We go on call in this episode with Christian Schneider and Clare Leighton, the CEO and COO respectively as well as co-founders of Singapore-HQ’ed data processing and workflow automation platform bluesheets. They talk about how bluesheets is changing the way businesses globally process and manage data, with the global data integration and integrity software market size on track to reach $29 billion by 2029 according to Fortune Business Insights forecasts.

But while they’ve found a longstanding gap in the automation market and have made early progress, it’s going to take a lot more work. We dive into the nuances of improving underlying technologies like AI, ML, NLP, driving adoption across use cases from offline SMEs to enterprise using legacy software, as well as leading the team enabling fundamental infrastructure for the digital economy, especially here in Southeast Asia.

Highlights and Timestamps

(01:21) Paulo introduces Christian and Clare;

(02:23) Bluesheets Origins and Targeting the Financial Data Use Case for Workflow Automation; “We really understood the kind of problem space within the finances area of a back office, the financial workflows that now form our primary use case…the market opportunity was there…advances in natural language processing that kind of addressed unmet needs where OCR was kind of lagging…being able to combine the online and offline component of data processing for us really fit well with the financial space.”

(08:45) Ripple Effects of Changing the Way Any Business Deals with Data; “When we talk about automating financial workflow, at the core of it, we’re replacing busywork with automation. So we’re opening up capacity to focus on my high-value tasks and kind of providing that back within the business…it’s like time-saving, it’s cost-saving, it’s the efficiency gained by their operation, and that goes from everyone who handles that data all the way up to, you know, the top dog — but having the value of the data being processed in a more real-time fashion also really makes a difference.”

(14:18) Perks of Expanding AI SaaS from Southeast Asia to the Rest of the World; “If you are looking at a problem in Southeast Asia where you’re solving for several different languages, several different markets, the likelihood of applying AI on top or inside that process with messy, regional or local data sets is close to zero…so that’s where we come in. We help build these really robust data sets that you can utilize later on when you need to, or can finally apply AI on top of that. That will be a transformation for these companies that they’ve never seen before. It’s not even happening in the Western markets right now, so we definitely are far away from that.”

(25:21) Unlearning from Big Tech and Corporate and Impact of bluesheets on their Leadership; “And coming from an environment that really did encourage literally big, bold bets, I think it prepped me really well for a big risk appetite, but I think the way that I evaluate risk has had to change because we don’t have that big corporate backing and that big back pocket of global Uber funding.”

(31:52) Leading the Workflow Automation Competitive Landscape Forward; “From a general perspective of looking at the competition, I think the field is still very early…to really fully embrace a cloud-based process as we do and allow this plug and play solution — that we feel isn’t there, and we’ll definitely press that advantage.”

(34:40) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guests

Transcript

Bluesheets Origins and Targeting the Financial Data Use Case for Workflow Automation

Paulo: So speaking of origins Would just like to get into it. So how did you guys come together? I know Christian is based in Singapore. Claire is based in Australia. Did you guys actually start the company not having met each other at all? Or how did it come about and what led your decision to focus specifically on this part of, this whole digital transformation process. Yeah.

Clare: So we were connected actually through Christian’s previous startup. They were also a Singapore based technology company that expanded to Australia. So I joined that team remotely here to launch and kind of manage the Australian operation. So we’d been working together remotely for a number of years before we started talking about [the] bluesheets concept and kind of leading into what we have now launched as bluesheets, the company.

So we were set up working remotely. And as you kind of suggested we had met in person before, but not in the time we’ve working on the company thanks to the pandemic.

Paulo: So I’m sure [you are], and especially for the rest of the bluesheets team, pretty excited to maybe in the near future, actually meet in person, for the first time as a bluesheets team, and we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the product, but one thing that I already wanna bring up this early on is the fact that the technology behind bluesheets has a lot of different use cases.

But the go-to-market that you guys decided to tackle first was really financial data processing. So what was the decision behind that specific go-to-market strategy?

Clare: There were a couple of factors in deciding on that use case and kind of coming back to the origins, we were both, as you mentioned, myself at UberEats [and] Christian at foodpanda been working in these marketplace environments. So we were exposed to vendor operations at scale and had a really great insight into their problems, their back office, kind of what the impact of rising cloud solutions and new technology and partners like food delivery platforms were having. So we had that insight. 

And then when we moved on to selling B2B with large MNCs, we saw that they had exactly the same problems with their back [office]. And then internally within our startup again, nothing was different. So we really understood the kind of problem space within the finances area of a back office, the financial workflows that now form our primary use case.

The other thing was, as you mentioned, the market opportunity was there. People have been saying for decades that in five years’ time, we won’t have any paper, we will be completely digital. And five years go by, and every five years we still have this persistent offline component.

So looking at the space, there were a couple of things that helped inform that. Advances in natural language processing that kind of addressed unmet needs where OCR was kind of lagging, and that’s a really typical solution used for financial processing. So we saw that window opening and again, just that persistent, offline component that exists in financial processing. A lot of other parts of the business are moving online, but there is this really stubborn component. So being able to combine the online and offline component of data processing for us really fit well with the financial space.

“We really understood the kind of problem space within the finances area of a back office, the financial workflows that now form our primary use case…the market opportunity was there…advances in natural language processing that kind of addressed unmet needs where OCR was kind of lagging…being able to combine the online and offline component of data processing for us really fit well with the financial space.”

Paulo: So it was really both low hanging in a way but at the same time a really big opportunity. and those are the kinds of go-to-markets that definitely work well for startups. 

And obviously, you mentioned earlier, the funny thing is that every five years or every X years, people will always say like we’re gonna go zero paper, everything’s digital, and then the cycle sort of repeats.

It’s a well-recycled prophecy, and obviously, that means that there have been tools emerging and popping up all the time. So what were the gaps that you saw in these existing suites of tools that maybe you wanted to change with bluesheets?

Clare: To knock on that point, we’re trying to digitize — so it’s not like everyone’s sitting, manually processing and writing down their receipts and punching things into Excel. It’s a really small portion of financial data that any company processes. It could be one or 2% of the data points that they need to process. 

So on one hand, we had, and still have this kind of optical character recognition or the OCR that does the digitization. That falls short in a few areas, but just to name a few, the categorization is not super accurate.

So you’ve kind of got this review process anyway, so it’s digitized, but you’ve got to go through and manually correct it and review it anyway. Even if it’s a 5% inaccuracy, you’ve got to review a hundred percent of the data to find that 5% incorrect. There’s also no learning in that process. So if you make an adjustment, you’re making that same adjustment every single time.

Leveraging machine learning with the current continuous flow of data over the platform, we can see those corrections inform more accurate results going forward. So on the other side of that just pure digitization OCR piece, where you’re taking offline data, making it online, it then needs to go other places, and that’s kind of shortcoming in the workflow space

But if we look purely at digital solutions, there are integrators [and] there are integration platforms that are trying to tackle that online piece. But as I mentioned before, if you have half of your data online and half of it offline, an integrator is great, but they’re only solving part of the problem.

So it was really important for us in developing the bluesheets platform and our solution that we could fully ingest that entire scope of online and offline data to provide end-to-end automation across the full scope of finances. So we did spend a lot of time kind of in the R&D phase before we got started on actually building the MVP to make sure we could properly address that.

Christian: Most people every day when they go to work, their task nowadays is actually to shift, data around. And that is quite funny to see. I mean, when the digitization waves happened, starting from 10 years ago or even earlier all the way until now, we’re not even close to done there.

This problem of interoperability between systems has become so apparent the tasks of a finance manager nowadays really is just reading emails, downloading attachments, and sending [them] somewhere else. And there’s very little value-add in between. Most of the time it really is the data transparency problem.

And so that’s where we come in. That’s where we build those workflows. We are trying to really impact these day-to-day work streams you have where you don’t even realize that 80% of your day doesn’t actually really matter. It’s just caused by different systems not being able to talk to each other. So that was fascinating to see.

“This problem of interoperability between systems has become so apparent the tasks of a finance manager nowadays really is just reading emails, downloading attachments, sending [them] somewhere else. And there’s very little value-add in between. Most of the time it really is the data transparency problem…That’s where we build those workflows.”

Ripple Effects of Changing the Way Any Business Deals with Data

Paulo: A lot of our listeners are actually BD and finance professionals, so I’m sure they can all relate to what you just shared, having to start your day just inputting data from one software to another software. And that’s definitely one of the pain points. The other one, which Clare mentioned is also the accuracy, which ends up forcing people to look for needles in a haystack. And then the third is also the lack of learning, which Claire also mentioned, in terms of being able to improve this software from one use case to the next. 

And we talk a lot about very high-level stuff. It would be great to also share the impact and how things look from the business’ perspective. Maybe you can share some of those use cases that you’ve seen and how bluesheets change the operation from the business perspective.

Clare: Just to echo what Christian was saying there for our clients and from their perspective, when we talk about automating financial workflow, at the core of it, we’re replacing busywork with automation. So we’re opening up the capacity to focus on my high-value tasks and kind of providing that back within the business.

So you mentioned you’ve got a few financial services folks that listen, so I’ll start with the accounting use case and it’s a great fit for the blue sheets platform because we’re in the business of automatically ingesting, and digitizing, and categorizing financial data.

Obviously, we then store it securely on the cloud and you can then automate other workflows by sending it off to an export integration, like an ERP and accounting system [with] settings already applied. So it’s coded or the settings are there, what have you, but very literally for somebody who works in that team, if I’m an owner or managing partner of an accounting firm, I care about the happiness of my employees. I care about my margin. I care about my clients’ satisfaction as well. 

So a few key things that we address at that kind of senior-level, that senior stakeholder level, of course, [when] employees aren’t doing that busy work, they’re able to focus more on high-value tasks in the scope of their role. So we really have kind of seen a lot of encouraging data around the NPS of that impact. We improve the speed of processing data because it’s all automated. So client NPS as well, of course — we’re getting more data back into their hands faster.

And [with] margins, we’re replacing human resources or costly outsourcing with a single SaaS subscription. So it makes a lot of sense from that perspective, but in the workflow itself, it’s typically a bookkeeping manager or a bookkeeper, someone who’s actively handling this data. 

So they know that they’ve got to go gather and consolidate all of this information that, as we talked about, stays in a mix of different tools and platforms, some of it is online housing, like POS systems, maybe it’s on their Stripe account. If it’s transactional data or it’s offline, and that doesn’t have to be like a physical receipt, although that is also part of what we helped hold for, but PDFs and summaries and bank statements and downloads and things that exist in all different file formats. 

So typically a bookkeeper has got to go about chasing a client for that information, and as Christian said, their days [are] largely consumed by sending emails, requesting things, downloading those things, uploading them again. They upload them, then manually key them in. Maybe they’ve got a bit of OCR to help with the digitization component. So they upload it. They get some of it there, they correct it. They input it. Then they’ve got to follow through with all of those other steps, right? They’ve got to input it to the relevant system. They’ve got to categorize it, code it, all of that. 

Whereas with bluesheets, we connect to the tools and systems that all their clients are using. And by that, it could be as simple as we put our bluesheets spot in a WhatsApp [chat]. We connect with an email forward. We connect to the online systems that they already have through our suite of integrations.

So when there’s a sales transaction from a POS, it comes directly to bluesheets automatically. They get an invoice; it’s automatically ingested by the blue sheet system. They have a physical paper receipt. They snap a photo on WhatsApp. It’s automatically retrieved and processed by bluesheets, before they even get their hands on the data. 

A ton of busywork can be automated. It then goes through — they’re obviously not keying it in, they’re not having to review it. We provide 99.5% and above accuracy, incredibly high accuracy scores so they can have that assurance of not having to review the data, and then, of course, all of that encoding and entry into the ledger.

That’s purely working with accounts payables and receivables data, like the bread and butter of a bookkeeping operation. That frees that person, that bookkeeper or accounting person up for more high-value tasks like advisory and strategic work.

It looks really similar on the F&B side, but we’re working with everything from purchasing invoices, POS delivery orders, receipts, POS statements, bank statements, food delivery statements, and pretty much anything that they are having to process as part of their financial operation.

We can click into or upload, adjust and process for them. And that’s everything from sales, purchasing, [to] payroll, and then the other thing I wanna highlight there — because yes, it’s like time-saving, it’s cost-saving, it’s the efficiency gained by their operation, and that goes from everyone who handles that data all the way up to, you know, the top dog — but having the value of the data being processed in a more real-time fashion also really makes a difference. 

When we look at the business side of things, if I’m making decisions about my store or my teams like staffing or purchasing, I wanna be relying on up-to-date data, not data from four weeks ago, which is typically — books are closed 30 days plus after the end of the month. If I can see those numbers the same day, I can make more informed decisions about my business operation.

“When we talk about automating financial workflow, at the core of it, we’re replacing busywork with automation. So we’re opening up capacity to focus on my high-value tasks and kind of providing that back within the business…it’s like time-saving, it’s cost-saving, it’s the efficiency gained by their operation, and that goes from everyone who handles that data all the way up to, you know, the top dog — but having the value of the data being processed in a more real-time fashion also really makes a difference.”

Paulo: There are three points there that really I wanna emphasize as well is that one is definitely the cost, reducing a lot of the costs that come with the status quo way of doing things. And then two is obviously it reminds me of the visual that you guys have on your website.

If you go to bluesheets.io there’s this visual they have of multiple sources of data, and then on the other side, all these destinations of where this data is supposed to go. And then bluesheets is right in the middle, doing all the work, actually getting data where it needs to be when it needs to be there.

And that leads to the third point, which is the ability to help leaders make real-time, business decisions, which I think just goes to show how encompassing the impact would be with just the way that it’s able to be encapsulated in a SaaS product that you can ship and is very flexible, I think is really amazing. So speaking of the tech behind it, I think one of the key drivers of bluesheets growth over the past years has definitely been these various technologies that have developed over time.

And Claire mentioned earlier, it’s sort of the right timing that these technologies exist at this moment that you guys could come in and leverage these things. So how do you think about prioritizing expansion across all these different sources of data, all these integrations that you have to make, all these different destinations and languages as well, since you guys are catering to a global market, right?

Christian: It’s really clear that we are a SaaS solution. And therefore from a geography perspective, first of all, we’re a little bit more agnostic. So we don’t actually need to have a physical presence in every country. At this point in time, we work with clients in over 25 countries already.

What you said here is very true. The technology to build a powerful tool like ours [hasn’t existed] for that long just yet. So we consider ourselves still a little bit first mover here, utilizing the most advanced natural language processing that is available. And then for us, it’s all about building layers and layers of algorithms, and as a next step, introducing machine learning to the process. So that’s how we work. 

And the reason why we feel that we can be very successful with this is, first of all, we’re based in the Asia Pacific region. And that will allow us to get exposed to many different Southeast Asian or generally Asian languages alongside the English language. We feel that with that very robust set of data, we can build very good results and algorithms on top of that. That will eventually be very useful when we approach customers on a multinational level or even just regional because we feel there’s currently a lack of automation tools in this region.

And we have more often than not encountered the case that our customers would say, “We never thought this is possible,” because they were just not aware that you can actually automate processes in a very elaborate manner that it seemed to be unreasonably far away from anybody’s imagination on what you can automate. So that’s definitely a key driver for our growth and we are going to be investing in fostering that growth.

“The technology to build a powerful tool like ours [hasn’t existed] for that long just yet. So we consider ourselves still a little bit first mover here…we’re based in the Asia Pacific region. And that will allow us to get exposed to many different Southeast Asian or generally Asian languages alongside the English language. We feel that with that very robust set of data, we can build very good results and algorithms on top of that…”

Clare: I was just gonna add and tack on there a little bit about the kinda growth side of that. Obviously, the processing capability that sets us apart is one thing. And as Christian said, the ability to fully automate those workflows is almost too good to be true. For some of the client discussions that we have in customer discussions, we have, but a big part of, I think, what makes that really accessible and we have a self-serve product that serves F&D businesses as well, so part of making it accessible in the sense of everyday businesses can subscribe and self serve the product, is the integration side of things.

And like you mentioned that many-to-one, one-to-many little workflow visual that we have and love to reference, but it means we can kind of meet users where they’re at. So if they’re just starting their digitization journey and they have a lot of offline data, that’s not a problem we integrate, but we can ingest and kind of take things online for them. We can really help bridge that. 

It also means that we’re not having to go in with a huge implementation, in order to connect directly to systems that they’re using or customize the product and kind of doll out these huge implementation costs, it’s a plug-in-and-go solution.

And then the other part of that would be integrations. They’re really easy to implement, low cost and easy to kind of integrate into an operation. The more they realize what they can do with the system — like we talked about the multiple exports as well. 

If I’m sending it to my ERP accounting, that’s great. Maybe that’s the first thing that was on my mind, but then I realize I can send it off to my reporting, off to my payments provider. I can do all sorts of things with this data now that I have it. So providing the suite of integrations also then makes it very sticky, and provides this kind of complete network for their back office.

“A big part of, I think, what makes that really accessible…is the integration side of things…providing the suite of integrations also then makes it very sticky, and provides this kind of complete network for their back office.”

Perks of Expanding AI SaaS from Southeast Asia to the Rest of the World

Paulo: And I think that’s really at the heart of the acquisition and retention pathway for you guys is really the ease of access and the ease of use and the fact that it’s also self-serve points to again, that part of the market, which you mentioned earlier that deals with offline data. And oftentimes, some of these other businesses would probably encounter bluesheets as their first digital tool to use, rather than having already used Excel or whatnot.

And that leads me to my next question actually, because in Southeast Asia, SaaS companies for the longest time have always tried to start out here, but then looked towards the US or Europe as eventually their cash cow, and try to expand there to go global. 

Meanwhile, on the other hand, you talked about the advantage of actually having started here and actually solving a lot of the issues for some of these businesses that have been historically offline. So how do you sort of reconcile that and is this trend changing, because of the work that you guys are doing?

Clare: I’ll start with this one and I’m sure Christian will have something to add as well, because there’s a lot that we talk about here. Firstly, just nodding to what Christian said about language capability. So the bluesheets engine is language and currency agnostic, but of course with that, there are some things more difficult to process than others.

So for us, starting with a specialization in Southeast Asian languages, we’re tackling the biggest problem first. So it gives us a really robust foundation to then scale outward, to international markets and especially other, just English speaking markets, [where] NLP is already pretty well optimized.

To your point around the historic trend of startups starting in Southeast Asia, and then looking outward for opportunities really speaks to the digitization and kind of the speed at which maybe more Western markets have been able to adopt digital technologies and kind of bake that into their everyday stack.

So for us, that’s kind of like a twofold opportunity, the fact that there is less digitization in Southeast Asia. There’s a trend, especially in financial digital transformation. There’s an interest in going digital and we help plug that gap.

So we’re providing the digital workflows and integrations, but we are one of kind of the only solutions that can actually take the offline operation and put it into that online space and help them digitize. 

So as we see things like your payment providers, AWS, cloud accounting technology really start massively growing in these markets, more and more businesses are wanting to use these products and they’re moving from a completely offline process to a digital cloud solution — the middle piece of that to help connect it up and then take their offline data and kind of make it digital and make those other cloud solutions accessible. 

The other side of that though is that we do of course connect data with integration. So if the data is already online, in those more readily digitized markets, we kind of solve the same use case, the same purpose, and the product functions in much the same way.

We’re just kind of plugging into an online source of data and exporting [it] as we would normally, it’s just a matter of how many input sources [there are]. Are they online? Are they offline? So for us, it doesn’t change too much, but the kind of digitization or lack of digital operation in Southeast Asia is more of an opportunity for us.

Christian: I can only attest to that and also say that the pandemic has been a massive boost for this region to adopt digital, solutions. I think at this point in time will still be a bit more upmarket when it comes to company size whereby the larger players. might have already started these digital transformation initiatives earlier on will now accelerate, which is exactly what we’re seeing, but also it definitely trickles down into the SME segment where we see a lot of growth opportunity, a lot more, I’d say willingness to automate and therefore eventually, pay for automation as well. and so slowly that educational missing piece is, trickling down into the market. And, I think that’s extremely exciting. And as Clare said, we see two massive opportunities here and we’ll be trying to tap into both of them.

“For us, that’s kind of like a twofold opportunity, the fact that there is less digitization in Southeast Asia…So we’re providing the digital workflows and integrations, but we are one of kind of the only solutions that can actually take the offline operation and put it into that online space and help them digitize.”

Paulo: What I find really interesting here is that typically with SaaS, whenever they say like, “Oh, we wanna do both SME and enterprise, you sort of have a question mark in your head, how are you gonna be able to juggle all of that the same time? Don’t you wanna focus on one or the other?”

But I think for bluesheets, the way that you’ve explained the product so far, it seems that it’s really easy to switch in a way between all these use cases, mainly because you deal with the granular aspect of source data destination and that makes it a lot easier to [implement] even from a sales standpoint…

Clare: Absolutely. The fact is that our core use case is unstructured, isolated, disparate data. So when we look at the difference between SMEs and corporate, like in any case, we’re still dealing with unstructured, isolated, disparate data — actually, in a corporate landscape, it’s typically more structured, more consolidated than it is at the SME level.

So for us, technically there’s no kind of additional customization or anything that we have to construct for the product to serve its purpose, maybe some implementation piece on the corporate side, but it’s not a limitation by any means. 

“Our core use case is unstructured, isolated, disparate data…technically there’s no kind of additional customization or anything that we have to construct for the product to serve its purpose…”

Paulo: And speaking of all these use cases, we’ve been talking about financial data processing and we also talked a little bit about how the technology might apply to other types of businesses as well, so I was curious to know, what are the most important use cases that you’re looking at, say beyond financial data? And how do you see the infrastructure that you’re building and expanding, beyond these long term?

Christian: First of all, I could say we love that question. I guess here we have to look a little bit more into the future of what’s going to happen in the next, again, five to 10 years. At this point in time, we assume then in five to 10 years, AI actually finally delivers what AI has promised for 20 years now.

And we will be able to apply AI to do more informed decision-making and eventually, land on certain endpoints faster because AI supports the process along the way, and can enhance the way that humans work. So what you need to apply AI to any business operation are data sets.

And if you don’t have a conformed or cleaned dataset that would eventually look very similar over a long period of time, then the usage of AI is extremely challenging, especially if it is applied from the outside. 

So if you are, for example, an insurance company and you process claims applications on a large scale for a whole region, then if you are looking at a problem in Southeast Asia where you’re solving for several different languages, several different markets, the likelihood of applying AI on top or inside that process with messy, regional or local data sets is close to zero. 

That one I can say, and so that’s where we come in. We help build these really robust data sets that you can utilize later on when you need to, or can finally apply AI on top of that. That will be a transformation for these companies that they’ve never seen before. It’s not even happening in the Western markets right now, so we definitely are far away from that. 

So in essence, I guess, what we’re really looking to solve for here is we want to provide a clear stream of data for our customers in all segments that we are in, and we want to have them be able to utilize their data later on. That’s first of all the main message to this sales from a high-level perspective.

“If you are looking at a problem in Southeast Asia where you’re solving for several different languages, several different markets, the likelihood of applying AI on top or inside that process with messy, regional or local data sets is close to zero…so that’s where we come in. We help build these really robust data sets that you can utilize later on when you need to, or can finally apply AI on top of that. That will be a transformation for these companies that they’ve never seen before. It’s not even happening in the Western markets right now, so we definitely are far away from that.”

Unlearning from Big Tech and Corporate and Impact of bluesheets on their Leadership

Paulo: Actually the thought came to mind that you guys are using AI to make AI better, and just to speak to that, right? In [your] fundraise press release, you guys talk about having processed more than 100 million data points, you have more than 11 million financial integrations, NLP capabilities catering to more than 75 languages, and that’s just the beginning, right? That’s just been a year of operation. 

And I think one thing that people often skip over when talking about AI is the fact that AI does need to learn in order to live. And so it goes going back to what you’ve talked about Christian, really feeding those data sets for the AI to grow and learn. 

And now I’d like to shift gears a little bit and talk about your leadership approaches and how you’ve been taking this company off in its first two years. 

So for Christian first having been an operator in Rocket Internet and foodpanda, what is one thing that you’ve had to unlearn from your past experience, heading into bluesheets, something that you’ve had to let go, or a misconception that maybe you’ve had to change?

Christian: I’m actually having a corporate background as well. So I was in investment banking in my early years. And there have been a lot of cultural shifts in organizations since the time when I started my career. I think what was for me easy to understand, because I was a young person when that cultural shift happened, was not necessarily very easy to understand for everybody who has been in a different culture for 10, 20, or 30 years.

And to really apply a different kind of mindset when it comes to approaching people, from different segments, from wherever they are in their life is a very challenging approach. I think it starts when you try to sell to these people; it starts when you try to interact with these people and do business with them.

And I think to learn this skill, to be able to be approachable and converse with anyone on an eye-to-eye level has been something that can be challenging at times. And certainly, it’s something I had to perfect over the years as an entrepreneur.

I think we all know what I’m talking about. You’re constantly selling, you’re constantly trying to just look for opportunities and that is a very difficult task. And so you really have to know, who you’re talking to and to read the room well. And, so I think, something that the early days, I probably wasn’t as good at, and over the years now, I think it has hopefully improved.

“…to be able to be approachable and converse with anyone on an eye-to-eye level has been something that can be challenging at times. And certainly, it’s something I had to perfect over the years as an entrepreneur.”

Paulo: Like sort of an entrepreneurial sixth sense. Claire, how about you, coming from UberEats?

Clare: I might start with like a similar one then, because at Uber and Uber is just such a huge brand name, and when it came to hiring for teams or seeking partnerships or even new deals kind of coming in with this defined value of that brand power, if you’re talking about a job, anyone in tech’s already, “Oh, but this is my dream job. This is my dream brand.” This is the dream partnership for the partnerships guy. 

So coming in as the new kid on the block being completely not established and having to go from scratch, I think has been a great hustle and learning there, but I think almost like unlearning that baseline of like people trusting that you do what you say you can do, like the tech stacks up the way you expect it to. 

And like we’ve talked about this before. One of the biggest, kind of the only, objection that we have is that it sounds too good to be true. We can solve that with a quick demo or a pilot, but it’s not like Uber and of course, huge brand power and brand trust there.

So stepping away that was a big change up and then unlearning — Uber kind of operated like lots of little startups, but a startup culture even at its size before IPO like a startup, but with the backing of a big corporate budget. 

And coming from an environment that really did encourage literally big, bold bets, I think it prepped me really well for a big risk appetite, but I think the way that I evaluate risk has had to change because we don’t have that big corporate backing and that big back pocket of global Uber funding. So the way I evaluate and consider risk decisions is definitely something that I’ve unlearned.

“And coming from an environment that really did encourage literally big, bold bets, I think it prepped me really well for a big risk appetite, but I think the way that I evaluate risk has had to change because we don’t have that big corporate backing and that big back pocket of global Uber funding.”

Paulo: bluesheets is only two years old, but over time you guys will be able to build that brand trust and I was also curious to know how blue sheets has shaped you as leader, now that you’ve spent two years building this company. 

For Christian, having come from Germany where you built a career, and then built a career growing startups in Singapore, how has it shaped you as a leader and how has that influenced your own approach to hiring more leaders to join blue sheets?

Christian: Well, I mean, it has shaped me a lot, I can say that much. I’ve been always been a very humble person, and that hasn’t changed, but I think what really is different here, especially in Asia, I can say that is a little bit of that drive, that will get you very far.

And you can with a lot of persistence and effort achieve a lot here. And that is really different in some of the Western markets I’ve worked in, and that has shaped me a lot and helped me a lot. And I think that’s just really great about this region here.

“I think what really is different here, especially in Asia, I can say that is a little bit of that drive, that will get you very far…and that is really different in some of the Western markets I’ve worked in…”

Paulo: It really provides you with a lot of drive to be an entrepreneur. Claire, how about you, being a female founder and an operator in Australia.

Clare: So being remote, I think has been the biggest kind of learning for me in being a leader with bluesheets and my experience the last couple of years, prior to bluesheets, I was already very involved in the women in tech, communities, and the general startup community in ANZ. And it’s incredibly supportive and the “giving acknowledgment and support” kind of community, being remote definitely changed a bit…

So when we started Christian and I, we were already had been working remotely together for a number of years, as we’d said. So when we launched the business at the start of the pandemic, it was business as usual for us.

Everyone else was going online and it was kind of like any other day for us being completely remote, as we started to build the team, and it is really important to both Christian and myself that the engagement with our team, the engagement and the culture is really a priority. So even consciously thinking about that from the start, like, “Oh my God, this is a completely different ball game.”

So being conscious of engagement and inclusion within our team, some remote, some hybrid, and now, for the most part, we do have remote and hybrid teams still, but for the most part, we have [an HQ] based in Singapore and I’m now the one remote. 

Trying to lead a lot of that and drive those sorts of things as the one remote person has definitely been a huge learning curve. Thankfully it’s not like I’m going solo at the moment, a lot of the world is going through that same shift, and obviously for myself, very luckily we’ve got an amazing team. So that has been an easy learning curve, but definitely a big kind of growth piece for me since we launched bluesheets. 

In terms of being a female founder, I think, like I said, I’ve been really involved in this space even before bluesheets, so rather than a learning, I’ll share a takeaway, which is there’s a lot of data out there that talks about how women, as well as a huge number of minorities, are underrepresented.

The investment level as well as founders across the board, and I’ve been involved with groups and workshops in this space and the thing that I would take away for any women in tech listening to this is yes, those stats are pretty grim, but it’s never been more supportive.

There’s never been more opportunity in the space. Companies and investors have never been more aware and have put more effort in initiative into supporting female founders, so I just encourage people to look at it from that [perspective].

“…the engagement and the culture is really a priority. So even consciously thinking about that from the start, like, “Oh my God, this is a completely different ball game.”…for the most part, we have [an HQ] based in Singapore and I’m now the one remote. Trying to lead a lot of that and drive those sorts of things as the one remote person has definitely been a huge learning curve.” 

Leading the Workflow Automation Competitive Landscape Forward

Paulo: And to put a tie on our whole discussion, which has been certainly jampacked, would like to also get your view of how this competitive landscape, obviously blue sheets is a first mover, but definitely in the next five to 10 years, as Christian mentioned, things will definitely evolve. So how do you see blue sheets evolving in its role within the competitive landscape in the next five years?

Christian: Definitely, as you say, we see ourselves as the first mover in this region here. We do already compete with companies based in the US [and] based in Europe. We know that, but in essence, we have a slightly different approach than some of the companies in this field. And we feel very comfortable with that and we feel that we will achieve a market-leading position, especially when it comes to bringing the technology of natural language processing as a built-in automation flow to the mass market.

And I think that’s definitely a clear goal for us to break through and become a go-to solution for many businesses around the world. From a general perspective of looking at the competition, I think the field is still very early. We see companies at Series A stage somewhere, eventually some similar companies who come from a bit more of an old-fashioned approach that have made it to a larger stage, but to really fully embrace a cloud-based process as we do and allow this plug-and-play solution — that we feel isn’t there, and we’ll definitely press that advantage.

“From a general perspective of looking at the competition, I think the field is still very early…to really fully embrace a cloud-based process as we do and allow this plug and play solution — that we feel isn’t there, and we’ll definitely press that advantage.”

Clare: Just to add to that, in terms of how this landscape will evolve and really more to speak to the first move of advantage that we feel we have at the moment is while the technology is really easy to implement and roll-out, like you could have your entire company set up within the hour.

That’s great. But to unravel that is a completely different story. And I think the big part of that is the value in having that data. So everything is digitized and stored, particularly on the cloud. You can repurpose that data, but to step away from that for a nominal, even pricing difference, say however much cheaper per month, like it’s a huge thing to unravel a complete workflow set up when you have so many different things connected, and then the value [of] historic data as well just setting neatly there, packaged up. 

The one thing I was going to add is we focus on what we are doing, obviously keeping a side-eye on what competitors are doing in other markets, but for bluesheets, there’s also kind of an expansion of services and what we allow users to do with their financial data. 

We’ve talked a bit about the financial use case. We really [are] only solving a very small part of that at the moment with the bookkeeping and accounting automation, obviously like reporting and other things in that space. But we are really looking forward to expanding what we allow then our customers to do with that data once it’s been processed over the platform. So kind of increasing our competitive advantage there as well as the product roadmap expands.

“While the technology is really easy to implement and roll-out, like you could have your entire company set up within the hour…but to unravel that is a completely different story. And I think the big part of that is the value in having that data. So everything is digitized and stored, particularly on the cloud.”

Rapid Fire Round

Top 3 traits of a great CEO (Christian)? 

Christian: Being humble, being a quick thinker, and being honest to yourself.

Top 3 traits of a great COO (Clare)? 

Clare: Oh, mine are very practical by comparison. I think like the decision-making…we can’t see around every corner, but we kind of have to make preparations where we can to be proactive as well, and we can make certain guesses as we grow.

Favorite book / podcast / resource to learn about SaaS? 

Clare: I like Product Live.

Christian: Yeah, I joined you there, I think. I’m not sure we covered this, but we’ve been investing a lot of effort into a product-led growth in the past few months. So I hope it shines through at some point.

What digital technology/innovation excites you the most today, apart from the ones you’re working on in bluesheets?

Christian: I love what, OpenAI is doing. Text-to-Image is extremely amazing, and yeah I’m following that segment pretty closely right now. So I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it, but there’s some amazing new AI evolving in that segment.

Clare: Bit of a broad bucket one for me, and it’s just a topical one. One of our investors Investible here in Australia have just kicked off their climate tech fund with a greenhouse project. So I’m personally very interested in what’s happening in the climate tech space.

What’s your favorite go-to destination in Southeast Asia / trip you are looking forward to taking?

Christian: Wow. That’s actually quite difficult. Well, I love to go to places with great food. So I love to go to Seoul or Japan. So that’s probably my two favorite places.

Clare: You might have guessed it, but I’m so excited to go to Singapore and meet the team. I’m actually flying over next week and that will be the first time I’ve been in the same room as Christian since before bluesheets and then be in the room with any of our team. I’m super excited about that one. 

Favorite activity to de-stress? 

Christian: Napping.

Clare: Here I was thinking we were gonna have the same answer. I was gonna say sport or working out. I play netball personally, but any kind of physical activity that makes me 100% focused on what I’m doing because I’m switching my brain off work for that period of time.