Levelup

The first company I started was Levelup and it will always have a special place in my heart. Levelup is a development and hosting agency with clients in sectors like telecom, off-shore and real estate. The journey started in 2015 and ended when we sold the company in 2020.

Brief history

In 2015 an idea started to bubble in my head. How would it be to run my own company, and be my own man. This idea got all consuming and ended with me delivering my resignation. This was thrilling and scary at the same time. I had no idea if I was going to succeed or fall flat on my ass. Luckily things turned out well.

Over time the company morphed, I had different partners and tried out a lot of different strategies. In the early days, we where a fully-fledged marketing and development agency. We did branding, websites, advertising, analytics, and even graphics for physical packaging. This experience thought me a lot about a lot of things, but it was to broad to get any real growth. Therefore we altered the strategy and started focusing on UI/UX, web-development and hosting. This worked out really well and we got some traction.

In 2020 I had already begun investing in Real Estate and had a dream to test out making products for myself instead of clients. Levelup wasn’t self sufficient enough to make it without me, so the only viable option I had to make room for going after my dreams was to sell the company. So we did.

My Role

I was a true 🥔 in the company. My official role switched between being CEO and CTO over the years, depending on which partners I had.

My main responsibilities where working closely with clients, managing our team and making sure all our deliveries where top notch.

I came from a Typo3, WordPress and Craft environment. So the initial work we did where make with WordPress and Craft. After joining with Stian Grytøyr we started making applications with NodeJS and React. This was a major boost, and so much fun.

Throughout the process we went from hosting everything on Hetzner servers, to AWS and later Google Cloud with Kubernetes and Serverless architecture.

The entire process was a blast, and I got to grow so much as a person. All the projects, responsibilities and the fight to grow forces you to really work on yourself, and I’ve been addicted to that feeling ever since.

Building, growing and finally selling Levelup was a fantastic experience!