The crazy vision of
a BI consultant
The story of how Konstrukt came to be and what the beef our founder has with Excel is all about.
"This MUST be working by tomorrow at 7 AM!"
Samuel, the CFO of our first client, had all reasons to be furious. Less than 6 months ago he had placed is trust in us and told his organisation, a rather big one, that Konstrukt would be their new tool for budget and forecasting. Today the first process was launched and it had all crashed - none of the users could do any work and the deadlines were tight. The board expected the budget to be completed in just a couple of weeks. I looked at my co-founder Johan and we knew that there was just one thing to do, rewrite a lot of the code and hope that the hours until dawn would be enough...

But let's step back a bit. I had been working as a BI consultant for 7 years at this point, my work spanning everything from being a sounding board for companies wanting to become more data driven and building visualizations, to building data pipelines and hacking integrations – whatever was needed basically.

Not actually our client CFO.

Manual work - a killer of motivation
But one problem kept reoccurring – why did all solutions have to involve Excel? It’s a fantastic app, but I hated the vulnerable scripts needed to pull the data out, making it difficult to maintain. Besides, with more than a single user, there was always tons of manual work needed. And I HATE manual work.

I had started a consultancy and for several of our clients we had hacked together solutions around planning, forecasting, simulations and other data entry stuff that the real data stack tools didn’t handle. But I felt it could be done better and we decided to give it a shot.

I imagined a tool that would plug neatly into the data stack by using the same data structure (a star schema model). Secondly, it should feature a simple and easy-to-use interface for end users, so everyone needed easily could be involved without a lot of training. Thirdly, it should be a living model, like spreadsheets, where formulas are calculated immediately.
I wanted to help the likes of myself in the business, the creators, the problem solvers, the builders. Konstrukt should be a given addition to all data stacks!
Our premise for the investment was to have a paying client before the money ran out, which brings us back to the story. We had presented a mockup to Samuel and landed a contract with him. All we had to do was to build the product. But resources were scarce, and we hadn’t had time to test anything thoroughly, hence the big crash. But we had grit and customer focus, and by the morning the product worked okey. We kept working nights that month, clocking in record number of hours, but we pulled through and the client was happy. Our product was alive!

For several years we kept adding customers and improving the product, but my end goal was never just helping clients. I wanted to help the likes of myself in the business, the creators, the problem solvers, the builders. Konstrukt should be a given addition to all data stacks!

Today, we’re about to make that vision a reality. Do you want to be a builder in our community? We're currently offering free early bird access.