Episode 140 – Hans Skillrud

Introducing Hans Skillrud

Over the course of seven years, Hans Skillrud built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019, to focus his attention on his new start up, Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto-updating privacy policy generator.

Show Notes

Twitter | @twitter.com/deepspacehans

Website | termageddon.com

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 140.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Hans Skillrud. Over the course of seven years, Hans built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019 to focus his attention on his new start up Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto updating privacy policy generator. Hans, Welcome.

Hans: Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey glad to see you here today virtually Hans. Thanks so much for joining us. I would love for you to share more of your story here. Tell us more about yourself.

Hans: Absolutely. So, I like starting, I have to pick a divide somewhere. So, I am going to start it when I found WordPress. I should date myself. Pre WordPress and post WordPress because that’s really been a big determiner of my career.

Tara: Yeah. We all have that demarcation point, I think. You can start wherever you want though. If you want to go back further, that’s fine too.

Hans: Well maybe a good example is how I got to WordPress, you know?

Tara: Sure.

Hans: I was one of the first employees of Groupon. Groupon was a hot, young company that was seemingly helping small businesses get more traffic through their doors. And I drink the Kool-Aid as we would say at Groupon. I very much believed in the model of discounting a company 50% off or more, for one day only and bringing people together to try out a place. Over the years though, that company went public and I think their priorities changed and I shared my concerns with management. They disagreed, so I quit. I was managing a sales team of about 150 people and I decided I don’t like their business model anymore and someone, a small business owner is passionate about what they do within their doors, but they aren’t necessarily passionate about bringing that information online. That was what Groupon was taking advantage of in my opinion. So, what I set off to do was to help small business owners, share what they do best online. I think that message, that was the fuel to my midnight fire, midnight oil? I’m always so bad with those things. It was the fuel to my fire to help the small business owner out. Over the course of seven years I found WordPress. I started building WordPress websites, helping small business owners with their exposure online and the company was successful. I built it up to a 12-person team in downtown Chicago. I happened to be dating a privacy attorney at the time and I told her how I used to copy and paste privacy policies over dinner and her jaw dropped. She was like what you doing? I’m like that’s what everyone does. She’s like that’s not what you do anymore, not when we’re dating. Through a few discussions, we came up with the business model for Termageddon. I now have sold my agency and focus all of my time with Donata on. Termageddon is a privacy policy generator. What’s cool about our tech is that you copy and paste an embed code from Termageddon onto the website. That’s what allows us to push updates to the policies when the laws change.