We are very proud, and slightly surprised, to say that we have been nominated as Nordic Startup of the Year by Nordic Startup Awards. Behind the awards is, among others, Google, Facebook and Twitter.

You can find more info about the awards here:
http://nordicstartupawards.com/

For the 2014 final there are five nominated companies from Sweden in our category. Other than us it's iZettle, Tictail, Narrative and Truecaller. We are the only bootstrapped company of the five, which we think is pretty cool :)

If you like what we do and how we do it, we would highly appreciate if you voted for us! You do so by going here, choosing Sweden and then Startup of the Year.

Go PagePicnic!

Ludvig Granberg, CEO

A lot has been written about ‘startup life’ and the emotional and physical demand that starting a company can have on a person. There is no doubt, building a successful company will take a lot of hard work, but does the ‘startup world’ take “hard work” a little too literally?

We’ve all heard the saying “work smart, not hard”, and I can’t help but wonder if more entrepreneurs could learn a little from it. One of the great things about building a company is that it becomes your entire world - but it’s also important to make sure you’re working effectively, not working yourself into a burnout. All the success in the world won’t mean much if you’re too sick to enjoy it.

If you’re not working 15 hour days, are you not working hard enough? Does it make you a “wantrepreneur”? There’s certainly a “badge of honor” associated with all-nighters, not enough sleep and startup stress, but is it necessary?

There’s no doubt about it - customer support can really make or break a SaaS product - and for many products, especially in competitive markets, it’s the differentiator - the feature they are most proud of.

I talked about support a lot in the last post, and actually named kickass customer support as one of the three key factors in our growth over the last five years. We got a lot of feedback on the last post and a lot of people wanting to know more about our support structure - so here goes.

In a couple of years, we’ve managed to build a pretty solid SaaS business out of a small Swedish coastal town. We’ll do $2.5m in revenue this year and have a little over 10,000 paying customers. We’ve never taken VC funding and done surprisingly little marketing. Even though we’re certainly not content with those numbers - we’ve learned a few things about building software businesses, so we’re happy to share our story so far.

In the last post, I spoke a lot about our culture and what success means to us - but we got a lot of feedback, mostly people wanting to know more about how we managed to hit 10,000 paying customers and how we grew our business in the early days.

Well, after spending some time over the holiday period thinking about the early days of Hemsida24 (our brand in Sweden) - I realised that, for us - there were 3 key elements to our growth - Product, Support and Adwords.

Tom Preston-Werner (CEO - GitHub) wrote a great blog post a few years ago entitled ‘Optimize for Happiness’, in which he describes the difference between optimizing for happiness and optimizing for profits. He went on to talk about the GitHub journey and how bootstrapping the company helped him to always “optimize for happiness”.

One of my favorite quotes from the piece is:

“VCs want to see quick success or quick failure. They are optimizing for money. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you want the same things they do. But if you're like me, then you care more about building a kickass product than you do about having a ten figure exit. If that's true, then maybe you should be optimizing for happiness. One way to do this is by bootstrapping a sustainable business with infinite runway. When there are fewer potentially catastrophic events on the horizon, you'll find yourself smiling a lot more often.”

Without comparing ourselves to GitHub (we will get there one day!), we try to have the same philosophy here at PagePicnic. We’ve spent 5 years building a solid product, a solid customer base and a solid revenue stream, and because we’ve been profitable almost from day one - we’ve never had to “optimize for money”, for fear of the runway.