Usersnap: The “Late Co-Founder” Who 2.5x’d Revenue — a 7-Figure Exit After 10-Plus Years, With a Small Coda

In a world of indie-development exits that tends to celebrate the speed of an 18-month sell-off, Usersnap sits at the opposite pole. It took more than 10 years from founding to sale, running entirely on revenue after a $500K seed round, growing to $2.2M in annual revenue, 20 people, and 1,500 customers before selling to saas.group for seven figures at the end of 2023. There are two things worth reading closely here: the organizational story of a person brought on in year six under a “co-founder” title who 2.5x’d revenue, and the seller’s unusually concrete piece of practical advice, “keep your data room always up to date.”

Timeline

The Origin Was “a Bug I Couldn’t Put Into Words”

Austria’s Josef Trauner, working as a technical consultant supporting European telecom operators, kept running into the same gap: “users can’t clearly describe the problem they’re having with an app.” His solution was simple, let people take a screenshot of the screen and draw directly on it to point out the issue. That single idea became Usersnap. The only outside money the company ever took was a $500K seed round from Europe’s SpeedInvest. For the following ten years, revenue alone kept the company running.

The customer list includes the BBC, Lego, Red Hat, and Microsoft, alongside financial group Erste Group and Turkish e-commerce giant Trendyol. In the niche category of bug-reporting and feedback collection, the company reached 1,500 companies across industries and regions.

The Business by the Numbers (at Sale)

What the “Late Co-Founder” Actually Did

In 2018, in Usersnap’s sixth year, Schremser joined as head of growth. His title and standing were both “co-founder.” What he brought was growth hacking through SEO and content marketing, and over the five years from 2018 to 2023, revenue grew 2.5x. According to the source, inbound customers from search were the primary engine of growth. Working backward, annual revenue at the time he joined was around $880K ($2.2M ÷ 2.5), a business that had spent its first six years plateaued at that scale before adding a new function changed its growth trajectory.

Growth came with a cost, too. The source cites “enterprise readiness” as the main challenge. Large customers like BBC and Microsoft come with specific feature and compliance requirements, and continuing to meet those demands with a team of 20 was a persistent load for a small-scale SaaS carrying big-name accounts.

The Mechanics of the Sale — “A Messy House Doesn’t Sell for a Good Price”

The sale went through M&A advisor i5invest. The buyer, saas.group, is a SaaS-focused holding company whose portfolio already included Seobility, Prerender, and Keyword.com. Usersnap joined that stable. The price was seven figures (the exact amount undisclosed). The two founders stayed on for a year and left in mid-2024.

Schremser’s advice as a seller is concrete: keep meticulous financial records from day one, and maintain an “always up-to-date data room” holding monthly P&L statements and customer contracts. In his own words, “if the house is a mess inside, the house won’t sell for a good price” (paraphrased).

What You Can Learn From This

Bringing in a co-founder later is a real option. Schremser, who joined in the company’s sixth year, was treated as a co-founder in both title and equity, and he 2.5x’d revenue. The combination of a founder who can build the product and a joiner who can sell it is essentially Transistor’s marketer-plus-engineer pairing, achieved with a time lag. Recruiting a missing skill set even later, at “co-founder-level” terms, is a configuration worth recording as one that worked.

“Keep your data room always up to date” ranks among the most important pieces of practical advice a seller can give. A seller who can’t produce the numbers during due diligence gets their price beaten down for that reason alone, and the risk of the deal falling through rises. PsychCentral’s “get your numbers in order beforehand” and AppArmor’s “due diligence is hell”, every successful seller ends up saying the same thing.

A one-year post-sale lock-in followed immediately by founding the next company has become the standard route for serial entrepreneurs. The two brought in Thomas Peham and launched Otterly.AI, which tracks how brands appear in generative AI search results from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. It’s a move that carries customer understanding (feedback, UX) and SEO skills from the previous business into the next wave of search. It sits alongside Tibo’s restart and Kahl’s pivot into media as a recognizable “life after exit” pattern.

Reading Between the Numbers — Weighing 10 Years Against Seven Figures

“Seven figures” spans anywhere from $1M to $9.99M, so the multiple against $2.2M in annual revenue could be anywhere from 0.5x to 4.5x. We simply can’t say more precisely. What we can say for certain is that this is a different curve from Tweet Hunter’s model of extracting $10M in 18 months. Ten years to reach $2.2M in annual revenue, with roughly $880K of that coming in the first six years by our back-calculation, a gentle trajectory by the standards of VC-style expectations implied by a $500K seed round, but also a realistic landing point for a mid-sized European SaaS: sustaining 20 jobs while running on revenue, then having the founders cash out and move on. Reading this case only through a lens that glorifies speed misses the staying power of this pattern.

That staying power came with conditions of its own era. The 2.5x between 2018 and 2023 was driven mainly by inbound traffic from SEO and content, numbers from a period when search traffic still worked. That the two founders went on to build Otterly.AI, which tracks how brands appear in generative AI search, is itself a sign that the assumptions behind traditional SEO are shifting. The strain of meeting BBC-class customers’ feature and compliance demands with a team of 20 also sat behind this ten-year curve.

Related Cases

• DashThis — a larger deal with the same buyer, around the same time
• Transistor — the same skill combination, done from day one
• FeedbackPanda — an earlier example of the same buyer type (a dedicated SaaS acquirer)