Creandum welcomes “Built for Mars” Peter Ramsey as Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Over the course of the past 18 years, Creandum has become the natural home for outstanding product founders. Spotify, iZettle, Vivino, Klarna, Cornershop, Trade Republic, Taxfix — you name it, it’s part of our core mission to help the most ambitious global entrepreneurs deliver the products the world needs next.
Our Entrepreneur-in-Residence programme is designed to double down on that mission and provide all founders in the Creandum Funds’ portfolio with world-leading expertise. So, we are delighted to announce our latest team member: Peter Ramsey, best known as the author behind “Built for Mars”.
Put simply: Peter is the best UX expert in Europe today.
Despite being based on the beautiful, vibrant south coast of England, his business sees him working shoulder to shoulder with the most progressive tech companies in the world, including Google, Klarna, and Notion.
“Building great UX is a mixture of art, personal preference and understanding human behaviour. It’s not a set of fixed rules to follow, but rather a process of creatively solving new problems.”
When he is not analyzing websites and digital tools, you can find him “understanding human behaviour” of his 6-month old daughter or exploring ambitious plans that involve British farms (and potentially metric tons of insects. Ask him about it one day.)
We sat down with him to learn more about his path to become Europe’s most active UX consultant at the age of 28, his core tips for great UX and his future plans:
- You ran a proptech company for six years and sold it to one of the worlds largest private equity firms in 2018. Today, you’re one of the most well-known UX experts and more than 250.000 people read your “Built for Mars” Blog. How did you become a UX expert? Tell us about your story.
The short version of the story is that at Movem, I was a product-led founder. That was the part of the job I truly loved, and so I was self-taught (out of necessity) to build a better product.
When we were struggling with sales, instead of hiring more people to hammer the phones, I obsessed over reducing churn.
After the acquisition, friends started asking me to help them with their products. Then friends of friends, and after a few years of ad-hoc consulting I set up Built for Mars. Now it’s all I do, and it’s great.
2. How important was the role of UX in your company Movem and what are the biggest lessons you took from that time about UX?
The user experience is important to every start-up, I think it’s just the definition that people struggle with. UX doesn’t just mean pixels on a screen, but how something feels. It’s the cross-section of human psychology and ‘stuff’ — and humans are surprisingly irrational.
For example, people are outraged when physical bank branches close down, as that’s something that they believe they value. Yet when you actually have to visit one, you’re frustrated that you couldn’t solve it online. Banks can somewhat alleviate this by having great UX within their app.
3. What do you think is the “secret sauce” to really good UX?
As a product grows — in both features and staff — it gets more difficult to maintain a high standard of UX. If I had to pick one factor, it’s having a product manager / designer who really cares.
And not just a corporation tweeting that they care, but actually investing their resources in making the experience better, regardless of if it directly impacts their EBITDA.
4. What are the key UX tips you would give to any early-stage company that is just starting its product development?
Most people don’t properly account for the incremental cost of adding features. Teams get excited, and claim that “in just 1 week we can build this cool feature” — what they fail to understand is that it’s never just a week.
The complexity that you’ve added to your product increases the time required for testing and it likely makes building an intuitive UX harder.
6. How do you think being part of Creandum will benefit your professional development?
I’m here to learn as much as I can. One day (could be months, could be decades), I want to swing for the fences with another product. But the timing and opportunity needs to be right.
In the meantime, I’ve been gifted an opportunity to learn from not just one of the best VCs in the game, but portfolio companies that clearly ‘get it’.
Creandum is thrilled to have Peter join us and share his UX wisdom with our investment advisory team and the funds’ portfolio companies. Any ideas or UX-related questions? Ping him!
- Peter is a frequent contributor to Techcrunch providing UX analyses
- Read more about the importance of the right product team
- Learn more about our former Entrepreneurs-in-Residence Leo Nilsson and Caroline Ingeborn.
