Brisk
After selling TAT to BlackBerry for $150 million in 2010 and spending two years in M&A leadership, Hampus felt bored. He'd spent eight years building TAT into a powerhouse that signed massive deals with Motorola, Samsung, Sony, Ericsson, and even designed Google's Android UI. But success made him comfortable—he knew all the answers, knew all the details, and had lost the intellectual hunger. "I'm way too comfortable," he realized. He left BlackBerry in 2012 specifically to find something he didn't know.
Hampus observed a universal problem: every company hated their sales CRM. Reps never used it. Managers loved it, but it sat dormant. So he built Brisk with a radical B2C2B strategy: make a product so good that sales reps *loved* it—not managers, not executives, but the people actually doing the work. Once reps fell in love, managers had no choice but to buy it for their teams. The product nudges reps with actionable next steps: "You forgot to call Bob," "Set up a meeting with Linda," "This deal is going stale." Pricing was intentionally simple: $39 per user per month if paid annually. He deliberately avoided professional services—a lesson learned from TAT's complexity—to keep the business lean.
The go-to-market was pure product-led growth. Brisk didn't chase sales; instead, individual power users discovered it and fell in love. The Evernote deal perfectly illustrated the playbook: one sales rep in Zurich found Brisk, loved it, and cornered the VP of Sales Operations when she visited. One conversation became a deal for Brisk's entire global team. Hootsuite followed a similar pattern—one user picked it up in January, five new users signed up each week until momentum forced a conversation, ultimately landing a 60-license deal. No enterprise sales team needed. Just one person saying "this tool is amazing."
By October, Brisk hit $7,000 MRR ($84,000 ARR projected) across approximately 1,000 seats split across 380+ companies. But the real action was in the pipeline: several enterprise giants were evaluating 200–400 licenses each. Average contract value was climbing—companies bought licenses for entire teams (250+ seats common) rather than individuals. Hampus was energized again, doing what he loved: learning hard problems and building something that mattered. No professional services headache. No consulting. Just pure product-market fit.
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