The 9-Year Overnight Success: Mirror42's Path to Enterprise Mastery

The Midnight Distraction

It’s 1:33 AM. I should be fixing a bug, but here I am writing this post again.

I got sidetracked reading an old ServiceNow press release from 2013.
"ServiceNow acquires Mirror42 to power Performance Analytics."
I remember Mirror42, kind of. But I never really knew the story behind it.

Turns out, it wasn’t just some BI tool that got scooped up and forgotten.
Karel van der Poel built it from scratch, sold it, and stuck around. And then made it even bigger. Also, he has a YouTube video about this he made 12 years ago (5 minutes).

That hit me.

Phase 1: Just Survive (2004–2008)

Back then, Mirror42 was an on-prem BI tool. No funding. No fluff. Just solving a problem for real customers.
By 2008, they were profitable.

Karel wasn’t trying to go viral. He was trying to stay alive.
And that worked.

Phase 2: Betting on the Cloud (2008–2010)

In 2010, the cloud was still weird to a lot of people. Karel rewrote the whole stack to support it anyway.
He didn’t chase the trend. He saw what was coming.

Phase 3: Building with Community (2008–2013)

While scaling the company, Karel launched something wild.
KPI Library.
A shared space where 400,000 people added 6,000+ metric templates.

He basically open-sourced strategy. That move built trust, reach, and a moat.

After the Acquisition

ServiceNow bought Mirror42 for $13M.

Most people would walk away.

Karel didn’t.
He scaled Performance Analytics to $75M+, then helped launch NowX and over 30 new products inside ServiceNow. This is generally part of premium SKUs, or a standalone product at a double-digit percent annual contract value increase.

He didn’t stop at the finish line. He treated it like the start of the next thing.

Stuff I’m Taking From This

1. Build for deployment, not hype
Karel made something useful for real teams. He focused on being installable, usable, and flexible.

2. Community matters
KPI Library wasn’t flashy, but it created something that lived on.
Letting users shape the product made it stronger.

3. Long games win
Nine years at Mirror42. Eleven years (and counting) at ServiceNow.
That’s what sticking with it looks like.

Not everything needs to go big right away.
Sometimes you just need to make something that works, solve a problem, and keep showing up.

That's what Karel did.
That’s what I want to do too. If you want to know about that, schedule a meeting with me on https://getaiinabox.com 

Want to see more, here’s some interesting links.