Behind SempreMilan: First years in business revisited [Bonus article]

Welcome to the second edition of Behind SempreMilan! In this series, we bring you closer to the SempreMilan brand by taking a look at everything from how we founded the site, the life-changing investment in 2019 and how we operate on a daily basis. The time out, having covered our origin story in the first edition, we will revisit our first years in business.

Note: The following article is a first-person narration told by the co-founder Isak Möller, also including comments from the co-founder Oliver Fisher.

Our first years in general

There is a lot to say about our first months in business, as we hinted at in the first edition of the series. And the truth is that I don’t really know where to begin, partly because it feels like we founded the site a lifetime ago. There are, however, a few things that stand out to me in hindsight. We will also take a look at some funny stats at the end, so read on for that!

Our first months were filled with both ambition and optimism. Thanks to Gian’s following on Twitter, we got some traction immediately and were able to build on that quite well. But it was far from an overnight success, let me be clear, and this is something we realised quickly after the initial ‘hype’ - if you will - died down. This should have been expected, but perhaps we were a bit naive in thinking we would reach the moon immediately!

Indeed, we knew that we had a great opportunity on our hands as there was no competition (let’s be honest) at the time. As such, ‘just plug away’ became our motto in the first few months and years, writing as much as possible in our spare time. We also brought on some feature writers, knowing that all of these things would eventually pay off. In that sense, I guess our first ‘proper’ recruitment to look at was Dan Gutman.