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Headline lessons
Smartly was not a first attempt for the founding team. It was the third company Kristo built with Tuomo, and their history shaped how they operated once the real opportunity appeared. They had already worked together closely, including a long grind with Metrify where they lived through the uncomfortable realities of startup life and learned what it feels like when money runs out. Kristo treats that period as part of the same journey rather than a separate “failed chapter,” because it gave them a strategic vantage point and hardened the cofounder relationship before Smartly even existed.
That co-founder dynamic was not accidental. When Metrify broke up, they made a deliberate choice not to carry the same full founding group forward. Kristo sees that most companies die first because co-founders can’t go through hard periods together, then because money runs out, and only after that because the product is not must-have. Smartly’s early foundation, was that Kristo and Tuomo had already been tested in the ways that usually kill startups, and they started the next company with a team they believed could survive the same pressure again.
Smartly formed inside a wave, not next to it. Through Metrify, Kristo and Tuomo were already working with gaming companies on the mechanics of user acquisition and LTV. That put them directly in the budget flows that were about to shift. After Facebook’s IPO, performance advertising moved from desktop banners to mobile, and gaming companies reallocated spend from many ad networks to Facebook very quickly. At the time, the pain was not abstract. Facebook was becoming the default channel, but its tools for serious advertisers were still weak, and the gap between spend and tooling created the opening for them.
Kristo makes it clear that this shift would have been hard to see from the outside. Their advantage was not necessarily a market report, but proximity through Metrify. They were already sitting with teams whose budgets were moving towards Facebook, watching how those teams struggled, and seeing how quickly the channel was becoming central. Looking back, the timing window was also quite narrow. A little earlier and they would have built on the wrong infrastructure. A little later and the opportunity would likely have been captured by someone else. The arena choice was therefore not “ads” in general, but instead, Facebook performance advertising at the moment it became dominant. This was before the platform had built professional tooling themselves.
At the beginning, they did not win by having deep marketing expertise. Kristo says they knew very little about online marketing, and that Smartly did not start from the classic founder situation of having personally suffered the problem. Because they didn’t have that built-in intuition, they started by talking with customers, building prototypes, and learning by watching how people actually operated inside Facebook’s tools. Their approach was to get close enough to the workflow that the pain became measurable, then build the smallest thing that removed it.
At the same time, validation also meant learning where the pain was actually strong enough to buy. At first they found it somewhat difficult to close customers in Finland, but then saw clearer demand elsewhere, including Swedish e-commerce advertisers, before the Rocket phase changed everything. In parallel, they deliberately built with advanced prospects even when those relationships did not convert into customers. In early 2014, Tuomo did analytics work with Supercell in Silicon Valley, which was partly how they were able to develop a more advanced MVP by the time their main design partner came into the picture. By pushing forward the cycle of learning, building and testing, they were ultimately able to get the first MVP live in around 4 months.
Moving towards the MVP, Smartly’s path towards it started with a very simple form of discovery. They asked Finnish agencies what the most painful part of Facebook marketing was, then watched people use the tools to understand what that pain looked like in practice. As a result of this process, one concrete issue stood out. When marketers created ad variations, they had to copy-paste a large set of fields repeatedly. In Kristo’s words, this was about 14 different fields, and that observation produced the first “killer” feature: a copy-and-clone button that made the workflow dramatically faster and more tolerable.
But Smartly was not building a standalone feature. They were effectively rebuilding Facebook’s ad operations interface on top of the API. That meant the copy-and-clone button only mattered if everything around it worked in production environments. To make that one action useful, Smartly had to build support for the surrounding requirements advertisers depended on such as formats, attribution, analytics, and the rest of the operational scaffolding. The lesson from this stage is that the “core” can be small, but the product still has to be complete enough to carry proper workloads without breaking.
The breakthrough early customer was Rocket Internet, and they behaved like the ideal R&D lab for Smartly. Rocket had a centralised marketing team running Facebook as the primary channel across dozens of ventures, with a factory-like operating model for launching and scaling new businesses. Smartly initially told Rocket the product was not ready, but promised they would build it with them. Rocket agreed to start with a few ventures as a test, and once the relationship began, Smartly went all-in on closeness and speed. They sent two of their three engineers to sit physically in Rocket’s ventures’ offices for months. In other words, Smartly had “forward-deployed engineers” working at their customers offices every day. Features were built under extreme time pressure, including shipping critical changes over a single weekend in response to urgent customer emails. This wasn’t just any old customer service, it was how Smartly accelerated learning and earned the right to be rolled out across Rocket’s portfolio.
With Rocket, product–market fit was not subtle. Once Rocket started rolling Smartly out, the company entered a phase where demand outpaced their ability to deliver, and the problems became purely operational. At this point they weren’t left figuring out whether there was pull, instead they were adding servers, fixing bugs, and hiring as fast as possible to stay alive. This was a period of around six months where revenue grew month after month at extremely high rates, somewhere between 100-200% every month during that window. In the same run, monthly recurring revenue went from roughly €8.8k to about €128k, and the team expanded from single digits to around thirty.
The tempo was set by the customer. A significant moment was an email from Rocket’s CMO on a Friday asking for a feature that a venture needed to go live on Monday. Tuomo shipped a screenshot on Saturday, they aligned quickly, and Rocket launched. Then the cycle repeated. Rocket brought new ventures regularly, and Smartly’s job was to keep the product and infrastructure from collapsing while they scaled alongside the customer. In Kristo’s own words, this is what real PMF looks like. When it is real, there is no calm space to philosophise. The company moves from “finding” to “surviving and scaling.”