In building MuchSkills, I discovered that our growth mirrored my own values far more than the industry’s playbook.
November 28, 2025
When MuchSkills reached its first 10,000 users, I didn’t feel what I expected to feel. In the tech world, 10,000 barely registers as a number — certainly not in a landscape fuelled by LinkedIn announcements about “hockey-stick growth” and “blitzscaling”. As founders, we are conditioned to see numbers as ladders: you are always meant to climb, and if you’re not climbing fast enough, you must be doing something wrong.
So when our dashboard ticked over to 10,000, my first reaction was almost dismissive: it’s not much.
But later that evening, I tried to visualise what ten thousand people actually looks like. I imagined a small stadium — every seat filled. Ten thousand individuals, with backstories and lives and hopes, who had chosen to join us on our journey. Somehow, seeing it that way made everything feel different. It was the first time I realised we weren’t building software. We were building trust, person by person.
It was also the moment I understood that we were on a very different path — not slower, not faster, just unmistakably our own.
If I trace back the origins of this instinct — this need for agency and self-direction — it predates MuchSkills by decades. Growing up as a gay child, I learned early what it meant to feel alone in a world that wasn’t automatically designed for you. There was no roadmap, no guaranteed safety, no handed-down assurances. What I did have was my own resourcefulness. I understood very young that the only person I could depend on — consistently, without negotiation — was myself.
That realisation didn’t make me isolated. But it did make me fiercely protective of my independence. I never wanted to be indebted to anyone. I never wanted to rely on someone else’s permission to shape my life. Agency, for me, wasn’t a philosophical choice — it was survival.
Years later, when I became a founder, I realised that this inner wiring had quietly shaped every major decision I made.
MuchSkills wasn’t founded in a single dramatic moment. There was no epiphany in a café, no heroic “let’s quit our jobs” story. Instead, it emerged in a series of small, ordinary conversations between my co-founder Daniel and me.
Daniel is the dream-maker. I am the dreamer.
He understands how to take an idea and put scaffolding around it. I understand how to push at the edges of what something could be. Together, we balance fantasy with structure — an ideal pairing for a product trying to do something genuinely new.
One day, we looked at each other and made a decision that, in hindsight, was quietly monumental. We took €20,000 — money we had earned through our own work — and invested it into the first version of MuchSkills. It was a terrifying amount for us at the time. But it was also the clearest expression of who we were: if we were going to build something, we wanted to build it with our own hands, our own money, our own pace.
That moment set the tone for everything that followed.
People often assume that founders who bootstrap are doing so because they lack ambition or speed. But that wasn’t our story. We weren’t intentionally carving out such a path. We simply made decisions that we were more comfortable with.
We didn’t chase funding rounds. We didn’t optimise for optics. We didn’t build features because board members demanded it - we didn’t have a board.
We built because customers had real problems and we wanted to solve them with care. We built because we believed people deserved better than the clunky, admin-centric HR tools that dominated the market. We built because we wanted employees - not systems - to be at the centre of skills management.
And yes, we moved steadily. But steady is not the same as slow.
In fact, when I look back, we shipped more per person per week than teams ten times our size. Our pace was a heartbeat — rhythmic, persistent, alive. Sometimes the pulse quickened when we needed to push hard; most of the time it beat steadily, sustaining us through the long journey.
Every founder who builds independently faces the same recurring surge of panic: are we moving fast enough? It comes every year, every month — sometimes every hour. And in those moments, the noise of the tech world can be overwhelming. Funding announcements. “We grew 300% this quarter.” New unicorns minted overnight.
You begin to question your own judgment.
But whenever that anxiety crept in, we reminded ourselves of something simple:
We are solving a problem that is niche today, but foundational tomorrow.
Back in 2018, almost no one was talking about skills. Now, every conference is filled with the language of “skills-based organisations”, “skills taxonomies”, and “skills intelligence”. We didn’t chase the trend — the trend came to where we already were.
There is power in being early, even if you are invisible at the time.
Building at our rhythm gave us something that hyper-growth rarely affords: time to listen. Time to question. Time to refine. Time to prioritise value over velocity.
A few examples:
Most “skills” platforms are glorified spreadsheets: surveys dressed as software. They collect data without any regard for the employee experience. We refused that model. From the very beginning, MuchSkills was built to feel friendly, human, and intuitive — something even field workers with minimal computer access could use easily.
While other companies scrape job posts or mine Wikipedia for skills definitions, we built a dataset rooted in voluntary, structured, human-input skills. It is original. It is contextual. It is alive. Everything else in the market is yesterday’s noise.
No Google Analytics.
No heat maps.
No obsessing over click paths.
We focused on business value: does this feature help managers make better decisions? Does it empower employees to articulate what they actually want to work on?
You shouldn’t need to log into B2B software every day. The point is not to maximise interaction — it’s to maximise clarity. Good enterprise UX gets out of the way.
These principles would not have survived a VC-led roadmap. Our independence preserved the originality of the product.
But being bootstrapped has its own sacrifices:
When you’re spending your own money — not investor money — every decision has weight. You feel the consequences directly. And that sharpens you. It keeps you honest. It keeps you grounded.
I sometimes think this is why compliance failures happen so easily in VC-backed startups: when you’re spending someone else’s money, the real-world consequences don’t feel real.
Years after our first 10,000 users, we looked at the numbers again. This time there were nearly 100,000. And once more, I pictured the stadium. Not a small one — a full one. Ten times larger. Filled with people who had placed a small piece of trust in something Daniel and I built from scratch.
Recognising that — really feeling it — was a quiet, private moment of pride.
A moment where everything made sense.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
Don’t try to be someone else’s version of success.
Founders often lose themselves trying to match the tempo of others.
But tempo is personal.
Values are personal.
Direction is personal.
Bootstrapped companies aren’t actually slow. They’re simply moving at the rhythm required to build something that lasts. Something differentiated. Something thoughtful. Something with a pulse, not a countdown timer.
And in the end, what matters is not how fast you build, but whether you recognise yourself in the thing you’ve built.
Noel Braganza is a designer and founder who enjoys working at the intersection of technology, behaviour and clear, thoughtful design. As Co-founder of MuchSkills.com - a Swedish SaaS company and Up Strategy Lab, he draws on a background in Interaction Design and research experience at the MIT Design Lab to build practical tools that help people and organisations understand themselves better.
He is especially interested in questioning inherited assumptions—about work, skills, growth and what it means to build a company with integrity. His ambition is to create tools and ideas that outlast trends, empower people, and challenge the conventional narratives around success, visibility and value.