My story: from entrepreneur to developer

I live in Aarhus with my fiancée and work as a developer — not in a company with a logo and a board, but as myself, at a desk, one codebase at a time. Most of my time goes to three things: my own apps, published under my own name on the App Store (Quiz Fight, HeadToHead, TaskMondo, Nuze, Bubbi, LostLead, WatchEnhance, Dealer-ID and the games Dolphin Beyond and Ragnaroll — see apps); development for companies through JegUdvikler.dk, where all code lives in the client’s own repository from day one; and talks about entrepreneurship, standing in a media storm and starting over.

I have no computer-science degree. Everything I can do I taught myself in the years after 2020. I have no employees, no investors and no partner. That is partly a choice and partly a consequence — more on that under the bankruptcies.

I finished school in 2013 and went straight into nightlife: managing a nightclub in Vejen before I turned 20, opening a cocktail bar in Kolding in 2014, later clubs in Haderslev and Aabenraa. I was good at opening places and bad at running them. Nightlife taught me to sell, to keep many balls in the air and to decide fast. It also taught me to measure everything in revenue and speed. Both became my problem later.

My first webshop I started in the mid-2010s, while still in nightlife: fitness clothing and equipment. It got hardly any orders. But I could see how an ad, a landing page and a product could become a business that ran while you slept.

In 2017 I founded Posture Clothing ApS with a business partner — my first real company — and we launched My Posture: a shirt built on kinesio technology, the same principle as kinesiology tape, designed to support your posture. It was not an ordinary T-shirt, whatever was written later. The shirts were produced in several factories in China to our own specifications, and we travelled there twice to visit them. We sold in Denmark and several other European countries, and the shirts were also stocked by Netto through the Salling Group. In total about 400,000 shirts were sold. A great many people were happy with them, and some probably still wear them.

In 2019 My Muscle — EMS training — was added, also sold through the Salling Group. That year we were nominated for EY Entrepreneur of the Year. The nomination was withdrawn shortly after, when the critical coverage began — which says everything about that year.

I was 24 when it took off, and from my desk it was a success story. In many ways it was. The engine was marketing on Facebook and Instagram — videos, influencers, discounts, countdowns — and I was good at it. What I was not good at was seeing when “good at marketing” becomes “too much”. That blind spot is what I spend most of my talks on today.

This is where I have to be specific, because this is where the criticism comes from.

The marketing was at times misleading

On myposture.dk we used claims like “50% off everything” and “LAST DAY with free shipping” together with a countdown timer that restarted when it hit zero. That is illegal under the Danish Marketing Practices Act. It was not a single mistake; it was a way of selling that we should have stopped when we were made aware of it. The Consumer Ombudsman reported the company to the police in 2018. We admitted the violation shortly after. The judgment — a fine for the company — came in 2022, after the company had gone bankrupt. That does not change the fact that it was deserved.

Anodyne

Shortly after launch — we had hardly had a thousand customers — we used some images that the competitor Anodyne held the rights to. The images were from an American brand, Alignmed, that Anodyne distributed. It was wrong; we admitted it, settled and stopped. Later we advertised on Google on their name. As we experienced it, that went both ways in the industry, but the court found it to be misuse of their trademark, and we stopped after the judgment. Anodyne brought further cases about our marketing, and they won them.

Two things I want stated clearly: our shirt was not a copy of their product, and no court has ever found that it was — the cases were about images and keywords, not the product. And the conflict was not one-sided. But we were the ones found against, and we were the ones who should have stayed far away from them from day one.

Reviews

We were far too aggressive about collecting reviews — we asked too often and pushed too hard. In 2021 Trustpilot excluded our companies from the platform. We denied it through our lawyer at the time. Today I say it as it was: we pushed too much.

Gigabutik

In the autumn of 2020, when it was clear that Posture Clothing could not continue, we founded a new company, Hama Network ApS, and opened Gigabutik.dk. We still wanted to do e-commerce, and we wanted to learn from what had gone wrong. From the outside it looked like we simply carried on as if nothing had happened — and I understand that. Gigabutik quickly drew the same kind of criticism of its marketing as My Posture, and in 2021 I left e-commerce. I have not run a webshop since.

I have spent much of this page on what I did wrong, and that is deliberate. But there are also things I cannot sign up to, and they belong here just as clearly:

• The shirt. My Posture was described as “a tight T-shirt”. It was not. It was built on kinesio technology, produced to our specifications in factories we had visited ourselves, and it was bought around 400,000 times — including in Netto. A great many people were happy with it. That our marketing was too aggressive does not make the product bad.
• The copy claim. Our product was not a copy of Anodyne’s, and no court has said it was. The judgments were about marketing.
• The customers. There were customers who were unhappy, and I take them seriously. There were also hundreds of thousands who got what they ordered and were satisfied. Both are true — only one of them became a story.

I am not going through the rest point by point. That is not what this page is for.

From 2019 the Danish daily Berlingske covered a group of webshops with the same pattern, started by acquaintances from Aarhus, and called it the “Aarhus network”. Other Danish business and consumer media followed, and the consumer programme DR Kontant made broadcasts about it in 2021. My Posture and Gigabutik featured in most of that coverage, and my name is inseparably tied to it today.

At the time I disagreed with almost all of it. We answered through a lawyer, we denied, and we felt the coverage was skewed. Some of that was because I could not bear to look at it. Some of it was because what was written was not right.

Today my view is more nuanced. The criticism of our marketing, and of how we handled the criticism, was justified. Other parts I still do not recognise, and some of what was written was one side’s account presented as fact. I am not using this page to go through it point by point — what I stand by is above, and so is what I see differently. Some of the criticism we had invited ourselves. It took me far too long to say that sentence out loud.

In December 2020 we filed for bankruptcy of Posture Clothing ApS ourselves at the bankruptcy court in Aarhus. My first real company was gone after three years. The trustee reviewed the company’s final months and recommended bankruptcy quarantine for both of us. We disagreed at the time. I am under bankruptcy quarantine today. It means I may not take part in the management of a limited company during the quarantine period — which is the very concrete reason everything I do now runs through me personally: my name on the apps, my name on the invoice, my personal responsibility for all of it. I have chosen to see that as an advantage. There is no company to hide behind.

Hama Network ApS, the company behind Gigabutik, also went bankrupt. In 2023 the remaining companies — holding companies and a property company — were wound up through bankruptcy. On 1 May 2023 I was declared personally bankrupt by the court in Aarhus following a petition from the Danish Tax Agency. The estate has been closed. The short of it: I lost everything I owned. I was in my late twenties.

Behind the personal bankruptcy is a claim from the Danish Tax Agency that I fundamentally disagree with. I have appealed the decision, and the case is now with the Danish Tax Appeals Agency. While it is being heard I am not writing more about it here — not because there is anything to hide, but because it has to be decided there and not on my website. When there is a decision, I will publish it here, whatever it is.

I lost the money. All of it. I lost friends — some because they chose to, some because I was not good company in those years. I lost the self-confidence I had lived on. At 24 I thought I was better at this than most people. At 27 I was not sure I was good at anything. The hardest part was not the headlines; it was what came after — that my name comes up every time I meet someone new, and having to explain it before I can say anything else.

In the middle of all that there was one thing I did that was not about selling anything to anyone: I tinkered with our websites. A button that had to move, a text that had to change. First a little CSS in the browser inspector, then the real files. The first time I wrote code that actually changed something on a live site was one of the best feelings I had had in my working life. Write something. Refresh. See it work. And the opposite: either the code works or it does not. No ad can rescue an app that crashes. No countdown can make a feature exist. I fell for that honesty immediately — and I think it was because I needed it.

In the years after the bankruptcies I taught myself the craft with freeCodeCamp, MDN, the React documentation and endless small projects that went wrong until they did not. No degree, no certificates — just hours, in a period where I did not have much else. In 2025 I released the first real products under my own name. I have not done anything else since.