Karma CEO shares how he moved from enterprise software to an app to reduce food waste

• Hjalmar Nordegren went from choir school, medical school, where he became a trained medical doctor, to the cofounder of a tech company.
• In its early phases, Karma founders had to figure out what service the app should provide for users.
• Now, the founders, including Nordegren, are trying to differentiate themselves from competitors. They usually do this by integrating transparency into their offerings.
• The Karma team hopes to continue the growth of the company and invest some of that into growing staff as well.
• This article is part of a series on growing a small business, "From 1 to 100."

Hjalmar Nordegren doesn't fit the mold of a classic tech entrepreneur. While many have a computer science degree or an MBA, Nordegren spent several years at choir school.

But, that isn't the end of his education story.

The Swedish 30-year-old is a trained medical doctor who used to work in an addiction emergency clinic at an accident and emergency hospital.

"I loved it, but I always felt hyperactive...like there's more I [could] do," he said.

Now he's the cofounder and CEO of food surplus app Karma, headquartered in Stockholm. Although he doesn't have a "techie" resume, Nordegren has been programming since he was 13 years old.

"In the beginning, it was just for fun - to do something in my free time," he said.

It ended up leading to a part-time job and before he knew it, Nordegren was building small little apps.

"They were really horrible business ideas and failed fast," he said.

But it didn't take long for Nordegren to land on a successful business idea. He built an enterprise-software application that companies use to get feedback from their staff.

"Think of it like SurveyMonkey but well, well, well hidden within enterprise software," he said. "It's several layers deep in airline systems and stuff like that. It's not something anyone would have ever heard of. And it was an exciting business."

Even with its enticing prospects, Nordegren and his cofounders weren't convinced that enterprise software was for them.

"We were all sitting down and saying it's enterprise serving software ... is that what we want to do for the rest of our lives?" he said. They started working on a new app that allowed people to get bargains on a range of items.

"We said, if we can build a model around people feeling that they're making a good deal, then that's a great start," Nordegren said. "And we built this deal app, you could almost call it a crowdsourced version of Groupon, which sounded good, but it was very difficult to get it to work."

They had to work through issues about what customers wanted and how they could provide that, but they found that its thousands of users all wanted something different from the app. The founders realized that they needed to focus on one particular offering if Karma was going to become a global utility.

After noticing some solid early traction among restaurants, they decided to focus on food and food waste in particular. They weren't the only ones to think of this. Other apps like TooGoodToGo and Olio also allow people to pick up food surplus.

Nordegren said that Karma is trying to differentiate itself from some of the competition by showing consumers exactly what food items they can purchase through the app. There's no mystery boxes or secret surprises on Karma.

In terms of his leadership style, Nordegren isn't afraid to be hands on.

"I can be quite micromanaging if I'm supposed to engage in something," he said. "If I'm supposed to have input on a design or if I'm supposed to be part of a project development group, then I'll engage full-on.

"At the same time, I think I'm pretty Swedish in my management style. I expect people to take responsibility. In the beginning, you did everything yourself. Now we're finding that in order to scale you have to delegate quite efficiently."

And Nordegren has plenty of people he can delegate to. The company's headcount stands at 75 today. Nordegren said he expects Karma to have more than 100 staff by the second quarter of 2020.

"We're just trying to keep up with our own growth at the moment, which is feels like a luxury problem," he said.