One hundred people. That was Samir Smajic’s price for changing his life. He had a job he liked, a new apartment and a second child on the way. His future co-founders wanted him to commit to their startup. He kept finding reasons to wait. Eventually, one of them asked what would actually persuade him. There was a trade fair coming up. Smajic set his condition: a hundred people would have to sign up for the beta.
They got the hundred, and more. His escape clause had become an instruction to proceed. There is something pleasingly awkward about this beginning. The future CEO had arranged a test that could prove his own reluctance unreasonable. Once the names arrived, he would have to listen.
“I had to trick myself into starting a company,” he later wrote. He describes the decision as a way of making risk concrete. A family, a salary and an apartment do not disappear because a business idea sounds promising. A measurable sign of demand gave him something he could discuss at home. For a graduate of mechanical engineering, it was a fitting entrance into entrepreneurship: specify the condition, run the experiment, accept the result.
Beta signups at a trade fair.
A threshold for leaving a job he liked.
An engineer discovers the sales department
Smajic studied mechanical engineering at Lund University. After university, he began working in CRM consulting in 2009. The appeal of customer problems drew him toward software and, eventually, product leadership. At Lime Technologies, he became Head of Product. He had moved from the calculations of an engineering education into a working life full of people explaining what their businesses needed.
That work gave him a view of selling from inside the machinery. A customer relationship management system could organize a company’s knowledge. The exchange with the customer still had to happen somewhere. Proposals, questions, revisions and decisions could scatter across separate messages and tools. A well-kept internal record did not automatically give the buyer a coherent experience.
GetAccept, which he co-founded in 2015, grew around that external exchange. Its digital sales room collects the material and conversation associated with a deal. Smajic’s explanation has remained accessible: buyers should be able to understand an offer and work through it with the seller. In his account, the product ambition is to make that interaction feel natural online. A mechanical engineer had found a process whose moving parts included doubt, attention and other people’s calendars.
A room for the conversation
Consider the ordinary sales follow-up. A meeting ends. Someone sends a proposal. The recipient needs to show it to colleagues. A question appears. An answer travels back. The documents may be perfectly legible while the shared understanding becomes less clear. Smajic’s work concerns that interval, when a promising discussion has ended but a decision has yet to arrive.
He puts considerable weight on personal contact. In 2021, he described video as a way to bring a recognizable person into a digital exchange. A greeting could accompany the material. A question could become a conversation. The same room could hold documents, quotations, video and chat, giving both sides somewhere to return.
His advice also allows for social timing. Sending someone a video link without an established relationship can feel odd; using one after contact has begun is a different proposition. That observation is more revealing than a list of features. He is thinking about how the recipient experiences the approach. Software offers the channel. The seller still has to exercise a little judgment about when to use it. Even a well-equipped digital room benefits from somebody knowing when to knock.
A conceptual map of the buyer-seller exchange.
Coffee, conspicuous suits and a growing company
In the early days, attracting attention required some resourcefulness. Smajic recalls arriving at a San Francisco event with limited money and a larger supply of ideas. The team wore conspicuous suits, handed out coffee in branded mugs to people waiting in the entrance queue, and brought an FBI negotiator to the booth for visitors to test themselves against.
A queue is a fairly democratic audience. Everyone would rather be somewhere else; most people will consider a coffee. The tactic had the virtue of acknowledging the person before presenting the software.
His early sales calls also supplied an education in English. He used to explain his accent by saying he was not a “Native American.” After more than 200 calls, someone explained the expression. He had meant a native speaker of American English. The correction was embarrassing, and useful. It is a good detail to retain in a founder’s story: ambition does not confer immunity from saying something unfortunate on the telephone.
The company entered Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch. The founding group brought together Smajic, Mathias Thulin, Jonas Blanck and Carl Carell. From the beginning, GetAccept had a team behind the idea, rather than one person supplying every piece of experience it would need.
Financing followed. A $7 million Series A led by DN Capital arrived in 2019. On December 8, 2020, GetAccept announced a $20 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, bringing announced cumulative funding to $30 million. Those figures describe a particular stage in its development. They also mark the growing responsibility attached to Smajic’s original decision.
The Series B was completed remotely using GetAccept’s own product. For a company selling a place to conduct business online, fundraising offered an unusually direct demonstration. Investors could experience the premise while deciding whether to fund it. The software was doing work in the very transaction intended to finance more of its work.
The hundredth employee gets a different invitation
The number one hundred returned in a less conventional arrangement. Smajic has described an agreement with his people leader: when GetAccept reached 100 employees, he would jump from an airplane with the hundredth recruit. He likes the adrenaline. By his telling, the other participant was less delighted. Some companies give the milestone hire a commemorative mug. This was a more demanding interpretation of joining the team.
His public accounts of running the business also contain quieter obligations. He described turning lessons from an early sales call into a shared sales playbook. The document grew into a knowledge base. An observation that might otherwise have remained in one founder’s head became something a new colleague could use.
Scale brought limits that enthusiasm could not remove. He recalled having as many as 18 account executives reporting to one manager, then working toward seven. He described training aimed at the specific stage of the sales process where an individual struggled. These are practical details of a CEO learning to build an organization around the work he once did himself. The airplane makes a better anecdote. The manager’s available time matters rather more often.
Permission to try, a duty to teach
Smajic’s writing about sales teams gives experimentation a structure. Managers, he argues, have to support people taking a risk and connect that permission to incentives. An instruction to be creative will travel only so far if the first unsuccessful attempt is treated as a personal failing.
He also asks teams to document the approaches that prove useful. That is the less photogenic half of experimentation. Trying a new way to reach an account can produce a lesson. Writing it down gives someone else a starting point. Otherwise, the organization pays for the same discovery several times.
His proposals for mentoring are similarly specific. Pair stronger performers with colleagues who need coaching. Arrange recurring conversations. Refresh the pairings each quarter so people learn from different teammates. The experienced seller gets a teaching role; the developing seller gets somebody’s time.
There is a recognizable product manager’s instinct here. Observe what people do, identify where they get stuck, make the next attempt easier. It is also a fairly generous view of ability. A sales team contains people at different stages of learning, and the manager has some responsibility for what happens between those stages. The shared playbook and the recurring coffee meeting belong in the same picture.
The camera, the commute and the next experiment
By 2025, Smajic was applying that appetite for experiments to AI. His examples were refreshingly particular. He described talking to ChatGPT during his commute to outline a SaaSiest presentation. He also built an image filter for hunting cameras to separate photographs of birds from wild boars. Executive learning had acquired an unexpected wildlife department.
Inside GetAccept, he described requiring teams to test three AI initiatives each quarter and present at least one across the company. The intended rhythm was learning followed by sharing. He also set a goal to double annual recurring revenue without increasing headcount, asking teams to investigate automation before opening a hiring brief.
That remains a stated ambition. The interesting evidence is the operating behavior he described around it: personal trials, repeated team experiments and a requirement to explain what happened. “Every team must learn and apply AI,” he wrote. “It’s a learn and share thing.”
For someone asking colleagues to change how they work, there is value in having a concrete example of his own. A presentation outline can be examined. So can a camera filter. Both invite a better conversation than a general instruction to embrace the future.
“Creating a category and winning it are two different games.”
Samir Smajic
After the category has a name
In 2026, Smajic returned to the difference between naming a market and succeeding within it. Having helped build GetAccept’s place in digital sales rooms, he was asking more exacting questions about adoption. He described personally spending three months onboarding 20 account executives before shipping AI features.
He also acknowledged a mistake: for two years, the company had concentrated on the senior buyer and overlooked the person who needed to use the product. Winning a vice president’s agreement did not ensure a sales representative would open the tool. Daily use demanded its own attention.
The observation brings the story back to the hundred beta signups. At the start, Smajic needed evidence that people would try the idea. Years later, he was still close enough to the work to watch people learn it. The questions had become more demanding, but he continued to look for answers in somebody’s actual behavior.
He leaves room for enjoyment, too. In the same reflections, he argued that a founder needs to enjoy at least some of the disorder to keep going for a decade. There are plenty of solemn ways to describe building software. His version has room for a trade-fair wager, a conspicuous suit and the occasional airplane. The paperwork, one hopes, is signed before takeoff.