Howey

Ulf Arnett had spent years working with CEOs through his services company, observing a critical gap: while strategies were carefully crafted with financial goals and timelines, companies lacked any digital application to translate those strategies into actionable, coordinated execution across the entire organization. CEOs were stuck working "analog"—using PowerPoint, Excel, or nothing at all—unable to measure how activities across departments connected to revenue and profit improvements. By 2012, Ulf founded what would become Howey to solve this problem, but he didn't immediately jump to a SaaS model.

From 2012 to 2015, Howey operated as a results-as-a-service company, where Ulf and his team worked closely with CEOs to implement strategy execution, charging based on achieving pre-agreed financial outcomes. The business scaled rapidly to $5.1M in revenue by 2015, proving the market wanted what they were building. However, Ulf realized he couldn't build a scalable software product without deeply understanding customer needs. In 2015, he pivoted to a traditional SaaS licensing model, pricing by seats for managers and employees. This decision cut revenue dramatically—from $5.1M to around $2M—a $3M drop that was "substantially more than he had expected."

When Ulf launched the SaaS product in 2019, he leveraged his years of CEO relationships and his ability to conduct cold outreach. He and his sales team called CEOs directly, achieving an 80-85% success rate in getting first meetings. The pitch was conversational, heavily researched, and relevant to what the CEO was measured on—not a sales monologue. Typical sales cycles ran 3-6 months initially, eventually compressing to 3 months. However, hitting rate remained low "until a year ago" because while CEOs understood the value, one-third of them didn't take action, and some simply preferred the title of strategic leader without the responsibility.

Howey's biggest challenge emerged quickly: a devastating 60% churn rate. The product worked brilliantly for CEOs but gave nothing to managers and employees, triggering widespread dissatisfaction. Ulf realized he couldn't afford to fix this immediately—it required hiring more developers and money. But he also introduced an "assessment" product in Q1 2020-22 that became a turning point. This assessment helped CEOs (and later, each executive) understand they couldn't continue working as before and needed to embrace digital execution. The assessment increased sales hit rate from 6% to 17% and nearly eliminated churn. Between 2019 and 2021, the company achieved 0% churn—losing no customers for three years. Ulf also added AI features and measurable financial impact reporting, so employees could see how their weekly activities contributed to company revenue and profit improvements. This transparency transformed engagement and customer satisfaction.

By the time of this interview, Howey was generating $5.1M in ARR in Sweden, with 96% coming from subscriptions. The team had grown to 30 people, 60% in development. Ulf had moved to the US 1.5 years prior to expand the business internationally, though he noted he couldn't yet disclose US revenue due to ongoing financial transactions. The company's typical customer was a mid-to-large enterprise where the CEO bought licenses for all managers and employees, making installations 10x larger than typical CRM deployments (which only serve one department). Customers reported 8-24x return on investment within 12 months, with measurable weekly acceleration in activity completion and strategic goal attainment. With Microsoft announcing entry into the "enterprise execution software" space via its acquisition of Ally IO, Ulf was optimistic rather than worried—the market validation and expansion would grow the total addressable market by 300-600% annually, far outweighing the loss of percentage share to larger competitors.