From 0 to 500,000 users

Freja launched in 2017 into a market dominated by an established electronic identity system. The early challenge was circular: consumers had little reason to adopt a new identity before enough useful services accepted it, while organizations had little reason to integrate a product without a meaningful user base.

Freja's official five-year retrospective describes a slow beginning while the company worked to connect enough services to make the product relevant. Security technology alone could not solve that problem. Freja needed a consumer proposition people could understand, an experience they could complete confidently, and an acquisition model that could turn attention into registrations.

Nenad's role crossed product, design, organizational development, and performance marketing. The work was organized around one shared outcome: sustained consumer adoption.

Nenad helped translate security, identity, authentication, and regulatory requirements into a product intended for ordinary consumers. Registration needed to feel understandable without minimizing the safeguards behind a government-approved electronic identity.

His firsthand account identifies the first 50,000 users as the foundation phase: shaping the consumer experience, onboarding, trust cues, product communication, and the relationship between product progress and acquisition.

According to Freja Chief Product Officer Kristofer von Beetzen, Nenad's user-first leadership, educational work, and restructuring of the development process helped move the organization from technology-focused B2B thinking toward a consumer product company.

The second phase was the acceleration point. Product development and performance marketing were treated as connected parts of the same system rather than separate functions handing work to one another.

Acquisition created demand, but the product had to convert that demand into completed registrations and trust. Consumer response informed product iteration; clearer product value and a stronger registration experience improved what performance marketing could achieve. This operating loop powered Freja's most explosive user-acquisition period.

The public record confirms the scale of the breakout. Freja reported more than 400,000 users by the end of 2021, then described 2021 as the breakthrough year in which the user base grew to almost half a million.

For digital identity, trust is not a decorative layer or only a compliance requirement. It shapes whether people begin registration, understand necessary friction, and feel confident enough to complete the process.

The product made consequential states legible: who was asking, what information would be shared, what action a person was authorizing, and what would happen next. The goal was not the fewest possible taps. It was the clearest path to informed consent and confident completion.

That approach also had to survive GDPR, eIDAS, security, legal, and certification review. Product design became a translation layer between regulation, technical architecture, marketing promises, and human behavior.

The transition required more than campaign execution or redesigned screens. Education, shared priorities, and a development process centered on the user made product and acquisition decisions repeatable across the organization.

Von Beetzen describes Nenad's foresight and user-first leadership as pivotal to the shift. Freja's 2021 breakout validated the model: a regulated identity product could acquire consumers quickly while preserving the seriousness, clarity, and trust the category demanded.

Product and company recognition followed, including a Best UX design honor at the INUSE Award 2021 and Security Company of the Year at Tech Awards Sweden 2022. These remain product and team recognitions connected to the work, not individual awards.

Kristofer von Beetzen, Freja's Chief Product Officer, describes Nenad as “pivotal in transforming our company into a leading consumer-centric application in Sweden”—a contribution he notes would typically be associated with the vision of a Chief Product Officer.

His account explains why. Nenad anticipated the pivot to a consumer product while still working as a marketing designer, then converted that foresight into preparation: user-first product direction, educational initiatives, and a restructured development process. Kristofer writes that this work created “a fundamental shift in our operational mindset” and ingrained a culture of user-centricity across the company.

Kristofer directly connects that operating change to delivery: launching Freja under stringent EU regulation, reaching 500,000 users in a remarkably short period, and creating the foundation from which the product later reached one million. He characterizes Nenad's leadership, innovation, teamwork, and ability to inspire as transformative—and the mark he left on the organization as indelible.

Nenad's direct case-study arc is the journey from zero to 500,000 users. Freja later passed one million registered users in January 2024 and officially reported 1,577,000 users at December 31, 2025.

Those later milestones belong to Freja and the teams that continued building the company. The connection to Nenad's work is the foundation established during his tenure: a consumer-centered product, development processes organized around user needs, and a repeatable relationship between product improvement and acquisition.

The result was not a short-lived campaign. It was a durable change in how a regulated technology company built for, communicated with, and acquired consumers.