The note that started it

What the note says

The file is called Random Ideas and Thoughts. Near the top, it states a vision, twice.

Enable anyone to sell their product using minimum effort.

To enable as many as possible to earn a living, with respect and agency.

Then a third line: Think the marketing version of Microlending. Microlending means very small loans to people banks will not serve, on the theory that a little capital in the right hands compounds. The note applied that shape to marketing.

A friend called it HubSpot meets microlending. The phrase is from 2025. The idea it names, marketing tools for people who could not otherwise afford them, is about a decade older.

Two ways to be paid

Before this I ran an internet service provider, 1995 to 2001, and sat on the board of the Danish body that administers the .dk top-level domain. That is a prior career, not this company's beginning. One rule survived it: in that business, putting your own name on a customer's domain turned a service into a hostage. It is why you are the registrant of your domain here, and we are the technical contact and nothing else.

Then cybersecurity, from 2002. The note sets the two business models down beside each other. Security first:

Sell on fear, buy my product and maybe you avoid some pain, we will take your money when you are having a really bad day. The customer sees us as a money drain, a necessary evil.

Then the other one:

Talk to us about positive stuff, like selling and being successful. Only pay us when we deliver good news.

I would rather sell sunshine.

Why it waited until 2022

What changed was not the idea. It was the cost of building it. In 2014 a small business online meant a server, a database, and somebody to keep both alive. That put a floor under the price, above what a gardener or a market stallholder could pay.

Static files on a content delivery network took out the server. Better tooling took out most of the team. By 2022 the arithmetic worked, and the file started moving.

What we count now

The note lists a lot of metrics. Two made it into the product. The Poverty Exit is the number of people we help lift out of poverty. The Multiplier is every customer getting back at least three times what they spend here.

There are no external investors, so nobody is asking for a different number. The team is capped at seven, which is in the note too, and everyone on it uses the product daily to sell something of their own.