Josef Trauner was working as a technical consultant for a large telecom provider in Europe when they were stymied by a challenge: Users of their app couldn’t describe any problems they were having with the app.
“That’s when I said, ‘Okay, why can’t we just create a simple screenshot of this scenario within the browser, then submit it, and users can draw on it and say what’s wrong?’” recalled Trauner, who lives in Austria.
That’s how he ended up founding a startup called Usersnap in 2012.
“We just created this super-easy-to-use visual backtracker,” he said. Add a small piece of code to your app, and your users could immediately draw on the screen and say, ‘Hey, this button isn’t working,’ and send it over.”
As it evolved over a decade, Usersnap grew into a user feedback platform that’s used in product development by more than 1,500 companies around the globe. These companies employ Usersnap to streamline user feedback and track “bug” reports with automated screen captures on their app or website.
Collecting as much user feedback as possible is crucial for enabling product developers to make data-based decisions about how to proceed, says Trauner: “The biggest pain point for product managers is what to build next.”
Aside from a small seed investment of $500,000 from European tech startup funder SpeedInvest, Usersnap was revenue-funded. Notable Usersnap customers grew to include the BBC, Lego, Red Hat, Erste Group (a Swiss bank), Trendyol (a Turkish e-commerce platform), and Microsoft.
By the time saas.group acquired Usersnap in late 2023, the buyer described its new acquisition as “the leading user feedback platform for digital product teams to scale user testing and gain confidence in product decisions by collecting visualized user issues, improvement ideas, and micro surveys.”
Before all of that, though, Usersnap had to grow and evolve from Trauner’s initial idea. That’s why he brought in a partner to help.
Growth hacking and a keeping a tidy house for Usersnap
Klaus-M. Schremser joined Usersnap as a “late co-founder” and head of growth in 2018.
It wasn’t his first experience with a startup. Schremser recalls that he had been studying and practicing growth hacking, the employment of sales and marketing tactics to drive growth – particularly SEO and content marketing. He spent a year working at a marketing agency specifically to learn more about it.
With Schremser in place, revenue grew by 2.5x between 2018 and the company’s eventual sale in 2023. Search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing brought in most of the inbound customers, Schremser said.
Their biggest challenge during the growth phase? Becoming enterprise-ready. Big companies wanted to purchase the product, Schremser said, and they had to make changes to support those types of customers.
At the time of sale, Usersnap had 1,500 customers – small to large – and was earning $2.2 million per year. They’d grown to 20 employees. Figuring out how to keep that team on board, Schremser said, was one of the tough parts of the sale.
The founders connected with their buyer in 2023 through M&A advisory i5invest. This was Schremser’s third exit – one of his previous companies sold to Atlassian – so he brought that experience to the table, too.
Usersnap was acquired by saas.group, a holding company that focuses on SaaS businesses, in a 7-figure deal. The buyer had previously acquired companies like Seobility, Prerender and Keyword.com.
Trauner and Schremser stayed on with saas.group for a year before leaving in mid-2024 to start a new company.
“Saas.group is a great company with a great culture. But as a founder, I just have this feeling that I need to build something new,” Trauner said. “I need to have this feeling, this excitement of, does it get destroyed tomorrow or will it be super great tomorrow?”
Trauner, Schremser and a third partner, Thomas Peham, are launching Otterly.AI, an entry in the relatively new field of “generative engine optimization” – like SEO, but for AI instead of search engines like Google. Companies use Otterly to track how they and their competitors rank in search prompts on AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Advice for selling a business from a founder who’s been there
When it comes time to sell your startup, Schremser has this advice: Keep your finances in order (preferably from the beginning) and maintain an updated data room – where you can place private financial records like monthly P&L statements so they’re accessible for prospective buyers to review. This helps speed along due diligence.
“I’ve assisted a lot of other startups. I saw that they often had a mess when it came to their finances and their customer contracts and freelance agreements and so on,” Schremser said. “You know, you cannot sell the house for a good price if everything is messy. Because people come, they look around, they see that there are holes in the wall everywhere, the electricity is turning on and off, and they worry about what they’re buying here.”
