The SaaS Revolution Show is a weekly podcast that brings insights and tactics from leading SaaS entrepreneurs and operators across the world. Hosted by Alex Theuma, the show is brought to you by SaaStock. You can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast.

Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss, CEO and co-founder of omni:us, learned very early on she was destined to build companies. She had the knack for it as well as the determination. By the time she finished high school, Sofie had exited her second company, having organised a ball for nearly 5000 Viennese high schoolers. She used the money from selling the company to buy her first car.

That car would get Sofie faster to university where she was onto her third business — building a robot that could scan binded documents and books.

At this part of the story it is important to understand something fundamental about Sofie — she knew nothing about robots at the time. But she recognised the demand for digitising the physical written word.

Ten years and 980 million scanned pages later, she had another powerful epiphany — a digitised but unstructured and therefore machine unreadable document did not bring much value. Searchlink, later renamed to omni:us, was born addressing that far bigger challenge. Sofie had the unfair advantage of the of millions of digitised documents, which she could use to train the algorithms to “read,” something many AI startups usually struggle with.

This time around Sofie decided not to go at it on her own, as she had done so the previous three times. With four co-founders and a new address in Berlin, the Viennese entrepreneur began her journey into AI. As important as it was to train her bots, so was finding the use cases and product market fit that would allow her to monetize omni:us

It took selling into two industries before finding the one, which would truly benefit from the value proposition of omni:us — making sense of and structuring digital documents. Finding it was a combination of listening to inbound signals and being disciplined to apply the criteria that helps rule out the unfit choices.

Listen on to hear:

  • The criteria to find product-market fit
  • A key learning Sofie picked about the search for product market fit
  • An important lesson about selling to enterprises with product market fit

Sofie is one of many excellent speakers we will host at SaaStock on Tour Berlin on June 7th. On the day she will be joined by the likes of Christoph Janz, Managing Partner, Point9 Capital speaking about Lessons from 10 years investing in SaaS, Steli Efti, CEO, Close.io who will offer a bombastic keynote on giving SaaS product demos that sell and Stan Masseuras, EMEA Sales Director at Intercom, who will open the show with “How to acquire customers and build a $Billion dollar company.” Come learn from them and 200 SaaS peers that we are gathering. Get your ticket now.