Nanna Ulsøe

Hello! My name is Nanna Ulsøe, and I am the Founder & CEO of Canvas Planner.

I am a tech entrepreneur who wanted to grow a business organically to make it sustainable. The end result is Canvas Planner - one of the only female-founded bootstrapped tech companies in Denmark.

After high school, I worked abroad in Italy, France, China, and the US before returning to Denmark to do my Bachelor's degree. I was educated at Kaospilot - a super creative and hands-on educational experience and I enjoyed the very entrepreneurial and innovative environment at the school.

After some fun years at Kaospilot, I moved to London to do my Masters in Project Management. The education, combined with my work experience, helped me to land a nice job in Denmark. Unfortunately, I hated spending all my time on emails, inefficient meetings, and follow-ups - so I quit my new job to build Canvas Planner.

I have since been nominated for awards several times, both in Denmark and abroad, and last year I won Wonder Summit’s Entrepreneur Of The Year.

For fun, I love playing football (soccer) and have since I was a young girl.

Company Name: Canvas Planner

Location: Copenhagen, Denmark

Operating since: 2014

Company Website: www.canvasplanner.com

Company Instagram: @canvasplanner

Tell us all about your company. What product do you offer?

Canvas Planner is an online platform that helps teams visualize their workflow and collaboration in an interactive overview. Canvas Planner uniquely combines the visual canvas or whiteboard with task management. The tool creates a picture of events, projects, and tasks in real-time and is ideal for people that often work in remote teams and across time zones. If you love post-its and colours, I am sure you will love Canvas Planner.

Tell us a bit about your co-founder.

My co-founder is Jane Houlind Ulsøe and she is responsible for our visual identity and for all our customer relations. We are, without a doubt, a very unique team because we are sisters! We have been working together in Canvas Planner for almost four years now and we are still best friends. I am the boss and she is the oldest so it balances it quite well. We often talk about how lucky we are to be on this journey together.

How did you get the idea or concept for your company? What was your mission at the outset? Was there anything in particular that inspired you to start at the time you did?

I simply believed I could bring a smarter and better tool to the productivity field, and I wanted to help people get a more healthy work-life but also to create a healthy work-life for myself. As mentioned earlier, I experienced the pains and problems we solve with Canvas Planner when I was working in my previous job. The lack of overview was the result of way too many emails (cc. emails as well - aka ‘cover my own ass emails’), inefficient meetings and interruptions. I wanted to work smarter and support the remote workstyle, so I quit my job to build Canvas Planner.

Growing up, did you always intend to start your own company?

Nope, but I have always done things in my own way… And when I started working and decided that I could come up with something smarter, it seemed like the most natural thing.

What is the biggest personal/professional obstacle you've had to overcome?

As a tech entrepreneur, I make mistakes and face obstacles on a daily basis. When things go wrong, I try to see them as learning opportunities and, of course, try to fix them. If I should underline one major obstacle, it was my surroundings always pushing me to take in funding. At times it felt tempting to do so, but today where we are bootstrapped and own the entire business, I am SO HAPPY we didn’t.

What's your definition of success? Do you consider yourself a success? If not, when will you?

That is super individual - luckily. To some, the success criteria is money. To others, it is the impact, a title, or personal goals. I believe it is whatever makes you feel good about your own accomplishments and the goals you set. To me, my dream was to become a bootstrapped tech founder with a solid product on the market that I could live off - and I have done that. So I definitely consider myself a success. Now my next goal is to become a successful serial entrepreneur:-)

Have the women around you helped you to rise? How?

I started building up my professional network when I was still at the university and that is something I can really recommend for you to do. Now I have a lot of clever and ambitious women in my life and a lot of them have helped me with advice or by suggesting other interesting people that I should get in contact with.

Any other advice for women starting out in your industry or starting their own companies or organizations?

That’s a long list, but here are some:

Believe in yourself.
Go for it. Seriously, just get started and you’ll figure things out along the way.
Remember that advice is free for others to give but you alone have to live with the consequences.
Everyone makes lots of mistakes when they try to live out their tech dream, so just make sure to recover fast when you fail and don’t be too harsh on yourself.
Don’t try and do it alone.
Separate your dream and business from you as a person. So don’t take feedback/criticism of your product or service personally.
Find a niche in the market where you will be the biggest fish and don’t start in a red ocean.
Your product has to be 10 times better than the competitor’s for customers to make the shift. In tech, 3-4 times better just isn’t enough.
Run your business for as long as possible without external investment - that gives you much more freedom to learn, grow and perform (If you need external investment to get started, then do that but you can start with surprisingly little money).
“If you are going to eat shit, don’t nibble” quote from the book: Hard Thing About Hard Things. I love this advice since it is so true in the world of entrepreneurship.