From the Basement - Peter Mühlmann, 1 of 3

Peter Mühlmann:

I sold a lot on the eBays of the world and then I thought, actually I would like to start my own website also, because of that’s what I saw other people did. So I did that and I thought lots of people were just going to buy automatically. The trouble was, we did get some visitors but nobody bought because they suspected that it was just Peter sitting in a basement with his friend, two kids, selling electronics. And the trouble with that was it was actually true. And I didn’t want to refer them to the eBays of the world because all my competitors were there. So I thought, why isn’t there a way where I can gather my customers’ opinions and show it in a credible way so that people trust my business 

Stephen Cummins: Welcome to 14 minutes of SaaS! The show where you can listen to the stories and opinions of founders of the world’s most remarkable SaaS scale-ups!

Stephen Cummins:  Welcome to the first of 3 episodes with Peter Muhlmann, CEO & Founder of Trustpilot. When you’re looking to select SaaS applications, you want detailed, validated, credible data – not magic. I interviewed Peter because he built a phenomenally successful B2B SaaS company that holds a huge position in online reviews – with its biggest success in the B2B2C domain. Finance and retail are the biggest parts of that. It’s a remarkable growth story. It has over 100 million reviews on it’s platform – with well over 5 billion monthly impressions on its Trustpilot widgets. It has about 760 employees, 660 of those located in Denmark, the US, and the UK. This is Peter’s story and was recorded in the Web Summit in Lisbon at the end of 2019. I’m recording this update … literally … in a telephone box in the amazing Dogpatch Labs in Dublin in September 2020 – as Peter takes us from his idyllic youth all the way to the powerful ‘why’ behind Trustpilot, and their 2-stage experience of achieving product-market fit.

Stephen Cummins: Peter Muhlmann, CEO and Founder of “Trustpilot”; a major global independent review platform reviewing businesses across multiple categories worldwide. Delighted to have you here on 14 Minutes of SaaS Peter.

Peter Muhlmann: Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Stephen Cummins: Tell us a little bit of your life growing up in Copenhagen, I believe, prior to … and including perhaps your days in Aarhus University.

Peter Muhlmann: So, I actually grew up in a very small town close to the German border. My Dad is a doctor. My Mom’s a nurse. I have two younger sisters. We had a dog that thought it was a lion. And life was really good and simple. Then when I was 18, I thought it was time to do something new. So I moved to a city to take an education. That was the city called Arhaus where I spent an enormous amount of years in business school before dropping out to do Trustpilot.

Stephen Cummins: And your dog that thought it was a lion? Tell me a little about that? And how small was the village? Tell us a little bit about that?

Peter Muhlmann: A little… It was called a Cairn Terrier. So, so it’s a terrier dog and it’s, say about, 30 centimeters long and 15-20 centimeters tall. And the Danish name it had, translates into the English language as; it’s a one word that means “a lot of noise.”

Stephen Cummins:  Perfect guard dog, right. Won’t do any damage but will keep you away.

Peter Muhlmann: Exactly. And it had an amazing self-confidence.

Stephen Cummins: And how small was that town?

Peter Muhlmann: It was about 1,000- 2000 people; I think, last year in… in the local newspaper, they marked that it had now passed 2000 people.

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