In March 2017, Emil Hajric had a question that would look rather inconvenient on a motivational poster. His software business was making roughly $400,000 a year, with profit margins he put at 60 percent. Growth had stalled. Some recurring revenue was slipping away. He wanted to know whether it was time to sell.
He asked in public. The title was plain: “Should I sell my SaaS ($400k ARR)?” The post described the uncomfortable arithmetic of running something that worked, paid, and still left its owner unsure what to do next. He had no other business underway. Whenever he considered selling, he said, he judged himself harshly and went looking for another way to grow.
Hajric remains the founder and CEO of Helpjuice. That gives the question a different weight today. A company can survive the moment when its founder stops sounding certain. Indeed, that moment may tell us more about the work than the polished account of how everything began.
The return journey
Helpjuice started in 2011. Hajric’s route into it crossed the Atlantic more than once. He spent much of his childhood in the United States after leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina with his parents during the war, then returned in 2003. Programming began at fourteen. Before Helpjuice came unsuccessful projects, including a social network called Bizteen.net and a photograph-watermarking tool called Picopy.
After school, he went to Austin. Capital Factory provided $20,000 in early backing. The following months were difficult, and in early 2012 he returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina. He kept working on the software. By March 2013, he was describing a six-person company and rising revenue.
The early product had a straightforward purpose: let customers type a question and find an answer without calling a company. He recalled 300 companies signing up for the beta, with five paying €100 a month. Amid all the experiments, those payments supplied a useful verdict. Someone had a problem serious enough to spend money on.
The journey is a useful corrective to the way startup geography can dominate a biography. The departure for Austin offers an obvious opening scene. The return to Sarajevo complicates it. The company’s next chapter happened after that return, with the original customer problem still available to work on. A plane ticket can change an address. The product has to earn its own continuation.
The question he asked in public
Revisit the 2017 post and the usual founder biography acquires an awkward middle. Annual revenue is an attractive number to put beside a name. Yet the owner of that revenue was worried about the direction of the business. Profit and confidence had parted company.
His question invited other founders into a decision often presented afterward as inevitable. Sell, hire someone to run it, find a partner, try again: the discussion contained options rather than a tidy answer. The surviving post does something valuable on its own. It preserves uncertainty before hindsight can iron the creases out.
In May 2026, Helpjuice was described as profitable for more than a decade, privately owned, and serving thousands of companies. Customers named included Amazon, Virgin Mobile and Fujitsu. The business had received acquisition approaches and remained independent. Hajric was discussing its development from a 2011 startup into a platform used around the world.
of profitability reported for Helpjuice
Those later facts make the earlier doubt more interesting. They do not tell us exactly which decision unlocked the intervening years. They do establish that the founder who wondered whether to sell continued to lead a lasting business. Independence here has a history, including a point at which its appeal needed examining.
That is a less comfortable story than permanent conviction. It also leaves more room for a person. A founder can want to build, wonder whether to stop, and still have work worth doing on Monday. The contradictions need no tidying to make the career intelligible.
A programmer writes the textbook
There is another small reversal in Hajric’s career. In his early account of school, he was impatient with dry theory. In 2018, he published Knowledge Management: A Theoretical and Practical Guide for Knowledge Management in Your Organization. The title is admirably untroubled by the possibility of fitting on a mug.
The 211-page PDF moves through organizational knowledge, memory, learning, culture and leadership. It considers how knowledge passes between people and how organizations store it. These are the surrounding questions of a business that sells a place to put answers. Installing software is one decision; making the information inside it useful involves a much wider set of habits.
The guide gives Hajric’s product work an intellectual setting. A customer searching a help page experiences a simple task. Behind that task sit decisions about what an organization knows, who records it, and whether the next person can find it. His book spends time on the machinery behind the apparently ordinary act of answering.
He had already expressed a view of education that made space for this combination. In 2013, he argued that universities should let students create things aligned with their view of the future. He also called for a stronger culture of innovation and greater tolerance for failure in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
That position treats learning as something people can put to work. A framework can help organize a problem. An experiment lets someone discover whether the proposed solution does anything useful. His own succession of failed projects supplies a practical context for the argument, without turning every failure into a secret triumph.
The programming background remains visible in smaller public artifacts. On GitHub, he uses the name hajrice and lists Austin and Sarajevo. His repositories include work around Rails editors and search integrations. A Ruby gist from July 2019 demonstrates a trimmed mean, removing the highest and lowest outliers before calculating an average.
It is a modest piece of code, far removed from the language of acquisition offers and global platforms. That modesty is part of its appeal. A biography can accommodate the person who runs the company and the person who writes a small example to explain how a calculation works.
An open door, across eleven countries
Hajric’s preferred company seems to have a short hallway. In a public post about growth, he argued for using automation to keep a business small enough to move quickly. The point was access as much as headcount: decisions should happen promptly, and people should be able to reach someone who can resolve a problem.
“At Helpjuice, anyone can DM me on LinkedIn and get a response.”
Emil Hajric
He explained that his team’s automation helped carry the load, leaving room for direct human connections. It is a revealing choice of ambition. The founder of software designed to shorten the search for answers wants the organization around that software to remain reachable too. An inbox becomes a test of whether the principle survives company life.
A hiring post made the preference concrete. Looking for a designer, Hajric described a process conducted mostly through chat. He advertised flexible hours, a month of paid vacation, an international team spanning eleven countries, and salaries based on skills rather than location. He also explicitly rejected the expectation of twelve-hour working days.
There is a whole view of work inside those details. The candidate should be able to start a conversation quickly. Geography should expand the pool of colleagues. Compensation should follow what someone can do. The clock need not serve as an elaborate attendance register.
Helpjuice’s public company principles extend the picture: remote work, flat communication, time off and a budget for professional development. Its stated approach gives team members direct access to one another. Customers are described as long-term partners whose feedback helps guide the product. Simplicity appears as a recurring preference.
Hajric’s comments about hiring also show an appetite for people who notice what needs fixing. He has written favorably about colleagues with strong opinions who will revise them when facts prove them wrong. The interesting requirement is the willingness to change an opinion after holding it firmly. It leaves room for disagreement without making stubbornness a qualification.
The answer is still the product
The company now develops AI features around its knowledge base, and Hajric has publicly shared the soft launch of Outlearn, another customer support product. Technology has given the question-and-answer business new tools. The underlying irritation remains familiar: a person needs information and would prefer to get it before the afternoon disappears.
His public writing keeps returning to that irritation. Helpjuice’s blog lists September 2026 articles under his name on creating a self-service knowledge base and why customers stop using one. The second subject is especially practical. A repository can exist, look respectable, and still fail to attract the people it was built for.
His product conversations can be equally specific. In May 2025, on a request for variables in articles, he shared an early sketch and asked users for their views before development. The requested feature concerned information reused across pages. It is the kind of detail that rarely makes a founder profile but can make someone’s working day less tedious.
There is a telling earlier glimpse of what he liked to hear from other founders. In 2014, after a year listening to Startups for the Rest of Us, he praised the podcast for including their lives and daily struggles. He appreciated the part of the business story that survives after the advice has been stripped away.
His own public record offers some of that texture: the return journey, the book, the small code examples, the candid question about selling. Fifteen years after Helpjuice began, he still runs a company built around finding answers. He has also left a few useful questions lying around. One of them, posted in 2017, makes the years that followed feel earned.