Simplice

Tobias van Schneider was obsessed with his portfolio. As a lead product designer at Spotify with a background spanning development, branding, and product design, he knew that showcasing his work well was critical to his career. Around nine to ten years ago, while in Austria running his own design agency, he had an idea: instead of showing just images of projects, he'd create full case studies that told the story of each project—sketches, wireframes, prototypes, behind-the-scenes details, everything.

He partnered with a friend and developer, Mike, to build a backend system that would make it easy for him to publish these detailed case studies. At the time, almost no one was doing this level of transparency. "It wasn't so transparent, you know," Tobias explains. "People were trying to keep a lot of secrets." But Tobias's portfolio stood out dramatically, and he got a lot of attention and exposure because of it.

Here's where it gets interesting: Tobias and Mike never intended to sell this. They built it 100% for themselves. "The technical system behind the portfolio system, I built for myself," he says. The idea was simply to make publishing case studies easy for his own future work.

But people kept asking: "What tool are you using? What CMS?" For four years, Tobias and Mike ignored these questions. They weren't in "product mode." It wasn't a business idea yet—it was just their tool.

Then, about four years before launch, they decided to rebuild the entire system from scratch. They spent roughly one and a half years completely redoing it with different branding and architecture. Still, there was no clear plan to launch it. But working at Spotify was shifting Tobias's mindset. He was thinking more like a product person now.

Five years before the interview, Tobias and Mike did something simple: they put up a sign-up page saying "Coming soon." No product. No promises. Just interest collection.

Thousand people signed up.

Tobias was shocked. He called Mike: "Look, here's the bet. Let's just build this. If we sell just a hundred copies and have some friends we respect using it, we win. We can't lose. A hundred people—we don't even care." Mike agreed. Their only expectation: find 100 customers. Everything else was a bonus.

They launched, and because they had no pressure, no hype machine, and no ego attached, they made rational decisions. They focused on quality. They didn't try to grow explosively. They wanted 20 people a day, not 1,000 people overnight. "If I could choose between 20 new people a day or a thousand tomorrow, I'd pick 20," Tobias says. A massive influx would overwhelm a two-person team, create bugs no one could fix, and force them to hire people they'd later have to lay off.

Simplice grew slowly, deliberately, and sustainably. After more than a year as a duo, they hired their first person—not for a specific role, but someone with the same creative energy who could do everything. Eventually they grew to five people, then seven, then scaled back to five again.

Why scale back? Because meetings and coordination are overhead. Tobias's partner told him: "I miss when it was just us two. We could just decide things." With seven people spread across different time zones, everything took longer. They decided to focus on making each team member more independent and creative rather than hiring more coordinators.

Tobias admits there were failures within Simplice too—features they built that nobody used. But with low expectations, these weren't catastrophes. They were learning. The perfectionism of designer-led teams meant some features took longer than needed, but it also meant the product stayed beautiful and thoughtful.

Crucially, Tobias and Mike never bet everything on Simplice. Both were willing to take freelance gigs or even full-time work elsewhere if needed. This meant zero desperation in their growth decisions. They could say no. They could go slow.

Simplice has grown to a profitable, five-person team serving designers worldwide. It's not a venture-backed unicorn chasing hockey-stick growth curves. It's a sustainable, profitable business built on the original insight: designers need a better way to show their work. The story of Simplice is less about viral growth or brilliant marketing and more about a creator who built something they loved, stayed patient, and let the right customers find them through word of mouth.