Actiondesk

We’re fascinated by what technology can bring. Man, space rockets land back safely on Earth nowadays! We should be able to harvest what tech can bring in our daily routines too. We believe that, tomorrow, everyone - not only software engineers - will be able to build software. And at Actiondesk, we are working on enabling everyone to interact with the critical data they need.

After doing Y Combinator in 2019, the whole team relocated to San Francisco, from Paris, France. We had already worked on Actiondesk for two years and being backed by VCs allowed us to get to the next level. We pivoted, and now here we are, a team of 4, currently recruiting more people to join the adventure!

“How I ended up creating Actiondesk” (J’s story)

Hey, I’m Jonathan, CEO and Co-Founder at Actiondesk.

Before that, I was the Managing Director at Jumia, the Amazon of Africa. One day, as we are hustling to grow faster, our most crucial report screws up. The one tracking the North Star Metric of our e-commerce business. With our percentage of orders fulfilled in time. And there’s no way to modify it ourselves. Now, I'm blind because of our BI tool. And I realize that day I have no control over our key data and that’s a no go.

How did this happen? We had decided to do something we had never done before: offer a killer product as a pre-order.

Of course, our backend system doesn’t know how to handle it yet. It considers those orders are late. That messes up our North Star Metric. And without reliable data, we can’t manage our business.

So I ask the guy in charge of our BI to filter this product out so that we can track the real late orders. Can’t be that hard right? It’s like adding a countifs in a spreadsheet or a condition in a SQL query.

He answers: “Sorry Jonathan, but we can’t do that. The calculations are standard and we cannot make a change for one team. Pre orders are not something in the system, so you shouldn’t have made them”. Yeah sure, we should stop growing, stop satisfying our customers and let the competition beat us because it bothers someone to change our standard report.

Now it’s crystal clear: it’s crucial that I have direct access to our data. And be able to pull a number very fast if I need to. And modify reports as our operational needs change.

After that, I tried all the alternatives I could find. As easy and flexible as they are, Excel or Google Sheets don’t connect to live data, and BI tools are too clunky for most of my team to use. I figured I should build the solution I needed. So I left Jumia. I had studied business. I learned how to code. And built the first prototype of what should be as easy and flexible as a spreadsheet, and powerful as a BI tool.

You can request access to Actiondesk and see for yourself.

Who We Are

We’re an early-stage startup, VC backed, between 22 and 38 years old. We want to understand things in depth. We’re independant, don't want to ask and wait to get things. We want things on our own terms, not one-size-fits-all. We like productivity, to try out new apps and beautifully crafted brands. We believe we can accomplish

People we follow on Twitter

PG, Rahul Vohra, Sam Altman and Tobi Lutke.

Podcasts we like

Tim Ferriss, Invest Like the Best and Acquired.

Tools we use

Todoist, Notion, Slack, Zapier, Superhuman, Figma, Linear, Airtable, Roam Research, Command E and Zoom and 1Password among others.

Stuff we don’t like

Useless meetings, 9 to 5, “it’s just a job”, slowness, inefficiencies and paperwork.

All combined, we lived in France, Canada, Poland, Kenya, Mexico, India, USA, UK, Italy and Germany.️