From inception to impact: Cardboard’s 2023 retrospective

Greetings to our community and friends! As 2023 comes to a close, we at Cardboard are taking a moment to share our journey with you — a story filled with challenges, achievements, and a whole lot of learning. It’s been an exciting ride, and we’re thrilled to share the highs and lows of our first year in business.

Setting the stage for success

At the beginning of the year, we laid out an ambitious roadmap. Our vision is to help businesses get control of their SaaS (software-as-a-service) subscription spending and automate accounting. To achieve this, we laid out three strategic goals:

• Launch a minimum viable product (MVP) with automatic receipt collection and matching by Q2.
• Introduce virtual payment cards to give businesses more control over and insights into their subscriptions in Q3.
• Integrate with Norway’s top five accounting systems to automate accounting by Q4.

Now, as we stand at the threshold of a new year, we take a look back at where we stand vis-à-vis these goals.

January-March 2023: Early foundation

In its first few months, we moved into our own office space in downtown Oslo and balanced between pitching, grant applications, and coding. We secured over 8 million NOK in funding, including pre-seed from Sondo, ProVenture, and more than 20 friends, family, and ex-colleagues, as well as a grant from Innovation Norway. We established a key banking partnership with Adyen, a leading financial technology company, as our payment card issuer. This collaboration has enabled us to issue cards throughout Europe with a single partner. In product development, we focused on specifically targeting receipt collection and transaction matching, with plans to release a minimum viable product (MVP) in Q2. Additionally, discussions on pricing strategies and understanding customers’ software as a service (SaaS) usage were undertaken through a survey.

April-June 2023: Steady progress

We continued making progress in our product development, focusing on building the free tier of the product and preparing for beta testing. We conducted user testing to gather valuable feedback. We re-branded to Cardboard to show a name that was simple and easy to remember and, at the same time tangential enough for our business ambitions. A quirky yet on-point take on our value proposition of getting control over SaaS spending through payment cards and providing a complete overview in an easy-to-understand dashboard.

By June, we had finalized our brand’s visual identity and were almost done integrating with our bank partner. In mid-June, we suddenly got news that a competitor’s card-issuing partner lost their banking license, and their cards stopped working. As a result, we got calls from several of their customers, keen on alternative solutions. We canceled some of our vacations and rushed to launch a pilot program.

July-September 2023: Growth and development

The first customer payment with a card issued by Cardboard happened on July 19, just 28 weeks after we started with an empty office and zero product. We launched our pilot program for a select few customers. We were featured in Shifter, which led to some good awareness and trial sign-ups. We knew we had hit a pain point that many businesses in Norway faced and were dependent on international solutions or scrappy workarounds to solve.

By the end of August, we expanded our payment card customer pool and launched for all Norwegian businesses. In today’s tough environment, the key metric for startups isn’t just finding product-market fit but also proving the potential for monetization. This is what makes Cardboard stand out: we saw significant growth across various areas, including revenue and transaction volume, to become a post-revenue startup!

We added a new team member in September! Vidhi joined us to head our growth initiatives and to propel our growth strategy. This was also the month where we got to work on making it easy to go from having everything organized in Cardboard to automating the accounting of your subscriptions.

October-December 2023: Customer-focused approach

We focused on refining our sales and marketing efforts, engaging with customers to understand their needs better and improve the product accordingly. To combat the expected confusion of our name with an actual cardboard box, we launched an awareness campaign called #NotABox, which received significant engagement on social media.

We launched exports that automate the accounting part of SaaS management with Norway's most popular accounting systems: PowerOffice Go, Tripletex, 24SevenOffice, Visma eAccounting, and Xledger.

In November, we got approved an exemption from PSD2’s Strong Customer Authentication requirement, meaning that our customers no longer need to prove who they are with BankID or an SMS code to be able to use our cards. So, if you’re annoyed with getting payment approval requests during a meeting or while away on vacation, with Cardboard, you won’t have that problem anymore.

Following our customers, we are now ready for our next market. To be announced soon!

Outlook for 2024: A promising future

Moving into 2024, Cardboard is well-positioned for further growth and success. We have demonstrated our ability to adapt and iterate based on customer feedback, resulting in an increasingly refined product. The positive metrics growth seen throughout 2023 provides a strong foundation for the company’s future. Additionally, our customer-focused approach highlights our commitment to understanding and meeting customer needs. As we continue to refine our product, expand our customer base, and implement efficient go-to-market strategies, we believe we are poised for continued customer empowerment and cost savings through our platform. Just the saving in internal admin time alone more than justifies the cost of using Cardboard.

In 2024, we can expect our main product to enhance its product features further, deepen its market penetration, and increase revenue streams. With the strong customer base and positive growth trajectory established in 2023, Cardboard is well-positioned to become a leading player in the global SaaS management industry.

All of this is only possible with one key ingredient: our customers.

And so, as we stand on the brink of another year, we invite you to unbox Cardboard for your business! 🗃 💳 Together, let’s reach new heights, explore uncharted territories of efficiency, and maybe, just maybe, find the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything in SaaS management (hint: it’s not 42, it’s Cardboard!). Buckle up, 2024, we’re coming for you! 🌟