Culture book

We want all our colleagues to know how Thatsup was founded and the huge amounts of hard work that have gone into its creation. It’s a unique, interesting and in many ways humorous story. Our founder Adam Linders tells the long version here (tl;dr? Read the short version):

The foundations of Thatsup were laid as early as 2007, about a half year after I graduated, when Richard Stillar and I were discussing if we could come up with something to do on the side of our retail jobs at NK. We came up with the idea of producing a site where you could read about events and entertainment in Stockholm. We reached out to Fredrik Jungstedt (who has worked full time at Thatsup since 2016), a friend from school, who had just started working as a developer. Together we started ”WhatsupSthlm”, which consisted of four event and entertainment blogs: Nightlife, Music, Fashion and Culture. The first site design was created for free by one of Richard’s best friends, Sam Brandhildh (who has worked full time at Thatsup since 2018).

Richard and Jungstedt, 10 years later.

The process of coming up with the name WhatsupSthlm consisted of a dialogue that looked something like this: ”We’re going to have a site of what’s happening”…”Helrör.se” (which could be translated to something like ”Booze.com”)…”Haha, maybe a bit unprofessional. How about Whatsup?”…”That’ll be perfect”…”Hmm, whatsup.se is already taken by someone”…”Let’s go with WhatsupStockholm then?”…”That’s good, but quite long, we go with WhatsupSthlm”. Do you realize Whatsup is Thatsup with a T? ? I’ll get back to that.

The plan was that Jungstedt was going to get 10 000 kr to build WhatsupSthlm. The job however was much bigger than expected. The site took more than double the time to build as planned. At the beginning we managed to keep a float by letting Jungstedt come home to Richard and just take home almost anything he fancied. ? I think what he most appreciated was an old Playstation Portable, and Richard was most put out by losing his slippers without warning. ?

When we were finally finished we wanted to add a big function (an early version of our present search tool, you could describe it) that was going to double the working time again. In addition we realized that we were going to want ongoing development of the site, so it became very clear to us that Jungstedt was going to be needed permanently. Therefore we let him in as a shareholder and co-founder instead of consultant. A decision I can confirm now, 10 years later, as being the right one.

Just in time for the launch in May 2008, about a half year after we started the company, I quit my job at NK to fully focus on WhatsupSthlm. Because I still had a roof over my head and food on the table at home at my parents I thought that I would be fine with my savings of about SEK 30 000 until I was getting a salary from WhatsupSthlm, which I estimated was going to take about a half year (?).

Early version of WhatsupSthlm

By then I was about 20 years old, and as you can imagine, most things were at a low level. You could say we had to invent the wheel again, because we didn’t have any experience at all. We didn’t have a single penny and raising capital was not an option; actually I didn’t even know about that. And even if I learnt about it on the way, it still wouldn’t have been an option, since the company wasn’t worth anything at all. We had to invest with our own time, and the editors who wrote the posts on the blogs worked for free.

We launched the site for the public 18 May 2008 and the response was actually better than expected. That month we had 7 000 unique visitors and the rest of the year we averaged around 10 000. That’s a lot less than nowadays, but it felt a lot then.

That summer I met Fredrik Fernström by coincidence at an event at restaurant Bryggan in Gåshaga on Lidingö. I was there with a friend who introduced us and after I told him about WhatsupSthlm he asked if we could have a meeting. In the end he became a partner in the company to help us get started with sales. Again, there was no money involved, we had to bargain with shares and Fernström had to invest his time. Which should not be underestimated! ☝️

I remember that after the first meeting with Fernström I was a bit blown away about how sales worked. For me a salesman had always been this annoying git who tries to force you into buying something from him over the phone. All other sales I thought that the customers bought what they wanted, and the companies sold what the customers wanted. I actually thought that the customers would come to us to buy banner advertisement. Banners! ? In addition I thought that customers paid the prices that were offered on the websites advertisement pages. Luckily I learnt things quite fast at least.

Terrified of selling, I let Fernström and Richard head out to town and try it out. After about 10 hours of canvas selling we understood that this was going to be quite difficult.

2008 we had revenues of about SEK 15 000, tops. As you probably understand the salary I was hoping for this autumn was a long way of becoming a reality. All editors and other people working for free were also going to be paid before me of course. I remember that the first editor that got paid anything at all got about SEK 20 per post. ? Of course the posts were really short, but it was still hard to reach any kind of sensible compensation at all.

But we kept on working with the site and besides publishing a lot of blog posts about what was going on in the city we also started to fill up our search with profiles about local businesses, including restaurants. About this time we actually didn’t even write about restaurants at all besides this.

Then I came up with an idea to start selling premium profiles, where clients get pictures and an enhanced presentation. Before sales start this was packaged as an ”Advanced profile” for SEK 199/month with a 12 month fixed contract. Included was photo shoot, text presentations and in addition we would publish information about events that they were having. Half of the income would go to the sales person. Do I have to tell you that this was hard to juggle economically? I don’t know exactly how I was thinking then, but I remember that I was so excited. 

Towards Christmas we started looking for sales people. I remember at least three old friends who tried out. Only commission, of course. We managed to get a client or two. Diplomat, Soap Bar, Fem Små Hus and Pet Sounds Bar are some of the first I remember. Many of these I photographed myself - Fredrik Rollman didn’t join until about a year later. Not strange that the clients were not always happy with the pictures… ?

However, it was not until Fernström got Camilla Agardh to try out selling at the beginning of 2009 that it really took off. Our turnover reached SEK 600 000 that year which enabled us to start paying the editors, which simplified things a lot. One year later than expected I could get about a subsistence wage, which isn’t much, but it was actually fantastic considering how I had lived the last 18 months. It took another year before I got a ”real” salary, and by then, you could say that we had managed to built a company that was standing on it’s own feet. That year, 2010, our turnover was about SEK 1,5 million.

The following two years, everything moved on very slowly, but steadily. 2011 we reached a turnover of around SEK 2 million, but 2012 we lost clients at about the same rate as we got new ones. At the same time, the company, besides sales, was developing slowly. But for many reasons, not only economic, we couldn’t move faster.

The summer of 2012 I specified what was going to be our new site. Everything would be new: functionality, design and even the name!

As you may remember, we choose the name WhatsupSthlm quite fast. There were so many problems with the name, I don’t even have enough space to write about it here, but you can imagine to try growing with a name where all the domains and trademarks in the whole world are already taken. Since a change of name is really hard, I didn’t want to realize the magnitude of the problem, so we went on trying to build a brand as good as we could. 

One day we got an email with a threat of legal action because we were infringing on a trademark. I got really upset and redirected the threat to Camilla, along with a picture of our logotype where I had changed the W to a T, and joked about that we were going to have to change our name to ”Thatsup”, which felt like a joke at the time but turned out to be a brilliant decision.

We managed to stay away from the legal actions, even sidestepping WhatsApp’s American lawyers, who contacted us at a later stage. 

But even if the name worked, we had higher ambitions for our new site. We wanted to build a strong brand. I trawled for new names for a long time and held a couple of brainstorming workshops with everyone involved. But as soon as we found anything decent, domains and trademarks had already been taken - most often internationally, but even sometimes in Sweden. 

So what about ”Thatsup” then? It started out as a joke, and therefore we saw it as a joke for a long time. But one day it all became clear to me: ”Thatsup” is perfect. It describes what we do, but at the same time it’s not a word/expression; it will be our own. It was almost too good that most of the domains and all trademarks were available. Nobody but us uses Thatsup, in the whole world. ✌️

Early draft of Thatsup

Enough about the name. Progress was slow but I kept on fighting and at the end of autumn 2013, we reached a level when we were ready for the next step:

• The traffic had grown to more than 100 000 unique visitors/month. In addition it was the right type of traffic, that we could make money off.

• Our advanced profiles were sold more rationally with focus on what actually gave a return for our clients, rather than ”this seems nice and is cheap, but we have no idea what we actually get”, which made the clients stick with us longer and at the same time we could charge more.

• We had built up a buffer of about SEK 300 000 that we could use to hire a sales person and an editor on full time.

• We had a clear plan for how WhatsupSthlm would become Thatsup.

Said and done. We hired Johanna Lagerkranser and Fredric Engelbrecht. On that day we entered the second phase of the company’s history. We became a real company. With a real office where people sat every day. If you can call it a real office when it lacks light, oxygen and is an old apartment that hasn't been renovated in at least 40 years.

Something that still progressed slowly was the development of our new site, or of Thatsup as we had started calling it then. From the day I started to specify the site summer 2012 it took 3 years(!) before we actually could launch it 2 June 2015.

The year after we could hire Jungstedt full time and since then the development has progressed fast. In the same year, we were named Sweden’s best lifestyle site on IDG/InternetWorld’s Top100 list which they’ve compiled each year since the late Nineties. This was a long-held dream which came true when we made it onto their list and we’ve remained on that list every year since then. 

Thatsup by launch in June 2015.

With the launch of Thatsup our very unpolished user content and community was also launched. At the same time it was hard to develop it faster, because we didn’t have either a designer or a community manager in house.

In 2018 we entered the third phase of the company development, which we also find ourselves in now. We hired Sam Brandhildh as the company’s first designer, the same person that designed our first version for free, so it felt good to “pay him back” with a job ten years later. At the same time we hired Ida Berzén, who became our first Community Manager (and even Marketing Director). Both of them still work for us today. It felt like the last two pieces of the puzzle were laid with these two roles. Now we only had to grow the puzzle. The same year we increased the editorial and tech teams. In 2018 we hired the same number of people as we had done in total up until then. We also began to develop Thatsup Web the same year.

In 2019 we began to scale up, particularly in sales. At the end of the summer, we launched Thatsup Web and got our first clients. We also started to prepare the company for international expansion in autumn 2020.  In the autumn we began to see the results of our hard work. We entered a new period of momentum stronger than any we'd experienced before.

The momentum was maintained until the first week of March 2020, when we ran straight into the corona wall. In just a few weeks we lost half our income and sales became completely impossible. The whole organisation was furloughed and the business ran at half speed until restrictions were lifted in September 2021. 

As soon as corona restrictions were lifted we regained our momentum. We hit sales record after sales record and our dreams of international expansion were reignited.

I have done this for more than 15 years and I have never had more fun than now. We are in an extremely exciting phase where ideas are born and realized constantly. 

As I write this, we're entering the fourth phase of the company and are in the middle of the recruitment process for English content editors in London.  

It's incredibly cool that we've managed to create something that so many people use and appreciate, but that's so hard to get to succeed. There are numerous websites trying to do what Thatsup does, both in Sweden and abroad, but only very few survive, and even fewer have growth. But of all the fantastic things we've built, I'm most proud of Thatsup's team and culture. It's close-knit, incredibly competent and we have fun together both at work and outside the office. 

Adam Linders, March 2022