Startup interview: Steffen Wulff Petersen, Co-founder, Sona

RTIH gets the lowdown on Sona, which recently raised a $2.2 million pre-seed round as it looks to accelerate the development and adoption of its app for retail employees.

RTIH: Tell us about yourself and Sona

SWP: I’m one of the three co-founders behind Sona. Originally from Denmark, I’ve lived and worked across Europe and Asia.

I set up Rocket Internet in the UK and I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with several startups that went on to hit unicorn status and achieve big exits such as Lazada and HelloFresh.

We built the Sona employee app for the specific needs of retail employees and workers in other ‘deskless’ industries.

The problem for many frontline retail staff is that lots of aspects of managing their work - checking their schedules, booking leave, submitting feedback - involve a lot of manual back and forth with managers and HR.

Sona is a mobile hub for all of these tasks. Colleagues can:

View and claim shifts instantly
Access and manage their schedules
Book annual leave
Get real time company updates and message team members one to one
Leave feedback for managers and head office

We make these common tasks extremely easy and convenient for employees to complete autonomously so they feel more empowered and valued at work.

Then, as more workflows can be automated, managers are freed up to focus on mission critical work.

RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the brand up?

SWP: Previously we’d built our own technology to stop us being overwhelmed by manual processes as we grew and ran ‘gig economy’ workforces (predominantly made up of shift-based staff).

Through that we found out that many of the companies we worked with did not have their own equivalent.

At one point a candidate of ours - who'd been working for a major UK retailer - showed us a WhatsApp group filled with photos of paper schedules that had been annotated in pen.

Over time a pattern emerged across our client base and we realised there was an incredible opportunity to create something far better.

RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?

SWP: The fantastic response from our early customers is what made us so excited about Sona. We’re running pilot projects with two national retailers and have been getting positive feedback from the teams we’re working with.

One of them has seen new patterns of cross working between departments emerge that simply wouldn’t be possible if their teams didn’t have the full visibility of available shifts that we enable.

All the feedback we’re getting is helping us to build out our product roadmap and ensure that the app is as suitable as possible for use across the retail sector and its supply chain.

RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?

SWP: As Sona was born during the pandemic we have had to do more on a remote working basis than we would have liked.

Given that the product we’re building is in a relatively new category we would ideally be spending lots of time on the ground with our customers getting to know their people and operations and that just hasn’t been possible.

We have, however, been transported into our client’s living rooms via Zoom which has been an interesting experience and we have managed to build strong relationships that way too.

The benefit of online meetings is perhaps the ability to jump on video calls much more frequently compared to in-person meetings which is valuable too.

In terms of our team, it helps that everyone is already used to this way of working, but there are still some aspects of collaboration - especially the more creative side - that are more challenging when you can’t all be in the same room.

Also, nothing beats being able to toast to success in real life, so we’re looking forward to our next all-company get together to celebrate our progress so far.

RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?

SWP: As tiresome as it is to bring up the ‘c-word’, its long-term effects have lots of implications for the future of retail.

From a customer perspective, periods of lockdown have created crazy peaks and troughs in demand and it’s still a huge challenge to predict firstly what demand is going to be like for the rest of this year, next year, and beyond and secondly where that demand is going to come from - is it online, is it stores, and which stores?

From a staffing perspective, putting current availability issues aside, we are seeing a longer term restructuring of the labour market and permanent shifts in what people expect from their employer.

Though not as stark here, retail has been a major victim of the ‘great resignation’ in the US as the pressures of (and unplanned time away from) work during the height of the pandemic have led them to reevaluate the role of work in their lives.

So the challenge ahead for retailers is not just to put people in vacant roles but to completely review and overhaul working practices, employee benefits and company culture to ensure they can attract talent in an increasingly competitive jobs market.

RTIH: What's the best question about your brand asked of you recently by an investor and/or a customer?

SWP: It’s probably “where did the name come from?” When brainstorming we knew it needed to be short, easy to pronounce and work in multiple languages.

We ended up taking ‘Sona’ from the middle of the word ‘personal’ and it was pretty much everyone’s favourite from the start. The dictionary definition of personal is “belonging to or affecting a particular person rather than anyone else”.

Sona represents our belief that technology that works for the individual creates the most value for the whole. As an added bonus, ‘sona’ is the Irish word for happy, which is apt as we want to help employees feel good about their work.

RTIH: What can we expect to see from Sona over the next 12 months?

SWP: We’re a young company so we are currently focused on our early customers and building amazing experiences for them.

We’ll be opening up the platform to new customers very shortly and we have a packed roadmap that includes four to five new feature areas we plan to launch by the end of the year.

Then it’s all about growth so we’re excited to deepen our engagement with the retail community and help more operators to get more flex from their existing workforces, engage their teams and return more time to their managers.

Hopefully that all means your readers will be hearing more about the results of our work in the months to come too.

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