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Headline lessons
Before Swappie, Sami and Jiri had already built multiple small businesses together. For the pair, these projects were execution reps that taught them how to move fast with limited resources, and how to use goals to stay honest about whether something was working. They did not have a polished written “system” at the time, but they built a habit of tracking progress and staying opportunity-driven rather than becoming emotionally attached to one industry.
When they started Swappie, their working dynamic was intentionally pragmatic. Responsibilities split naturally by strengths, with Jiri focusing on growth and Sami taking the operational side like finance, supply, and customer service. Both emphasise a low-ego approach: the work mattered more than the title, and they were willing to do whatever the company and customers needed.
The idea with Swappie was not just “used phones are a bit cheaper.” It was a bigger thesis that refurbished devices could become a mainstream purchase, tied to circular economy impact and an explicit mission to make the category trusted. They committed hard while the numbers were still early, because the direction was becoming clearer through leading indicators like improving conversion and rising NPS, and through signs of behaviour change such as a meaningful share of customers buying refurbished for the first time. These lead them to see that this could become a meaningful category to build in.
They also framed the arena as a trust problem from day one. Demand for phones already existed, but mainstream adoption depended on proving reliability in a market where many consumers expected to be scammed. That framing shaped how they thought about winning. In this kind of category, they believed scale is not optional and that growth is what lets you build trust signals, learn faster, and eventually create operational advantages that smaller players cannot match.
When setting out to build the company, Jiri wanted evidence that the opportunity was not just Finnish-sized, so he leaned on analytics and early modeling to estimate how big the market could be across Europe. That work mattered because it removed a lot of weekly doubt. If the ceiling is clearly large enough, you can push harder and expand earlier with more conviction. Additionally, when it comes to timing, the market does not need to be rapidly growing without you, as long as it has the potential to grow and you can drive the behaviour change yourself.
Swappie’s validation started with speed to real customer contact, before building any kind of product. Sami & Jiri had learnt from their past ventures to go to customers immediately, even when it feels uncomfortable, and to treat “shipping” as something you do in days. In their case, Swappie went from idea to the first sale in about four days, which set the tone for how they would keep learning.
In the first months, the work was a tight build–measure–learn loop around the customer-facing experience. They would iterate the funnel daily: adjusting site content, improving the flow, refining marketing messages, and watching what happened in conversion and NPS as the feedback mechanism. They were still operating with very early data and small sales volumes, but the discipline was to keep making changes, observe the signal, and repeat.
They also kept the build constrained to what they could execute with the team and tooling they actually had. They did not have developers early, so they leaned on website builders and off-the-shelf tools rather than waiting for “a proper stack.” In parallel, they stayed deliberately humble about what they did not know: listening closely to customers, and also leaning on mentors and people who had scaled before to compress the learning curve.
Early Swappie was deliberately “manual behind the scenes.” This was a period where the founders handled packaging and customer service themselves, because this was was the fastest way to learn what customers actually cared about and where the experience was breaking. They treated this hands-on phase as the foundation for how the company should run before they started handing those surfaces to someone else.
Their first customer base came from the people who were already comfortable buying used or refurbished phones. They reached these early adopters through existing online marketplaces and then pulled them into Swappie’s own funnel. The goal at this stage was simple: make the buying experience feel trustworthy enough that the transaction would happen, even if everything else was still rough.
Once that early loop worked, it created the bridge to mainstream. They got conversion to a level where revenue started to appear, and then used that to invest into broader marketing to reach customers who were not already “used phone people.” Around this period, they made an irreversible commitment to the company. Within roughly six months, despite revenue still being relatively small, they sold their previous business and put the money into Swappie. That was the moment where early belief plus early signals turned into a decision to go all-in.