Our Swedish readers may be familiar with Hemsida24, the website builder, but they might get on more people’s radar as Friday they announced they are launching internationally under the name PagePicnic. The company has seen impressive growth in the Swedish market, so it will be interesting to see how they compete in the much more crowded international and English speaking world.
PagePicnic does what an easy website builder should – they allow untechnical people to put together nicely designed webpages for their project or small business. While there are many website builders out there, PagePicnic provides that simple and beautiful Swedish design touch that hopefully more restaurants and stores will start using, compared to the rather boring “web 2.0” style that many website builders seem to fall into.
With no external financing the founders have grown the company to solid revenues. With 10,000 customers they say they’ve hit annual revenues up to $2.5 million (€1.84 million) with a near 40% profit margin. “We’re extremely confident in our product and have some really exciting features in the pipeline,” says co-founder Mikael Öhren.
We’ll be interested to watch how they grow under a new brand. It seems to be a trend that Swedish companies will first build a Swedish brand in Swedish, and then rebrand a new service for international audiences. Clearly PagePicnic has done well on the Swedish front, but they’ll have to build new traction internationally.
