10er

Mikkel Malmberg's idea for 10er came from a deeply personal frustration. Seven years before building the product, he and a fellow comedian started a podcast together—back when few people even knew what podcasts were. Over 262 episodes, they accepted one-time donations from listeners, but the model felt unsustainable. "One-time donations were fine," Mikkel recalled, "but they were hard to plan anything around. And we didn't want to keep pleading for donations." When Patreon emerged with its recurring subscription model, it seemed perfect. But when Mikkel tried to set up an account, he hit a wall: the signup process felt like a hassle with too many fields, graphics to provide, and content expectations he wasn't willing to meet. Being a self-taught programmer who'd transitioned from stand-up comedy into tech, Mikkel made the entrepreneur's classic move—he decided to build his own solution. He'd recently used Stripe to build Motherload.dk, a digital comedy shop, and the experience left him feeling empowered. "The experience of using Stripe was such a joy that I kind of felt like I could build anything," he said.

Mikkel built 10er in Ruby on Rails, a choice he credits with making the project actually happen. "If I'd built it in anything else it might've never been done," he reflected. The entire first version took about a month to build and was deliberately minimal: a signup form with credit card and email fields, an account page listing subscriptions, and a monthly charging script. This constraint was intentional. Mikkel designed 10er for his own podcast initially but built it modularly so other creators could adopt it without heavy customization. The bare-bones approach proved smart when his charging script went rogue during its first run, charging some users multiple times. Rather than panic, Mikkel responded quickly and honestly—and his podcast audience, knowing the service was built by him for them, found the mistake amusing rather than infuriating. This early forgiveness taught him a crucial lesson about transparency that would shape how he handled the business going forward.

Mikkel had an unfair advantage: he already owned the distribution channel. He launched 10er through his own podcast to an engaged, loyal audience. "The first month 10er charged money was December 2014," he noted. About six months later, the first external creator joined the platform. From there, growth came almost entirely through word-of-mouth among creators. "I think most (if not all) projects found 10er through some other project using the service," Mikkel explained. Podcasters listen to other podcasts, so when one creator started using 10er, their peers noticed. He experimented with content marketing—even hired a friend to interview projects on the platform—but ultimately found that direct creator experiences and peer recommendations drove adoption more effectively. Later, when he began openly sharing 10er's income and expenses on the site, he saw renewed interest. By the time of the interview, 10er had attracted 136+ projects to the platform.

The biggest challenge Mikkel faced wasn't product-market fit but time scarcity. Working full-time at Elastic while raising two young children left him precious little time for 10er development. This constraint paradoxically forced smart decisions: he kept the platform minimal, still manually onboarding projects and managing some operations via terminal commands rather than building admin interfaces. This "forced non-growth" had unexpected benefits—he'd personally connected with every project on the platform and never experienced abuse or major disputes.

His biggest mistakes involved handling money. Early on, his charging script wasn't idempotent; when charges failed, the script would restart and charge everyone again, causing panic and multiple refunds. Later, consolidating two types of user accounts (project owners and donators) caused him to jumble subscriptions, resulting in people being charged for others' subscriptions. Each time, Mikkel responded with humility and speed, personally fixing the damage. Only 2-3 users left after these incidents. Most forgave him because he was honest and visibly committed to making things right—lessons he'd learned from years bombing on stage as a comedian. "Everybody experiences bombing," he reflected, "and when you do, you've never felt as terrible before. But then you get over it."

By February 2019, 10er had reached nearly $2,000 per month in recurring revenue from 136+ creators on the platform. Mikkel remained the sole full-time decision-maker and had recently brought on a freelance junior developer to handle lower-risk tasks, marking his first real effort to delegate. He openly shared 10er's financials at 10er.co/open, inspired by similar transparency from other bootstrapped founders. While time constraints meant development sometimes stalled during busy periods at his day job, the business was sustainable and required minimal maintenance. Mikkel's next challenge, as he acknowledged, was resisting the temptation to spread himself too thin across multiple side projects and instead focus on deepening 10er's impact within the Danish creator community.