Meet Niklas Ingvar, the founder who defines fun as building solutions to match customer needs

Since fun means different things to different people, Niklas and Johnny always emphasise the importance of finding your kind of fun. It's perfectly okay to be goofy if that’s what you like.

“Some people feel that they want to be left alone to sit with their headphones and work seven hours straight and then go home. Others want to play pool or board games, go home or go running with a work friend,” says Niklas, nowadays leading the work of utilising generative AI for the benefit of engaging inclusive meetings.

Building for a good cause feels more fun than playing pool

Niklas is the person who bought both the pool table and the foosball table for Mentimeter’s office but never uses them himself. “It's just not my type of fun. I'm a builder. I love crafting things that people use for hopefully productive or fun reasons. That's why in the early days I wanted to be in the product organization where I can design, build, and ship features,” Niklas explains. And it’s not just the new things that he finds exciting. He enjoys improving existing features as long as it’s driven by user demand. “It’s super fun to set goals and tactics, identify solutions, build, test, reiterate, and ship. And when done, celebrate.” 

“I build for people wanting to use it.”

Right now, Niklas is really enjoying maintaining an AI tool built for the sales department. “I'm doing it almost on the side because it's not really a prioritized initiative, but I believe in it. So I want to keep it alive. It requires me to do things daily, which is a bit disruptive. But for now, it's fun.”

Making work fun doesn’t mean non-stop fun all the time

The goal behind Mentimeter’s core value ‘Have fun’ is to make work itself more fun. Yes, there are some fun extracurricular activities, and no, it doesn’t mean that work will be super fun all the time. Life is life, as Niklas puts it 

Niklas’ team is launching AI powered features, and he enjoys making adjustments and fixing bugs after some early feedback. “Then there are parts that are not so fun. There are some meetings that need to happen with the end goal of alignment so that we will do the right things. Uncomfortable meetings are part of the deal. Do I want to eliminate those meetings from my life? Ideally, yes! Do I think it's good to eliminate those meetings from my life? No. It's an investment that you make for the future.”

Not having fun is very much connected to not living by the other core values, according to Niklas. Because it’s not fun when teammates are unprofessional or get stuck perfecting things that don’t need to be perfect. 

Finding your way to make work work for you

“Of course there are intense work periods when it is difficult to find air in your schedule and there's pressure in terms of different kinds of deliveries. I'm the kind of guy who puts fun on pause,” says Niklas.

He explains: “If I have a plate of food, and there's disgusting parts of the food and there’s good parts, I eat the disgusting parts first so I can enjoy the good stuff at the end. That's who I am and that's how I work. I kind of go into Goblin mode and crunch through the things until I finish. And then I do some carrot work after.”

Things have inevitably changed over the last 10 years that Mentimeter has existed and grown from a few people tinkering with a hobby project to a 400+ people company. “Ejecting myself from the management team is one way of actually coming back to some of the old fun,” says Niklas and continues: “Closer to the customer, closer to the product, that is what I like.”

In the dynamic environment of Mentimeter, the essence of fun evolves, but the core idea remains the same: work should be engaging and fulfilling, tailored to what brings joy to each person. Whether it's building new features, getting to know a customer or collaborating with colleagues, finding your kind of fun is key.