At the same time, Slack had established itself as a tool that digitized both projects and daily communication by, as a platform, in principle replacing the various systems for e-mail, meeting services and document management and linking the projects’ various application tools.
Cooach took note of this and the working hypothesis was to use Slack as a digital office to deliver business support services and thus create a business support system that provided the functionality of all the SaaS solutions that came on the market during this period.
The goal was to use digital tools and with Slack as the nervous system itself to connect the functionality, create as good business support for the smaller growth company as what the large enterprise companies have created through their staff functions. The ambition was to be able to offer it at a reasonable cost by doing it digitally and automating as many parts of the processes as possible.
Cooach has always developed in a true lean method spirit. We have set working hypotheses and always worked customer-driven. In 2016, Cooach began testing Slack with two selected customers to verify that customers would like Slack as the base of the platform.
The response was huge – they loved it! The next step was to automate the underlying processes. This resulted, as early as 2016, in the first Coach fine in the form of an automated flow to receive expense receipts and book them in the payroll system. Cooach then expanded with solutions for sending out salary specifications and invoices for certification. A series of small steps in a work process that so far required a human to solve the task had now received a human-bot interaction.
Thereafter, we continued to develop digital tools aimed at companies facing growth that requires external capital injections. We continued to run it as a lean startup company and constantly develop the services together with our customers while we grew as a company through new customers.
When Covid19 struck, the rest of the world caught up with Cooach, and demand for Cooach services increased markedly. Cooach then decided to invest properly and equip the company for a growth journey by appointing a professional board and conducting a capitalization round that enabled a proper packaging of the service offering and that the company was also able to build up the distribution line at a faster pace.
