UserFlow

Espen Fries Jensen had spent seven years building Cobalt.io, an application security platform that grew to 200+ employees and raised $37 million. By 2020, Cobalt had matured into a high-touch, sales-led enterprise business. But Espen was itching for something different—the early-stage energy of a bootstrapped startup and the product-led motion he'd pioneered at Cobalt's beginning. His co-founder Sebastian had been building what would become UserFlow since 2018, initially as a video platform called Studio One. The two knew each other through the Danish community in the Bay Area (where Sebastian was based) and through Cobalt's customer network. In late 2020, Espen decided to leave his operational role at Cobalt and join Sebastian full-time to take UserFlow to the next level.

Sebastian had already been working on the product since 2018, pivoting from video training content to interactive in-app guidance in 2019. When Espen joined in late 2020, the vision was clear: build a no-code platform that lets product managers, designers, and customer success managers create in-app onboarding flows and product tours without writing any code. The core product required only a small JavaScript snippet installed on a website, making it accessible to non-technical users. Espen and Sebastian made a deliberate choice to bootstrap rather than raise VC funding, wanting to prove how far a lean operation could scale. With no external capital and just the two of them, they had to be ruthlessly focused on what mattered: product quality and word-of-mouth growth.

UserFlow's growth came through multiple channels, but word-of-mouth emerged as the primary driver. Espen focused on thought leadership around product-led growth and the no-code movement—topics that were trending and aligned perfectly with UserFlow's positioning. He leveraged his credibility from Cobalt to speak publicly about these trends. The company also invested in SEO and ran Google Ads to capture search demand while organic search ramped up. They made sure to appear on review platforms like G2 and Capterra, where customers could leave testimonials that sparked further word-of-mouth. Free trials (a two-week window) allowed customers to try the product without talking to anyone, perfectly fitting the product-led motion. Many customers signed up and paid without ever speaking to the team.

The two-person team succeeded by making the product do the heavy lifting. Rather than hiring support staff, they designed UserFlow so that great UX meant customers rarely needed help. When support tickets came in, instead of writing knowledge base articles, Espen and Sebastian asked: "How can we make the product smarter so this question doesn't come up again?" They used tools like LoopRocket to watch how new users interacted with their platform and identified friction points. They also used their own product (UserFlow inside UserFlow) to guide users through key actions, proving that onboarding tools should never compensate for bad UX—they amplify good UX. For larger enterprise customers, they intentionally made the online/credit-card tiers very attractive and only offered sales contracts and manual procurement for truly large accounts, avoiding overhead that would kill their unit economics.

As of the podcast recording, UserFlow was "closing in on the 1 million ARR mark" with just two founders and no hired employees (beyond occasional freelance UX help). Espen and Sebastian serve SMB and mid-market SaaS companies as their core base, but have landed some larger Fortune 500 enterprises building customer-facing platforms. The bootstrapped approach is intentional—they want to prove you don't need VC funding or large teams to scale a SaaS business if you obsess over product quality and let word-of-mouth drive growth. Espen credits their success to the philosophy of "quality at speed," focus, and the product-led mindset honed during his years at Cobalt.