The little tool that turned out to be fantastically scalable and efficient. Our focus has always been to help the 900,000 Swedish companies, and 25-50 million Europeans, who will find it difficult to meet all the requirements of the regulation without a constantly updated and very educational e-register tool.
This page is as much for our own sake as for you as a visitor. It’s easy to forget how it all started when you just look ahead and everything goes very, very, fast.
Although, everything from idea to development, launch and expansion has been going on for less than three years, it is difficult to include everything without it becoming too long – but here comes a, hopefully, manageable version:
Everything really started when Daniel Sällberg and Ola Andersson sat down at IDEON in Lund and noticed that they tried to solve the same problem from different directions – sometime in the early autumn of 2016. In short, Ola had an IT company and Daniel a law firm (albeit in a student apartment of 11 square) – and both wanted to find a solution for all small business owners that they felt would not have a chance to meet when new demands from large companies, the EU and the Supervisory Authorities from May 25, 2018 , just under two years ahead. They wanted to find a solution to the “problem”, or let’s say the challenge (and later the “opportunity”), with the new Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR as the English abbreviation reads.
The mission they gave themselves was to help all companies and organizations that do not want, or can, spend thousands of euros on a solution that requires both IT and legal expertise. Daniel set out to build on a legal requirement specification for a cloud service where the target was the user, regardless of size or industry, that could go from section 1 to 7 and when the entry was complete, all requirements of the regulation would be met – but no more. Lean and correct were the key words, and I remember that we were more annoyed than pleased at all the attention we received from companies in the size of 500 employees + and how difficult it was at the same time to convince small businesses. One advantage of having to start developing what became a fully launched and in itself complete (but unpolished) product within six months is that we received both the benefits of our minimalist approach (where no additional work is created in an already tough challenge) and the equally great benefits that come from companies with ten times more lawyers and IT technicians constantly demanding more and more functions.
In the summer of 2017, both our English, Danish and Norwegian versions of the tool came, and between April and August ten new lawyers were hired – five students and five seniors. Jönköping Municipality started a public procurement, which we won, and GDPR Hero GOV was born.
At the beginning of 2018 we were 15 employees and many more connected to us through collaborations and agreements. We are still very lean, still have the ambition to help everyone with a cheap and legally and technically strong product, but along the way it has become clear how many different skills and backgrounds are needed to help everything from an ornithological association to an international group or public authority. We have senior business developers, a large group of lawyers with expertise niches within niches within GDPR and data protection, our own IT-stars and a large network of competencies through all partners. What we “miss” is sales. We do not have a single seller and never have – which surprises many, but it simply is not needed.
Now, after just a little more than a year after GDPR became applicable, 25 May 2018, we focuses to establish good relationship with our customers and continue the development of GDPR Hero.
// Daniel Sällberg, CEO
