Independent company building
Moltke Benjaminsen ApS · Denmark
We build
companies.
A self-funded reverse incubator.
Run by
Chris Benjaminsen.
Most ideas get shut down. We build the ones that work into businesses with paying customers, then recruit founding teams to take them over.
How it works01 The approach
How the handoff works
We aim to recruit a founding team once a company has roughly $500K in annual recurring revenue.
Early revenue can be one lucky deal. At around $500K a year, there should be enough evidence of demand and enough money for a team to keep improving the business.
The team gets meaningful equity and help to raise a seed round. $500K is a working target. Some companies will be ready earlier.
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Build the first version
Choose an idea and make a product people can try. The first job is to find out whether anyone wants it.
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Test with customers
Release it and see whether people use it and pay. Shut down the ideas that don’t show enough demand.
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Grow toward $500K ARR
Check that revenue comes from repeat demand, rather than one customer or a one-off deal.
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Recruit a founding team
The team takes over the day-to-day work. Chris’s role moves toward advising and board work, and eventually just being a shareholder.
02 Portfolio
Companies in the incubator
Great Games Network
Puzzle game sites, including DailyPlay, SolitairePlace and PuzzleNext. Each has its own business model.
HyperPolished
Casual games with simple mechanics, including Hex, a puzzle game for iOS.
Forgeable
The software platform the other companies run on. It also builds and maintains software for selected businesses.
Also in the lab: Amptune, Barcodepedia, funny.io, lol.dk, Guide for the Few, Enterpricey, Danish Luxury, Hard to Book, and Who Was Alive.
Read the first company announcement03 The person behind it
Chris Benjaminsen
Chris Benjaminsen has been starting companies since 2004. Across that work, the teams involved have reached billions of users and raised more than $100 million.
Chris would rather take a $25M opportunity today than wait for a $250M opportunity that might never materialise.
“On a scale where founding a startup is 1 and an IPO is 100, my skills and my interests are in the 1 to 10.”
Read the story behind the incubator
Tools we build for ourselves
Running several companies at once takes tooling, so Chris builds it as he goes. Forgeable and Amptune both started that way. The goal is ten or more new companies a year, but the process for doing that repeatedly isn’t in place yet.
04 Open questions
What we haven’t figured out
We’re testing the model in public. These are the questions we still need to answer.
When do we shut an idea down?
We haven’t settled on firm kill criteria. That means deciding how long an idea gets and what it has to show before we spend more time on it.
Where do the founding teams come from?
We need people who want to run a company they didn’t start. Finding them is central to whether this works.
Does the same process work for every company?
We’re testing products for businesses and consumers, including products that serve both. We don’t yet know whether the same process works across them.
How do we stay useful after handoff?
Advising ten companies will take more time than advising one. We haven’t settled on how much support each team will need after handoff.
Is $500K always the right number?
Some companies may have enough evidence of demand before $500K ARR. Others may attract investors earlier. We expect the handoff point to vary.
Talk to Chris
Email Chris if you want to take over one of these companies, or if you’re building something yourself and want to talk.