🌿 Building Without Burnout: A Scandinavian-Inspired Lunch & Learning on Sustainable Startups

In May, part of the Happo team will be in Paris — and we’d love to share our story with founders and startup teams looking for a more sustainable way to grow.  This workshop is for anyone building a company while trying to protect their energy, values, and creativity. Bonus Swedish lunch included : Because good food, and honest conversations make everything better. 🍽️🇸🇪

Interested in having us speak at your incubator, accelerator, or startup program?  Reach out to Pauline at pauline.mialhe@happo.io

💬 Why us?

We’re not HR consultants.  We’re startup founders, engineers, and operators. And that’s exactly why this talk matters.

We’ve built Happo, a visual regression testing tool used by Airbnb, Patreon, and ServiceNow, as a calm, profitable business with no external funding. We’re still a 3-person team, growing at 30% annually, working four-day weeks, and doing our best work yet.

What is Happo?

🤝 Happo is the perfect bridge between teams: Your design team build a clean, consistent brand, and Happo gives your tech team the tools to keep that design consistent across every product.

Every time someone changes a button color, moves a section, or fixes a bug, the design can slowly drift from what you originally approved. Happo would notify you when visual changes happen. Happo is the perfect bridge between teams: Your design team build a clean, consistent brand, and Happo gives your tech team the tools to keep that design consistent across every product.

🧭 What is this workshop about?

This is a session for founders and early-stage teams who want to grow without burning out.
It’s not a “how to scale fast” pitch. It’s a fresh take on startup life, from people actually living it.

We’ll share how:

• Our personal passions (woodworking, painting, cooking) fuel our product work — they’re not distractions

• We bootstrap with intention: no external funding, no fixed roadmap, just clear priorities and creative freedom

• We’ve turned Scandinavian work culture into a core operating principle

📚 What you’ll get from this session

In this 60-minute lunch session, expect something casual, honest, and interactive (max 30 people).

We’ll talk about:

• Our journey from side project in San Francisco to $50K MRR

• How we build only when inspired — and why that works

• Why creative flow, not pressure, is our performance metric

• What Scandinavian work culture looks like in practice

• A more human, more sustainable way to build great products

🔄 Happo: what does visual testing have to do with well-being?

Good question.

Just like a codebase needs visual consistency to grow without chaos,
a team needs cultural consistency to grow without burnout.

At Happo, we believe:

• Good culture is not a perk. It’s infrastructure.

• Sustainable speed beats hypergrowth.

• You can build great products and protect your team’s energy.

We created Happo to spot visual drift in products.
We designed our company to prevent human drift too.

👋 Who's coming?

Confirmed for the Paris trip:
Henric Persson (Founder)
Ex-Causes.com, ex-Kanal 5 (now HBO Nordic)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/henric-trotzig/

Pauline Mialhe (Marketing & Culture)
Ex-Centra.com, led pricing and culture projects
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pauline-mialhe-328a5611b/

Hoping to join:
Joe Lencioni (Co-founder)
Ex-Airbnb, led frontend infrastructure
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lencioni/

Mai-Li Hammargren (Advisor)
Founder, speaker, and innovation expert

🌱 Who is this for? Startups in the early stages — especially founders and small teams navigating uncertainty, fast iterations, and limited resources — who want to build something solid without sacrificing their mental health, creativity, or sense of purpose along the way.