Usercentrics

In 2008, Karsten was invited to Harvard to research how personal data was collected from websites without user consent. His epiphany came when he realized the world needed legal requirements for data consent. But when he returned to Denmark and tried pitching the idea, people thought he was crazy. Undeterred, he quit his job in 2011 and founded the company from his kitchen table, taking on a single client who left after a week. For five years, he barely made a living, living in a small house and working from a shared office with only two chairs for three people.

In late 2017, as the E-Privacy Directive kicked in and GDPR approached, Karsten realized the timing was right. He sold his house and boat in January 2018, moved into a cabin, and hired 10 developers in Poland to build the product. "I had only funding by myself. So I had to sell my house, I had to sell my boat, I had a small crappy boat, move into a cabin and I'm only moved out of that this spring." The product launched in May 2018 alongside GDPR, and immediately attracted 500 clients. However, progress stalled—one year later, monthly revenue was only $140, despite spending $150,000 on building a credit card payment system.

Karsten's breakthrough came from positioning himself as a subject matter expert. He wrote the practical implementation guide for the E-Privacy Directive for the Danish Business Agency, made a documentary on privacy that aired prime-time on Danish national television, and established himself as the go-to authority. This credibility led to consulting work and early product adoption. As word spread through his network and the product improved, customers began referring others. By the end of 2021, "70% of the top 100 companies in our country and public sector were using our service."

Karsten's breakthrough came from obsessive focus on what he could control. He reduced churn from 60% to 3% by improving UX and self-service signup. He developed a key KPI: "we can spend 80% of a first invoice to a new client for the CAC. So if the CAC is 80% of the invoice amount we will send, then we will not go bankrupt." Between October 2019 and late 2020, revenue grew 100-fold by systematically reducing friction—upgrading from Joomla to WordPress, implementing HubSpot for sales automation, DocuSign for contracts, and Slack for operations. He converted all consulting clients to annual subscriptions, standardized pricing and contracts, and eliminated manual processes. By automating the entire customer journey—from webinars (40-150 consistent participants) through onboarding—he reduced his customer success team from 8 people to 2, while handling 30,000 requests in six months.

By the end of 2021, Usercentrics had reached $5M ARR and was handling 6 million consents per hour. According to the Danish Business Agency's annual report, they had become the second-largest third-party consent service provider in Denmark, surpassed only by Google. Rather than raise VC funding, Karsten completed a secondary transaction in April 2022 with Deloitte's guidance, generating nine firm offers. The deal was structured so "nothing went into the company"—all proceeds went to shareholders. The company scaled from 25 to 50 full-time employees and expanded to 20 nationalities in the Copenhagen office. Karsten's persistence through five years of financial hardship, combined with his focus on building something genuinely useful rather than chasing growth, ultimately created a company larger than Google Analytics in its home market.