Christian Holst - The man behind Baymard Institute

At one point or another, every young entrepreneur wonders what lies beneath a successful business. What are those special qualities that will make his idea a success.

Even if there isn’t a magical recipe that will transform your small business into an empire overnight, there are certain steps and tips that will help you become a successful businessman. And the best way to find out what works and what doesn’t is learning from those who succeeded.

Christian Holst, the Research Director and Co-Founder of Baymard Institute is one of those young entrepreneurs that managed to transform his passion into a successful start-up - Europe's most popular Web Usability Research company.



This interview with Christian Holst will give you an in depth view on how you can transform a vision into a company with worldwide clients from the Fortune 500 companies.

IconicMan Magazine: I want you to tell us a little bit about yourself because there are only a few people that know what the IconicMan behind the Baymard Institute does on a daily basis.

Christian Holst: Basically I see myself as someone whose main job is servicing my employees, making them perform as good as possible, by providing vision and guidance, but also removing any roadblocks they have in their daily work.

What we do at Baymard Institute is large scale e-commerce usability testing. A typical day involves connecting with the different research teams we have at the company, because everyone works remotely. So you can say it’s a distributed team across 5 different time zones, so there’s always a bit of connection with all of the research teams.

IonicMan Magazine: You mentioned that you work with people remotely. Is it better to work with them remotely rather than having them in an office?

Christian Holst: I would say there are two very different setups, with each having some pros and cons. It’s true that when you have an office it’s easier to quickly connect and discuss. When working remotely, you lose a bit of that, to some extent. But, it’s very easy to just use slack or something like that and set up dedicated calls. Because we are in so many different time zones it can be difficult to just quickly meet with someone and if you have something you need to discuss, then, that can also be difficult.

So you do require some structure, to have a remote company and some policies for how and when you meet with people and how you reach out to people, depending on how urgently you need feedback. So there’s a difference between needing feedback casually and needing feedback urgently.

IconicMan Magazine: What was your moment of truth when you started your business? I wanna hear about the frustration, the passion, the fear, the problems, maybe even with money.

Christian Holst: I started Baymard with another co-founder, his name is Jamie Appeleseed. Way before we started Baymard Institute he worked as a lead technical developer at a somewhat large agency. This was 9 years ago.

And he had an observation: when it came to making decisions about web designs, for instance, having to choose from 3 different variations of a particular web page design, there was a meeting where they had to decide which version should they choose between version A, version B and version C.

He noticed that the final decision often came down to 1 out of these 3 situation:

Either there was someone who was really passionate in the room, who convinced everybody that design version A is the best one. This person was usually the designer who designed that version.

Other times, when the meeting dragged on for a long time, the boss said: “I’m the boss, I’m deciding, let’s go with version B” - he often said it’s slightly nicer, but that was what he meant.

Or, if The Client was in the meeting, then The Client had the final say: “we are The Client, we are paying, we want version C.”

Very seldomly someone said: we have research data that suggest version D is actually the one that will perform the best with users.

We have based our entire company on this one observation. Could we provide that piece of data that you can bring into a design meeting to help you make more research based and qualified decisions instead of basing them mainly on opinion and gut feeling?

And that’s the foundation we have established the company on, and also the goal we set out 9 years ago and that we’re still working towards.

Did we have any challenges in the beginning? Yes, definitely.

We needed to create research that would take a very long time. It took two years to create our first research study, and so, for the first two years we didn’t have any products to sell.

We couldn’t just built a product for two years and then launch it without having an audience to launch it towards.

So, from day one, we figured we needed to start building an audience and a blog and a following, so we wouldn’t just deploy a product into a vacuum.

That`s why we launched baymard.com, as a blog talking about UX design and UX research. We based it on existing academic research, and then condensed that research into articles, because our own research wasn’t ready.

After 6 to 12 months, we started basing it on our own, at that time, unpublished findings and kept on doing that.

For two years, we posted a new article on our blog, every other week, without having a product to sell.

Those first two years were, by far the hardest, because we obviously didn’t earn any money and we spent quite some time on it, while having full time jobs in addition to it.



IonicMan Magazine: So, basically, you didn’t start a company with money from investors, you started it with your friend, by yourselves. And because you didn’t have this money, you didn’t want to waste any time, so, you spent that time building an audience.

After nine years, if you had to synthesize your business goals in one sentence, what would that sentence be?

Christian Holst: Our goals for our business are still quite imbedded in that initial observation, that initial story I told you before. So, our goal is pretty strict: being a provider of research that helps inform e-commerce companies to make better decisions about their designs and user experiences.

It’s a very direct goal that we work towards, because it’s somewhat of a universal goal that we can always be better, provide better research, so it’s a goal that at least so far has stood the test of time. It’s not something that will be outdated in one or two years, and I think that’s maybe one of the lessons that we’ve learned.

Find a goal or a mission that isn’t too time sensitive, that’s not hinged up in a single trend right now, but will be true five or ten years from now and then focus relentlessly on that one goal. And this has been our business strategy. We focus very intensely on doing this one thing extremely well and we aspire to be the best in the world on doing just that and then there is a whole lot of things we don’t do.

So, we don’t do traditional consulting. When people ask, even very large companies, Fortune 500 companies, if we do hourly consulting, we say no. Because, if we want to be the best in the world at building this research catalogue, then we cannot do five or ten other things at the same time. It’s not that they are bad for business, but if we want to be the best at this one goal, then we cannot do these ten other things.

IconicMan Magazine: I watch interviews of other successful people like you, and everybody says that when you start a business you don’t have to focus on what’s right in front of you, you need to think what it’s gonna happen in five or ten years. What would you say was your greatest challenge with Baymard?

Christian Holst: Launching the company was one very big challenge, actually getting through those two years and having a good product to launch.

Then, building the audience was also a major challenge. Now this is no longer a challenge, but is still our key focus. Also the quality of our products and services and how to engage the best with customers. Those are still our two key focus areas.

We have right now a research catalogue of 42.000 hours of e-commerce UX research. A challenge we have at the moment is to maintain and update a catalogue that large, because it takes a research team more than a year to update the entire research catalogue.

Then, obviously, hiring and maintaining existing employees it’s also a big challenge.

If you identify this long term goal or problem that you want to solve for your customers and focus on that, then the challenges you will have, will typically come and go, or change quite a lot. At least it’s been that way for us, we have a certain challenge for one or two years and then it changes to something else.

IconicMan magazine: You talk about how important it is to retain your employees. How do you motivate them to stay focused on work?

Christian Holst: I would say it’s not just one thing. Firstly, it’s individual, I think it’s important to keep in mind that what motivates one employee is different from what motivates another.

But, I would say there are some general principles: so firstly, we try to give people a lot of say and involvement in basically all decisions we take. We have some procedures for how we run projects and how someone can propose a new project. Basically any employee can suggest any kind of project, regardless of its size. There are just a number of steps and some things you have to present and then it could be approved and resources will be allocated.

So that’s one way we motivate employees, ensure that they have a say in every business decision: for instance: should we close this entire product line and build something new? Any employee can suggest that and if their observations, arguments and analysis hold true, then we’ll also execute them. So, that’s one part of motivating our employees.

Another part of how we motivate our employees is allowing people to really focus on their work and not get too distracted with a lot of meetings. We have set up all the file work procedures, so they are very clear and defined, meaning that when you are in each stage of what you have to perform, in terms of what your work task is, then it’s quite clear what the boundaries are, but within those boundaries, you have complete freedom of how you want to perform your work, how you want to structure your work day. So, that also motivates quite a lot of people.

IconicMan Magazine: What motivates you to wake up everyday at 5 am and keep doing what you do?

Christian Holst: Primarily two things.

One, feeling that there are meaningful challenges that have to be resolved.

This doesn’t happen in the beginning of a start-up, but once you’ve run a company for five years, if everything just works, it actually gets kind of boring at some point, or at least it doesn’t motivate you to put in seventy or eighty hours or more per week and really give it everything you’ve got.

So, there needs to be a challenge. At Baymard when things start to become somewhat of a routine it just happens that we have to make some major changes to the company. Maybe because we have been resting a little bit too much on our laurels. We have to reinvent the company a little, or how we work, or what we actually sell, so that’s one aspect of what motivates me.

Another aspect is seeing that we make an actual difference for our customers, actually that’s the number one motivational factor. Getting feedback from our customers, that our research had given a conversion rate increase of 20%, or that we have sold for 10 million extra dollars on our website, or (and this means the world to me) that the research is insightful, that’s what really motivates us.

Hearing that from our customers, knowing that we helped them with that and figuring out how can we help them even more. That’s the number one motivational factor, for me at least.

Iconic Magazine: So, you wake up and start building more and more and that keeps you motivated. What is the number one piece of advice you would give a young entrepreneur that is aspiring to have an iconic lifestyle?

Christian Holst: I would say: spend time, not necessary figuring out how to make money here and now, spend a lot of energy and time on figuring out what is the problem that you’re solving for your customers and who are your customers.

You don’t have to target a super broad audience, at least that’s not what we have done. We have targeted somewhat of a niche and then we have become the best in that.

So, figure out what is the problem that you are solving. You don’t have to solve that problem for 10 million customers, it’s quite fair if you have a problem that you’re only solving for 1000 customers, as long as it’s very, very important for those thousand customers. So they can become your fans or your go-to source. That’s my main advice.

Figure out what that is, spend some time on that and make sure that is something that’s not too much of a trend right now, but something that will also hold true in five years. Because when you have that, you can then focus relentlessly on that.

And then cut away all distractions. Then along the way you will figure out how you will make the most money. So, you could start with something and then just know that as long as you keep solving the problem, you can change the actual business model, how you solve that problem, or how you charge your customers. You can change that after two, three, five or six years.

So the business model doesn’t have to be perfect up front, but the problem you solve and the long term goal for your company, that has to be somewhat perfect from the start, or at least it has to be clear, so you can focus relentlessly on that.

IconicMan Magazine: So, basically, don’t focus on making money, focus on solving a problem and then the money will come. Do you guys do your marketing yourselves or do you work with a company that does the marketing for you?

Christian Holst: We do very little proactive marketing so we don’t actually do any sort of marketing in the traditional sense. Our main source for new customers and leads are two things: that blog or article thing we started nine years ago and that we have posted every second week for nine year in a row now.

That started out small, we had 10 subscribers, then 15 subscribers and, I think, after doing it for, I don’t know, half a year or a full year, we still had 100 - 150 subscribers. Now we have 20.000, so now there is a real impact. It takes some time to build something like that. But, now it is our number one vehicle for customers and leads. That’s how we get almost all of our customers.

So, 90-95% of our marketing effort is that blog, so you can say it’s not something we pay money for, but obviously we spend quite a lot of resources on it. It takes one or two full working days to create a blog post like that or like the ones we’re creating. And we have some 240 now, so that’s 500 work days that we have spent. So, you can say that’s a significant marketing expense, if you translate all that time into money.



IconicMan Magazine: How does your current business benefit its customers and what is the impact that you want to have with your brand in the coming years?

Christian Holst: It’s still really the same as it was in the beginning, or at least the core principle: we help them make better design decisions. The way we actually help them is different now because we have more research. Now, we have research on almost every aspect of online retail, so e-commerce, user experiences and designs. This means, we can obviously help them with more of their decisions than we could five years ago, but the underlying way that we benefit our customers is still the same. By providing the research they can take into their decisions and decision meetings.

We’ll keep broadening the types of research we can help our customers with. So making it more and more detailed and more and more niche and covering more unique markets, unique industries.

IconicMan Magazine: Have you worked with drop shipping stores? Because drop shipping is such a big thing now. And can they use your research to increase their sales?

Christian Holst: So, our research is not tied to a platform or a specific method at all. We focus exclusively on e-commerce user experiences from an end user’s perspective. And what we find in our research is that users have no clue and don’t care about what platform you’re using or what method you’re using, they care only about the actual web page that you serve them.

Then it’s true, as a business there are some platforms that are easier to work with and easier to achieve a good design with than others, but users don’t understand the underlying and technical layers that serve up the webpage, they only care about the webpage.

So all our research findings apply to any kind of platform or business method as long as it’s selling some kind of product online.

If you have a traditional retail e-commerce site, then the full research catalogue applies, but if you have a special BtoB niche, or an e-commerce site that only sells prescriptions for businesses, then only half of our research findings will apply.

IconicMan Magazine: And the final question is: all iconic men have a way of balancing their professional and personal lives. How do you manage to keep up with all your ongoing stuff.

Christian Holst: That’s a good question. It’s something that has changed.

When we started Baymard, we worked around the clock for the first two or three years. Back then I didn’t have a family, so it was easier to balance it, because there really wasn’t that much to balance.

Now I still work a lot, but when I don’t work, I stop all work. And that means two things: one - I don’t have a laptop at home, two - I leave my phone in the hallway, so I can’t keep checking my phone, meaning that, when I’m home, I’m actually home and don’t focus on work and don’t allow anyone to call me and distract me and don’t seek it out myself.

And that is what allows and justifies that I still work somewhat long hours. When I am home, it’s quality time instead of being home and keep on checking emails every ten minutes and then, all of the sudden, because I saw an email having to go to the computer and answer something complex that takes half an hour and results in being only half way there.

So I rather be there a few hours less, but when I’m there, I’m 100% focused on my family and friends.

We hope that the interview with Christian Holst managed to motivate you and gave you some interesting insights on what it takes to transform a vision into a big success.