Hi everyone, my name is Patrick Akeel and joining me today is
Maximiliano Neostat, CTO and Co founder of Polar Steps.
If you haven't heard about it and if you're a traveller,
download Polar Steps. It has over 50 million users,
more than a billion images and it's really cool to track your
itinerary for today. We talk about how it originated
from an idea to the scale that it is now, how they do business
and much, much more. So enjoy.
A couple of decades ago, one of the founders, we are 4/4 Co
founders, one of them Nick, he, he's a fanatic traveller, quite
an adventurous traveller. And one time he was crossing the
Atlantic on a sailboat. And then he wanted his friends
and family to be able to follow him and know where he was when
he was in the middle of the ocean.
And this was before social media, before smartphone, so
there were only websites where you could see stuff, you know,
on websites. And he, he brought a satellite
phone and AGPS device on his sailboat.
He would get the calling from the GPS device and through the
satellite phone, send a message to a several he set up here in
the Netherlands. And then through some web app
that he built, his location would be plotted on the map live
so people were able to see where he was in the middle of the
ocean at any point in time. This was 2005 or something like
that. Incredible.
So yeah. And that's, you know, when dad
was out there, all of his friends and family were really
excited about that. It even became like kind of a
bio thing within their small town in the in the east of the
Netherlands. And you know, after that
success, then he he always had it in the back of his head to
maybe do something, build the product out of this prototype
that he built for himself. Yeah, many many years later
things came together and him together with me, Kun and Jo who
are the two our Co founders, we got together and started
building this for for everyone, for every traveller that wants
to use it. That's amazing.
He came to you and the other guys and then what did you do?
Did you make this kind of into a side hustle on top of your
regular job or did you all decide that we're going to do
this full time or? Yeah, so he so he he was working
already with job. They had a concepting company
and Kun one of their Co founders also knew Job and so they they
knew each other all three of them from a long time ago.
And I knew Kun through the the work at hives.
And yeah, at that moment we things came together.
It's like different circumstances that that came
together. The details are not really
relevant for this conversation. And we said, yeah, let's try to
build this. And we started as a side hustle
building it, you know, first on, you know, off work hours and
then just working less in our normal jobs and then spending
more time with polar steps. And then eventually we got our
first small investment and that allowed us to really spend more
and more time with it. And eventually we we went to
full time dedicated to building the product and then we went
live in March 2015 and that's when everything started
basically. Nice.
When you went live, was it still the four of you?
So I'm assuming all of you kind of full time making this into a
main thing. You hadn't hired anyone yet
before going live yet. So we we did hire someone, a
front end engineer, to help me build the tech side of things.
The other three founders are more product and design and
creative. So yeah, Paco was with me.
I was building the back end and the iOS app and he was building
the front end and he's still with us.
He's our lead front end engineer.
That's really cool that he's still there.
Yeah. It's been like 25/20/15 as a
release and kind of 2005 as an idea and a concept.
That is incredible. Yeah.
How is it for you then building
this thing and being responsible for the thing kind of on your
own for a long time before that other person came in?
Yeah, yeah. It was of course a lot of fun
because the thing that also gave us a lot of energy and and push
to drive things forward was that we are all four of us that Co
founders really fanatic travellers.
We love travelling and building a travel product also that is B
to C We're not building a SAS platform for you know OTAs,
online travel agencies. We're just building a product
that all travellers can use. That was really energizing and
really exciting. So that was a lot of fun to to
build that. So yeah, that first part, that
was really exciting to just be on the on the tech side of
things, you know, getting my hands dirty into making this a
thing out of out of thin air. Yeah.
And then the growth came and then my role started to change
into different type of responsibilities.
But that first part was really exciting to just build something
for the first time that in my career that was something that I
would love to use, you know, something that I wanted to be
there that wasn't. And I was the 1 making it happen
together with the team, right? So that was really exciting.
I can see that like that, the idea of finding your passion
outside of work and then also doing your work, which kind of
fulfills that passion gets you so much energy.
Probably. I'm very jealous.
I feel like that. I would wish that upon everyone
I know because that's like the perfect balance of work and and
also play, I would think. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, talk to me about this hiring process because these
first few people usually is what I, I'm assuming are going to be
very key with regards to productivity and also energy
within the team. You're expanding kind of this
circle of people that you know with someone either through your
network or I just a random person as well.
How was it hiring people and getting more people on board,
especially for the tech side? Yeah, Yeah.
It's a good question because it's something that I always
found really important when I was just part of our companies,
when I was part of a team and we were expanding the team and we
needed to hire someone. I, I always gave a lot of
importance whenever I was part of that hiring process, not only
to the tech side of things, but also to the people side of
things, is, is someone that is going to enrich the dynamics of
the team. And I brought that along to
product steps. And that's how I always wanted
to build the, the tech team. But also in general, the company
were all very aligned in that, you know, giving a lot of
importance to the culture that we're building.
So we do put a lot of emphasis into that.
So if you look at the hiring process today, which is not very
different to how it was at the beginning, we on the tech side,
of course there's a a technical interview, but then we have an
interview that is only about human values, where we speak for
an hour about topics rated with what does this person value?
Is that enriching our values? Is it aligned with our values?
And we give a lot of importance to that.
And then the last step of the process.
And that was also the same back then.
It's a day at, we call it a day at the office where they come
and, and work on something together with the team.
And that, that is how you can see how people, you know, spend
their time when they're at work, right?
Because you know, the, the bigger tech companies, the way
they interview or they used to interview was like, OK, I'm
going, we're going to drill you for five or six interviews.
We're going to bring you on site and ask a lot of questions and
then you really don't see much of the person.
You see a lot of their ability to answer questions and their
knowledge, but not really of the person on how are they going to
be in a team in a team dynamics. So even from the beginning, we
would always spend a day with that person, whoever was a
candidate we thought was, you know, someone with potential at
the office working on a task that is related with with the
product. Before we zoom into kind of the
hiring process, how big is the engineering side of things
nowadays? So 10 year Fast forward, how big
is engineering now? Yeah.
So we have about 35 engineering people in the team.
Yeah. We, we were a a smaller team a
couple of years ago and since the last couple of years we
started growing faster. So we have about double the size
of the team in the last 12 to 18 months.
That's awesome. Yeah, Yeah.
And then so you mentioned kind of a more hard skill technical
interview than a one hour. Can I call it?
Can I call it a culture fit or team fit kind?
Of conversation team. And values conversation.
And then it's actually like a day working together at the
office. Yeah, it's really cool.
Yeah. If someone makes it at that
stage, are they actually like through, through, or can you
still see in some of the collaboration where it doesn't
go well, where it doesn't make them a good hire?
No, no, no, it is also a skill based interview that they at the
office, right? They're not coming to have fun.
So we, we also, it's actually the biggest part of the
technical side of things because they work on an assignment that
we give them, but then they we try to make it interactive with
the team. So it is still like, of course
we are, we are excited about this person.
That's why we bring them and also why we ask for their time
because it is quite an investment to spend the full day
at, you know, a company that you don't even know if you're going
to get the job. But yeah, many of them don't
make it through for either of the two reasons, either the
technical side of things or the the team.
What have you learned then throughout that last step?
Because for me it's it's rare that I see people do that.
Like I had that here, but then it was like I had already gone
through an 8 hour assessment. So then it was more so meeting
the team and they would kind of do the final pass to see if
there's actually something that went wrong in the other parts of
the organization, in the other parts of the interview steps.
But you're mentioning that this last part, it's not just let's
say a final check, but it's actually a big chunk of it.
What have you learned with regards to what goes well for
candidates that do well or what doesn't go well and how what is
that usually? Yeah.
I, I think, you know, one thing that happens very often is that
at the beginning of the session when we walk them through the
assessment, we say, hey, this assessment is much more than a
day worth of work. So it is, it should take you
more than one day to complete everything that is in here.
What we are assessing is your ability to make the right
decisions at every step of the way.
So whenever you make a decision, Please note it down and just
explain it to us afterwards. And many times in the
unsuccessful cases, what happened was that someone would
either go full on, you know, making a lot of, let's say, you
know, hacky decisions to build this so that it works, or
someone that goes full on, on the over engineering something.
And I'm not really, you know, going back and thinking all that
and, and, and and saying, hey, OK, what these people are
wanting to assess of me is my ability to make the right
choices given given the constraints and the and the
context. And yeah, people will just go
down the a rabbit hole and it's difficult for them to get out
even when we have checkpoints. We had a checkpoints throughout
the day to make sure that we can then get them back on track.
And that's something that some people found difficult.
And that's something that we still quite haven't tackled how
to help people get out of that deadlock that they get into
because it happens often. It's part we also understand
it's for any of us, such a thing, it would make you
nervous. It's it's a high tension thing.
So that, that also doesn't help in the situation.
But that is one thing that, yeah, we understood that we
really need to make it clear and make sure that we are on top of
people to make sure that they don't make decisions because
maybe they have the the abilities and the knowledge.
But because of that fright hall they go into, it's difficult to
to get out once they go in that direction.
Yeah, it's funny that that is the symptom that you see because
I've been in many projects and I usually also see people do that
like it was. Whereas very early on in my
career, it was feedback that I got where people said, OK, like
you learn and you grow. And it's also here in education,
especially Dutch education, it's like, yeah, you have a problem,
you dive into it and you try and solve it yourself.
And I feel like in product teams where there's deadlines, you're
working on business outcomes, time is kind of more finite.
So if you have a lot of assumptions and you're building
on top of that, then kind of this loop of feedback is not
going to be there. So then once you finally come
back up and you breathe and you show everything there, everyone
the results, it might be wrong and that's going to cycle you
don't want to get into. So the advice to me was always,
if you have assumptions, just check them and validate them
with your team. If you can do 2 hours of
research and you can figure out one problem, whereas you can ask
a question and then it's done in 5 minutes, then definitely ask
that question because we want you to be effective.
Not just like it's understandable from a learning
process. It's also maybe kind of an ego
thing. You can probably dive into a lot
of things and solve everything yourself, but it's not the most
effective. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
That's spot on. I think that that is one thing
that happens. Like you, you feel like, OK, if
I ask questions, then people will think that I don't know.
And then that's why they just try to solve it themselves and
then they go down those those paths.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like for teams where
you're not a team but like you're a single engineer, you
need that, right? Because there's no one around
you where you can ask questions. But if you have a team and then
you're working together towards outcomes, it's this kind of
togetherness that in the end makes a really good product.
I also wonder from your perspective, this interview
process, I feel like it's very much product oriented because
especially for consumers, there's a lot of assumptions you
need to validate with your product people, with your fellow
engineers. You need to be pragmatic but
also resilient towards the future.
Work with high quality, but also the right quality.
Like there's a lot of stuff that goes into it.
If I was building a system and I was going to go in a satellite
that needs to work and that needs to work forever.
So then going into that nitty gritty and making sure
everything's there dotted the eyes is very different than
building an app for consumers. Is that also why you've tailor
made this interview for the way it is?
Yeah, absolutely. So the, the, the assignment is
very close to the type of work that they would actually do if
they would join us. So we do take that into account
that it is one of the things that we assess as well.
Like can you think with a problem mindset on and, and do
you understand that pragmatic balance between, you know, this
is OK if it's not a nine or A10, it can be a 7 and we will make
it a nine or A10 as we iterate. But that's really important,
especially in in consumer businesses that you really just
need to put things in front of users as fast as you can.
The time to user value is really important and that's more
important than just a stable system you you can improve on on
the issues as you go. Yeah, let's talk about your role
because you mentioned 10 years ago you were responsible for
with another person getting the app live up and running.
Now there's 35 people in engineering.
Are you still working hands on or how has your role evolved
throughout the years? Yeah, it's not hands on
definitely for for a while. Also some other things happen as
we'll probably talk about that. That pulled me further away from
from touching code. More recently.
I did get back to it a little bit on a specific project that
we worked on. But yeah, most of my time in in
the last five years, I've been on, on, on, let's say higher
technical topics or even leadership topics more than
anything else. Do you enjoy those parts as well
or do you miss kind of the hands on stuff?
Yeah, no, I do miss the hands on stuff, but I also do enjoy
building, building the team and building their product and you
know, building towards our ambition.
That's that's really rewarding. As well.
Yeah, that makes sense. I saw and you and I spoke before
the show as well that your role not just evolved, but also at
some point you became CEO of the company.
So not just tech, but also business outcomes, investments.
I mean, this is just me naming a bunch of assumptions, but I'm
assuming it's all of that kind of in this umbrella, at least
from a title perspective. How was that for you kind of
getting responsibility of the whole thing more so than tech?
Yeah, Yeah. It was quite the challenge.
Of course, in a way, you know that the four founders, up until
that moment, we were all running the company together.
We would have weekly meetings where Kunhu was the CEO until
20/21 when I took over. We were just running the company
to her. So in a way it was a natural
step. But at the same time then I had
all the responsibilities that Kun was was having up until
then. So it meant like bringing along
an already full plate, many other things on top of it.
So it was quite challenging despite being in a way natural.
Yeah. But I I did manage to enjoy at
least a part of it. Yeah, yeah.
It's funny because that was also, I think during COVID,
right, Right. When that overlapped and during
COVID for travel company, it must have really sucked because
there's no travelling. Everything was in lockdown.
There were no people doing vacations.
I mean, a little bit here and there, but definitely not, not
with the rest of social media or anything.
How was that moment with regards to the company?
Also, you at the helm. Yeah, yeah, I know it was.
It was super tough. And that was also why I had to
step in. Part of the reasons why I
couldn't took a step back, personal reasons, but also all
the stress attached to running a company, a travel company
through COVID times. So yeah, it was super tough.
You know, when COVID started in March 2020, we had the Christmas
party in December 2019. We were doing so well.
Everything was going amazingly fine.
One of the other founders, Nick, we were having just a chat and
he was telling me, yeah, you know, we we were talking about
our plans for a CSV fundraise and all our organic growth that
was, you know, tripling year over year.
Everything was dark green light. And he, he told me, yeah, I
mean, what can go wrong? Famous last word, Yeah.
And then that happened, right? But because we were doing so
well as well as a company, not only financially but also
internally, we were super strong, a small team, but still
super strong. It also meant that a lot of
things were much easier and then, you know, cracks didn't
show, even though it was a very difficult time.
So we were managing to weather the storm quite well, but of
course, you know, we had big ambitions, big plans and all of
that had to be put on hold. So that was that was super
tough. Yeah.
The beauty for me is that like it's been put on hold, right.
It's interesting that if you were to have this company in an
inception and then everyone quit their job and it wasn't even
live and then COVID happened, it would have been the wrong time,
wrong place, and then everything would have kind of fallen and
crashed likely. But because this already was up
and running and as you mentioned, you had like really
good strong fundamentals, I think we just put on hold and
then COVID pass and now here you are like, I didn't look up any
of the statistics, but how many users are using the platform
nowadays? So right now we have over
15,000,000 registered users. That's.
Insane. Yeah, yeah.
And how many? Because people go on the
platform, they share their journeys and they usually upload
imagery, right? So 15,000,000 users do you know
any how many images or like media?
Yeah, it's more than a billion, I think at.
This point that's that's incredible.
Wow, Congrats on all your success.
Honestly, that's really cool. Nowadays I see a lot of people
talking about kind of this startup culture, this hustle
culture that you wake up at six, you basically are the most
effective version of you. What what is your opinion on
kind of the startup culture and this hustle culture?
And also, how do you run the company?
Yeah, I don't necessarily agree with the view that most of the
startup hustle culture voices go up on LinkedIn and and and share
and and talk about the 996 and all of that.
You hear that a lot, you know, also from investors.
We in commerce with investors, they also ask us directly, you
know, at what time do people normally leave the office?
And when we were hearing that question, I was thinking like.
Why does that matter from? Investors.
Oh yeah. OK.
Yeah, American investors, Yeah, I think you can build a
generational company. So a company that can define a
category without the 996 culture 996, you know, the 9:00 AM to
9:00 PM six days per for a week. I don't really believe in that.
I think that just giving, you know, hiring ambitious people,
hiring people with common sense and, and the intention to
actually build what you're trying to build, giving them the
space to do that, that is what you need to do.
And of course have a big ambition and, and, and stand
behind it and have crunch time when you need to, but then also
have times where things are more, more relaxed and people
can just do what they should be doing, but not, not really
pushing the limits constantly. It's fine to, as I said, you
know, go into crunch time. So for example, right now we, we
just did our summer release where we launched a few
important features that are going to help travel us a lot
during the summer season. So we were quite busy for the
space of, you know, 5-6 weeks. And that was OK because then we
gave people, we will give people the space after this release to
actually decompress and record the energy and then go back at
it later on. So I do think that, of course,
if you have big ambitions, you really have to be committed,
especially in the leadership team.
Then then it's a little bit more difficult to say, yeah, I'm from
9:00 to 5:00. That's not really the case if
you are the CTO, the CEO or the head of head of growth.
But for the individual contributors especially, then,
then it should be definitely doable to just build a
successful company where everyone is happy there.
There is proper work like violence, but still everyone is
very committed to succeeding in our mission.
Yeah, I like that a lot. I always wonder like how much
freedom is, is too much freedom? Because from my perspective, I
like product and I think I have enough empathy to put myself in
the shoes of the user. Think about from a user
perspective. But then if there's no umbrella
and everyone does kind of freedom wise what they think is
best and in the end it's just anarchy because everyone kind of
goes left and right and everywhere.
What? What process do you have and
what process do you not have on purpose?
Yeah, that's an interesting point.
And it's been one of the most, I wouldn't say challenging, but
let's say interesting trajectories of the company, you
know, upon we were quite a small team for a very long time.
And it was, you know, it was just a team of, well, first it
was just the five of us then, then it was 10.
Then even when we were 2025, we all knew everything about our
poke run by what we're going to do.
Everyone spoke the same language in a way.
But then as you start to grow, then that's not necessarily the
case anymore. And you don't want to be the one
dictating everything. You want to be empowering.
But like you said, you cannot just be fully empowering and let
everyone do whatever they want because we do have, you know, if
you just hire someone, you cannot just empower them to
whatever they want because they don't have the context, they
don't have the notice that we have from building this for
years and years. So we went from, you know, being
just a team that speaks the same language to A-Team that now
needs to empower others, but needs to do that in a way where
there's a balance with also being able to share our
knowledge and, and let people take from that and learn from
that and use it in their own empowering directions, right?
In the, in the directions where we empower them to, to go.
So that's something that we're still figuring out because you
want to make yourself scalable. You are not scalable as a
person. So you want to make the process
scalable basically, right? And that's a difficult thing
because you need to pick the moments where you have to be
directed when things are going off track.
You have two choices. Either you let people continue
in a certain direction that you think that maybe it's not
aligned with with our goal, and then they would figure out
themselves when you hold them accountable to the outcomes.
Or you intervene and, and, and, and your director and say, Hey,
I think maybe we should go this other direction.
That's a really fine art. It's really difficult.
And sometimes you have to make choices for the sake of
efficiency because we don't have an infinite team that can make
all the mistakes and constantly learn.
Sometimes you just have to put things in the right direction
and sometimes you have to actually let people go in
different directions because also sometimes you are surprised
that actually your intuition was not was not right.
Yeah, For me, it's really funny because I have this on a team
level, and then you have this more on an organization level
because you have more people, you have maybe even teams that
are going in a certain direction.
And for me, it would just be individuals.
And I like saying that, like, individuals can make mistakes,
and especially when they're, let's say, a little bit bigger
mistakes, they're not huge mistakes because those we
usually prevent. But when there's a big mistake,
it's also a really good learning opportunity for someone.
Like, I know people that have such a high sense of
responsibility and accountability.
If something fucks up and they know they were responsible, I
don't have to say a thing because I know they're going to
make that mistake once and then never in their career will they
do it again because that's a really good learning moment.
And I can see the challenge from an organizational perspective
because those teams and people are just amplified.
So it's really funny that it's still a balancing act even at
that level. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, I and, you know, another of the common opinions
in the start of the House of War is the founder mode.
You know, the the Paul Graham, I don't know if you read it, the
the manifesto that he put out of founder mode and all of that.
I also don't really believe in that because that's, you know,
if you, you should be hiring people that are smarter than you
and, and you also need to learn from them and give them the
opportunity to also show you that there are different
directions to things that you might be living that might not
be the the right path. So the only way to be able to do
that if you really empower them to go into those directions,
right. So that's, that's something that
has also been a process for us as we are going and getting
people with different views and giving them the space to go in
different directions, then learning that actually, yeah,
that that's, that's something that we should learn from.
But also in in the culture, right?
Because in the purest version of founder mode, then, then it's, I
don't want to cite examples, but there are examples where, yeah,
the founders are deciding everything.
But then what type of people are part of, of such a team?
And, and how, how much can you grow and go into, into new
directions or realize your ambitions if it's only the
founders, the ones that are making all the decisions.
So, yeah, for us, it was really about, OK, let's make sure that
we hire well, that we hire people that that understand our
vision and then that can take that vision to the next level.
And in that way, then, then really good collaboration gets
born in a way, because you get new perspectives.
You know, we've been doing this for more than a decade.
So we have our, our own ideas and many times we are right, but
many other times we, we're also wrong.
And it's good to have that, that fresh perspective coming in and,
and getting new learnings. Because with our big ambitions,
the only way we're going to do that is as a team and not with
our own internal visions. Yeah, I think culture for me is
super interesting. And culture, I heard someone say
a colleague of mine, he's a culture is literally the way we
do things around here. Like you have many words and
many definitions, but in the end, it's the way we do things
around here. And that can be within an
organization, it can be within a team that you're talking about
team culture. And to a certain degree, when
hiring, this is also a challenge we always have, and I've had in
many teams, you want to align on certain values where you're
like, these need to be the same and everything else.
You can look for diversity, for interesting perspectives, for
disagreements. And then as long as those values
are there, then we know we have the same kind of fundamental
baseline. We we grow from there.
What are those values that you think you will not compromise on
with regards to hiring? And then what can be diverse
with regards to anything else? Yeah, that's a good question.
I think from the early days, we really gave a lot of importance
to our company values. Like I think we were eight
people when we came up with our company values and we spent a
lot of time figuring those out. And the way we did that was
like, OK, how do we operate? How do we work as individuals or
the things that we find important as founders in those
very early days. And we came up with a set of
values that are still to the day of today the ones that we have
in the company, right? It was born out of not what the
corporate world tells you that you should have as values.
It was like, OK, what do we find important?
And then what happened was that it was very easy to keep them
alive because it's how the company was operating.
Until then. We just continue to operate the
company in that way. And that's why today with more
than 80 people in the company, this is already live by day,
day-to-day, naturally without us having to do anything.
Do you want me to mention also some of them?
So the number one for us is dedication to craft.
So we are a product first company.
Everything is seen through our product and we we have from day
one built a product that is very polished and and that it does
what it should do and do it and it does it very well.
And, and this is something that we find important not only in
our product, but also in our people and OPS processes, in our
engineering culture, in our architecture.
We really find it important to really be dedicated to our craft
and, and build beautiful things, whatever those things may be,
either an HR policy or a feature or anything in between.
We really dedicate a lot of time to making it how we want it to
be. Then another one is to enjoy the
ride. Of course, you, you know, one
thing that I also brought along always and I try to stay close
to that as, as a, as a journey continues is how things were
when I was employed at other companies and I was an employee.
And what did I think that I would like to, to experience in
a company ideally. And I keep those things top of
mind, top of mind to make sure that in the company that I'm now
building with the team, that I'm able to also create that
environment for people and enjoy the ride.
That value is a big part of that, you know, making sure that
no matter what's happening, no matter if, if the company, it
went downhill because of COVID and all the usage stopped, we're
still trying to enjoy the ride and make the rest out of it.
That that's a really important thing.
And that also applies to, you know, engineering, you build
something and sometimes you, you're going to push it live and
everything is going to break. That's OK, No stress, you're
going to fix it. And in all of that process, just
do your best to really enjoy it. That's that's really important
to us. Be good, the good.
We want to leave the world better than how we found it.
Explore us at heart, of course, we are travellers, we are
curious and then we want to understand everything around us
as much as we can and that's something that we find really
important in everyone that works at Polar Steps.
So that curiosity needs to be there always.
And then the last one is that we are human, so we should be
empathetic and we should understand that when things go
wrong, that's for a reason and it's OK when they go wrong, we
just learn from it. And one.
I really like that. Yeah, it's people have heated
discussions on technical topics, on even visions for certain
products. But in the end we are humans,
right? We need to connect as humans 1st
and then we can collaborate and be effective together.
So that one always I think is a huge one for me.
It's interesting. I I was wondering throughout
this product and also product development, especially to
consumers, how much access do you have to your users with
regards to validating assumptions or like iterating
with regards to AB testing, even from an engineering perspective,
do you actively speak to your users?
Yes, yes, we, we, we are very close to our users in different
ways. So we have a community and
support team that is answering to every single request that
users make every, every e-mail that comes to our inbox is
responded. So we do care a lot about that
the more reactive management of of of users.
Then we have a team of of use of research that is, you know,
running research campaigns where we talk to our users
specifically about new initiatives or or new features.
We also do a lot of AB testing through experimentation.
So the the more quantitative type of learnings and that's
more, yeah, just running different experiments, but but
also being very metric oriented in, in everything that we do,
every feature we release, we stay close to see how they how
it goes. Now we are at the scale where we
can actually very quickly do that.
So that's another way in which we get signals from our users to
see if things going well. Of course, we have NPS and other
ways to to measure customer satisfaction as well.
Nice. I wonder how that factors in
decision making. And I'll I'll give you an
example because I recently spoke to Samuel Bake.
He's Chief Product Officer of Veto IO And Veed is like this
online video editing tool in the browser.
It's one of I think it's the biggest one right now from a
browser base. And he says everyone is kind of
thinking from a user perspective when they have a new feature,
they make a video and they use the tool.
So they dog food the tool a lot. And he said there's also a
downside to it. And I think this especially
applies in the travelling company where people are super
excited about travelling. They join your company and they
think they can think from a user perspective and they are to a
certain degree also the user perspective.
But if you have millions of users, then it's very hard to
make those decisions with a smaller group.
How has this led to kind of decision making?
Do people still act a lot based on their own assumptions or how
do you in the end decide what is best for the user?
Yeah, it's, it's a mix of everything.
And that's also another of the challenges of the company.
You know, we have, we have people that are very
data-driven, We have people that are very intuition driven.
The reality is not in one or the other.
It's somewhere in between. Sometimes you have to make
intuition decisions, especially when it's more of a visionary
thing, right, where you can look at the data, but the data is
going to tell you about, you know, very simple indicators.
But if you think about, OK, but this feature is going to bring
long term user engagement, we're going to see the results.
It's a very lagging indicator that we're going to see a year
from now. We just have to build this and
then see what happens. And many of the initiatives that
we carry are of that type. And then there you cannot be
there. You just have to believe that
this is going to, to bring you the results that you want to to
see. And in some other cases you can
just run an AB test and see, OK, if, if we offer users this, this
feature or this slight variation of the feature, then you see
what happens. But also it's difficult.
One of the questions we ask the product managers is, OK, you
have an experiment that is performing really well, but it's
really ugly. And you have another one that
doesn't perform as well, but it's very beautiful.
It, it, it is matching the, the user experience very well.
Which one do you end up choosing as a result?
And there's no right answer for that because it depends in
reality, right? So and that's that's the the
challenge. There, I can see that.
Yeah, that's a hard one. It really goes into that value
that you talked about, which is the craft, right?
In the end, I think consumer apps, almost all of them fail.
Like genuinely, there's so many consumer apps out there.
From an adoption standpoint, I barely download a new app
anymore. It's like I am very considerate
with what I use. So I know a lot of people are
developing apps and the fact that this has traction and
adoption I think is really, really amazing.
And then it's a matter of how do you keep up with regards to
features and functionality and add on top of that to draw a
comparison. Again, with VID, they are really
in the video editing tool and their AI and AI hype is a big
part as well. Samuel mentioned that a lot of
the functionality can be kind of ephemeral.
So there's something is very much hype based, making a kind
of anime character out of a certain picture or a video.
And then they implemented in vid, but in a few weeks it might
be obsolete as well. How's that with regards to polar
steps and kind of the features and functionality that you build
also, especially with AI nowadays?
What is the question specifically?
As in how do you, because you mentioned that you touched on a
certain vision that we go towards a vision, but then
there's also functionality that comes available with regards to
new technology. How in the end do you decide,
OK, we're going to hop on maybe new technology because that
opens up a few added functionalities or we're going
to stick with this vision which is more long term and we're
going to invest in that? Yeah.
I think I mean in terms of new technology adoption, it has to
make sense from the user journey perspective.
That's how we the angle through which we make every decision on
on what we build. It's there about the hype, it's
there about investor likelihood of them, you know asking us to
asking us about that. Are you using this or that?
Because a lot of AIS, one very clear example, but also in the
past they're having other examples.
For us, it's always like, OK, is this bringing more value to our
users or not, whether it's short or long term.
So in the case of AI, for example, you do see like every
single, so open AI has done that.
Anthropic has done that. I think Gemini as well.
Yeah, Gemini as well. All of them, when they bring
examples of how to use AI, they give a travel example.
And we believe that, yeah, there's a lot of potential
there. But in in our case, what we have
and that's what we just launched as part of the summer release,
we have a lot of your own data you have track your trips.
So we know how you travel and we are leveraging that to even
recommendations for where you want to go next.
So we are now we have launched an itinerary tool that helps you
plan your itinerary next time you go to Japan for three weeks.
We know how you travel. So we're going to give you
recommendations for Japan that are tailored to you.
And we're using an LMS for that. And that's a great example of
something that, yeah, it's, it's perfect because we, you know,
you have written all your stories of how you like to
travel and it's, you know, put our steps.
It's not a social network, it's more intimate.
It's more your living room for your friends and family.
So people just tell things how they are and not for the for the
filtered version of Instagram. So with that, then we do know
how you tell. So we can recommend you truly
personalized destinations. And that's a very, very easy
example of how there's a lot of value in that.
If you have track your trips, you can be planning your trips
with us in a much more personalized way, but we're not
going to use AI for, you know. Just enhancing your images,
there's no real value in that. You can do that somewhere else.
So we're going to jump on the hype of that.
It has to be something that really enhances the user
experience. And in that, be it AI or
anything else, we're going to do it if that's the case and not
otherwise. Gotcha.
Do you think the most effective AI features either in general or
or in your personal environment, they still rely on the data that
you have from a user perspective?
Because 15 years ago we talked about, OK, you can make
data-driven decisions, but a lot of companies didn't have data,
they didn't capture data, so they started capturing data.
Then you had big data problems. So then you have big data
solutions and machine learning and everything like that.
And now with large language models, people are advocating
you don't need anything, you just use a model and then you
don't need data anyways. But how you're describing your
solution is you're still leveraging the personalized data
and then you're using that for even more personalisation.
The fact that it's generating content is just a part of it,
yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And there are a lot of ChatGPT wrappers out there, but I think
there's also a lot of value potential in those, as long as
you create a differentiating experience for the user.
If it's just another chat bot, no, people are just going to go
to ChatGPT. But if you are building
something on top of that wrapper that makes the experience
better, that's also a different way to differentiate yourself,
of course. But yeah, in our case the data
also played a very important role.
Gotcha. Yeah, you mentioned your role
has evolved. First you're really hands on,
then more hands off and you're missing the hands on part, but
you mentioned you were hands on as one.
As for one of the features that were released recently, was that
this one the more AI related? Why was it this one and not any
other one? Because this is something that
I, you know, when LLMS came, came out GBT, I think GBT 3.5,
that's the point where I saw it. And like, OK, this is seems to
be something that is really next level compared to the previous
versions, which were a nice gimmick that can work for
specific use cases, but not really very, very powerful.
And I had it always in the back of my head like, OK, what, what,
how can we leverage that? Apollo steps and then at some
point, OK, let's let's try experimenting with you know
what, what is different about us, which is that we have, we
know a lot about the travellers and how they travel because they
have travel trips with us. And I started playing around
with it like, OK, tell me what type of traveller I am with
with, with my trips. And then it was so spot on.
And then we did one experiment, which was, you know, Spotify
wrapped this thing well with the same thing, but for polar steps
in 2024, we call it polar steps unpacked.
And it would just tell you you're, you're, you're in travel
in 2024. And we, we launched that and I
think 300,000 users have used it.
And it was so the, the reception was so positive that we said,
OK, yeah. With that, we are really able to
capture the essence of of how people travel.
So let's leverage that. And this was why, you know,
recommending engineer is we're expanding our proposition to
helping people plan their trips. This is a perfect fit.
I did some experiments. It went really well.
So I kind of brought this back to life in the company and try
to push it forward. And that's why I was really
involved because I built the prototype.
So I was I stayed involved when it became a feature that the
team built. I love that.
I think it's, it's really cool that you can go from an idea
from experiments to kind of proof of concepts that are
smaller to actually proven value for users than I kind of hate a
long shot with that. How do you cultivate this kind
of experimentation with regards to engineering in general?
Do people get time to experiment and to try out ideas or how do
you make sure people keep innovating also with regards to
their skill set? Yeah, good question.
There are a couple of things that we do.
Of course, we, you know, every quarter when we plan for what
we're going to do the next quarter, we give every
engineering team the space to, to share with us for the things
that they would like to work on. And then we weigh those against
everything else that needs to be done.
And if there was a strong enough reason, we, we, we let people go
with whatever initiative that may be.
That's one way. And then also once per year, we
do what we call love days, which are two days where people can
work in whatever they want. So it's kind of a hackathon, but
more made more travel oriented, a little bit more fun than just
a hackathon because then anyone can participate.
People from anything can participate and we work on
whatever project we, well, anyone can, can choose whatever
they want to do. So that's, that's another way.
And then some of those initiatives then end up seeing
the, the day of light in the, in our users.
And that's also the fun thing about the stage where we are now
because the impact of everything that we do is really big with a
million users seeing that immediately when you when you
ship it so. Yeah, that's amazing.
Thank you so much for coming on and sharing the story.
I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun.
Thanks. Thanks to you as well.
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