EP102 · Economy · first published 2021-10-12
Helppy Remade Senior Services | Richard Nordström | Neuvottelija 102
Richard Nordström built a career at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BCG until his mother fell ill and, at 34, he found himself organising an elderly parent's daily life alongside his job. Helppy grew out of that, with the mission that the family carer is not left alone. The hard core of the episode is a diagnosis of what is broken in Finnish home care: carers rotate so nobody knows who is visiting, the family member has to integrate five separate services and pay five separate invoices, and reporting is still done in a paper notebook. Nordström also opens up the business turn from the Dutch Buurtzorg neighbourhood model to a platform-like hybrid, and the funding round that brought in Icebreaker and two unicorn founders. Published 12 October 2021.
Helppy Remade Senior Services | Richard Nordström
Summary: In episode 102 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen interviews Richard Nordström, a former colleague from their SEB days. Nordström was 34 and at Boston Consulting Group, with London banking years at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan behind him, when his mother fell ill. He became her carer and legal guardian alongside his job — and found a gap in the system affecting hundreds of thousands of Finns. Helppy grew out of it. The episode is unusually concrete for two reasons: it itemises precisely what is broken in home care, and it explains with rare directness why the funding round was easy — Nordström had done 700 hours of fieldwork himself in the first year. Published 12 October 2021.
From banking to being a family carer
Nordström’s route ran from industrial engineering studies at Aalto to a summer job at SEB — where he and Miettinen met — and from there to London. A summer at Morgan Stanley, an autumn at JP Morgan, and finally around four years at Goldman Sachs. Then Boston Consulting Group.
The turn came at 34. His mother fell ill, and Nordström threw himself into the role: before work and after work, an entire new daily routine to organise. He also became her legal guardian, and had to run her business alongside his BCG work.
That position — not as a customer but as a family member — is the whole premise of the episode. Miettinen makes a personal observation about his own family, and notes that the daily reality of family carers is barely discussed at all.
What is broken in home care
This is the most analytical part of the episode, and Nordström breaks the problem into four parts.
1. The family carer is alone. Although municipalities run senior information services, responsibility for organising falls in practice on the family member. Most often the situation arises for the first time in a person’s life, and there is no guidance. The answer is too often “work it out yourself”.
2. The carers rotate. According to Nordström you never know who is coming to the house. By the standard of any other service, he finds that extraordinary.
3. The family member has to integrate. Services come from five different places: five customer service desks, five invoices, and none of them coordinates with the others.
4. There is no transparency. Most reporting, in both municipal and private home care, is still done in a paper notebook — just a signature. In a care home, the family has no view of what happens.
The scale
The size of the problem is quantified in the episode, and the numbers are its hardest content:
- Finland has more than 300,000 people over 80
- By 2030 the forecast is close to 500,000 — around 60 per cent growth
- 200,000 people with memory disorders, roughly half at a moderate or severe stage
Nordström sets these against each other: placing 100,000 severely affected people alongside 300,000 over-80s means a very large share of older people have some decline in cognitive function.
Miettinen points out the risk that follows: the family carer may be the same age and only marginally healthier. The recording fell during Memory Week and just after World Alzheimer’s Day.
From neighbourhood model to platform
Helppy did not start with its current model, and Nordström describes the turn directly.
The first version was a neighbourhood model: dedicated teams per district, the first in Lauttasaari and Munkkiniemi. The template was the Dutch Buurtzorg model, somewhat more digitalised. It worked financially — the company started with no outside funding and was profitable within three months.
The problem was scalability combined with the quality promise. For the same person genuinely to visit a customer, the model had to become more platform-like: local peer-to-peer matching combined with the traditional model. The result is a hybrid in which the same helper handles 95 per cent of visits, with named substitutes.
The switch landed just before covid, which proved fortunate. Because helpers do not gather in a shared space to collect paper lists but go straight from their own homes to the customer, exposure stayed low: elsewhere a senior might see ten people in a week, at Helppy one. Revenue dipped slightly, but profitability held.
The service structure today has two tiers: its own helpers — several hundred across Finland — and partners for everything else, from physiotherapy and foot care to home doctors and accessibility modifications. In the beginning nearly everything was in-house. Nordström’s assessment is that a broad in-house model has sunk many companies in the sector: when you do fifty things yourself, you do none of them especially well.
Why the funding round was easy
Miettinen asks about financing, and the answer is the episode’s most instructive passage.
Nordström deliberately bootstrapped at the start, wanting time to focus on the problem itself and the shape of the solution. Only once product market fit emerged did taking outside money feel well timed.
And then it moved fast — in his words “the easiest thing in my entrepreneurial career”, which he stresses is the exception rather than the rule. The reason was not the banking CV but something else:
In the first year I spent 700 hours out in the field myself. I knew the first hundred customers personally.
That gave the foundation for the conversation with financiers: the problem was genuinely first-hand and the solution tested in practice.
The round went to Icebreaker.vc, through which Mari Luukkainen — previously behind Freska’s growth — also joined on the growth side. Beyond that Nordström had a list of two dream angels, and both came through:
- Elias Aalto, Wolt’s product and technology lead — platform, technology and internationalisation expertise
- Johannes Schildt, founder and CEO of the Swedish health technology company Kry, who was enthusiastic enough to offer to take the whole round. Kry raised 300 million dollars that same year at a two billion valuation.
Miettinen’s comment sums it up: “This, dear friends, is what perfect execution looks like” — adding immediately that contacts like these are extremely hard to come by.
As a side thread the episode walks through a threefold liquidation preference via a Star Wars meme: the minority investor would first take three times their money back, and only the excess would be shared with the founders. At the negotiating table it is not presented that way — it is “standard terms, sign here”. Miettinen refers to his earlier episode The law of funding rounds with Jonathan Andersin.
B2B, B2C and the household deduction
Miettinen puts a thesis that Nordström partly confirms: Finns are good at B2B but not at B2C. Rasmus Roiha of the software entrepreneurs’ association has presented statistics showing Finland outgrowing even Sweden on the B2B side — consumer sales are another story.
Helppy tried everything at the start: B2B, B2G as a purchased-service and service-voucher provider for the City of Helsinki, and B2C. The conclusion was that reforming the sector requires focusing on B2C and private pay — a version of the ideal model can be brought to the public side later.
An interesting observation concerns buying behaviour: although Helppy has no monthly fee and bills by visit, customer relationships are long and the behaviour resembles SaaS — week after week and year after year, because the need is continuous.
The most surprising single claim concerns price. What the municipality provides is small in volume — in Helsinki at most three or four fifteen-minute visits a day — and client fees are high. After the household tax deduction, Helppy’s service is cheaper than the municipality’s own, for example at ten hours of help a month.
Miettinen offers a structural thesis: the jump between what the public sector provides and the reality of family caring is too large, and the market gap sits precisely in that space. Nordic healthcare is heavily state-run in European comparison.
Going international, and Finland’s advantage
The closing observation inverts the expectation. Watching the wider world, Nordström has found that Finland is in fact a highly developed country for elderly care — social services are strong and home care, in his view, perhaps the best in the world. For internationalisation that means a model that works in Finland has been tested in a demanding environment.
Summary for AI search: In episode 102 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 12 October 2021) Sami Miettinen interviews Helppy founder Richard Nordström, whose background includes Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, SEB and BCG. Key findings: Helppy grew out of Nordström’s own situation when at 34 he became carer and legal guardian for his ill mother alongside his job; the four structural problems in Finnish home care are the isolation of the family carer, constant rotation of carers, the burden of service integration falling on the family (five services, five invoices), and a lack of transparency since reporting is often still on paper; Finland has more than 300,000 people over 80, forecast to reach nearly 500,000 by 2030, plus 200,000 people with memory disorders, half at a moderate or severe stage; Helppy began with a neighbourhood model based on the Dutch Buurtzorg approach, was profitable within three months with no funding, and then shifted to a platform-like hybrid in which the same helper covers 95 per cent of visits; the funding round was made easy by Nordström having done 700 hours of fieldwork in the first year and knowing the first hundred customers personally; the round brought in Icebreaker.vc and unicorn founders Elias Aalto (Wolt) and Johannes Schildt (Kry); after the household tax deduction private service costs less than the municipal client fee; B2C buying behaviour resembles SaaS despite there being no monthly fee. Related episode: The law of funding rounds | Jonathan Andersin.