How to Successfully Differentiate Yourself in a Crowded Market

Discover how Servebolt differentiates itself in the crowded hosting space with blazing speed & developer-first features. See what truly sets them apart.

With Special Guest Lasse Hall, CEO of Servebolt.com 

We explore how Servebolt has carved out its niche in a saturated market. Discover the innovative strategies and unique value propositions that set Servebolt apart from competitors. From exceptional performance to customer-centric solutions, learn how this company has not only survived but thrived. Don’t miss out on these key takeaways.

This Week’s Sponsors

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The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:00.100] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back, folks, to the WP-Tonic Show. This is episode 1013. We’ve got a fabulous guest with us. We’ve got Leslie Hall with us, the CEO of ServerBolt, um, a— one of the leading quality WordPress hosting providers in Europe, based I think in Oslo, but they’re a distributed company. Their people are everywhere. Should be a great discussion. Lesze, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the show. I’ve been looking forward to this discussion.

[00:00:42.330] – Lasse Hall

My pleasure.

[00:00:44.050] – Jonathan Denwood

And I’ve got my great co-host with me, Curt. Curt, would you quickly like to introduce yourself to the listeners and viewers?

[00:00:51.150] – Kurt von Ahnen

Sure thing, Jonathan. My name is Curt, Curt van Annen. I own a company called Mañana No Más,, and we also work directly with the great team over at WP-Tonic. And if I could be so bold, Jonathan and I have volleyed your name back and forth before going live. Is it Lassi? Lassi? How should we be saying this name?

[00:01:10.070] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, so if I’m saying it in the proper Nordic way, it’s Lasse. But most Americans, they say Lassi because of the E, but it’s Lasse or Lasse. That would be the proper pronunciation. So it’s just like, you know, it’s a silent E at the end there.

[00:01:33.750] – Jonathan Denwood

So I won’t be—

[00:01:34.230] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, we’re in.

[00:01:35.950] – Jonathan Denwood

I won’t be shot in saying Lasse again.

[00:01:38.470] – Lasse Hall

It’s always difficult with names, especially, you know, it is what it is.

[00:01:43.890] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it should be a great show. We’re going to be discussing Lasse’s background, why he decided to become the CEO of ServerBolt. We’re going to be talking about the fragmented hosting market and how ServerBolt can find its niche. We’re going to be talking about private equity as well. We’ve got a ton of things to discuss. It should be a great show. But before we go into the meat and potatoes, I got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. 3, 2, 1, we’re coming back, folks. Want to point out This show is brought to you by the support of our sponsors, so go over and support them. And by the way, we’ve got some great special offers from the sponsors, plus a curated list of the best WordPress plugins and services for you, the freelancer and small agency owner. You can find all these free goodies and the special offers from the sponsors by going over to wp-tonic.com/deals. wp-tonic.com/deals. Wp-tonic.com/deals. You’ll find all the goodies there, my beloved tribe. What more could you ask for? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page.

[00:03:01.630] – Jonathan Denwood

So let’s go straight into it, Leslie. Sure. So you’ve got extensive business background and then you become the CEO of ServerBolt. What attracted you to the company and the challenges that have probably come with that decision?

[00:03:21.120] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, well, you know, good question. So my background is a bit unusual for a hosting CEO, as I understand. You know, I played ice hockey for a good number of years as a professional hockey player. Also was on the— yeah, love it, Kurt. You know, I was on the national team for Norway in juniors and And what that does to you is it wires you for performance under pressure as a hockey player. Team dynamics, the mindset, the talent without execution means nothing. So, and after hockey, I went into fintech. I was in banking for a number of years, finance, and also management consulting. So I co-founded two fintech companies back in the day, scaled them across 9 countries, built them close to 100 people. I also led a vertical at a consulting firm, which I co-own, and that was also quite successful. So I’ve been in high growth and high pressure environments my whole career. Serbolt came to me in early 2025. The founder, Alan, built something I think was genuinely exceptional from a technology standpoint and one of the fastest managed WordPress and PHP platforms in the world. But the business needed a kind of different leadership, different direction, needed commercial motion structure and kind of a clear path to scale.

[00:05:22.930] – Lasse Hall

So that’s exactly the kind of challenge I love and like and what’s been driving me for X number of years. So I took the CEO role, you know, in February ’25 and been rebuilding from the inside ever since. And I think, you know, what’s, what’s coming in the future for us, I think it’s, I’m extremely bullish for. So yeah, that was kind of a little bit of a background and where and why I’m here.

[00:06:00.490] – Jonathan Denwood

Are you based in Norway yourself or is it Dubai?

[00:06:07.140] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, so it’s my main space is Dubai, but there’s a war going on and so I’m mostly now in Norway. So I think that’s a good thing to be. But You know, life is normal in Dubai at the moment. I don’t think there’s lots to be worried about in that perspective. But yeah, I don’t want to take any chances.

[00:06:38.460] – Jonathan Denwood

Who knows? Over to you, Curt.

[00:06:41.920] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think the whole interview just took a wild turn here, Jonathan, because I’m really interested in this hockey background. So I played defense throughout high school and apparently I have a big dog.

[00:06:53.540] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, you have. It’s huge.

[00:06:55.400] – Jonathan Denwood

He does.

[00:06:57.420] – Kurt von Ahnen

We got a delivery. I’m sorry, they always seem to come to the podcast. Um, so I played hockey. I also played soccer till I was 29 years old, and I raced motorcycles, uh, professionally, like all over the United States. And what you said, I think, is so like paramount to a lot of entrepreneurs. Like, once you’re in a space, whether it’s a team sport or like an individual team sport— like, everyone thinks racing is like this individual thing, but there’s a team behind you.

[00:07:26.640] – Lasse Hall

There’s—

[00:07:26.900] – Kurt von Ahnen

oh yeah, there’s a pit crew, a travel crew, a logistics crew, you know, a sponsorship crew. There’s all that stuff. Um, I, I just gotta know, like, how much of that sports-driven— um, Jonathan’s heard me say this, right? I’m like, we have two options. We, we can, we can fail or we can succeed. Like, I’m not going to work towards failure, right? We got to work towards success. Um, how much do you think your sports background played in your pathway professionally?

[00:07:58.610] – Lasse Hall

Oh, 100%, like everything. My team, the mentality of being, um, you know, in— and well, you play hockey, so you know, and it’s like, you know, the— you’re just one player out of 20 guys that’s there. Um, if you have two guys that’s dragging their heels or having a bad attitude or just, you know, not performing at the level, the entire team falls and you’re going to lose that game. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s— I know that I’m just a piece of the puzzle. Yeah, I’m the CEO and I take decisions and all that good stuff. But, but there’s a team here. And if the team is not performing, I’m not performing. So it’s, and looking back, it’s about building hockey teams with different angles, different, you know, you have different roles that you need to perform and you need that across any business. You know, no one can be the same. You know, that’s why all-star teams never work because they’re just used to getting the puck, you know, feed it to them and they have one shot and that’s it and they score a goal. But if everyone is that one-shot guy, yeah, you’ll, you’ll lose because he’s not going to do that.

[00:09:36.240] – Lasse Hall

He’s not— never going to do that grunt work in, in the corners.

[00:09:41.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, I find the whole thing fascinating because especially the culture in the United States corporately now it’s very touchy-feely, emotions. How do you feel today? But, you know, and there’s a resonance with me that’s like this— we’re here to win.

[00:09:58.840] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s not my impression of American corporate.

[00:10:03.860] – Lasse Hall

Yeah. And, you know, I’m not going to, you know, use the F-word here, but I’m in your face 100%. And I think, you know, to win, you need to be thick-skinned. And I’m a pretty decent, nice guy and so on. But I’m demanding. I like direct language. If things are not working, I’ll tell you and I’ll tell you why. And if you can’t handle that, sorry, you know, maybe you could go, you know, work somewhere else because, yeah, that’s what we need. I think, you know, this touchy-feely stuff, that’s fine for people that just want to manage stuff. But if you want to win and you want to be in a high-pressure environment and you want to make stuff happen, you want to do, you know, great numbers, you want to scale, you want to all that good stuff. I’m sorry, but if you can’t handle the shit, you can’t handle the good stuff either. So, yeah, you know, that’s my kind of easy approach to that one, you know, and bringing back the hockey teams, like, you know, I can’t count the amount of times people have been screaming at each other and telling people to step up and, you know, most likely, you know, 99% of the time, it’s, they need it.

[00:11:46.930] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah.

[00:11:47.390] – Lasse Hall

Yeah.

[00:11:47.630] – Kurt von Ahnen

No, no, I agree. So, so that takes us kind of to another way to ask a question. That’s, you know, we work in WordPress, obviously, right? WP-Tonic. And so we work in WordPress, we work in hosting, Mañana No Más has hosting. Hosting seems to be like this ever more like fragmented missing pieces of the puzzle kind of experiment. And so if the market is kind of that fragmented, how do you feel that Servebolt was able to find a niche, really drill down on it, and then— just asking because you mentioned WordPress and PHP, right? So it was like, obviously there’s another level. How important is WordPress to Servebolt in the overall picture?

[00:12:31.830] – Lasse Hall

Oh, it’s massive for us, obviously. I think, you know, the hosting market looks fragmented on the surface, but when you go one level deeper, it’s actually quite consolidated. You know, you have a handful of private equity-backed platforms own most of the volume, and most of that volume is low-end, high-churn, commoditized hosting. The niche we play is performance-critical workloads, right? So agencies, developers, enterprise, e-commerce, WordPress, people for whom a slow site or a 2 AM outage isn’t just annoying. It’s, it’s going to cost some clients and definitely 100% revenue. So, so these customers don’t buy on price. Obviously they buy on trust and performance. So I think, you know, WordPress is, is still dominant CMS on, on the internet. It powers somewhere around what, 40% of the web. And that’s not going away. But, you know, the interesting shift right now is that the most, I think, valuable WordPress customers, agencies running high traffic, let’s say WooCommerce stores, publishers, enterprise teams, they’re increasingly unhappy with big platforms. And it’s coming you know, a lot of that information is coming every week to us. They’ve outgrown shared infrastructure and they need something like, you know, purpose or custom built.

[00:14:18.700] – Lasse Hall

And that’s what Cerbolt is built for. So, yeah, you know, WordPress is critical for us, but more, I would say precisely demanding WordPress users are definitely our market for sure.

[00:14:37.280] – Kurt von Ahnen

As a follow-up to that, because I know your website specifically calls out WooCommerce, yeah, you find like these larger WooCommerce sites are the demanding, like dynamic server resource hungry websites, or is there a different type of site that kind of like dwarfs their demand?

[00:15:00.410] – Lasse Hall

Good question. I think, you know, from— yeah, good question. In terms of the— in terms of— actually, a question I need to think about a little bit. I think, you know, in terms of the demand, I think there’s a lot of things happening in WooCommerce, and I think, you know, they’re kind of lagging behind on the direction they’re going right now. And obviously they’re losing a lot of business to different, well, other tech. Yeah. And we’ll probably discuss that a little bit later, but I think, you know, if WooCommerce could, you know, step up their, um, development a little bit, I would say. Um, I don’t want— I don’t want to say that lightly because, um, because they’re, you know, they’re definitely moving but not moving in the right direction. I think, you know, it’s just— yeah, it’s a little bit of a babble from me on that question. I need to think about that.

[00:16:16.100] – Kurt von Ahnen

But yeah, um, we can let Jonathan come to the rescue and take over. Jonathan, over to you. Thank you so much.

[00:16:25.240] – Jonathan Denwood

Um, well, it’s kind of linked in, in a way in my mind, because lately obviously, um, Matt Marweg is having his problems with private equity. Yeah. And recently, um, Liquid Web’s decision to consolidate, um, the company and, and remove a number of brands around plugins. Um, so you’ve got the question of private equity, which you touched upon, but, um, I want to discuss the private equity. But first, we had a number of hosting companies buy plugins, buy and bundle them, um, either separately or you got them combined with their hosting packages. I was never, I was never sure that was a— I could understand it in some ways, but in other ways I never— it never totally gelled with me, let’s see. Um, yeah, so, but I suppose on the commodity side of the market, I suppose you are apart from price, you are struggling. So adding plugins seems attractive, but there always, always seem to be something missing about it. Um, what’s your own views on the plugin side? And then maybe we can touch on the private equity side as well as the second part.

[00:18:07.390] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, well, we don’t have any plugins at all. And what we have is more or less an add-on that you can, like, you know, where our tech is custom-built, proprietary tech. We don’t have any outsourced admin panels or anything that’s coming outside from— so everything is, you know, built from scratch. And, you know, all you know, all success to the plugin people and companies out there that, that does a good plugin. Fantastic, good for them. But for us, I think, you know, to have the ecosystem we have and to be— to have the, let’s say, the speed we have on our, on our network, it’s the more plugins we have into that will just slow everything up. And we don’t want to do that. So if you want to have a plugin on your own, be my guest. I guess that’s my, you know, response to that. And there’s so many plugins out there. So it’s, we can talk about that for a long time. But I think having a clean infrastructure is something that people, especially our customers—

[00:19:41.890] – Jonathan Denwood

I think what you’re saying is maybe, and I think you might be correct, but I’m inferring that you might be suggesting this. I got from that answer that in some ways you didn’t totally like the concept, even though not solely about the Pacifics, because ServerBolt is dealing with high-performance, high-level clients, you know, agencies, whatever. Yeah, just the general— the boundary between what a host provides and what the plugins— because you seem to suggest the plugins, some plugins, they have a performance hit, and they do. So combining the two becomes a little bit messy.

[00:20:26.080] – Lasse Hall

I think you were hinting Yeah, that’s what I’m more or less saying is that, you know, some plugins are great and I’m not taking anything away from anyone. But for us, I think, you know, it’s the plugins we do have is custom built for us and it’s not from the outside. Yeah.

[00:20:52.380] – Jonathan Denwood

So let’s look at the private equity, you know, Obviously, um, that could be a show of its own, to be honest. Yeah, there’s only so much drama I can stand, Leslie. Uh, so Matt Marowek, he’s had his, um, he’s having these continuous problems legally, and also, um, and we’ve had Matt on the show a few times and Um, we love Matt and, um, we wish him well. Um, but then you’ve had this thing with Liquid Web as well. Um, so what’s your general opinion about private equity getting into hosting? Do you see it’s a positive thing, negative, or a negative thing, or is it a mixed bag really?

[00:21:47.900] – Lasse Hall

Well, you know, it’s definitely, you know, private equity. We have one of the private equity companies that’s with Serbolt is one of our investors. And I think it’s a fascinating and honestly a bit troubling dynamic at the same time. When you see PE firms rolling up hosting companies and consolidating them under a single P&L, the goal is always the same. It’s optimizing margins, right? So reduce costs. You have upsells and they prepare for an exit. That’s what they do. And that’s the business model. There’s nothing inherently wrong, you know, I think with that, but it typically leads to the same outcome. You know, service quality degrades, support gets outsourced. Product stops innovating and customers feel it 100%. It’s just, you know, they kind of market it as, you know, we’re moving in a positive direction, but it’s really not. So, and I come from that space as well. So I know the business model. In and out. So what is creating our market is actually an opportunity. There’s a growing segment of customers who specifically don’t want to be a PE-owned platform or want to be on a PE-owned platform, and they want a team that actually cares about the product.

[00:23:39.930] – Lasse Hall

They want a founder and leadership team that has skin in the game. They want to talk to someone who knows their stack, for example. So, in a strange way, the PE consolidation wave has been good for companies like us, and it’s definitely driving high-value customers towards premium independent platforms like us. And we see that in our pipeline every week. So customers switching from big consolidated players specifically because, quite frankly, they’ve been burned.

[00:24:24.250] – Jonathan Denwood

Right. I wouldn’t say he’s a close friend, but I think Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, would say I was a friend of his. He would always answer my email and the occasional call, and he seems a great guy and he’s been very supportive. He’s one of them. He’s always impressed me with his insights and his down-to-earth attitude. But do you think, do you think, you know, and I’ve always got on with Kinsta really well. They’ve supported the show. They’ve supported the show on 4 occasions as a major sponsor. But do you think what you’ve said affects both of those, or is it—

[00:25:17.520] – Lasse Hall

I think, yeah, I think it affects both of them because you’re having, you know, finance guys coming in and saying, hey, this is not— you need to optimize, you need to do this, you need to do that. And it kind of takes away the innovation of the company. And the— but I, you know, it all depends on who’s at the top, obviously, of every company. And it’s, you know, I’m not saying that it’s necessarily wrong or bad in any way. It all depends on the trajectory of the PE firm. Coming in and what they want to do with the company. If that’s a, you know, 3-year exit, you’re in for a shit ride. But if it’s 10 years holding, it’s much better because they’re in for a long run and they’re there to build, you know, good standing and good markets and all that good stuff that’s needed. But if it’s a cash grab in 3 years, I don’t think it’s going to be a good fun ride for anyone.

[00:26:39.420] – Jonathan Denwood

All right, thanks for that insight. I think it’s a good place for us to go for our middle break. We’ve got another message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. 3, 2, 1. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve had a great discussion with Lesley about all things WordPress and hosting and private equity. Before we go into the second half of the show, I want to— if you really want to support independent media and you’re listening on Spotify or on iTunes, Apple’s podcast app, you can leave a review really easily, um, good, bad, or indifferent. I want to see those reviews. It does really help us reach a larger audience. Um, so I’m gonna throw it over to Kirk for the next question.

[00:27:35.990] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I’m like a dog with a bone this morning, Lassa. Um, we’re back on the WooCommerce trail.

[00:27:42.230] – Lasse Hall

Yeah.

[00:27:42.610] – Kurt von Ahnen

And I just I, you know, I know we kind of put the question up like, you know, competitors like Shopify, but then as an agency owner, I’m on the other side of the coin too because it’s, um, you know, let’s just call it out, like FluentCart came out and FluentCart was like lightweight, quick, seemed to be easy to set up. Um, SureCart with, with Adam and his team over at Astra, or the other name, uh, again, lightweight, more of a SaaS platform, but still lightweight, works with Woo, but I mean works with WordPress.

[00:28:15.820] – Lasse Hall

Yeah.

[00:28:17.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

But, but as an agency, it seems like clients invent these problems or these concerns or these wishes where you end up going, oh crap, now we got to drive back towards WooCommerce. So we have to do WooCommerce and any one of the multitudes of premium extensions you need to make WooCommerce do what you want it to do. And so for me, I see WooCommerce as this incredibly powerful shopping cart. But I also see it as this thing that nickel and dimes me for every feature I want to add to it to make it function. And then of course, either pass that to the client or upsell that service with the client. But, but so that’s my standpoint. But I mean, you’re— when I look at the website for Servebolt, It’s in your face, right? It’s fast, it’s fast, it’s fast. And I always see WooCommerce as being this one anchor that can really slow things down. So I was hoping you could give me some insights there.

[00:29:19.500] – Lasse Hall

In terms of the WooCommerce leaving, it just seems like they’re—

[00:29:28.460] – Kurt von Ahnen

gosh, I hate to say it like this because we have friends there, but it seems like they’re just leaving leaving an opportunity for Shopify, FluentCart, ShortCart to kind of take more of the market away from them rather than— I don’t see them doing activities right now that say stay here or don’t look somewhere else.

[00:29:49.160] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, I think— okay, so I get that question. I think WooCommerce, I think it has like a massive identity problem., right now it’s, it’s, you know, it’s open source, it’s, it’s extendable, it runs on WordPress. Um, you know, theoretically, uh, those are all advantages in my view. And, and, uh, but, but the experience of getting WooCommerce to perform at scale is, is genuinely, uh, it’s painful and, you know, people are coming back to that. So hosting dependencies, you know, you have plugin conflicts, performance tuning. Most merchants don’t want to deal with anything of that, you know, nothing. They want, they just want something that works, plain and simple, right? So Shopify solved that beautifully. You know, they opinionated, fast, reliable, great ecosystem, and they’ve eaten a lot of the market that WooCommerce have previously owned. But where I think WooCommerce still has a real advantage is the flexibility and the cost of ownership at scale. If you’re a larger merchant with complex requirements, custom workflows, or you want to let’s say, own your data and your stack, WooCommerce and WordPress give you that option that Shopify won’t ever give you. Yeah, never. Right. So, but for WooCommerce to genuinely compete, I think it needs the whole stack to improve, as I said a little bit earlier.

[00:31:55.260] – Lasse Hall

Including infrastructure. A WooCommerce store on a mediocre hosting is a bad product, like 100%. So regardless of how good the software is, it’s mediocre. But so, and coming back to our stack, it’s like when WooCommerce runs on Serbolt, it’s a completely different experience. And I’m not marketing that at all. It’s just It’s physics. You can test us. Please do.

[00:32:31.920] – Jonathan Denwood

Jonathan? Yeah, I think there’s another side of this as well, because I know for a fact that Automattic were developing a fully hosted WooCommerce solution, and they were very close to going public with it, and last year it was decided to bin it, basically. Um, um, I don’t know the precise reasons. I, I also know that it might— and I’m only surmising this, um— is that if Automattic went down that route, not with you or with hosting providers that are that offering a performance partnership with agencies, and, um, it caused a little bit of friction with some of the other hosting companies. But in my opinion, I think really Automattic should provide a hosted WooCommerce solution for those that, that you pointed out, because there would still be an enormous amount of business out there for those that grew their business that wanted more customization. So would you, yeah, so would you object to Automattic providing a fully hosted WooCommerce solution?

[00:33:57.000] – Lasse Hall

I think, you know, it’s, I think honestly, you know, if they have that and, and, you know, it’s, um, you know, and I’m not talking against my own market here, but I think from, let’s say, an agent, let’s say an e-commerce store owner, if I were in their shoes, that would kind of take the nail out of the— yeah, you know, the pain will go away, right?

[00:34:29.760] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, potentially. Potentially. Potentially. Yeah. I want to move on to AI. Obviously we’ve got some major— with OpenAI and coming to the market in North America. And we’ve seen, we’ve seen a lot of SaaS companies and the share price has been under a lot of pressure recently. I personally don’t know how this is going to work out. I think you’ve got to really take it on an individual basis. Because some of these SaaS companies have got a strong moat around them, others not so strong. So I personally think you’ve got to take it on a case-by-case, but in general, I think in some areas AI has been the— it’s just got on the verge of propaganda, but when it actually comes to coding, and certain specific areas, I think AI definitely has established that it’s going to be changing the market. Like I say, in coding, I think it is and has changed the market too. I see this as an enormous possibility for WordPress because this— the boundary between affording a SaaS, affording a— buying a SaaS product and being limited with what it offers and not being able to afford a custom solution.

[00:36:08.110] – Jonathan Denwood

I think those barriers are breaking down to some degree. Would you agree with that statement? What’s your own views about AI and where we find ourselves in the middle of 2016— 26, sorry?

[00:36:24.670] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, difficult. You know, It’s a big question, obviously, and there’s so many changes happening every day and every week, and we can probably talk about this for quite some time. And, but I think AI is the most significant platform shift we’ve seen since the mobile came out. And most people in the WordPress space are either panicking, because there are a lot of people panicking now, or you’re not paying enough attention to it. So it’s, you have both, you know, camps right there. The honest reality is that there’s a lot of generic content sites, thin SaaS products, templated agency work, it will get compressed. AI can produce that output now and super fast, right? So you don’t need that industry at all and you’ll be disrupted. It’s just what it is. So if you’re, you know, your value proposition as a developer or agency is volume-based content or templated builds, I think you need to move and you need to move quickly. But I think, you know, there’s a flip side. AI is generating also massive surge in computing demand. You know, the AI engines, agents, LLMs, powered applications, inference workloads. These need fast, reliable, scalable infrastructure.

[00:38:22.850] – Lasse Hall

They need hosting that can, you know, actually handle it. So at Cerebral, we’re definitely leaning into that hard. We’re positioning ourselves as, the infrastructure layer for AI-native PHP and WordPress applications. Um, yeah, so we’re looking at MCP servers, which we are, um, it’s live, uh, now, but that’s just the first layer. Everyone’s, you know, doing MCP. Um, um, so agent-compatible APIs, um, the whole stack. We’re going all the way down to infrastructure And without me saying too much, I think we believe the next generation of web applications will be agent-driven and they need a platform built for that. So I think, you know, my view is simple. AI will kill the average and it will accelerate the excellence. So if you’re generally good at what you do, and I think that there’s more opportunity coming forward than ever before.

[00:39:48.970] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I thought it would mean with your own company, am I correct? How important is North America? Because you’re you seem to be established in the Nordic countries and Europe. I can’t actually remember where, how you came on my radar actually, but I went to the website, talked to a couple of people, I approached you through LinkedIn, and you seem, you seem to have an interesting setup. So You’re established in the nautic and Europe, but how important is North America to your— how you see the company growing, basically? And am I correct that it— you get most of your— through recommendation, through agencies and that? Is that— is that about right?

[00:40:46.560] – Lasse Hall

Yep. Uh, you know, the company’s, uh, the company is 12, uh, 12 years old. Um, And before I came in, I would say that the entire customer base has been built by word of mouth, actually, through agencies, enterprise, other customers, stuff like that. When I looked through their P&L from start till I came on board in ’25, like very little marketing. You have some sales initiatives and stuff like that. And you come to, from where I am right now, I’m at WordCamp Europe. They’ve been to that kind of stuff and all that stuff. But I think North America for us, when I came in, I said, hey, You know, first, one of the first things I said, do we have an American company? That was no. We have that now, Cerabolt Inc. And so North America is extremely important for us. And we have a bunch of massive customers in the US, which is household names you would know about. And it’s getting more and more important because the growth we’re seeing is coming from North America. And we’re seeing extreme— I don’t want to say extreme, but I want to say that the interest from enterprise, large e-commerce players is definitely, they’re getting their eyes open.

[00:42:53.700] – Lasse Hall

And, you know, that’s for us, I find that, you know, great because we love custom and we want to do custom for everyone. And these guys need custom. So yeah, honest, you know, very short answer for that. Yes, 100%. US, America, Canada, even in North America, is extremely important for us.

[00:43:21.090] – Jonathan Denwood

So what kind of relation— you’ve mentioned customization quite a few times in this conversation. You’re working with agencies, they have their own developers, that they are talking to the client and they’re doing— how does their developer, um, resources work with what you’re providing? How does that normally work generally in terms of— well, boundaries, the boundaries between what you’re providing and what the agency is providing. Or is that, or does that really, it might be a silly question because it might be those boundaries on a case-by-case scenario.

[00:44:07.670] – Lasse Hall

Case by case, most likely, like we usually do is that we handle everything on the infrastructure side. And they’re more or less just, you know, ask us what, what they can do and what they cannot do. But we normally, we don’t access, let people access our infrastructure at all. So we handle everything from that perspective. So more or less, they just send us orders on Slack or whatever and said, hey, we want to do this. Sure, no problem. We’ll handle it and done.

[00:44:51.500] – Jonathan Denwood

Over to you, Kurt.

[00:44:54.030] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, I think it’s time to kind of drive things home a little bit, Lasse. If we were to think back, you know, we used to ask about, you know, time machines and crazy things like that. But if we were to just—

[00:45:07.530] – Lasse Hall

Back to the Future.

[00:45:08.290] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. If we were to just look back and think like, you know, hockey, sports, injuries, business. I mean, for you personally, what’s, what’s kind of like your biggest business or personal challenge, and, and how would you credit overcoming that?

[00:45:28.760] – Lasse Hall

Um, yeah, you know, I can talk about hockey and, and, you know, that, um, that for hours, but, you know, the, the one that shaped me the most was, um, was actually building my own company, uh, from scratch. I don’t talk about it much, but I kind of just, I saw an opportunity in the market and I resigned from my high-paying banking job and just got started. So, yeah, so, you know, not joining anything that already existed, starting from zero, no customers, no brand. No playbook, nothing. So what people don’t tell you about building a company is that, you know, the business challenges are actually the easy part with running, you know, the market fit, product pricing. Those are all like solvable problems that everyone, you know, can work around. The hard part is the psychological volatility, right? Because it’s, it’s so, so up and down. It can, you know, you can be at the bottom at 9 AM and you’re up at 3 PM, right? So it’s, it’s, yeah, you know, the weeks where you’re, you generally don’t know where you’re going and how you, how you’re going to make payroll. Right? The moment where you’re sitting in front of your, front of your 62nd investor meeting.

[00:47:15.320] – Lasse Hall

Let’s say that because I counted because, yeah, I did go to 62 investor meetings before I got my first investment. And you’re pitching the same energy with the same energy and conviction. As meeting number 1, right? Even though you have 3 months of runway left and the team is just, you know, 100% depending on you taking home, you know, this run. And, you know, coming back to, you know, hockey mindset, stuff like that, that’s where character gets built. Or broken. So what kept me going was two things. First, the team, you know, I wanted the team, I wanted to, you know, have their backs. You know, when you’ve recruited people who left safe jobs to bet on your vision and what you wanted to achieve, you know, you don’t get to quit. Yeah, right. That’s just, you know, that’s, that’s, yeah, that’s just ego. So that responsibility is real. It kind of changes how you show up every single day. And second, I think, and it sounds simple, but it’s not. I just never confuse the hard period with the wrong direction. You know, volatility is not the same as failure. Every company worth building goes through periods where it looks like it’s over from the outside.

[00:49:06.550] – Lasse Hall

But, you know, the discipline is knowing the difference between this is hard and this is wrong. So, but, you know, we got through it. We raised capital, we scaled. We built teams in multiple countries. But I’ll tell you that those 62 investor meetings. Yeah. And that 3-month runway window taught me more about, you know, leadership than anything else in my career. And I think that’s where my, me being the CEO now, that’s where that got built, you know, through that. And I’m super thankful for the team and the people and everything, you know, people believing in both me and so many other things that, yeah, I think, you know, I’m super happy I went through that. It’s at times it was proper shit, you know, but, but, you know, now I can look back and say, wow, you know, we made it. It was good fun and I want to do it again.

[00:50:30.170] – Kurt von Ahnen

So, yeah, it’s, you know, from an entrepreneur’s standpoint, that getting through that valley, right? Because we all, we all go through a valley of some kind. Yeah, but you get through that valley and then things start to look good. And then the people that come on later, they’re like, they’re like, oh, he’s so selfish. He’s trying to keep the profits for himself. And it’s like, hey, I don’t remember you being in the valley. Yeah, I don’t remember you leveraging your house to do this.

[00:50:55.390] – Lasse Hall

No, exactly. Yeah, you weren’t— you were not stuck in mud up to your neck trying to swim and get out from that mud. And it’s like, you know, it’s, yeah, people tend to forget that, you know. It’s like, you know, if you look at people that’s been super successful and everyone’s like, you know, oh my God, you know, this guy made so much money and, you know, and they’re envious, right? But what they don’t see is all the shit they’ve been through to get there. And it’s never an easy ride. So, you know, it’s— and that’s all due respect to everyone that starts on their own. Uh, you know, it’s— you have my respect because I know how hard it is.

[00:51:46.790] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:48.110] – Jonathan Denwood

Jonathan? Well, I think that’s a good place to end our conversation.

[00:51:52.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

Jonathan’s like, amen.

[00:51:56.290] – Jonathan Denwood

Well, I totally agree what you say, but this, if it had failed, you would have been able, you know, it would have been personally painful, but you would have been able to go back into the banking industry, wouldn’t you not? But it would have still been an extremely bitter pill to take though, wouldn’t it?

[00:52:17.860] – Lasse Hall

Yeah, but you know, it’s, uh, you, you, if you need to take that pill, you do that, right? It’s just, it’s the mindset of moving on. I’m always like that. It’s, it’s, if things don’t work, fine, leave it, let’s go, we move on. I think, you know, if you’re, I never ever get discouraged by failure. I, it’s, everyone says, you know, you learn from it. Yeah, you do. But I never think about it afterwards. If it’s done, you failed. Fine, move on.

[00:52:56.490] – Jonathan Denwood

Right, yeah. What’s the best way to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Lasse?

[00:53:02.630] – Lasse Hall

Well, I’m quite active on LinkedIn, or try to be at least. So, you know, reach out to me there and connect with me on LinkedIn. Or you can send me an email at [email protected] and just get in touch.

[00:53:21.560] – Jonathan Denwood

That’s fantastic. Hopefully you agreed to come back on the show, um, and we have another discussion. I’ve enjoyed it. So Kurt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:53:33.020] – Kurt von Ahnen

I’ll be hanging out with Lasso over on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Van Onen there. I’m easy to find. And then Mañana No Más is the company name. So anything Mañana No Más leads back to us.

[00:53:43.020] – Jonathan Denwood

And I want to say, if you want to find more interviews and anything around WordPress, Best place is to go to the WP-Tonic YouTube channel. We’ve got a load of content on there. It’s mostly all around WordPress. You’ll find some value and subscribe. That’s another way you can support independent media. We’ll be back next week with another fabulous interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

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