We (Mats and Marcus) started the company because we saw that the tools available on the market were not fully able to solve the needs of leaders and teams—to visualize and act on goals and activities associated with daily operations.
Marcus has long been involved in IT and business development, both as a management consultant and as a developer and project manager for the implementation of various IT solutions. I have experience working as a car builder, supervisor, Lean manager and also possess many years of experience as a management consultant.
Our strategy is to build Mevisio as a company by allowing Flexibility and Simplicity to be our keywords, not only for product development but also for all relationships with customers and partners. The platform will continue to develop and sell through a growing network of partners internationally. As a customer, this means that you will be offered new possibilities at a high rate, both in terms of new features and the availability and support being secured where your business operates.
As individuals, we share the deep-rooted drive to build Mevisio to the world's best platform and company for digital visualization for leaders and teams in operational businesses.
We also share the interest to challenge boundaries and explore opportunities. Our leisure activities include skydiving, diving, downhill cycling, sailing, among others. We bring the same mentality and attitude to Mevisio—we want to challenge our customers' working methods creatively.
From idea to success, how Mevisio was started?
The day after Lucia, December 14, 2016, in Stockholm, we presented a draft on a digital Lean board for a service manager at a large real estate company. The reaction was exceptionally positive and much better than we had expected, as, before that, the situation had not looked so bright. This is the story of how Mevisio was started.
The story actually begins five years earlier at a Swedish management consultant agency in Gothenburg. I had just started working with the sales of consulting services from being a Lean consultant at an international consulting company.
There were many good and friendly consultants in Gothenburg, but for some reason, Marcus, a consultant at the Stockholm office, was the one who became my closest friend. Perhaps it was because we both were active skydivers or practiced swimming at the elite level in our youth or subconsciously had the same goals and ambitions, even though we did not know it then.
After a couple of years, Marcus chose to leave his safe employment to test being an entrepreneur and started Meffecta, which immensely inspired me. I realized that I would like to do the same but felt it was too risky.
I continued selling consultancy services but could never let go of the dream of starting my own business. I finally reached a point where it was impossible to resist it anymore, and I just had to try. As I had always liked the visualization concept used in Lean Production, I started Metodio to test an idea with a webshop for all the accessories needed for Lean boards.
One of the first Metodio customers actually came through Marcus, who was in the process of helping a company with process development as a consultant. In addition to providing consulting services, Marcus also continued to develop a variety of IT tools and apps for mobiles.
In the summer of 2016, I tried to produce a digital Lean board. It was made in Google Sheets, a program similar to Excel, but ran in the browser. It was okay, but as anyone who has tried to do things in Excel knows, it's almost impossible to make stable and future-proof solutions in it. After the first delivery, I realized that it was not a sustainable business model. As soon as the customer started using the board, it became unique and could not be upgraded or supported efficiently.
The fist prototype, that laid the foundation for Mevisio
I still wanted to see if there was a potential in the market, so I took the solution to a couple of fairs where Metodio was an exhibitor, and many were interested, but no orders were made. In November, I presented it to an IT Manager at a large trading company, and then it became clear to me that I was completely wrong. He liked the idea but immediately confirmed my concerns that a solution built in an Excel-like environment was too uncertain, difficult to support, and not user-friendly.
It felt like it was good to give up. I would never be able to solve it myself.
Moreover, it did not work as it was thought of and being on a touch screen did not help. At the same time, Marcus was looking for a new project. He had run his own business for four years and was now looking for interesting partners who shared his aspirations. He had an idea for a new modular IT platform, and when we discussed the problems I encountered, it seemed like it was possible to build a Lean board in that platform.
In December 2016, I had a meeting booked with the service manager at the mentioned real estate company, who was actually only looking for a 58-inch touchscreen, but I still asked Marcus if he wanted to attend the meeting. I first thought that we could only discuss our ideas during the meeting, but Marcus quickly developed a prototype that we used to demonstrate the possibilities of a large touchscreen. The solution featured, among others, the Safety Cross, a Kanban flow, and a Gantt scheme—all adapted to touch.
Do you know that the feeling when something feels 100% right—when you are completely convinced, and the arguments come by themselves, and you can see how the facial expression of the person present is changing from just seeing the opportunities? It was the same experience that we had in the meeting: Success!
We started sketching a collaboration agreement for the development of the solution while continuing to demo the idea for more people. The results were always the same: Success! We immediately received requests. The road ahead was given. We would go for it—Worldwide!
In January 2017, we started the company.
