Creative Ops at Startup Speed: Lessons from Superside

Fredrik Thomassen, co-founder and CEO of Superside, joins the show to unpack how startups can scale creative work without slowing down or burning out their teams.

Superside is a subscription-based design company that helps fast-growing teams get high-quality creative at scale. In this conversation, Fredrik shares how he built a globally distributed team, why async collaboration beats real-time meetings, and what most startups get wrong when managing creative work.

We also get into:

• Hiring in overlooked markets
• Building customer trust and employee cohesion across time zones
• Structuring creative operations like a product team
• Why treating designers as partners — not vendors — drives better outcomes

If you're juggling growth and messaging or just trying to build creative capacity without the chaos, listen in.

RUNTIME 44:58

EPISODE BREAKDOWN

(2:30) “ You start out and think, ‘I can do this for four or five years,’ and all of a sudden, a decade has passed.”

(4:32) Superside’s beta was popular, but “ it was a total mess behind the scenes.”

(7:36) Why “ it felt like an obvious move to go to YC.”

(11:15) “ We found product-market fit, and then kind of COVID hit at the same time.”

(14:17) The biggest mistake Fredrik made while adding headcount in the early days

(18:59) Working with a founder coach has been “scary, but also in a sense, very motivating.”

(21:39) Fredrik lists his preferred Norwegian authors

(25:29) Inside Superside’s pivot from freelancer marketplace to enterprise creative services

(29:40) “ What's growing at the moment is AI-powered creative services for our enterprise customers.”

(32:08) Quantifying the efficiency gai”s from using AI-enabled services

(37:53) How Superside collaborates with clients to provide strategic services and production work

(40:31) “ It's quite hard to build a lifestyle business.”

(42:40) The one question he’d have to ask the CEO before accepting a job offer with an early-stage startup

LINKS

• Fredrik Thomassen
• Haakon Heir
• Jing Venås Kjeldsen
• Superside
• Y Combinator
• Paul Graham essays
• Hunger, Knut Hamsun
• Jon Fosse
• Karl Ove Knausgård

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Thanks for listening!

– Walter.