- Iranthi Gomes on making Forbes’ 30 Under 30
In another instance of Sri Lankans abroad making our country proud in a time of unprecedented troubles, a Sri Lankan-born Finland-based entrepreneur has lifted hearts and hopes by fulfilling her early adulthood dream of making it into Forbes Magazine’s 30 Under 30 Europe list for 2022.
At the age of 28, Iranthi is the first-ever Sri Lankan to make the Europe list – several Sri Lankans have managed to make it to this renowned list before, but none of them have done so for leading businesses in Europe. Iranthi is the Co-Founder and CEO of Serviceform, a suite of 13 tools that helps businesses communicate online and convert website visitors into customers through a single platform. Iranthi founded Serviceform in 2018 with her business partner and husband, Jarkko Oksanen. Under her leadership as CEO, Iranthi led Serviceform to raise more than € 2 million in capital in February 2022 through a funding round led by BackingMinds, a Swedish VC fund.
Fresh off her announcement as one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for Europe in the first week of May, Brunch sat down with Iranthi for a chat on how she became the first Sri Lankan to make it into the list from Europe, how her brainchild Serviceform came to be, and what drives her as a businesswoman and entrepreneur.
Making Forbes’ 30 Under 30
Born and raised in Sri Lanka, Iranthi moved to Australia for her higher education (she studied hospitality at the Federation University in Melbourne) where she met her now husband Jarkko, who is Finnish.
Making it into Forbes Magazine is something Iranthi has always wanted to do. “I came across Forbes when I was 15 or 16 – I was doing Business Studies, and people like Richard Branson and businesses like IKEA are common topics in the curriculum. I was fascinated by Richard Branson and asked my teacher to tell me more and ended up Googling him and came across Forbes, an entire community of innovators making change and making a difference by doing different things. I don’t think 30 Under 30 existed back then; it’s only in its 11th year,” she explained, noting that when she was 15, the Forbes30 under 30 list didn’t exist and until two years ago, she’d only read Forbes online before deciding to subscribe to the physical magazine. She learnt about the 30 Under 30 list when she was 22, and immediately thought that it would be amazing to one day be on it.
Of course, making it to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list is no small feat – you need to build a multi-million company for starters – but, with Serviceform and as its CEO, this is something Iranthi did accomplish. “Someone needs to nominate you for the list, it’s not something you apply for. My husband Jarkko nominated me, and I didn’t know he had,” Iranthi said, explaining how the whole thing came about and sharing that she only realised when she received an email telling her she’d been shortlisted and asking her to fill out forms and provide specific information as a potential candidate.
News of becoming a finalised member of the 30 Under 30 came a month later, and incidentally, Iranthi was in Sri Lanka working with Serviceform’s local office (Serviceform has offices in Finland, Spain, and Sri Lanka) when she got the news. “To be honest, I missed the email telling me I was on the list, I saw something online to do with Forbes 30 Under 30 and that was what prompted me to check,” Iranthi said, adding: “It’s amazing to be included in the list. It’s something I’ve really wanted from back in the day.”
Building Serviceform
Iranthi is what you would call a born entrepreneur. Her parents were also small business owners all their lives, and Iranthi always knew she wanted to run her own business, and began learning about entrepreneurship from as young as 15, before really starting to connect with startups as a culture after moving to Australia for her studies at 20.
Serviceform is not Iranthi’s first business – her first was Wheelys Melbourne, a gourmet coffee cart business that focused on catering coffee at social and corporate events throughout Melbourne. Wheelys Melbourne too was a joint business between Iranthi and her husband Jarkko, a software developer.
Wheelys Melbourne stemmed from both Iranthi and Jarkko’s desire to start a business together that could be operated part-time and without extensive resources. Coffee came about in part because of Iranthi’s studies in hospitality and because of Melbourne’s very rich coffee culture, and because it also seemed interesting and fun. Of course, as with all hospitality businesses, Wheelys Melbourne required a lot more work than one would initially have thought.
One key area that Iranthi and Jarkko found needed special attention was responding to and converting customers online. The pair had worked out their positioning such, that Wheelys Melbourne was the first website customers would see when searching for coffee carts, but still, they had very tight windows to respond to website customer inquiries before they lost the customer to someone else, and spent a lot of time speaking with customers on their requirements and essentially answering the same questions over and over. And this was how the seed for Serviceform was planted: “We thought, ‘let’s build a platform that makes this easier,’” Iranthi said. “If you think about wanting a coffee cart, customers have so many questions, so let’s make a form where they can answer these questions. Customers only answer one question at a time by clicking a button.”
This system not only gave Wheelys Melbourne specific information but also at the same time helped customers understand what services they offered and how they worked, which also meant that they could automatically identify the customers and models they wanted to work with quickly and efficiently. Iranthi and Jarkko also saw that other hospitality businesses were facing the same problems and looking for ways to not just streamline communications but convert visitors to customers more effectively, which was when the pair decided to sell their stake in Wheelys Melbourne and embark on Serviceform to create a product that could be used by any company regardless of what vertical they operate in.
Simply put, Serviceform offers businesses a range of back-end tools that integrate all customer inquiries into one platform, while also providing customised support to potential customers based on which page of a website they’re on.
“Let’s say you walk into a store looking for size 28 jeans and you look around but there is no one to help you. Basically, you will walk out of the store and that business will have lost a potential customer,” Iranthi explained. “The same things happen on websites – people visit websites daily but can’t find what they’re looking for and leave. The only difference is you can’t see it.” Serviceform creates customised chats and messages that help potential customers find what they’re looking for and operates as a plugin tool that can be linked to any form of website.
Serviceform can also be integrated with social media pages for businesses that operate solely off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on, to allow them to respond to and convert customers more efficiently.
Iranthi’s guiding principles
As someone who has successfully built businesses that add value, Brunch asked Iranthi what her guiding principles in business are.
Transparency was her first offering – it is always important to be transparent with customers and employees as well, Iranthi shared, noting that sometimes people are not honest enough about what they expect from you (and vice versa) which can lead to relationships that end badly.
Another guiding principle for Iranthi is respect. Explaining that Serviceform now has over 50 employees from diverse cultures and expertise and knowledge bases, Iranthi emphasised the importance of respect, saying, “simply be nice”. This also extends to the customers your company works with. For instance, Iranthi shared that Serviceform recently stopped working with a customer because of issues with how they handled Serviceform customer success managers.
And, as with all businesses today, Iranthi’s other defining principle is clear, non-judgemental communication and being willing to admit when you don’t know or understand something and being patient when others have gaps in knowledge or difficulty understanding, summing it up by saying, “there is no such thing as a dumb question”.
We also asked Iranthi for her biggest piece of advice to other aspiring entrepreneurs, and she gladly obliged: “I preach this every day – if there’s something you think is interesting, whether it’s a good idea or bad one (bad ideas can always evolve into good ones), don’t wait on it and don’t plan it forever. Just start. Even if it’s something like a blog article, for example, forget the writing and just jot down your main ideas and points – figure out the main paragraphs and write around it later. Get it done, and don’t overthink it.”
