cambridge, from all over the world as kind of a deep tech expert in artificial intelligence, or machine learning, or whatever their expertise is.

I do not believe I would have ever been accepted onto that program if it weren't for the fact that I'd done some web development and kind of at least understood the principles of development and how to speak and communicate with deeply technical people.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so cool. So when and how and where did you then meet your co-founder? Because you said it was during Entrepreneur First, right?

Karin:
Right. The main difference between Entrepreneur First and Y Combinator is that to get onto YC you pretty much, most of the time, have to already have an idea, ideally some kind of prototype or product and you need to be able to code, right? With Entrepreneur First, they're actually unique in the sense that they take really smart people but pre-idea and pre-team. So the idea is they have this hypothesis that if you combine people with industry expertise or deep technical knowledge of a specific application of some niche technology, that they will come together and you can spawn a company that way. I came in as a domain expert and my co-founder was a computer scientist from Imperial, so he'd done a bunch of really, really deep tech stuff, as well as some relevant internships at Mozilla for example.

Laurence:
Okay, cool. So right now you're in the phase of building the product out. Is it just you too or have you hired anyone else since?

Karin:
We did hire, actually one of my co-founders friends, who's a front end developer, also from Imperial. We don't have all the skills that we need in our core team and that's sort of obviously why we're fundraising as well. We do have paying customers, very happy paying customers, I think, as well. The journey only really starts in earnest here.

Laurence:
Yeah, again, you said you just finished in September 2015, so it hasn't really been very much time since then.

Karin:
No.

Laurence:
Wow. So you went from Makers Academy, and then you went to Entrepreneur First. There was only a few weeks between each?

Karin:
Yeah, exactly. I literally went home for Christmas. I couldn't afford to stay in London because obviously I wasn't earning anything at this point. I paid quite a lot to do Makers, I subsidized my living with savings, so I actually had to go and live with my mom for the first time in a very, very long time, for like a couple of weeks. Then I got the call from EF to say that I'd been accepted, so I had to move straight back down to London again. So yeah, we're literally talking like 3 or 4 weeks gap in between. It all moved very, very quickly. It was a really exciting time.

Laurence:
Yeah and I never heard of, or I did hear of Entrepreneur First because looking at your LinkedIn, but I didn't realize it was essentially very similar to Y Combinator, it was an incubator. That's really cool.
Okay, so I'm super curious about this because, you're running this company now and you have technical people on your team, so I imagine that you're not really coding day in and out. You're doing more of like the higher level stuff, am I right?

Karin:
Yeah, absolutely. I definitely haven't touched on code base for a really long time, pretty much since we first started out. I did a little bit of front end stuff but very quickly, obviously, I had to focus on other things, such as sales, all the finance stuff, customer acquisition, dealing with investors, finding investors, all that kind of stuff. I've started more into a product development role, or a product manager role where I'm working with the guys to write user stories and stuff like that. I don't actually write any of the code day to day. They're much more qualified to do that than I am. Suffice to say, I wouldn't be able to do that if I didn't have some understanding of how, what goes into actually building those features, right? The scope, the magnitude of a specific task.

Laurence:
Yeah, I listened to podcasts pretty often and I feel like I've heard in several interviews of people who are technical or maybe they're even computer science, they were in computer science, they were software engineers and they decide to start their own company. For a lot of them it's kind of like, maybe it's like bittersweet, because they have all this other stuff they have to do where they can't really pay attention to the code and the software development, but a lot of them still maybe want to or they kind of miss that.

I think that's something that people who want to start their own companies definitely need to consider. If they really love the technical stuff, if you're starting your own company, there's other stuff you have to do besides that and you may not even really be coding any more.

Karin:
Yeah. And it's a very, very different skillset. My background is running companies and selling stuff to big companies. I very naturally fit into the CEO role, that's not to say I know what I'm doing half the time. Honestly I don't. I don't think any new startup CEO does. It's a very, very steep learning curve. I guess as well as all the admin, all the annoying stuff, I do still get to get involved with product. More importantly, I get to speak to customers and users of the product and it's really my job now to translate what the user wants into something that the development team can go away and build, right? I guess I'm the bridge between the user and the technical team.

Laurence:
Yeah, I really like that. You're kind of the bridge between the user and the dev team. Because you have technical know-how, it's a lot easier for you to explain those concepts in a way that the dev team can understand. And you also understand the limitations and what not.

Karin:
That's right.

Laurence:
I can definitely relate. As I've been building my site and trying to grow in different ways, I definitely do a lot less coding now than I did when I first started the site. It's night and day, just because there's other things that you have to start to pay attention to beyond that.

Karin:
Yeah and you know what, one of the most important lessons as an entrepreneur that you need to learn really, really fast if you want to survive is that you really need to understand where your strengths and weaknesses are. You should focus at doing the stuff that you're good at. Clearly, as great as the Makers experience was, there's no way you can be as awesome a technical talent as somebody's who's spent years doing a computer science degree and who's built lots of products and worked on lots of exciting projects before.

If I was to work on our code base, it would really be an indulgence of my personal interest rather than what's best for the company. What's best for the company is me spending time on the business side of things and obviously trying to get into the heads of our customers so we can build awesome tools for them to use day in and day out.

Laurence:
Yeah, I absolutely, I've been nodding my head the whole time you've been saying that because I absolutely agree. I used to struggle from this, I used to do this myself, making these guides for my website, for instance. I would spend so much time learning certain tools to make them look good and meanwhile, I could hire a freelancer to help me do it and it would take them 1/10th the time, it would look 10 times better, so it's like, even though I would be paying them, it's kind of like this thing of your time vs. money and really allowing people who are better at things than you to get the job done. I love how you said that, you said something about your own self-indulgence, I totally agree. I totally feel the same way. Sometimes it's just better to have someone else who knows more just do it.

Karin:
Right, but that's not to say that I don't still do a bit of coding. I just do it in my spare time. We develop everything in MEAN stack so I'm trying to get my head around that in my own time, but it's not something I do day in and day out.

Laurence:
Yeah. You mentioned knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Is there anything else, any other traits or skills that would come in handy for a startup CEO?

Karin:
Yes. You sent me this as a prep question and I made a couple of notes on it. Honestly, I don't even know where to start. I'm still learning a lot about this on the fly myself obviously. I guess the first thing is that you need to be a visionary person. You need to be able to see into the future and you need to be able to persuade others why your vision is credible and why your vision is indeed the way that the future's going to unravel. It's no good kind of building something that already exists. You've got to be able to look way into the future and kind of imagine how the future might look and how your company and what you're building fits in with that. So being quite future oriented and visionary is super important.

I think the second most important thing is having a growth mindset. For those people who don't know what that means, it's kind of startup jargon, these days. Having a growth mindset means that you never believe that you are the way you are and that those are your limitations. You kind of have to accept that every day you're going to be confronted by a bunch of things that you've never heard of before, that you probably are a bit intimidated by. You have no idea how to do them, but having and adopting a growth mindset just means that you accept that as being something that every entrepreneur goes through and that you are open enough to go away and absorb that knowledge, right? And that you have the confidence in yourself that you can acquire that knowledge. I spend so much time reading, because you can never know enough. Every day I hear new words, especially when I'm talking to investors. Things come up all the time that I really don't have a clue what they mean or what that means to our company. Having a growth mindset is a must. You have to believe in your ability to learn new things.

I think you also have to be super disciplined. Having a social life and having a startup, particularly in the really early days, don't really go hand in hand. Invariably, that means that you might lose some relationships along the way. Not everybody's going to be understanding of your drive to do this one thing that to the outside world doesn't really seem that important. I guess people who do regular jobs often don't really understand what it takes to go away and start something from scratch and the kind of responsibility that goes with that. Being disciplined and being able to say no and kind of being cool in yourself with that as well, that's super important.

More on the product side of things, it's really, really important to have empathy with your users. You have to be able to put yourself into somebody else's shoes, ideally the person who's going to be paying money for your product. You have to be able to see what they see and feel what they feel and then translate that into a passion for building a really great product and user experience for them. I guess one of the things that, commonly, a lot of technical founders get wrong, because they're not necessarily comfortable in speaking to potential customers, is that they kind of build what they think's cool and it might be technically awesome, but the reality is that your customers don't care about the technology. In fact, they're probably not even, nowadays, thinking about its technology. They just want to get from A to B and it has to solve a problem for them. I can't emphasize enough how important talking to customers is and really getting into their head and understanding where the pain points are.

I guess a final point is that it's very easy to think of entrepreneurship, especially if you read Tech Crunch a lot and you hear about all these big exits and people raising massive rounds, it's really easy to think of entrepreneurship as a cash cow and as a way of becoming rich and being able to live this amazing lifestyle. The reality is that A, given that most startups fail, that very rarely happens to most of us. And B, you really need to be much more long term focused than that. Unless you really care about changing the world or making a difference to a certain user group and doing something that really matters, you're probably not going to be motivated enough to do it for the long run. The delayed gratification of getting that pay off if everything does go well, you're looking at like a 10 year stretch, in most cases.

Of course, there are the What'sApp stories and some people get really lucky and they sell to a big company when they're still very young. The reality for most startups is that you actually have a very long journey before the founders can take out any real monetary benefit from the company. You need to find something beyond cash that makes the early starts, the super late nights, the not going to your friends party, you know all of those things have to be worthwhile. You have to really care about the problem that you're solving.

Laurence:
Yeah, awesome, thank you so much. You just shared so much valuable information. I totally, I learned so much so thank you. Okay, so final question. If a person doesn't have any startup experience whatsoever, but they really want to start their own, what is one thing they could do today to take a step in the right direction?

Karin:
Stop reading books and take action. This is a trap that so many people fall into, and I was guilty of this myself initially as well. I was procrastinating about actually doing something because, I think especially if you've got something to lose. If you've already got a nice house, you've got a great salary, you can buy nice clothes, have great holidays, it becomes very easy to get into this mindset of, 'how will I be able to live without my 52" TV? How will I be able to live without my car? How will I be able to live in a new place without my friends around me?'

I guess the number one thing you need to do is really decide if you're an entrepreneurial person, because it's not for everyone. If it was for everyone we'd all be running our own businesses and there's no shame in not being an entrepreneur. We need a bit of everybody in the world to make it work. A lot of people do kind of delude themselves and they spend forever researching and reading stuff and they kind of become 'wantapreneurs.' So they go to all the startup events but they never take action.

I guess the best advice is try and find an entrepreneur that's in your network. Most of us know them. They could be the owner of the company you work at. They could be your parents or another family member. They might be your friends. They could even be people who run a local business that you literally just walk into their store and ask them, "Hey, what's it really like running your own business?" I think you need to understand that before you can decide whether it's something that is right for you. Because you do have to be prepared to make a lot of sacrifices. And you need to get the buy in of your family. I'm lucky because I don't have responsibilities like children or anything like that, but clearly, if you're married and you have other commitments, then it's really important that you've got the support of your life partner as well, because you're going to need them to really back you through the tough times that you'll undoubtedly encounter.

The other thing is around idea generation, I guess. There's no point thinking, "I just want to be an entrepreneur and I'm going to build another dating app." You have to really either have an affinity with a problem, maybe you've experienced something in your life and it's really frustrating and it's something that frustrates other people as well. Or you know, maybe a secret problem in your industry to do with a job you do now that maybe not everybody else could come up with or even know that that problem exists. Actually figuring out what to work on is the first thing you need to do. Without that, obviously you can't build a company.

Aside from that, you need to decide what kind of company you want to build. If you want to build a tech company, then very much in theme with your podcast, you really should learn something about tech and coding. I think it would be incredibly difficult to do it if you didn't know anything at all. It doesn't mean you have to go away and get a computer science degree, you don't even need to be the world's best coder, but you do
need to know some stuff.

I think it’s a really good place to start before you kind of go in head first and spend the family savings on going to a bootcamp. Most of them aren't cheap because obviously they're doing a very valuable thing to teach you and it's an expensive service to provide. My best advice on that would be, go to Codecademy, go to Treehouse or any of these great online resources that are by and large free or have an affordable subscription fee, and actually see if it's something that you enjoy. Coding and debugging software isn't for everybody. I think definitely before you spend a lot of money on a bootcamp, you need to kind of figure out first if it's something that you enjoy. If you do find that and you do have that great idea that you're passionate about and you want to go away and build it, then definitely I would recommend doing some kind of coding bootcamp. The pace of learning and the support network that you get with other students are all going through that same experience, is really unrivaled. You just can't get that same experience from being alone at home in your bedroom and struggling for hours with those really tedious problems that you come across.

Laurence:
Okay, awesome. Thank you so much!

Karin:
Thank you Laurence, it's been a pleasure.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/15. As I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, this is the last show of Season 1. As I record this outro, I am spending my last few days in Boston. By the time this goes live and you're listening to it, I will be living in New York City and working at a brand new job at Teachable. I absolutely love Boston, where I live now, and everything I've been doing these last few years since I've been teaching myself how to code. But, it's time for a change of pace and I'm looking forward to a new challenge.

These big life changes will naturally impact the Learn to Code With Me blog and podcast. The main result being, a slower production schedule. Meaning, I'll be producing less content. Nonetheless, I keep hearing amazing feedback about the podcast from both new and existing Learn to Code With Me audience members, and I want to do a Season 2. In fact, I've already begun planning it and I'll be releasing a special announcement about Season 2 soon.

However, in the meantime, what you can do to help me is keep the support coming. Keep sharing episodes on social media. Keep sending me kind email messages. Keep telling your friends to listen to the show. And continue leaving ratings and reviews on iTunes. This kind of positive feedback and reinforcement is super helpful. It shows me that people enjoy the show and want to hear more. Thanks so much for tuning in. I really appreciate you. I hope you've been having an amazing summer. Keep an eye out, or should I say, ear out, for an announcement about Season 2.