Brisk

What did it do?

Brisk was a software service running on Salesforce that combined CRM records with email, calendar and marketing automation data to remind sales reps of forgotten opportunities and the next steps they needed to take. The founders described the product as a sales acceleration system.

Why did it shut down?

Founded in Malmö in 2012 by Hampus Jakobsson and his partners, the company raised a total of $2 million from Creandum, DN Capital, three angel groups and 14 angel investors. Although it won customers such as LinkedIn, Intercom and Evernote, the fact that every company customised Salesforce differently made installation extremely complex, and a product left open to every use case lost its focus. In September 2015 an $800,000 bridge round was raised as a last attempt. At Easter 2016 management saw the plan would not work and decided to sell the company, but no suitable match emerged among the 10 to 15 global candidates approached. Brisk announced its closure on 2 June 2016 and the service ended on 1 July 2016.

The story

Hampus Jakobsson was one of the founders of TAT, the Swedish software company sold to BlackBerry in 2010. After the sale he set about growing the start-up ecosystem of the Skåne region and investing in more than 40 companies, and in 2012 he founded Brisk in Malmö with Alfred Beckman and Andreas Pålsson. Jakobsson and Mikael Tellhed funded the company's first six months out of their own pockets.

Brisk was a layer that sat on top of Salesforce, the tool sales teams used. It combined CRM records with email, calendar and marketing automation data to remind sales reps of overlooked opportunities and deals waiting to close. The product won well-known customers such as LinkedIn, Intercom and Evernote, and the company raised a total of $2 million from Creandum, DN Capital, three angel groups and 14 angel investors.

The problem was installation. As Jakobsson later recounted, companies had customised Salesforce in such different ways that the team counted more than 200 systematic deviations. Because the product was kept flexible on both the data and the interface side, it opened itself up to countless use cases; this scattered development, customer acquisition and sales. Users loved the product, but their managers thought differently about how it should work and how it should be bought.

In September 2015 an $800,000 bridge round was raised as a last attempt. At Easter 2016, after a meeting with all 13 employees, the decision was taken to sell the company, but no suitable match could be found among the 10 to 15 global candidates approached. On 2 June 2016 Jakobsson told Breakit that they had found an important problem and an interesting product but had been unable to generate sales on a scale suited to venture capital. Brisk shut down its service on 1 July 2016.

Lessons for founders

• A product built on top of another platform also inherits that platform's customer-by-customer customisations; measure the installation cost with your first customers and narrow the product's scope accordingly.
• Users loving the product is not enough; in enterprise software, test early how the manager who makes the purchasing decision sees it.
• Building a flexible structure that supports every kind of data and every interface use scatters customer acquisition and sales; start with a smaller product focused on a single customer segment.

Sources

1. Business angel Hampus Jakobsson shuts down Malmö start-up Brisk (in Swedish) (Breakit, 2016-06-02)
2. Hampus Jakobsson of Brisk and TAT (Salesflare, 2019-02-19)
3. After the SaaS Exit: Why His Next Startup Failed (SaaS Club, 2018-10-25)

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