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Retrospective 2025

The year 2025 was a time of laying foundations for Thril. Today, the cornerstone is in place, built from effective customer acquisition, focused product development, funding rounds, and a forward-looking team spirit.

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Author

Juuso Hirsimäki

10 Mar 2026
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Read time
5
minutes

Lue blogi suomeksi🇫🇮

“A lot of water has flowed through the Danube,” as my wise Co-Founder colleague Maaniemi would say. Seven months ago I wrote the previous update about what we had been working on. At that time, in August 2025, we had just raised angel funding, started working on Thril full time, and begun to gradually get sales off the ground. The main themes of that update were optimistic: momentum seemed to be forming and product development was getting close to what we then thought of as the “final version.” Today that blog post is both amusing and a source of pride.

Finding Humor in the Sisyphus’ Boulder

Let’s start with the humorous part. Among early-stage startups, the idea of a “final product vision” is an obvious cliché. On social media you frequently see posts joking about startups convincing both themselves and their investors that everything will be ready by spring and the world will follow right behind. I believe our entire team can relate to that mindset. By now, however, it has become clear that building a service is in many ways like chasing something that remains just out of reach. Progress happens and the service evolves, but at the same time our understanding of what the whole thing could become evolves just as quickly – if not faster.

During the second half of the year we managed to build practically every feature we initially set out to develop, which is an excellent achievement. If the first half of the year saw “at least dozens” of new features released, the second half likely produced hundreds. Among the most important were chats, tournaments, leagues, and numerous integrations. Yet today it feels like there is more to build than ever before. Last summer the current situation would probably have been terrifying, but now it feels quite the opposite. Perhaps that’s a sign of some kind of mental growth.

According to a report by LinearB comparing development team efficiency, our team’s development velocity ranks among the elite in the industry. On a monthly basis we produce over 70 pull requests per developer, more than 200 commits per month, production updates happen almost daily, and we now have roughly five thousand tests in place. So from both a numerical and strategic perspective, 2025 was a successful year for product development, though we didn’t get anywhere near a “final” version. Hopefully 2026 will continue on the same trajectory.

Milestones on track

When we raised angel funding in June, we set targets for the remainder of 2025. The primary goal was to close 50 deals with business customers. By the end of the year we had closed 52. For payment volume, our target for December was €140K. The realized figure was €141K. In other words, the momentum we anticipated in August materialized almost exactly as expected.

Selling or implementing booking or customer management systems is not yet as efficient as we would like it to be, which meant that reaching those goals during the fall required significant effort from many people. A monthly growth rate of 58% does not happen on its own. The fact that we reached our targets without the service going down even once, and while still responding effectively to customer needs during rapid growth, is a great achievement.

Quietly growing momentum has also started to appear in inbound deals. During the fall we even expanded into Estonia without any major marketing campaigns. The product is beginning to sell itself. And the more customers move onto the platform and the higher the quality of the product becomes, the stronger this effect should grow.

At least based on Thril’s internal conversations, belief in this hypothesis is sky-high. Just like last summer, our HubSpot sales pipeline supports this view. During 2025 we managed to build an excellent foundation for the future. Exponential growth always begins somewhere, and already in March 2026 it is clear that the successes of 2025 will carry us far.

A phenomenon in the making

The angel funding round in the summer gave us the opportunity to seriously explore this opportunity. Still, the entire year was spent operating under tight budget constraints, and at no point could our team be described as over-resourced. In November we received Tempo funding from Business Finland to support our cash position, but at the same time we were already actively building our pre-seed funding round, which would allow us to shift into the next gear of growth. The achievements during the fall convinced both our existing investors and several new ones, which ultimately led to the completion of a €0.6M pre-seed round in February 2026.

We are now at a point where we finally have the resources to invest in areas that over the past six months have often fallen into the “we’ll do this when we have time” category. Over the last few months we have welcomed new faces, particularly in sales and customer success. Marketing is now led by Topias Marjamaa, who many of you may already know (and yes, he’s a strong operator). Several new roles are opening across sales, GTM, and development teams. Interesting times ahead.

The goals for this year are ambitious. We believe that by the end of the year Thril could already become an emerging phenomenon in our home market. For now that still feels somewhat distant, but observing the team’s daily work makes it easier to stay calm. We have managed to assemble a group of people who every day do their part to make those shared goals a reality. I believe that in the next blog update we will once again be able to say that we hit the mark – and that the stone keeps rolling steadily upward.

Regards, Juuso & the Thril team