From idea to a product and a company

Startups aren't easy. I should know, since I have founded a few during the last 30+ years. My latest startup, Desktop.com just launched today, so it's a special day for me, my team, our shareholders and our partners.

The idea to start Desktop.com came to me 10 months ago. I wanted to make it easier to work on the web, by providing faster and more organized access to web tools and resources for both small businesses and consumers. In addition, I wanted to ease collaboration related to web apps and web links(bookmarks). My own needs was what sparked this idea. Since most small businesses primarily use web tools to conduct their business tasks, I assume that there are many more out there with similar needs.

After 1 month, I hired a part time UI/UX freelancer to help me with translating my idea to images, and to bounce feature ideas with. He is now a full time valuable member of our team.

It took 2 months to secure a domain name that would relate to what we do. A domain name like Desktop.com is a huge investment, but is in my opinion worth it when you look to launch a global SaaS service that could get massive amount of users. Sedo brokered the deal between the seller and us.

After 3 months we had a clickable very simple design prototype. After many rounds with potential early stage investors, I found a partner in Frank Schilling, a well known Internet entrepreneur, that chose to invest in my idea. This was also the time when we started to document the technical spec.

After 4 months I recruited a small but great team. A handful of people, half new and half previous colleagues. Only two of us lives in the same country, we all work from home offices, and we cover most time-zones in the world. We outsource many functions, and currently have 3 times as many people involved from partners as we have internal staff members.

With a rough "recipe" on how to build the product, the development started after 6 months with our partner Norse Digital. They have proven to be a perfect match for us.

After 9 months it was time to get more investors onboard to be able to follow the rather offensive growth plan we have, and make sure we can spend enough on marketing as well as expanding the development over time.

It has been just over 10 months since the idea came along, and today we have launched! Woohoo :) This merely marks the beginning rather than an end of a project. A minimum viable product (MVP) is what we have launched, and much development will be needed to move from this stage to amaze users in the future.

Hard work is ahead of us, but with optimism, perseverance and doing something we love and believe in, this will be fun!

Feel free to try out the service yourself. Its free for personal use and free trial for business use. Just head over to Desktop.com to explore and get your own account.

Here are two of several promo videos we have done so far: