So this is a strange week to be writing anything. But I've been thinking about what I'd actually want to say, and it isn't a victory lap. Those are boring, and they're dishonest. Every founder retrospective reads like the plan worked start to finish. Mine didn't. What I can tell you is that I built this company my way, mostly because I was too stubborn to do it the way I was told, and somehow that turned out to be the best decision I never really made on purpose.
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start. There is an entire industry of people who will explain how it's supposed to be done. Best practice. Frameworks. The way real companies operate. Consultants, advisors, the founder two exits ahead of you who's now very generous with his opinions. I listened to almost none of it. The few times I did, it usually cost me money, time, or both.
I started Upsales from a one-bedroom apartment with no money and never raised a krona. We competed from day one against companies that should have flattened us. We went public in 2019. We hit zero growth in 2023 and clawed our way back to double-digit growth and Rule of 40 with Salesforce and HubSpot as our main competitors. I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you because every one of those things happened because we ignored the people who said it couldn't, or shouldn't, be done the way we did it.
This is the philosophy that built the company. Not the org chart, not the strategy deck. The actual operating belief underneath all of it. That's what I want to hand over before I go.
A dude with a server under his desk
There was no company. There was an apartment.
I built the first version of Upsales in a one-bedroom flat, and for a while I also hosted it there. The actual product, the thing customers logged into, ran on a machine a few meters from my bed. I answered the phone myself, always trying to sound like an organization: "Welcome to Upsales, this is Daniel," the full thing, very professional.
We had one early customer who'd call right at 0700. The first few mornings I did the whole routine. Then one day the phone rings at seven, and before I can get the greeting out he just says: "Sorry to wake you, Wikberg. Can you reboot the server?"
He'd figured out the truth. He wasn't calling a company. He was calling a dude, asleep four meters from the server.
I love that story because it's funny, but also because it's the whole thing in miniature. There was no head of infrastructure to escalate to. No process. No one whose job it was. If the server went down, it went down next to me, and I rebooted it, because there was nobody else and waiting for permission was not an option that existed. I owned all of it because all of it was mine.
The first version took me something like 120 hours to build. No money behind it, no investor, no safety net, and that stayed true for the entire life of the company. We never raised a krona. Every server, every salary, every mistake, paid for out of revenue we'd earned. People treat bootstrapping like a constraint you apologize for. It was the best thing that ever happened to this company, and I'll get to why.
The first hundred nos
Before the first million, there were the first hundred sales meetings. They went badly.
I think I closed something like five out of the first hundred and twenty. Read that again. For every deal that worked, more than twenty didn't. Months of showing up, pitching, believing, and watching almost all of it go nowhere. If you've never sold anything, it's hard to describe what that does to you. You start to wonder if the product is the problem, or the market, or you.
What kept me going was embarrassingly simple. One yes. One scrap of positive feedback. You close a single deal, or a prospect says one encouraging thing, and it's enough fuel to get through another week of nos. That's the actual secret nobody puts in the founder stories: it doesn't take much to keep going, it just takes something, and you have to be willing to go find it.
The other thing that kept me going was that I refused to stay bad at it. I listened to sales audiobooks two hours a day. Literally two hours, every day. Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, and most of all Steve Schiffman. I wore those recordings out. I couldn't afford a sales coach or a mentor, so I rented the best ones in the world for the price of an audiobook and let them talk in my ear until the ideas were mine.
Here's the part I still can't quite believe. Years later, Steve Schiffman, the voice that got me through those first brutal years, became a friend. A real one. I've flown him to Sweden to speak at our events more than once. He came to my wedding. The man whose recordings I listened to alone in an apartment, wondering if any of this would work, stood there years later as a guest. If you'd told 26-year-old me that, dialing his way through another batch of rejections, he wouldn't have believed a word of it.
That's worth saying to any founder reading this. The people you learn from at a distance now can become your peers. The gap closes faster than you think. You just have to survive long enough to find out.
Half a million euro with my name on it
In 2012 I nearly lost the whole thing.
We had a revolving credit facility, and we'd drawn it down to the bottom and past it. Overdrawn by around half a million euro. And that credit was personally guaranteed. By me. Not the company, not some abstract legal entity. My name, my signature, my problem if it went wrong.
I don't think I slept properly for months. You can talk about resilience and grit and all the founder vocabulary, but what it actually feels like is lying awake doing arithmetic you already did an hour ago, hoping the numbers changed. They don't. You run a payroll knowing the account behind it is empty and that the gap between solvent and not is a guarantee with your name on it.
We came through it. Not because of some brilliant move I can package into a lesson for you, but because we kept selling, kept collecting, and the business underneath the panic was real enough to recover. Sometimes that's the whole story. You don't escape because you're clever. You escape because the thing you built actually works, and because you refused to be the one who walked away from it.
That's the part that connects back to the apartment and the server. I owned it. Not as a slogan, as a signature on a credit guarantee. When it's genuinely yours, all of it, the downside included, you don't get to fold the moment it gets frightening. You stay, because there's no one else, and you find the way through. I'd guaranteed that debt for the same reason I rebooted that server at seven in the morning. It was mine.
"But what if the internet goes down?"
Every major shift in this industry arrived wearing the same disguise: a very reasonable objection that everyone took seriously and that turned out to be wrong.
When we started, the objection was the whole premise of the company. We were asking businesses to keep their data on our computers instead of their own. The reaction was roughly what you'd expect. "What if the internet goes down? We can't have our data sitting in YOUR computer, are you insane?" And honestly, said out loud in 2003, it didn't sound insane to worry about it. The serious, sensible, best-practice position was that real companies kept their software on their own servers, in their own building, where they could see it. We bet the entire company against that consensus. We were right, but for years we were right while almost everyone qualified to have an opinion told us we weren't.
Then the ground shifted in our favor. Cloud computing stopped being a wild idea and became the obvious one. REST APIs stopped being exotic and became something you just expected software to have. And suddenly the thing we'd been doing the hard way became the thing everyone wanted, plus a whole new layer of what was possible on top of it. The moment software could talk to other software cleanly, the range of things we could build for a customer exploded. Problems that had been "not realistically solvable" became a Tuesday.
I'm not going to pretend I saw every shift coming with perfect clarity. Nobody does, and the founders who claim they did are editing. But I did develop one instinct that served me the whole way through: when the experts and I disagreed about whether something new was a toy or the future, I learned to bet on the future. Not recklessly. But the consensus is structurally late. By the time the sensible people agree a shift is real, the window to win from it has mostly closed. We made our money in the gap between "that's a toy" and "that's obvious."
Which brings me to now, and to AI, but I'll come back to that.
Burning the boats
About ten years in, we did something that, on paper, made no sense. We rebuilt the entire platform from scratch.
Not refactored. Not modernized a module at a time. Rebuilt. The product was working, customers were paying, revenue was coming in, and we decided to take the whole thing apart and build it again properly. If you'd put that decision in front of any sensible advisor, they'd have talked you out of it. Why touch something that works? Why pour years of engineering into rebuilding what you already have instead of shipping new things you can sell? Every short-term incentive pointed the other way.
It was painful. Genuinely painful, for a long time, in a way that's hard to convey unless you've asked a team to rebuild the floor they're standing on while still serving every customer standing on it with them. There were stretches where I questioned it myself.
But here's the thing about that decision, and the reason I'd make it again without hesitating. The advice that's perfectly sane in the short term is often completely wrong in the long term. Rebuilding the platform cost us in the moment and positioned us for everything that came after. The reason we can move the way we move now, the reason we were able to meet the AI shift from a position of strength instead of scrambling to retrofit it onto something brittle, is that we paid that price years ago when it would have been so much easier not to.
That's the pattern that runs through every good decision I've made. The right call and the comfortable call are rarely the same call. And the longer your time horizon, the more often you have to do the thing that looks foolish to everyone optimizing for this quarter.
They brought PowerPoints. We brought the thing.
I never accepted the idea that resources decide who wins. It's the most widely believed lie in business. The bigger company, the bigger budget, the bigger team, surely they take it. Most of the time, in the deals that mattered to me, they didn't. We did.
Here's how, and it's almost stupidly simple. We didn't pitch. We showed up.
When a deal mattered, we didn't send a proposal and a slide deck and wait. We got on a plane or a train, went to the customer, and stayed for a day or two. And instead of describing what we could do, we built it. Right there, on site, in front of them, using their real problem and their real data. By the time we left, they hadn't seen a vision of a solution. They'd seen the solution, working, solving the exact thing that had been costing them. No signature yet. No contract. Just the thing, built.
There is nothing a competitor can put in a slide that beats that. Seeing is believing, and an expensive PowerPoint cannot compete with a working answer to your actual problem sitting on the screen in your own office.
The clearest version of this was a head-to-head for one of the largest media companies in Sweden. The competition came in the way you'd expect the giant to come in. Polished. Senior people in the room. A beautiful deck and a lot of confidence. We didn't try to out-polish them, because we couldn't and it wouldn't have mattered. We just delivered. We went in and solved the problem in front of them while the alternative was still a roadmap and a promise. We won it. Not because we were bigger. Because we were standing in their office with the thing already working.
This is still the single most underrated advantage a software company can have, and almost nobody uses it, because it's harder than sending a deck. It costs you flights and days and real preparation. Good. That's exactly why it works, and exactly why the giant won't copy it.
And it shows up in our economics in a way I'm quietly proud of. We deliver the same outcomes our biggest competitors deliver with a roughly 90/10 split of subscription to services, where the typical model is closer to 50/50. That ratio isn't an accounting detail. It's proof that we built something genuinely scalable, that the product does the work instead of an army of consultants, and that we found a better way than the slow, expensive, partner-dependent model the incumbents depend on.
What nobody understands about a small company
We went public in 2019. The interesting part isn't the listing itself, it's what being public taught me about how little the outside world understands a company like ours.
You cannot understand Upsales by reading the balance sheet. I'd sit in meetings where smart, serious people asked detailed questions about line items that represented a fraction of a fraction of what actually made the company work. The balance sheet is maybe a tenth of a percent of the real thing. The rest, the part that determines whether you win or lose, is the team, the culture, the speed, the thousand small decisions a week that never show up in a quarterly report. Investors are trained to look at the numbers because the numbers are what they can see. But in a company this size, the numbers are the shadow, not the object.
Now the part that will annoy some people. Being public is nowhere near as complex or as expensive as the industry around it wants you to believe. The complexity is largely manufactured, and it's manufactured by the people who bill for it. Lawyers, corporate finance banks, the Big Four audit firms, they all have a direct financial interest in the whole thing feeling complicated and dangerous and beyond you. Complexity is their product. The more daunting it seems, the more of it you buy.
I refused to buy it. We ran one of the leanest budgets for all of that of any company going public, by a wide margin. And here's the result that matters: we still attracted more institutional investors than basically any software company our size. We didn't get there by spending more on advisors. We got there by understanding our own business better than anyone we could have paid to explain it to us.
And by doing the one thing that actually moves your investor relations, which costs nothing but time. Every single quarter, I reached out to our top ten owners and offered each of them a one-on-one. That's it. That direct relationship with your largest investors does more for your IR than any sponsored research money can buy. Most companies our size outsource their investor relationship to a budget line. We just talked to our owners, directly, every quarter, like the partners they actually were.
I'm not telling you to fire your lawyers or skip your audit. I'm telling you that "this is complicated and you need us" is sometimes true and sometimes a sales pitch, and a founder who can't tell the difference will pay for the difference for years. Know your own business cold, build the relationships yourself, and most of the expensive mystique evaporates.
The year growth went to zero
In 2023, our growth went to zero. Not slowed. Zero.
I want to be honest about why, because the honest version is less flattering and more useful. The easy story is that the market turned. And it did, the macro environment got harder for everyone. But if I'm telling the truth, the market was maybe a quarter of it. The other three quarters were self-inflicted. We made a major change to how the sales organization was structured, and it was the right change for where we needed to go, but it was painful and it cost us in the moment far more than I expected. I can dress that up, but I won't. We did it to ourselves, on purpose, and then had to live through the consequences.
Here's the part I'd actually want a younger founder to take from it. The change had a far bigger impact than we ever imagined going in. We knew it would sting. We had no idea how much. And the lesson there isn't "don't make hard changes," because the change was right. The lesson is that I hadn't done enough scenario planning, especially bad-scenario planning. I'd modeled how it would go if it went roughly to plan. I hadn't seriously sat with the question of what happens if this lands three times harder than expected, because that version was uncomfortable to look at. So it caught us off guard when it shouldn't have. Run the bad scenario properly, on paper, before you're living in it. Getting your own expectations right is half the battle, and it's the half most people skip because the realistic downside is unpleasant to stare at.
What "roll up your sleeves" actually meant, day to day, was this. We fought for every single customer, the ones we should never have had to fight for. We scrambled to hire people we'd needed six months earlier and hadn't moved fast enough to bring in. And those of us in the management team each took on two or three roles at once, because there was no slack left in the system and no one coming to save us. It was not glamorous. It was a year of doing three jobs each and sleeping badly.
I'm not going to pretend I carried that alone, because I didn't, and the people who carried it with me deserve to be named. Elin, our CFO, who held the financial line through all of it. Fredrik, who ran sales through the hardest stretch we'd faced in years. Stefan and Dennis, who kept the delivery side standing. There were others, but those people I'll remember specifically when I think about this period, because when it would have been entirely reasonable to flinch, none of them did.
I'll tell you how it turned out in a moment. But I want to sit in this part for a second first, because the temptation in a piece like this is to rush to the comeback. The truth is that for a stretch of 2023 I genuinely did not know how the story ended. That uncertainty is the actual experience of running a company. Everything reads as inevitable afterward. None of it feels inevitable while you're in it.
Why the crisis made the company
Here's what I believe now that I didn't fully understand before 2023: a company never examines itself when things are going well.
When you're growing smoothly, you challenge nothing. Why would you? The numbers are up, everyone's happy, and questioning a machine that's working feels like looking for problems you don't have. So you cruise. And all the small inefficiencies, the weak assumptions, the things that are quietly broken but not yet expensive, they all just ride along underneath the growth, invisible.
A crisis ends that. When growth went to zero, we were forced to look under every single stone. Every process, every assumption, every cost, every part of how we sold and delivered and retained, all of it got pulled apart and examined, because we no longer had the luxury of assuming any of it was fine. And we found things. A lot of things. Improvements we would never have gone looking for if the business had simply kept climbing. We came out of that year leaner, sharper, and more sustainable than we went into it, not despite the crisis but directly because of it.
That's the real reason for where we are now. A debt-free, bootstrapped company running above the Rule of 40 in 2026, with Salesforce and HubSpot as our main competitors. That doesn't happen by cruising. It happens because at some point you got taken apart and put back together better, and you kept the lessons.
But if I'm honest about what actually carried us through, it wasn't the process improvements. It was the people, and the culture they'd built. I've seen a lot of companies talk about culture. Ours is the only one I know of that I'd describe as genuinely, structurally unwilling to quit. When it got hard, nobody started polishing their CV. They rolled up their sleeves and got to work, and they did it with a kind of stubborn, almost cheerful refusal to lose that I still don't fully know how to explain. You can't install that in a downturn. You either built it in the good years or you didn't. We had, and it's the thing I'm proudest of in 23 years. Not the IPO, not the numbers. That.
The mistakes I'd put in writing
I've made more mistakes than I can count. Most of them I've forgotten. The ones worth telling you about are the ones I paid real money for, because that's the only kind of lesson that actually sticks. You don't learn from the mistake. You learn from the bill. And the only unforgivable thing is paying the bill and then not picking up what you bought with it.
Two I'll put in writing.
The first one cost me years of bad hires. For a long time I believed the resume. Someone would come in from a big, impressive company, a real logo, and I'd think, this person operates at a level we don't, they'll lift us. Almost every single time, it failed. It took me far too long to understand why. Taking a star from a giant company and dropping them into Upsales is like taking a kid off a kindergarten soccer team and putting him in the foreign legion. The environment isn't harder or easier, it's a different sport. The big-company person had resources, process, a brand that opened doors, and a hundred people around them doing the things they never had to learn. We had none of that. The lesson I bought: hire for what someone can do with nothing, not for what they did with everything. I've turned down a lot of shiny resumes since, and I've been right to.
The second one I'm still not fully over. In 2021 I pushed a manager too hard. He was good, genuinely good, and I leaned on him like he was unbreakable. He resigned. He'll tell you he was planning to leave anyway, and we're good friends today, so the story has a fine ending. But that's not the point. The point is I could have handled it differently and I didn't, and I knew better at the time. The lesson I bought: your best people are not a resource you get to spend without limit. They're a relationship, and relationships break in ways spreadsheets never warn you about. I think about that one more than the bankruptcy.
Neither of those is a clever-failure-humblebrag, the kind founders love where the mistake is secretly a flex. They were just mistakes. The reason I'm telling you is that I see founders make the same two constantly, and they're expensive, and you don't have to pay full price for them like I did.
Why now, and why I sold
Last week I sold a big part of my shares in Upsales, from around 44% down to roughly 10%. I'll save you the suspense on the obvious question: no, this isn't a founder cashing out. The simplest way to see that is to look at when I did it.
I sold when the company is in the best shape it has ever been in. Double-digit growth again, margins approaching levels most software companies never reach, the strongest team we've ever had, and a new CEO I trust to run it better than I would for this next phase. That's not the setup you create in order to get out. It's the setup you spend years building because you won't leave until it exists.
I could have sold earlier. Through the slow years I had chances to, at higher prices than I eventually took. I passed every time, because the company wasn't where I wanted it and I had no interest in walking away with it wobbling, however good the personal number looked. The legacy and the team were always worth more to me than the size of the exit. So I waited until Upsales was genuinely strong again, and then I stepped back. That's the whole story.
The hands it's going into matter as much as the timing. Johan didn't come through a search. He bought shares in Upsales with his own money, before there was ever a conversation about him running it. He looked at this company as an investor, decided it was worth his own capital, and the leadership conversation came later. I've known him since 2011. I'm not handing Upsales to a manager the board found. I'm handing it to someone who believed in it enough to own a piece before anyone offered him the wheel, and who happens to be the right operator for what comes next.
And I'm not gone. I remain a long-term shareholder and I'm staying on the board. I've got real skin in this and every reason to want the next chapter to be the best one yet. I just won't be the one driving. That's exactly as it should be.
Aira: doing it all again, from scratch
Here's what I've learned about myself in 23 years. I'm not built to run a company that's already working. I'm built to start one.
Upsales is in the best shape of its life. Growth is back, margins are strong, the team is the best it's ever been. And that's exactly why it's the right time to hand it over. The next chapter for Upsales is about scaling something that already works, running the playbook with discipline, compounding it year over year. That's a different game from the one I'm best at and the one I love most, which is building something from nothing. Johan is the right person to run that next chapter, and he'll be exceptional at it. Knowing when the company needs a different kind of leader than its founder is one of the more important calls you make, and this was an easy one.
What gets me out of bed is the empty page. Aira is the empty page.
Aira is AI-native from the first line of code. It's a tiny team, which after years of running a bigger organization I can tell you is a feature and not a limitation. It's global from day one. And it moves at a velocity I genuinely could not have imagined five years ago. The things that took my team months in 2010 take days now. Sometimes hours. I'm not exaggerating for effect, I've watched it happen on a screen in front of me.
The target is 100 MSEK ARR in three years. I'm saying that in public on purpose, because I've found the surest way to do something is to tell people you will and then be too proud to back out.
And here's the part that actually moves me. For 23 years I've been chasing the same handful of customer problems. Help people find the right companies to talk to. Help them stop wasting time on deals that will never close. Help them see the revenue sitting in front of them that they're walking past. Same problems, the whole time. For most of that stretch we could only ever solve them partway, because the technology only went so far. That's changed. With AI, for the first time, I think these problems are fully solvable. Not assisted. Solved.
That's not a pivot. That's the same mission I started with in a one-bedroom apartment, finally with the tools to finish the job.
What I'll actually miss
People assume what you miss is the title, or the status, or the thing you can point to and say you built. It isn't. What I'll miss are the rooms.
The Friday forecast with Aleks, Fredrik, and Stefan. Three people who know the business cold, picking the pipeline apart deal by deal, arguing about what's real and what's wishful, working out how to beat people ten times our size. There is nothing corporate about that room. Three people who care that much, solving a hard problem together every week, and I got to sit in it. I have loved that room for years.
The product sessions with Dernulf and the team. Sitting with the people who actually build the thing, pulling apart how something should work, testing a feature that's an hour old, finding a smarter way through a problem. That's where the real joy of this has always been for me. Not the strategy decks. The craft.
And Kristina, who joined as CFO in early 2026 and is probably the single brightest hire I've made in 23 years. One of the few genuine consolations of stepping back is knowing the people Johan inherits, and that he's inheriting her. I'd put the team running Upsales today against any company in Europe, and I mean that as someone who no longer has anything to gain by saying it.
So here's the thing I'd want said back to me in five years, the one belief under all of it. I got to run my business my way. I didn't listen to the people who explained what real companies do, the experts with the best practices and the frameworks and the very reasonable reasons it couldn't work. I trusted what I could see with my own eyes, I bet on the future before it was comfortable, and I let the work speak. That's the whole philosophy. It built a company from an apartment, took it public, broke it, fixed it, and left it stronger than it's ever been.
Tomorrow morning I ring the bell for Aira, and I start again from nothing, which is exactly where I've always done my best work. But before I do: to everyone who built Upsales with me, through the brutal years and the good ones, the ones who stayed when it would have been easier to leave and the ones who pushed me to be better than I was. You are the company. You always were. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
