When Torben Rytt decided to move from Denmark to Minneapolis Minnesota to be with his future wife he’d met in a Copenhagen bar, he had no green card, no grand plan, and no clue he’d one day build and run the American arm of a $100 million web accessibility platform called Siteimprove.
Siteimprove later was acquired for millions and Torben received only his second life-changing sum of money (his first being from an acquisition in his early 20s). He relaxed for a few months, then started a new business, called Gainbox, a niche intelligence platform that helps companies identify, quantify, and prioritize their best-fit sales leads.
Gainbox is still in its early stages but already brings in six-figure revenues with a small team of employees. Torben splits his time between building his latest project, raising his three children, and restoring his beloved 1980s motor yacht.
How did Torben go from just another Danish engineering grad with stars in his eyes to a key figure connecting the US and North European tech scenes? Read on to hear how he leveraged a creative spirit into a ticket into the tech industry, then scaled a ten-man bootstrapped business to $25 million dollars in ARR through niche sales mastery and a no-assholes policy.
“Boss, I Quit”
Just two years out of college, Torben’s CRM startup called Intraform was acquired for roughly $40,000 by a business called Netmaster (now Kruso). It was a staggering sum for a recent college grad.
Torben says that early success had a lot to do with his upbringing. He’s from a family of engineers. Dual majoring in electrical and software engineering in college, Torben just naturally gravitated towards automating office processes.
“My dad was an engineer, my brother’s an engineer, and I’m an engineer too. It’s always been kind of a passion of mine to tinker and get things to work. Using technology to solve real-world problems, if you will.”
Intraform ended up being Torben’s ticket into the tech world. When Kruso acquired the business, they also brought Torben on as a Project Manager. Here he spent two exciting years until a chance meeting with an American exchange student in a bar pushed him to go to his CEO and hand in his resignation. He intended to follow the woman of his dreams back to the US.
Torben’s boss came back with a better offer: His brother ran a SaaS business called Siteimprove that was looking to expand in the States. He asked if Torben would like to start the US sales branch of the business.
With no green card and no assurance of his success, Torben took a leap of faith and took the role. It ended up being the best decision he ever made.
Going From US Sales Rep to CEO of US Operations
When Torben joined (or rather, created) Siteimprove’s Minneapolis office in 2005, the company had nine Copenhagen-based employees, no U.S. presence, and big ambitions. By the time private equity bought it in 2020, the company had surpassed $100 million in revenue and Torben had led the charge in America as the CEO of its US operations bringing in fifty five percent of it.
Siteimprove was where Torben learned everything he knows today about sales. He helped build the entire team from scratch, leading growth by charging yearly fees up front, expanding by niche, and hiring with a “strict, no-assholes policy.”
Under Torben’s guidance, Siteimprove quickly picked up a range of clients in verticals like education, government, and finance (on its LinkedIn it boasts clients like Shell, Merck, and the UN). His biggest takeaway from those years? Make sure that each salesperson becomes a niche expert. It helped them maintain a 98 percent client retention rate.
“Instead of trying to just go out and do everything, we had teams that would get really good at working with banks or higher education or whatever it was,” he says. “We had these experts in-house that spoke to these people day in and day out. So when they got someone on the phone, they had hundreds of other conversations in their head that they could use as Information for that call.”
By 2015, they’d bootstrapped Siteimprove to $25 million in ARR and had received a $55 million minority investment from Summit Capital partners (for a $220 million valuation). By 2020, after 14 years of work, the entire business was acquired as a strategic buy by private equity. Torben was set for life – but far from finished.
When Selling to the USA, You Need to Think Bigger
After the acquisition, Torben bought a 1983 Viking 44 Motor Yacht he named Freya and spent a year and a half fixing it up—an engineer’s version of a vacation. He even had an article written about it from a publication called Passagemaker.
But as much as he loved trawling the high seas of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers, Torben missed the thrill of solving real business problems. “I get fired up when there’s a fire,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than a day where you wake up and there’s nothing to fix.”
Torben next got his former cofounder and high school classmate, Allan, to help him make a business helping Nordic companies enter the US. His old friend agreed and they decided to call their new venture Playmakr. They started in 2023 and soon noticed their clients tended to drastically underestimate the size and complexity of the U.S. market.
“I once told a Danish founder to focus more on banks. He told me, ‘There are five banks in Denmark, and three are already our customers.’” Says Torben. “While running Siteimprove, I had a team of 12 just calling into finance institutions. It’s a different scale out here and a different challenge.”
Even once they got acquainted with the scale of the US market, clients didn’t know how to actually find their target customers. For some niches, the process could become horrifically convoluted.
In response, Torben conscripted his problem-solving know-how and technical aptitude to build a go-to-market (GTM) automation system for Paymakr consulting clientele – Gainbox. Unlike typical sales tools, Gainbox didn’t just identify leads, it showed why those leads mattered, how big the opportunities were, and who to go after first, second, and third.
“Companies like Clay build lists. We build maps,” says Torben.
Using Gainbox, Torben and Allan helped multiple European clients figure out their total addressable market in The States before they even made their first sales calls. By 2025, they stopped bringing in new clients for Playmakr to focus solely on automating GTM for their current clients.
Today, they bring in 200,000 dollars in revenue from hybrid SaaS and consulting contracts. Torben is confident they can completely cut the umbilical cord very soon and make the most competitive GTM SaaS on the market. He recommends this model of operations to other bootstrapped founders. “Sell your expertise until you can sell your product” he says.
Yearly Subscriptions Are Intimidating – But Worth It
Looking back, Torben thinks the other major contributor to his back-to-back bootstrapped success was taking yearly fees rather than monthly. In his opinion, it’s a much better way to bootstrap capital if you’re selling to B2B.
“From day one, the Siteimprove owner said, ‘I’m not going to mess around with monthly payments, we’re just going to say one year paid up front.’” Says Torben. Cash was coming in and we could plan our expansion based on the ARR of the previous year. It’s a much safer way.”
Torben’s advice for other founders? Be intentional about your networking and make sure it doesn’t distract from building your business.
“I value the startup community and networking can be incredibly helpful, but I’ve seen too many founders get caught up in conversations about their businesses instead of focusing on actually solving problems for their customers. Spend your energy wisely—prioritize creating value and growing your product first.”
He also believes founders need to actively look for the opportunities around them and go all in on the ones worth pursuing.
“Bet on the big opportunities, and follow through on them even if it means you have to make life changes. You’ve got to go to the US and start that business – or chase that girl.”
