This week marks my first where I can fully focus on Squidler, and it feels great! I quickly realized that there are so many things we’ve been putting on the back burner for a long time.
One realization was that it’s been way too long since we last updated our blog. We have, however, had good reason for having our focus elsewhere over the past few months. Let me share what we’ve been up to…
We started Squidler.io as a side project between a group of friends. Balancing side projects with full-time work and personal life is always difficult, but for us, it was the only reasonable way to start working on this idea of making website testing super simple and accessible to anyone. But all of us have families, some with small children, and we were deeply involved in transforming IKEA’s perspective on sales data, insights, and sales steering.
By January, the situation had unfortunately become unhealthy. I think it was a case of us collectively feeling that we could execute in a way that was on par with our ability. My own focus was always a bit split, and I was always worried that I wasn’t performing. I can say that to constantly worry about underperforming, even though you aren’t, will eat away on you if you are used to being in high performing environments.
This led to serious team discussions. We concluded that we either had to fully commit to Squidler or let it go – we couldn’t realize the true potential of what we were building while simultaneously perform like champions at IKEA. Each one of us had to make the difficult choice on whether to take the leap and actually focus on doing a startup.
After a lot of discussions and some challenges, we landed a brilliant founding team: Erik Ogenvik, Christopher Suarez, Peter Kleine, and I. Together, I think we have an excellent mix of engineering, operations, design, product, marketing, and business skills - I couldn’t be more excited about building Squidler, both as a product and as a company, with this team!
Summer is coming to an end here in Sweden, which means we are ready to go full speed ahead. We have many more great things I want to share, and a ton of things in the pipeline, but I won’t spoil anything just yet. I’ll make sure to share our progress and be as transparent as possible with both our successes and challenges.
What is Squidler? We know you want to focus on your business, not on finding website bugs. Squidler helps you by monitoring and testing your website every day, checking for functional bugs, accessibility issues, spelling and grammar, and more, so that you can focus on your business. Enter your URL below to see what we find already now!