ESGRapporter – CTO and Co-founder 2024-2026
Summary
I built the ESG reporting platform in Laravel and carried the technical responsibility for the direction, the reporting side and everything visual.
Description
The demand for ESG reporting increased significantly due to new EU regulations and a growing focus on documenting companies' environmental, social, and governance efforts. Many businesses suddenly faced extensive reporting requirements without having the internal resources or specialist knowledge needed to handle the process.
In the early summer of 2024, I was approached by three people working on the idea behind ESGRapporter. They lacked the technical foundation and a profile experienced in digital platforms, UX and product development. I was recommended for the role by a former investor from Lifeguard Health ApS, and on July 29th 2024 we founded ESGRapporter ApS.
The requirements
The requirements arrived with the CSRD directive and the ESRS standard that accompanies it. They hit the large listed companies first, but the effect travelled downwards fast: a large company has to report on its entire value chain, and suddenly its suppliers found a questionnaire in the inbox they could not answer. A manufacturer with thirty employees had neither a sustainability department nor the budget for a consultancy – but it did have a customer demanding the numbers.
The gap in the market
The market was already filled with solutions focused on data collection, compliance, and enterprise-level reporting. However, we identified a gap: there were very few user-friendly platforms where ordinary companies and non-specialists could create ESG reports themselves without being experts in ESG, legislation, or reporting structures.
The vision behind ESGRapporter was therefore to create an “ESG for dummies” platform — a solution where users could build reports step-by-step through a more intuitive process while also having the ability to present the final report in a visually polished and professional format. The goal was to make ESG reporting understandable and accessible for companies without specialised ESG knowledge.
The project drew heavily on the experience I had previously gained from working with complex platforms, onboarding flows, and user-centered digital product development.
My tasks
I held overall technical responsibility for the direction: which way the platform should go, and what to build when.
In practice I owned the graphic design, the reporting side and everything visual – built in Laravel, with the information architecture and user flows. The admin module was built by my colleague Samuel – partly to take some of the load off me, partly because he had years of Laravel experience behind him.
A significant part of the work involved transforming complex reporting requirements and abstract ESG concepts into concrete and user-friendly workflows. This included onboarding flows, dynamic forms, report structures, export functionality, and presentation design.
We used AI to help users formulate and improve descriptive report text based on their own input. The purpose was not to fully automate ESG reporting, but to make the writing process more accessible for users who were not used to writing report content themselves.
The project required both technical understanding, product insight, and the ability to balance compliance, design, usability, and commercial considerations.
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