Interview with a CEO


Filestage CEO

Niklas Dorn

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1. In one sentence, what does Filestage offer and who do you target? Filestage is a review and approval platform that helps marketing teams to share, discuss and approve all their files, all in one place.

2. How did you make your way into the world of SaaS and start your company? My co-founders and I used to work in marketing and advertising. One of the biggest problems back then: We spent 50% of our time in painful email ping pongs, instead of working on campaigns. Everyone that has ever tried to review and approve files like videos, documents, or a website with a group of stakeholders knows how nerve-wrecking this can be. Since there was no review and approval solution in place, we started our SaaS company Filestage.

3. What makes Filestage unique? Our customers love Filestage because it's the easiest way to review and approve any kind of content. Through Filestage GroupM for example, reduced their daily email inbox by roughly 30%. Furthermore, we allow organizations to build waterproof approval workflows across the organization. This makes review rounds 3x faster and helps them to hit their project deadlines.

4. There is no easy path to success. What was the biggest challenge you went through and what was your biggest achievement? I'd say there is not one big challenge. Once you have solved one thing, the next challenge is waiting. Still, I think one of the hardest parts is to hire the right talent, transfer the ownership to your teams and transform from a founder into a CEO.

5. Hiring talent is an important part of a CEO's job. What lessons have you learned in this respect? I'd strongly recommend starting with clear hiring criteria. Then, in the interviews, be very strict to only move candidates forward that tick your boxes and fulfill your must-have criteria. Lastly, listen to your gut feeling. If something doesn't feel right, it's not right - even if you can't clearly spot it.

6. As a CEO, what do you know now that you wish you had known in the beginning? Hire great talent faster. In the beginning, we worked too long with working students and juniors.

7. What is your advice on setting up a go-to-market strategy? Start with the customers and their use cases first and build upon this. Once you have defined the go-to-market strategy, test it through experiments and then improve it quickly.

8. The Covid-19 pandemic is causing a great deal of uncertainty in many industries but also opportunities. How did it impact Filestage? We've received more churn requests at the beginning of the pandemic especially from smaller customers. On the other side the demand from larger organizations for a proper review software has increased.

9. What advice would you give other founders in the B2B SaaS industry? Have regular chats with other B2B SaaS founders to share learnings 😉