Q CONGRATULATIONS ON MAKING IT TO THE FORBES 30 UNDER 30! Q WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF AND SERVICEFORM IN 5 YEARS? IRANTHI GOMES Forbes 30 under 30

Agood cup of coffee helps a lot of us to start our day but not many can say it helped start a business that landed them in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list- unless of course, you are Iranthi Gomes. Gomes (28) secured a coveted distinction in the Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 Europe list in 2022 for her role as co-founder and CEO of Serviceform, a global B2B Saas company that offers 13 tools to help businesses communicate, convert website visitors into customers and manage them all in one platform. The Sri Lankan born and Finnish-based entrepreneur co-founded the company in 2017 with her partner in business and life, Jarkko Okasen. Today, Serviceform has expanded to Spain and Sri Lanka and secured a USD 2.4 million funding in an investment round in January 2022.

Gomes’ Forbes 30U30 distinction makes history as she becomes the first ever Sri Lankan to make it to the European list. Before Gomes, several other Sri Lankans have been listed over the years for their work in different sectors.

In conversation with the Daily Mirror Life, Gomes talks about the cup of coffee that started it all, building a start-up and celebrating the good news.

Thank you! Being on Forbes was something I dreamed of while growing up - so I saw it as a big achievement, even though it is just a listing to celebrate being on the way to achieving real success. We were in our Colombo office when I got the news, and before that, I had only told a few selected people about being shortlisted for the Under 30 list before Forbes came out with the news.

Q FORBES UNDER 30 IS SUCH A HUGE DISTINCTION.

HOW DID YOU CELEBRATE THE NEWS?

Even though I got the news while I was in Colombo and at the local office, we had an early flight to Finland the next morning so we couldn’t really celebrate the news there. But then we had a fun party in our Finnish office. We celebrated two things actually; being listed on Forbes 30 under 30 and hitting a big milestone of hitting 1.5mn USD ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)! I’m also excited to attend the Forbes Under 30 summit in Israel next month.

Q WE HEARD THAT YOUR BUSINESS SERVICE FORM STARTED WITH A CUP OF COFFEE?

Yes, actually. Me and Jarkko actually started another business before in Melbourne. We started a Coffee Catering chain with coffee carts for the events industry with the goal to grow Australia wide. Soon we saw that a physical business with the bureaucracy belonging to the food industry would have

been hard to scale. Even getting our permits to begin in Melbourne took almost 6 months! We also found the problem that spawned Service form. There were a lot of enquiries coming through our website and we saw that we were losing potential customers if we didn’t respond to them quickly. As a small business, we couldn’t afford to lose gigs. So, we created an automatic form to solve this problem - and it did!

The automatic form helped improve the business in 3 ways; firstly, it helped us reduce the customers we were losing to the competition. As soon as a customer filled the form with their need for a coffee cart to cater to their event, through the automatic form, we gave the assurance that we will come to their event. This reduced us missing out on a lot of the gigs. Secondly, it took away the unnecessary back and forth communication. The automatic form was built in a way to educate the customer about the service we were offering so they can get their questions answered at the same time. This took away a lot of the back-and-forth communication we previously did. Finally, it helped us not work with the wrong type of customers. As the coffee catering business was entirely based on time and human resources, it was important we worked with the right type of customers. We wanted customers who paid us by the hour instead of the number of coffee cups they purchased. This gave us a guarantee of what it would cost to operate a gig. And our focus was on corporate events, weddings and birthdays. With asking simple questions on the automatic form, we were able to qualify the customers we wanted to work with.

So that’s when we realised, we had something on our hands that could not just help the events industry but any other industry anywhere in the world as long as you have a business and a website.

Q ONE OF THE REASONS YOU AND YOUR PARTNER FOUNDED SERVICEFORM IS BECAUSE YOU

WANTED TO MAKE TECH LESS SCARY - HAVE

YOU ALWAYS BEEN A FIRM BELIEVER OF INNOVATIVE TECH?

I have always been interested in tech and when running the coffee catering business, we saw that we had an advantage around marketing ourselves online which similar

I had only told a few selected people about being shortlisted before Forbes came out with the news...i’m also excited to attend the Forbes Under 30 summit in Israel next month.

businesses in the space lacked. That’s when it initially clicked, there are so many established businesses with people knowing their craft amazingly well. But then, when it comes to their online presence, and how they are attracting customers, they are left behind because they don’t have the knowledge and tools. It’s time consuming, difficult and expensive to take up a new software. Our goal is to create a service that combines great tech with a great service solutions that helps with onboarding. For most business owners there is simply not enough time to deal with installation and onboarding. We combine easy-to-use, but advanced software with a very simple onboarding.

Q IN JANUARY, SERVICEFORM SECURED A MASSIVE USD 2.4 MILLION INVESTMENT WHICH MEANS BIGGER AND BETTER THINGS

FOR THE BUSINESS – ARE THERE ANY NEW RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH A BIGGER BUSINESS? WHERE IS SERVICEFORM HEADED?

The investment is for growth; our goal is to grow from 30 to 150 people over the two years. As of last week, we hit our total headcount of 50 people across four offices. Handling an expanding number of employees is always going to create more challenges and managing the growth that it’s handled sustainably will be difficult. Going from 30 to 50 so far this year already showed that it can be challenging around communication and replicating processes.

Q RIGHT NOW, WE GET TO SEE THE THRIVING BUSINESS YOU’VE BUILT BUT STARTING OUT MUST NOT HAVE BEEN EASY. WHAT’S SOMETHING NO ONE REALLY TELLS YOU ABOUT RUNNING A START UP?

There is no clear path and most advice you get is broad and quite useless. A lot of people will give you advice but very rarely give actionable steps. It’s difficult making decisions without having all the data and hoping that it’s the right thing to do. I also work very long hours with my co-founder. In the beginning, we did that with no salary. When asking other people for advice, don’t always take it for your own truth. Keep it in the back of your head but don’t be afraid to try something out and fail.

Q TODAY, MANY NEW BUSINESS OWNERS

SEEM TO CHASE AFTER QUICK REWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS IN

THEIR BUSINESSES.

HOW IMPORTANT IS IT TO GROW YOUR BUSINESS ORGANICALLY, CELEBRATE THE SMALL WINS, BEAR THE LOSSES AND BUILD YOUR BRAND CONSCIENTIOUSLY?

Unfortunately, there are no quick wins. It’s just constant long-term effort, while remembering to build a business by your values. It’s very important to have that long term mindset from day one because there will be days that you will doubt yourself and when you remind yourself that everything you are doing is for the bigger picture, it helps to get through difficult days. Celebrating small wins is really crucial for a growing business and recognising your team for their hard work goes a long way. Every time someone new joins the team, we close a new deal, we build a new feature, our internal communications tool, Google Chat is bursting with encouragement.

Q IN AN INTERVIEW YOU MENTION THAT IT WAS EASY TO ESTABLISH AND GROW YOUR BUSINESS IN FINLAND. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON

SRI LANKA’S BUSINESS LANDSCAPE FOR STARTUPS AND WHAT CAN SRI LANKA LEARN FROM THAT BUSINESS INDUSTRY?

Sri Lanka has a lot of talent that is not getting enough opportunities. What Finland does, for example, is have a governmental funding system for Start-ups which also works directly with the private sector. This allows everyone with a scalable idea that will grow exports from the country to reach a level of funding, and advanced funding if your idea is successful. A similar system in Sri Lanka could stop part of the brain drain and create billions in exports over time.i see a lot of potential in Sri Lanka and we already have a team of 12 people there. One of my goals is to turn Sri Lanka into a hub to target the international market.

My primary goal is to grow Serviceform to 100m ARR as fast as possible - we want Serviceform to be the go-to partner for SMES around the world for any marketing related tools. outside of Serviceform, I want to create other companies around health, real estate and gaming.