Subscribe now

The team is eleven people today, they’ve built six locations, handle just under 100 cases per month, and have been profitable since September 2025.

This is a summary of Episode 175 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From PayPal and Coca-Cola to the Funeral Industry

Katia Lübbert spent more than 20 years in brand marketing – for U.S. corporations like PayPal and Coca-Cola, with agency and tech roles in between. In early 2024, she hit reset, took a break, and realized that the world of corporate brands had run its course for her. Through personal connections she came across Manuel Kaiser, who had started Memovida a few months earlier: with no background in the funeral industry, but with a founding investor and the conviction that the sector was ripe for consolidation and digitalization. Manuel personally conducted the first funeral in June 2024. By the end of 2024 Katia joined as the second co-founder and CMO.

The market Memovida operates in has roughly 5,000 providers in Germany. Most of them are small, regionally tied and run by second- or third-generation families. Digitalization barely exists. Some registry offices still prefer a fax over an email. The opening Memovida sees lies in exactly this gap between an emotionally charged topic and an operationally outdated industry.

The Model: Fixed Price, Transparent, Bookable Online

Memovida has radically simplified the offering. On the website, funerals can be configured at clear prices – a cremation in Berlin costs €2,550, all administrative paperwork included. Cremations account for 95 percent of cases; traditional burials are the exception. Anyone who starts the funnel gets a callback quickly. Most orders come in by phone – especially older relatives, who pick up the phone rather than clicking further online.

“We have to show who we are and who you’ll be dealing with – because it really is a deeply emotional topic.” – Katia Lübbert

The website does two jobs at once. It makes Memovida tangible as a team and a brand, and it removes the taboo from the price conversation. In an industry where grieving relatives are confronted with opaque quotes in their hardest hour, that alone is positioning.

99 Percent Through SEO and SEA – And Why Stuttgart Pays Off Before Stuttgart Exists

Classic performance marketing on Meta or LinkedIn plays almost no role at Memovida. 99 percent of acquisition runs through Google search – organic and paid combined. Searches like “funeral director Munich” or “cremation Cologne” aren’t huge in volume, but they’re highly intent-driven. The conversion from search query to order is correspondingly strong. Memovida builds location pages and a local footprint systematically, scaling with comparatively little effort.

“Stuttgart is already profitable for us – before Stuttgart even exists.” – Katia Lübbert

The location model is deliberately lightweight. A new location usually launches inside a co-working space, with a local funeral director on the ground handling appointments. Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg has been the first proper storefront location since February 2025 and serves as the flagship. Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Cologne and Leipzig are all live as well – six locations in just over a year, without a classic high-capex chain model.

Pre-Need, Black Friday and the Double Panic

Alongside the acute funeral case, Memovida is building a second line of business: pre-need arrangements. Anyone who plans their own funeral while still alive leaves loved ones with less stress and Memovida with a warm lead. The funnel mindset runs through everything – including a Black Friday campaign that gave away a pre-need urn for free. A polarizing move in an industry that otherwise has no hooks – and effective precisely because of that.

Still, the business remains hard to plan. Death waves can’t be modeled. Months with disproportionately many cases alternate with quieter phases. Since September 2025 Memovida has been profitable, with downward outliers. Katia’s honest take:

“We’re basically always in panic mode – either it feels like not enough customers are coming, or the numbers come in the way we want or even more, and then the team is overwhelmed.” – Katia Lübbert

What doesn’t shift: the emotional responsibility. Funerals aren’t a product you compare three times. Either you have the need – or you don’t.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

What I Learned in This Interview

• Transparency beats theater. The website sells trust and price, the phone call converts. In emotionally charged markets, you need both.

• Google search is the superior channel in high-intent markets. People who search “cremation Hamburg” want to book, not browse – organic results and paid ads complement each other.

• An industry-outsider background can be an asset. People who don’t know the industry from the inside ask the naive questions – and stumble onto outdated standards.

Lessons for Founders

• A clear price is positioning. In markets where price is taboo, transparency opens the door to the call.

• Location rollout doesn’t have to pay off from day one. Co-working stages before storefronts keep capex flat.

• Pre-need is long-term acquisition. Feed the funnel today, harvest tomorrow.

• Operational stress comes in waves. Recession-resistant doesn’t mean predictable.

• Industry clichés can become differentiation. When your competitors still fax, a modern website is already marketing.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

In episode 174 of Happy Bootstrapping, Anna walks us through how they financed the start with a KfW founder loan and a crowdfunding campaign, how an undetected post-pandemic growth slowdown led the company through two rounds of layoffs – and why they want to keep going exactly like this.

This is a summary of Episode 174 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Tel Aviv to the Oberbergisches Region: A Family Idea Becomes a Company

Anna studied in Tel Aviv, met her husband – a sports therapist – there, and lived in Israel for twelve years in total. Their three kids were born there and grew up barefoot, partly because Anna’s husband is professionally focused on mobility and gait. In 2013 the family moved back to Germany, settling near Cologne.

When winter came, the kids needed shoes – and nothing on the market matched what they were used to. The simple thought “then we’ll just make a better shoe” turned into eighteen months of groundwork: a business plan, a designer found online, materials research, a shoemaking workshop they won in Pirmasens, factories sourced in Portugal. In parallel, the founding couple deliberately registered as unemployed to be able to focus entirely on building the company.

“Looking back, I think it was actually pretty smart that there was no plan B.”

€150,000 Loan, ~€100,000 in Crowdfunding – and a Community That Was Already There

Wildling financed the start with a KfW founder loan (the ERP-Startgeld program, up to €100,000 per founding person) – Anna and her husband took out €150,000. The money went entirely into product development and preparation; the molds for the outsoles alone cost nearly €3,000 per size. In parallel, Anna built a community on Facebook, especially in mompreneur groups.

By the time the crowdfunding campaign launched, around 1,000 interested people were already in the wings. The €12,500 goal was hit in 24 hours; in the end the campaign brought in €75,000, and another €30,000 came through pre-orders – about €100,000 in total. The first major production run was prefinanced this way.

It didn’t go smoothly, though: an extra material they’d sewn in for water resistance bled heavily when wet – socks, feet and skin suddenly turned blue. A near-disaster that only ended well because the community saw itself as part of the journey: most customers waited for a corrected pair or took a discount, and Wildling sold even the defective stock in the end.

Deliberately No Retail, Deliberately No Amazon

Wildling sells almost exclusively direct to this day: through its own webshop and a small store in Engelskirchen. Initially there was simply no other option, because they were constantly sold out. But even as volumes grew, Anna stayed consistent: the high-quality materials and complex manufacturing make the product expensive, and pricing in an additional retail margin would have been impossible.

On top of that, she’s clear about her position: Amazon is not the right environment for Wildling. She openly acknowledges in the interview that this stubbornness – no brand bidding on Google, barely any paid performance ads, no marketplace presence – has cost the company significant revenue to competitors over the years. Accepted, not regretted.

“Our production costs were always relatively high. We just couldn’t have priced in a retail margin on top of that.”

The Growth Slowdown They Missed – and Two Rounds of Layoffs

For years, Wildling grew almost entirely through word of mouth. Every pair shipped brought one to two new customers; revenue tripled from one year to the next at times. Paid marketing was barely a thing – and that’s exactly what became the trap during the pandemic. When people don’t meet anymore, they don’t talk about their shoes either. Exponential growth flattened sharply, and Wildling took too long to understand what was happening.

People kept being hired into a curve that was already bending the other way – at one point the team was just under 300. What followed were two rounds of layoffs: in early 2023, around 40 people left the company; in early 2025, the team was reduced to today’s roughly 80 employees. In retrospect, Anna says, the hard cut should have happened in the first round rather than being spread out over two.

“The first thing that had to happen was a mindset shift – away from ‘we throw a person at every problem.’”

Routine Allergy, Family Business, and the Long Game

Wildling has been remote-first from day one – out of life circumstances, not strategy. Anna’s husband is her co-founder, her father runs the recycling initiative, her sister handles photography, and her son is now doing an apprenticeship in the company. The line between family and business is fluid – sometimes exhausting, often beautiful.

At the end of 2024, the family took a seven-week break in Costa Rica. Anna talks openly about her “routine allergy,” about how her creative ideas usually come during downtime, and about deliberately building a setup in which others run the day-to-day. Her plan: at least another ten years of Wildling – no exit, no investors, no rush.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Key Takeaways

• Wildling sells around 500,000 pairs of shoes per year, in sizes 18 to 48, with about 80 employees.

• The start was financed by a KfW founder loan (€150,000) and a crowdfunding campaign that hit its €12,500 goal in 24 hours and ended at ~€100,000 including pre-orders.

• D2C only: no retail, no Amazon, barely any performance marketing – for both economic and ethical reasons.

• The pandemic growth slowdown was recognized too late; the team shrank from nearly 300 to 80 in two rounds of layoffs.

• Purely in terms of business output, the 80-person team delivers what the company once did with 260 – with almost no use of AI.

Lessons for Founders

• Having no plan B can be a powerful focus driver – when personality and family situation allow for it.

• Building a community before the start is more valuable than any crowdfunding mechanic itself.

• High product costs and a retail margin are often incompatible – D2C may be the only sensible option.

• Don’t paper over growth issues with more headcount – the mindset shift has to land before the next hire.

• With restructuring, one hard cut beats two salami slices – even when it feels radical in the moment.

  ---

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

In Episode 173 of Happy Bootstrapping, Christian and Stefan share how an idea that started in 2022 around preserving knowledge in mid-sized companies turned into an agentic AI buddy for Microsoft Teams – and why, after two trips to Silicon Valley, they consciously decided to stay in the Bavarian Forest.

This is a summary of Episode 173 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Idea: Securing Knowledge Before It Walks Out

The original idea for amaiko goes back to 2022. Back then, Christian brought his father out of retirement because a PASSION4IT ERP project needed production know-how that wasn’t available in the team. What started as a question of how to preserve knowledge before experienced employees retire grew into a larger thesis: demographic change and the job-hopping habits of Gen Z make valuable company knowledge disappear every day. When ChatGPT had its moment in late 2022, it became clear to Christian that AI had to be the obvious answer.

Two Silicon Valley trips followed – the first to check whether the problem had already been solved. The second, with Stefan on board and a concrete product called amaiko. Both times, the same response came back: “Move here. Build here.” Both times, they flew home.

Founding the GmbH Over an After-Work Beer

The decision was made at OMR 2025. Christian and Stefan pitched a product they hadn’t even built yet, the response was enthusiastic – and over the last after-work beer, the two looked each other deeply in the eye and decided: We’re really doing this now. amaiko GmbH was founded in May 2025. 50/50, no investors, not a subsidiary of PASSION4IT.

“I don’t care whether it’s a zebra or a unicorn or a Lower Bavarian Wolpertinger – this will simply become a cool, successful story.” – Christian Kirsch

Christian continues to run PASSION4IT in parallel. The growth ceiling of “no more than ten people” that he explained to me back in Episode 77 fell in February 2025. Stefan quit his job in Berlin and now works full-time on amaiko – no safety net, just savings.

The Product: An AI Buddy Inside Microsoft Teams

amaiko is a personal AI buddy for knowledge workers in the Mittelstand, deeply integrated into Microsoft 365 and Teams. Instead of separate threads, there’s a continuous chat that retains context, learns over time, and works proactively. Emails get sorted, tasks created, meetings prepped – it even adopts the tone from the last 100 emails. Pricing: around 30 euros per user per month, tokens included, with a personal Customer Success Manager in the Plus tier.

Behind the scenes runs an agent network with GPT models on Azure Frankfurt as the default. Anyone who wants can switch to Claude or use the fully European Mistral variant. The team deliberately avoided relying on Microsoft Copilot SDKs – the entire Teams integration is built in-house. This makes it straightforward to now add Google Workspace, Dropbox, Slack, and Zoom.

Three Senior Engineers with Claude Code

The way the team produces is interesting. amaiko currently has five employees, three of them senior engineers on the tech side. Stefan puts it like this:

“We’re three senior people on the tech side, and when you turn people like that loose on Claude Code, the output is unbelievable. I would have needed 20 to 30 people for the same output before.” – Stefan Kirsch

No vibe coding – experienced engineers with a clear architectural vision who use AI tooling as leverage. Speed is also a deliberate asset against their competitor Microsoft – Google Workspace integration in a few weeks instead of quarters.

OMR 2025: 140 Leads for 25,000 Euros

On the sales side, amaiko runs on multiple tracks. The PASSION4IT customer base delivered the first pilots. SEO and GEO are running via an agency. Webinars happen monthly. And most importantly: events. At OMR 2025, the team brought home 140 new contacts. Christian estimates the total cost for the booth – including travel, accommodation, and lost revenue – at around 25,000 to 30,000 euros.

“Microsoft has been proving for a while now that they can’t do this. Half the world is complaining about Copilot, nobody wants to use the thing. Microsoft is an oil tanker, they move at iceberg speed.” – Stefan Kirsch

A first US customer in Silicon Valley is also on board – won through a single Reddit comment in a Copilot frustration thread.

Bavarian Forest Instead of Silicon Valley

Christian and Stefan could have taken investor money. On their Silicon Valley trips, there were concrete offers – tied to the demand that they relocate everything there. For Christian, that was never an option. He sees it as “not fair from a social-ethical standpoint” to take advantage of the education and infrastructure here and then leave – and he’s convinced that a solution for the European Mittelstand has to be built in Europe. The target for the end of 2025 is 3,000 seats. When it’ll be 10,000, they leave open. There’s no exit pressure.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Key Takeaways

• AI tooling as a bootstrapping lever: Three senior engineers with Claude Code produce more than 20 to 30 without AI – that changes the math on whether investor money is actually needed.

• 50/50 between brothers can work: When skills, life backgrounds, and responsibilities are clearly separated, the shareholder split matters less than the shared goal.

• Speed as an asset against Big Tech: Whoever integrates faster than Microsoft wins in the Mittelstand – regardless of how big the competitor’s marketing budget is.

Learnings for Founders

• A reliable core business (like PASSION4IT) can carry a second startup – without having to become a subsidiary.

• Events are worth it when real domain expertise is on the booth instead of greeters – and when the team actively approaches people.

• Reddit comments can generate leads – if they’re genuinely helpful and not crude promotion.

• Investor feedback isn’t always useful: “Come back at 30,000 euros MRR” is essentially an invitation to do it yourself.

• Local roots aren’t a disadvantage. A solution for the European Mittelstand has to be built in Europe.

  Thanks for reading Happy Bootstrapping Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

  Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

  Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
  
  Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

In episode 172 of Happy Bootstrapping, Marc shares how a serious phishing hack of his former company’s website back in 2012 eventually grew into a maintenance business that today employs ten people.

This is a summary of Episode 172 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Phishing Hack as the Entry Point

Marc’s journey into the WordPress world didn’t start with a business plan, but with an emergency. In 2012, the website of his former company was hacked. Tens of thousands of phishing emails were sent through the server, with the consequence that the domain was on blacklists for years and Marc was unable to email German government agencies for a long time afterwards.

“That was the point where, for the first time in my life, I started looking into what WordPress security actually looks like.”

What started as “how do you even repair a site like this?” turned into a blog in 2015, then a repair business for hacked WordPress sites, and finally a maintenance service that grew through word of mouth. What Marc says today about WordPress security sounds almost unspectacular: keep things updated, do backups, follow a handful of security basics. Those exact routines became the business model.

The €50,000 Switch into Full-Time Self-Employment

Until 2018, WP-Wartung24 was a side project. Marc had set himself a rule: he would only switch full-time once the business reached the same size as his earlier self-employment, specifically €50,000 in annual revenue.

“I told myself: if you do €50,000 with WP-Wartung24 on the side, that’s the point where I’m sure that once I do it full-time, it’ll grow into a proper size.”

In 2018, he hit the mark. Marc resigned and went full-time. In 2019, he founded the GmbH, triggered by a large hosting deal that ultimately fell through. The non-disclosure agreement from the potential client had left a lasting impression.

“I thought to myself: their legal department probably has more employees than my entire company.”

The deal never closed. The GmbH stayed. Today, Marc’s team of ten manages 800 sites in ongoing maintenance. Pricing starts at €35 a month, moves up through a mid-tier package around €80, and goes all the way to individual contracts for larger clients.

In-House Monitoring Plugin and the April 2026 Plugin Scandal

At some point, off-the-shelf solutions weren’t enough. Marc’s team developed an in-house monitoring plugin that runs on all 800 sites and centrally tracks what changes — at the code level, with plugin activations, with hosting status. How important these tools are became especially clear in April 2026.

That month, 30 WordPress plugins were sold to a new owner. The new owner injected malicious code into every single plugin and shipped it through the official WordPress update mechanism to every site using those plugins.

“It didn’t happen through some security hole. It happened through the official update mechanism.”

For WP-Wartung24, that meant going on alert. Marc’s team checked all 800 sites to see which of them used which of the 30 plugins. Thanks to the in-house monitoring tool, it quickly became clear that nothing more serious had happened.

Audience Shifts, Diversification, and the Road to WordPress 7

What clients expect from maintenance has changed completely over the last ten years. Maintenance used to mean updates plus backups plus security monitoring. Today it’s about holistic care — including legal aspects, proactive measures, and solid monitoring. That changes the target audience as well: away from the small hair salon with a website, toward agencies who need this service for their clients, and toward Mittelstand companies whose IT department can’t take on the topic and whose marketing department won’t.

For 2026, Marc names diversification as his most important goal. WordPress remains the core system, but the service portfolio is meant to broaden thematically. The next webinar, for example, focuses on email phishing — a side topic that clients keep asking about anyway. Marc also hinted at a new data product, which he is teasing publicly here for the first time. In parallel, his team is watching the rollout of WordPress 7 with its new AI connectors arriving in May 2026 — including the last-minute removal of the collaboration feature from the release.

What I learned from the interview

Niche operations can be a full business. Maintenance gets underestimated because it sounds like “just clicking update buttons.” Marc’s model shows that you can build a ten-person team with 800 contracts out of that routine — if you take it seriously.

Linear growth is enough. Marc never went after hockey-stick growth. Many small contracts, long-term relationships, growth via referrals. That works just as well — and tends to be much more resilient.

External events can build trust. The April 2026 plugin scandal could have been a reputation problem for the entire industry. For WP-Wartung24, it became proof that their in-house monitoring works.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Learnings for founders

• Set thresholds before you make the jump: Marc’s €50,000 mark was an objective criterion for going full-time — and gave him confidence in the decision.

• Recognize a crisis as an opportunity: A brutal hack of a company website turned into his own business 14 years later.

• Build your own tools when the market doesn’t fit: Marc’s monitoring plugin wouldn’t have been affordable as an external product — in-house, it’s the most important lever in his operation.

• Audiences evolve with the offering: If you offer more depth, you naturally attract different clients — that’s good, but it has to be communicated intentionally.

• Doubts are part of the journey: Marc’s open words about the exhaustion phase in 2019, before the first hire, show that even linear success stories have their turning points.

  Thanks for reading Happy Bootstrapping Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Alongside that, she runs TeamJulia, her founder program at €1,000 a month with up to 20 participants per cohort. In the conversation with Andreas, the topics are the CEO role, why she doesn’t offer frameworks and is still fully booked, and why most startups don’t fail because of wrong decisions but because of decisions that were never made.

This is a summary of Episode 171 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

Two Models for Two Very Different Audiences

Julia’s business consists of two clearly separated brands. Derndinger GmbH is the 1:1 sparring for later-stage entrepreneurs. Five retainer clients in parallel is her full capacity. Average client tenure sits at three years and longer. One of her better-known references is Christoph Behn of die Kartenmacherei, whom Julia accompanied from €10 to €70 million in revenue.

TeamJulia is the other model – a twelve-month founder program at €1,000 a month, running remotely, with one in-person strategy day per year in Berlin. Up to 20 participants per cohort, 80 percent of them bootstrapped, with a 50 percent share of women. The program is led by Johanna Küster, supported by external experts such as Christian Angel and Felix Schlegel, who are active entrepreneurs with multi-million revenues themselves.

Sparring Is Not Coaching

When the word “coach” comes up, Julia visibly pulls a face. Coaches work with frameworks, with questions, with curricula, she says. Her clients have no patience for that. What she delivers instead, she describes very plainly:

“I genuinely enjoy serving my clients. I’ll happily make them a coffee.”

In practice, that means: every week, the biggest problem on the table gets solved. No workshops, no tool licenses, no method. Availability is same day, no contract, cancellable monthly. What sounds risky is Julia’s deliberate lever: she has to prove every month again that she’s worth it. And her clients still stay – on average three years and longer.

The CEO Role as a Playing Field

One of the recurring topics in Julia’s sparring is the question of who in a founding team is actually the CEO. She uses an image for this that sticks:

“The job of the CEO is to define the playing field. What sport are we playing? Are there six on the field or eleven? Do we need a coach, do we need a chef?”

By Julia’s definition, the CEO is the club owner. Not the player who goes into goal when the goalkeeper falls ill. His or her only role is to make sure the company survives. Most startups, Julia says, don’t clearly work out in the first three to five years who actually holds that role. As a result, everyone has it or no one does – and that’s exactly what makes teams dysfunctional.

Bottlenecks and the Question of Missing Decisions

In the later-stage companies Julia works with on retainer, the bottleneck is rarely the customer. Product-market fit is usually already there. What’s left are time and money as resources – and with that, the question: What do I focus on this week?

Julia likes to ask her clients what they would do if money weren’t a bottleneck. The answer sharpens what really matters. In her experience, most companies don’t fail because of wrong decisions but because no decision gets made at all:

“Most startups don’t go under because of the wrong decision but because they don’t make any decision at all.”

TeamJulia as Insurance – Even for Investors

Julia has a thesis about her founder program that lands hard in the conversation: TeamJulia is essentially insurance. Over twelve months, she notices when a co-founder conflict is brewing, when product-market fit isn’t there, when the sales pitch is too weak. And she notices faster and more honestly than investors, because the environment is more vulnerable and participants are not dependent on her. Her conclusion: anyone investing €100,000 in a startup should put €12,000 of it into TeamJulia. Of the seven VC-funded teams Julia has had in the program so far, all of them closed a successful round afterwards.

Gut Feeling as Compressed Experience

Julia describes herself as a doer – fact-driven, fast, always pulling numbers, data, facts. And she still decides by gut feeling. Her reframing of this is one of the most memorable moments in the conversation:

“Our gut feeling is the sum of all the decisions we have ever made. Our body can process that faster and better than our brain.”

Because entrepreneurs have to carry their decisions through themselves, she argues, you need that softer factor. Otherwise the commitment doesn’t hold. The ability to reflect, for Julia, is therefore entrepreneurial skill number one.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Key Takeaways

• Sparring instead of coaching: No frameworks, no curriculum – every week the biggest problem at hand gets solved.

• Two clearly separated models: Derndinger GmbH for later-stage retainers, TeamJulia for ambitious founders from around €250,000 in annual revenue.

• The CEO role has to be named: Who is club owner and who is player decides whether a founding team works or doesn’t.

Learnings for Founders

• No contracts can be a feature: Monthly cancellability forces you to deliver – and still creates relationships that last several years.

• The bottleneck is rarely the customer: In later-stage companies, the lever is time, money and focus, not acquisition.

• Missing decisions cost more than wrong ones: Most companies fail because of unclarity, not because of mistakes.

• People skills are learnable: But only if you recognize that they matter – without them, you stay self-employed and stuck.

• Gut feeling isn’t esoteric: It’s the compressed experience of every decision you have made so far.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

What makes the story unusual is that Mandelbaum didn’t start in a garage. It came out of the e-commerce agency Dynabase, where Carl and Tim were previously employed. Today, the two of them hold the majority, while the agency’s founders are involved as angel investors. Hosting, model and vector database all sit in Germany.

In Episode 170 of Happy Bootstrapping, Carl and Tim explain how the spin-out worked, why they replaced OpenAI, and why customers only pay when the search actually drives a conversion.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 170 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Internal Agency Project to Independent GmbH

Mandelbaum didn’t launch as a startup. It started as an internal idea inside an e-commerce agency. Carl and Tim had repeatedly seen that search is one of the weakest links in online shops – and at the same time one of the most important. Early versions of the product were built within the agency, with agency clients as pilot customers. When it became clear that this needed to be its own product with its own roadmap and its own business model, they had to decide on a structure. Their answer: spin it out into a new GmbH, with Carl and Tim as majority shareholders and the agency’s founders Norman and Daniel as angels.

“There are different ways a spin-out can work. We believe we found a very good path for us and for everyone involved”, Carl says in the episode.

What makes this spin-out unusual is that Carl and Tim hold the majority. In typical setups, investors or former employers retain control. Here it works the other way around – the operators are at the wheel, the capital is on the advisory side.

Semantic Search Instead of Keywords

The product solves a problem every online shopper knows: You know what you need, but you don’t know what the product is called. “Customers don’t have to search by keywords anymore. They don’t have to know the product name”, Carl explains. His favorite example: In a fashion shop, you type “I need a piece of fabric so my legs don’t get cold in winter” – and you get warm trousers. This works because an AI model understands the meaning of the query in the background and matches it against product descriptions, instead of looking for exact keyword hits.

Mandelbaum integrates in three ways: through a crawler that walks the shop on its own, through a Shopify app, or through a product feed. Zero configuration to start, full configuration depth for power users. The flagship customer is Foto Leistenschneider with around 25,000 articles on Shopware. Carl quotes the owner in the episode, and the line captures the USP perfectly:

“Your search is so good that I wouldn’t recommend it to any of my competitors, because it’s our unfair advantage.”

Tech Stack: Own LLM, Own GPU Server, All in Germany

Mandelbaum is not just an OpenAI wrapper. Carl and Tim deliberately moved away from external API providers and now run their own open-source model, fine-tuned for e-commerce, on their own GPU server. The vector database comes from Qdrant in Berlin. Everything is self-hosted on Kubernetes, the entire stack lives in Germany. The switch wasn’t ideological, it was pragmatic: faster, better, cheaper – and an additional sales argument for German Mittelstand shops whose data should not leave the country. “We want to have technology in Europe, AI companies in Europe that can compete with the big players”, Carl says.

Pricing Against the Market: Pay Only on Conversion

When it comes to the business model, Mandelbaum takes a different path than most SaaS players in the search space. The standard is usage-based pricing, billed on API calls or search volume – with the side effect that shops can suddenly receive four- or five-figure surprise bills on Black Friday. Mandelbaum bills on conversions instead, in fixed tiers. Meaning: If the search leads to a purchase, it gets paid for. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t cost anything. That’s a model only someone confident in their search converting better than what shops had before will offer.

Sales Through the Agency Network and Run Clubs

The first customers came through the Dynabase agency network. After that, trade shows like the E-Commerce Berlin Expo and Didacta, with reach far beyond the booth conversations themselves. One of the more unusual sales situations: a chat at a run club hosted by Ryzon, a premium triathlon and running brand. Carl ended up in conversation with someone on the way to the toilet – Ryzon became a pilot customer. This mix of systematic network-driven sales and serendipitous acquisition runs through the entire episode.

Customer vs. Complainer

One of the key lessons from the spin-out is captured in a phrase Tim keeps using: customer vs. complainer.

“There are lots of problems and we all spend the entire day complaining. The real question is: which problems are you actually willing to pay money for?”

In the agency world, the customer arrives with a finished requirements document. In product, you have to figure out yourself which problem is big enough that someone will reach for their credit card. That’s why Mandelbaum doesn’t build features just because someone complained about them at a conference – they build them when a paying customer concretely needs them.

What I Learned in This Interview

A clean spin-out is possible if all parties are treated fairly. Carl and Tim structured the spin-out so that the operators hold the majority and the agency founders stay involved as angels. Both sides benefit long-term.

Running your own LLM is feasible at bootstrapper scale. Mandelbaum hosts its AI model on a GPU server in Germany and is faster, better and cheaper than the OpenAI wrapper they started with.

Conversion-based pricing is a strong USP. Removing Black Friday surprise bills from the SaaS conversation gives an immediate sales advantage – but it requires a product that genuinely converts.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Takeaways for Founders

• Spin-outs can be structured fairly for everyone involved – clear majority ownership and well-defined roles between operators and investors are key.

• Owning your AI infrastructure is feasible for small teams – a self-hosted GPU server can beat OpenAI on speed, quality and cost when the use cases are clear.

• Pricing against the market standard can be a USP in itself – conversion-based billing removes risk from the customer and creates differentiation in sales.

• Customer vs. complainer as a roadmap filter – not every requested feature is one someone will actually pay for. The credit card prioritizes the roadmap.

• Sales happens outside the pipeline too – trade shows, agency networks and serendipitous run-club conversations bring early customers when the product convinces.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

The remarkable part: he hasn’t done any meaningful marketing in the past five years. And he runs all of this alongside a 12-hour-a-week job as a senior software developer. In episode 169 of Happy Bootstrapping, Florian explains how that works.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 169 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

Stumbling Into the Bike Niche

Florian didn’t position TRADElube strategically. He stumbled into the niche. In 2020, an ERP vendor faced the problem that an externally developed interface never worked satisfactorily. Florian stepped in – and suddenly had his first customer in the e-bike sector. Since then, bike retail has been his core business, even though he never actively chose it.

“It was pure coincidence. My first customer happened to use this ERP system – and we’ve been working together ever since.”

The bike industry is particularly well-suited for TRADElube because the products require very specific attribution: battery size, frame size, gearing, brakes, sprockets. But the same requirements apply in other industries – electronics, for example, or tool retail. That’s exactly where Florian wants to expand next.

Referrals Instead of Marketing

For five years, Florian’s growth ran through a single channel: referrals from ERP vendors. There’s no contractual relationship with them, no commission agreement, no formal partnership. They simply pass him on to their customers because their product becomes more valuable through a working shop integration. A classic win-win that gave Florian five years of pure development time.

“I haven’t really done any marketing in the past five years – they all came in through referrals.”

Only now is he launching his first real marketing push: handwritten letters to tool retailers. 20 per week, with a flyer and QR code. The idea is to open up new industries where the existing referral channels don’t reach. He still has 990 flyers left over – from an e-commerce trade fair where only 10 people picked one up.

Tracing as the USP

Florian himself says that for integration platforms, it’s not enough for an interface to “work”. As an integration vendor, you’re always the first to be blamed when something goes wrong on the customer’s side – regardless of whether the problem lies at the source, in the shop, or somewhere in between. That’s exactly why Florian built end-to-end tracing into his system. Every data transfer is logged, with full history, per product, per channel.

“With integration work, it’s not enough that it functions. There has to be much more so that it’s truly maintainable.”

This level of traceability isn’t just a feature – it’s his actual sales lever. He can resolve any customer concern within minutes, without spending days debugging. And that’s exactly what has allowed him to reduce his support workload to one or two hours per week, with 60 customers. When a customer comes in with an unusually high volume of requests, he can teach them to use the tracing themselves and route the issue back to the source.

Pricing, Tech Stack, and the 12-Hour Job

Florian’s pricing is transparent and identical for every customer: 79 Euro per month for the standard interface between his main ERP system and Shopware, 99 Euro for WooCommerce, 149 Euro for Shopify. The difference reflects not only the complexity of each API but also the customer base. When customers tell him the price is “really fair”, Florian knows he’s too cheap – but raising prices for existing customers is difficult.

Technically, he builds on .NET in its latest version, with Blazor for the backend, MVC for his APIs, and MariaDB Galera running on a Kubernetes cluster. He uses AI tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code in parallel – Copilot for detailed work in individual files, Claude Code for entire features that can be 80% pre-built. Every line still gets reviewed.

He keeps the 12-hour job deliberately – not out of financial necessity, but for the social contacts. One week he works half-days on-site at his employer, the next week he’s fully at home on TRADElube. In an emergency, he’s 15 minutes away by car.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Learnings for Founders

1. Referral partners beat marketing budgets. If an existing product becomes more valuable through your solution, you can grow without a commission model.

2. Niches are often found by not searching for them. Florian’s first customer was coincidence – today, the bike industry is his core business.

3. Tracing and traceability are a USP, not a nice-to-have. As an integration vendor, you need an answer to “is this on you?”.

4. Transparent pricing simplifies sales – but caps revenue. Uniform pricing reduces negotiations but costs margin on larger customers.

5. A side project with a main job isn’t a transition – it’s a strategy. Florian keeps his 12-hour job by choice, not by necessity.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Then came an acquisition offer – which they turned down. The cash reserve went into a meeting software called ZipDo. Not a single license was ever sold. In Episode 168 of Happy Bootstrapping, Jannik reflects on what he learned – and how he rebuilt with rawshot.ai and careertrainer.ai.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 168 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The rise – and why it couldn’t last

At its peak, Global Commerce Media was running sites like Supplementbibel.de and Luftking.de, ranking for thousands of keywords, with a tech team in El Salvador and up to 15 full-time employees plus freelancers. Monthly revenue ran between 200,000 and 250,000 euros.

“We actually knew pretty early on that this was a dying space. We knew before the wider market did.”

They still turned down the acquisition offer. Not out of strategic conviction – Jannik simply didn’t know what he’d do next. So the cash cushion went into ZipDo, a tool for structured meeting agendas. The idea was solid. The market didn’t want it. After months of development and zero sales, they pulled the plug.

rawshot.ai: AI product photos without prompting

The restart began with a simple lesson: no more generic products – pick a clear vertical. Jannik and his co-founders Flo and Alex chose fashion and e-commerce, a space with high image demand and obvious pain points.

rawshot.ai generates AI product photos for online shops and fashion brands. Consistent models across hundreds of images, no prompt field, scalable from ten to ten thousand products. Launched in late January, within less than two months the tool had around 100 paying customers and over 3,000 registered users. Pricing starts at $9 per month.

“Pricing for AI products is just really hard. People upload the most complex piece of jewelry – and use that as their benchmark.”

Growth runs entirely through SEO and visibility in ChatGPT and other AI search tools. No paid marketing, no outbound. Jannik applies the same technical playbook he built during years of affiliate SEO – this time pointed at his own product.

careertrainer.ai: Practicing difficult conversations before they count

In parallel, Jannik and his second co-founder Markus are building careertrainer.ai – an audio-based platform for AI role-plays. Managers practice difficult feedback conversations. Sales reps rehearse cold calls. A separate LLM evaluates at the end how well the defined conversation goals were met.

Large companies came knocking early – before the product was ready. Today, careertrainer.ai grows primarily through white-label partners: organizational development consultancies that run leadership training for corporations and deploy the technology under their own brand.

“Apparently it’s a huge topic – I only ever hear about it during sales calls.”

What Jannik does differently now

Jannik once wanted to go solo. He quickly realized it wasn’t for him. Today he values the different perspectives in his teams – Flo as the technical deep thinker, Alex as the systems builder for prompt pipelines, Markus as the developer behind careertrainer.ai. At the same time, he tries to set up processes so that AI handles most of the routine work.

What drives him isn’t an exit. Not a full-time founder title. Just the feeling of working on products that people actually use.

The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

5 takeaways for founders from Episode 168:

• Pick a clear vertical – being generic was the core mistake with ZipDo

• SEO skills transfer: what works for affiliate sites works for SaaS landing pages too

• ChatGPT visibility is buildable – and often comes before Google rankings do

• White-label partners can be a stronger growth lever than direct sales

• Passive income is a myth – even at six-figure monthly revenue

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.

Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

He works 80 percent as a Flutter developer at Next Level Coffee, helping build the next generation of coffee machines – and uses the rest of his time to develop two apps of his own. No exit plan. No full-time ambitions. And with a calmness that has become rare in the scene.

In episode 167 of Happy Bootstrapping, he explains how YAWA and Apol came to be, why he keeps going at 30€ MRR and 200€ in API costs, and what the best ideas have to do with his dog.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 167 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

A weather app that isn’t defined by data

YAWA stands for “Yet Another Weather App” – a wordplay for anyone who still remembers the Java acronym. The name says it all: Dario isn’t trying to build the most precise or feature-rich weather app on the market. His starting point is a different one. The gaming world shaped his thinking – clean, intuitive user interfaces you understand instantly, without a manual, without a jungle of features. That’s exactly what he wanted to bring to a weather app.

The result is handcrafted animations that make weather conditions visible. If it’s raining harder, you see it. If the wind picks up, the clouds move faster. Nothing is generated, everything is hand-built. YAWA has since collected somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 downloads. A small, loyal user base that appreciates exactly this approach.

“I thought I’d just start with a weather app because that’s simple and straightforward.”

It turned out to be anything but simple. The weather API eats up around 200€ every month, while subscription revenue sits at about 30€ MRR. Mathematically a losing proposition – one where most people would have pulled the plug a long time ago.

Apol: a debate app spreading to countries Dario never had on his radar

The second app is called Apol – short for “apolar.” On first glance, the concept sounds abstract: users enter a thesis, and AI personas discuss it from different perspectives. You could mistake it for a niche experiment that fizzles out in some German tech bubble.

The opposite happened. Apol has reached up to 20,000 downloads and about 1,000 monthly active users – entirely organically, without paid marketing, without a PR campaign. What’s most surprising is where the users come from. Not Germany. Not the US. But China, Russia, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Countries with a strong debate culture, with clubs, competitions, a real competitive drive to find the better argument.

“Apol is growing in corners I never expected – in places where debating is actually a real culture.”

That’s the kind of insight you don’t arrive at by writing market analyses at a desk. It comes from putting an app out there without expectations and watching what happens.

80 percent employed, 20 percent free – and why that’s by design

In theory, Dario could lean more heavily into the apps. He could scale back, quit, take the leap. He consciously chooses not to. The 80 percent role at Next Level Coffee isn’t a compromise for him – it’s the foundation that lets him build the apps the way he wants to build them, without the pressure of having them support him immediately.

He works on them Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays. When he feels like it. When he doesn’t, then he doesn’t. And the best ideas don’t come to him in front of a screen anyway – they come when he’s out walking the dog. This rhythm isn’t a coincidence, it’s the actual product. Dario himself describes his app work as a zen garden. Something you tend to, something you tinker with, something that gives you peace – not something that sits on your neck.

Since he started integrating AI tools into his development workflow, a lot of things move faster. Features that used to eat up entire weekends now take hours. That changes the character of the side project: less grind, more craft.

What’s next – and what explicitly isn’t

The next project is already in the works: a skincare app Dario is building together with his girlfriend. Again on the side, again without a business plan. The goal is modest and clear – ideally the apps should pay for themselves, nothing more. No exit, no acquisition, no pitch deck. If you’re looking for the big win, Dario is the wrong address. If you want to understand how to build software sustainably and joyfully, he’s exactly the right one.

“I want to build cool apps that people actually want to use. They should at least pay for themselves – I don’t need more than that.”

In a scene that often speaks about scaling, ARR growth, and Series A rounds, that’s almost a political statement. And it works – quietly, organically, across 16 countries.

NEW: The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

5 Takeaways for Founders

• A good job and a side project aren’t mutually exclusive – quite the opposite: the financial safety of employment takes away the pressure that usually kills creative work.

• UX can matter more than features. YAWA sells itself through animations, not through data precision – and finds its niche that way.

• Organic growth happens in directions you can’t predict. Simply putting it out there and observing is often worth more than any market analysis.

• AI tools are fundamentally changing what’s possible for solo developers. What used to take weekends now takes hours.

• Not every project needs an exit plan. Some apps are allowed to simply exist because they’re fun – and that’s a legitimate business model.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

In episode 166 of Happy Bootstrapping, he explains why AI transformation is fundamentally a human problem – and what that means in practice when you walk into a mid-sized manufacturing company.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 166 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

What Does Kambria Actually Do?

Kambria is part of the b.telligent group and positions itself as a full-service partner for AI transformation in the German Mittelstand. In practice, that means three things: giving organizations broad access to AI tools, training people to actually use them, and identifying processes that can be meaningfully improved with AI.

What sets Kambria apart is the composition of its founding team: the technical depth comes from b.telligent, one of Germany’s larger data and software consulting firms. The transformation and change management expertise comes from Silvano, who spent eight years guiding mid-sized companies through growth processes. That combination makes it possible to go deep on technical implementation while genuinely bringing people along.

The Real Problem with AI Adoption

The obstacles to AI transformation in mid-sized companies are more nuanced than most assume. Silvano describes a split picture: at the decision-maker level, there’s often an inflated sense of what’s possible – driven by LinkedIn posts about AI agents that sound more like science fiction than day-to-day reality. At the same time, there’s a complete blind spot for simple, low-threshold measures that produce immediate results.

On the operational level, it’s often the reverse. Some employees are already far along, quietly using AI tools with personal accounts, shared licenses, or informal subscriptions. Others are starting from zero and bring real skepticism. Kambria has to work with both.

“In roughly a quarter of cases, the process improvements we map out have little or nothing to do with AI.”

That sounds counterintuitive, but it makes sense. When people start thinking about their own processes from the perspective of an AI, they discover inefficiencies that don’t need AI at all. The value isn’t always the tool – it’s the change in thinking.

Pioneers, Not Champions

Kambria’s approach is deliberately bottom-up. In most projects, the team starts with a small group of employees who are motivated and know their own processes well. Silvano calls them pioneers rather than champions – because “champion” sounds too much like sales language.

These people don’t need to be technical. But they need process knowledge and openness to rethinking how things work. With them, Kambria builds early wins. Then those pioneers start sharing their small solutions with their teams – and that’s when momentum builds. Kambria uses that momentum to launch more centralized initiatives.

The Platform: Open Source as Strategy

Alongside consulting, Kambria operates its own AI chat platform built on open-source technology. This isn’t just a technical choice – it’s a strategic one. No per-user license fees, full data sovereignty, hosting in German infrastructure or at the client’s own site, and the ability to combine multiple models – from OpenAI to Mistral to locally hosted options – in a single interface.

For clients with sensitive data, this enables hybrid setups: general queries go through European APIs, high-sensitivity use cases run on local models. One example from the episode: an HR team running open-source models on an Apple Mac Studio.

30 Projects in 6 Months

Kambria became operationally active in October 2024. In the first six months, the team signed around 30 projects. The initial client base came from their own network – the platform was tested internally, contacts asked about it, and early testers became early customers.

Since then, Kambria has focused on two channels: strategic partnerships with companies in HR, change management, and related fields, and physical offline events in regions with strong Mittelstand density. Not the major cities – the B-tier locations where competition is lower and the audience is more accessible.

Bootstrapped and Profitable

Kambria launched without external investors. The founders put in their own capital, and by early 2026, the company was running profitably. Silvano’s guiding principle: projects before people – only hire when the next contracts are secured.

Growth is expected to come primarily from the consulting side. The platform is a tool in the transformation journey, not a standalone SaaS product. Clients who work with Kambria get both: technology and guidance.

NEW: The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

5 Takeaways for Founders

• AI transformation rarely fails because of the technology – it fails because people aren’t equipped or motivated to use it.

• Shadow use of AI tools is present in almost every organization. Ignoring it means missing a critical signal.

• Bottom-up approaches create more durable momentum than top-down rollouts. Motivated pioneers are worth more than reluctant users.

• Open source as a platform strategy can be a genuine differentiator – especially when it aligns with clients’ data security and infrastructure requirements.

• Events outside major cities often yield higher-quality leads than well-covered metropolitan markets.

  ---

  Thanks for reading Happy Bootstrapping Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

  Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

  Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
  Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

The remarkable part: the app is free. No subscription, no paywall, no freemium model. And that’s exactly why it grew.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 165 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

An App Built for Himself – Then for Everyone Else

The idea came from personal frustration. Stephan and his wife had tried various budget apps for years – and always ran into the same problems: suddenly doubled transactions, wrong totals, bugs he couldn’t understand as a developer. In early 2022, he thought: fine, I’ll just build it myself.

Two to three months later, the first version was live. It couldn’t do much – but it let him and his wife track their expenses together. That was enough. Early users showed up, some even paid for it. And Stephan realized: there’s a market for people who genuinely want to track their finances manually.

“I’ve been doing this ever since I started working – tracking every cent. And eventually I got my wife to join in, because I just think it’s important to have a clear picture of your finances.”

The Turning Point: Going Free

By late 2023, the app had stagnated at around 40 daily active users. Revenue was under €100 per month and App Store rankings were mediocre. Stephan rethought his approach – and removed the price entirely.

What happened next surprised even him. Within a year, daily active users grew from 40 to 2,700. By the end of 2025 it was 11,000 – and three months later, 16,000. No paid marketing, no viral moment, no new feature. Just: free.

“There’s no way I could have bought this growth through any kind of marketing.”

The mechanism is simple and self-reinforcing: more downloads lead to better rankings, better rankings lead to more reviews, more reviews lead to more downloads. On top of that came an effect Stephan hadn’t anticipated – mixed households. Someone using the app on iOS recommends it to their partner on Android. Since August 2024, Monee has been available on the Play Store too – and the Android app is already growing faster than the iOS version did in its early days.

Simplicity as a Product Philosophy

Monee does exactly one thing: manually track income and expenses. No bank account sync, no AI categorization, no automatic import. That’s intentional.

The app launches in a tenth of a second. Tap plus, type in an amount, select a category – done. Stephan built it this way deliberately, because he’s convinced: it can’t be faster than this. When you’re standing at the supermarket checkout, you don’t want to tap through three screens.

“You’re standing at the checkout, you grab your phone – and the entry is done in two to three seconds.”

This year’s roadmap is correspondingly cautious: CSV import, currency conversion, more statistics. Features that strengthen the core promise – without compromising simplicity. Because that’s Stephan’s biggest concern: feature creep. He’s watched other apps in his position become bloated, slower, more error-prone over time. He doesn’t want that.

Monetization: Donations Instead of a Paywall

The open dilemma: the free model is his growth engine – but it makes monetization difficult. Once you’ve grown with a free app, you risk rankings and reviews the moment you put features behind a paywall.

Stephan sought advice – including from Fynn Kliemann, 500 euros for two hours. Money well spent, he says. The most valuable tip came at the end: write to your competitors. He did – and has since found a regular exchange with Timo Stübing, the developer of another household budget app. Conversations between peers walking the same path.

His current approach: a donation feature, just launched. His goal: 500 to 1,000 euros per month that meaningfully ease the household budget. No exit, no funding round, no big acquisition.

No unicorn dream. Just honest bootstrapping.

What Actually Makes the Difference

Stephan puts it plainly: growth doesn’t come from a clever idea or a perfect product from day one. It comes from feedback, from years of listening, from consistent improvement.

Today he receives 20 to 50 emails a day. Anything that isn’t intuitive shows up five times in his inbox within a week – and he changes it. This self-reinforcing system of user feedback and fast iteration is what made Monee what it is today.

His tech stack: Firebase for around €20 per month, Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android – developed with AI support via Codex, which he’s been using since last October. His second wow moment after ChatGPT.

NEW: The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

5 Learnings for Founders

• Free can be a business model – at least as a growth strategy. Without a price came the rankings, without rankings came the users, without users none of this would have been possible.

• Solve your own problem – Stephan built Monee for himself. That gives you the energy to keep going through the long stretches where nothing seems to happen.

• Simplicity is a feature – The fastest input wins. People standing at the checkout don’t have time for complex UIs.

• Competitors aren’t enemies – Talking to other app developers has given Stephan more than any outside consultancy.

• Feedback is gold – Not as a number, but as a signal. If five people ask the same question, something is unclear – and needs to change immediately.

  ---

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Over nearly two decades, he built a company together with his brother Felix: two cafés, a roastery, a coffee school, and two online shops. Around 50 employees, close to €10 million in revenue – and not a single euro spent on advertising.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 164 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

A YouTube Channel as the Foundation

In December 2018, the Kaffeemacher YouTube channel had 15 to 20 subscribers. Benjamin made a decision: one video every week, starting now.

He hasn’t stopped since. Today the channel has 131,000 subscribers, over 500 videos, and 35 million views – with an average watch time of 8.5 minutes per view.

“Without YouTube, our German company simply wouldn’t exist.”

The channel isn’t an end in itself. It’s the primary traffic driver for both online shops. The Swiss shop came first; the German subsidiary followed when order volumes from Germany grew so large that shipping from Switzerland no longer made logistical sense. Benjamin’s brother Florian took over as managing director of the German operation. Today it generates €4 million in revenue – entirely through the online shop.

What makes the channel credible is its independence. All test machines are purchased by Kaffeemacher themselves. No manufacturer ever provides equipment for review. YouTube ads are currently switched off. The result: Kaffeemacher has become the largest independent espresso machine testing platform in the German-speaking world, with a 13-page test protocol and university-backed test series.

The combination of YouTube and blog is deliberate. Every video is accompanied by a blog post with the video embedded. When someone arrives via Google and watches the video within the article, their time on page increases significantly. Google reads that as relevance. Video and article end up ranking simultaneously – double visibility, single effort.

From the Roastery to an Expropriated Farm

Kaffeemacher sees itself as a company that manages the full value chain – from origin to cup. Coffee is sourced directly from producers, often through long-term partnerships with farms in Brazil, Mexico, and other growing regions. At the roastery in Basel, every roast is recorded by six sensors and archived digitally.

For eight years, Kaffeemacher also owned a small coffee farm in Nicaragua. That ended abruptly in August 2024, when the Nicaraguan president expropriated 15 kilometres of border territory – including their farm.

Benjamin takes it in his stride. The farm had already been written off, and the experience reinforced his view: roasteries don’t need to own land to have impact. Partnerships built on equal terms are the better model.

“We don’t ask what the price is – we ask what you need for this to work for you.”

This principle runs through all of Kaffeemacher’s sourcing. With an indigenous community in the highlands of Mexico, where they’ve been working for four years, it took four visits just to build genuine trust. Generations of colonial history don’t dissolve with a trade contract.

Purpose Business Without Return Pressure

Kaffeemacher was founded as a purpose business. Profits stay in the company and are reinvested – that’s written into the articles of association. Shares cannot be sold externally. Founders’ shares don’t grow with the company’s value; instead, they can be passed on at nominal value to employees who take on responsibility.

The company is currently in transition: the leadership circle is growing from three to six people, and the model is moving toward employee ownership. Benjamin is deliberately working to make himself dispensable.

“We grow because we want more impact and because we love what we do – not because of any return expectation.”

Annual growth runs at around 25 percent. Faster, says Benjamin, would have meant him and his team falling behind. For him, bootstrapping means more than independence from investors – it means the freedom to grow at a pace that actually works.

NEW: The full episode is now also on YouTube (German only):

Learnings for Founders

• Content beats advertising in the long run: A YouTube channel with consistent weekly output can replace an entire marketing budget – if you’re willing to invest years before seeing results.

• Video plus blog doubles your visibility: Embedded videos increase time-on-page, which improves Google rankings for both the article and the video simultaneously.

• Independence is a business model: Refusing manufacturer deals, declining free equipment, and avoiding sales commissions builds more trust over time than any campaign.

• Pace is a strategic choice: Without external return pressure, you can grow at a tempo that fits your team and your culture.

• Succession planning starts on day one: Sharing responsibility early and keeping share values nominal creates a company that can outlast its founders.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 163 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Path There Was Anything But Straight

The team came together through Y Combinator – three people from different cities, without a shared office. Early on, they raised around €500,000 in outside funding and set out on a classic VC growth path. Two years later, they were nearly at zero. The mistake: chasing the wrong metrics, losing focus on the core product, and running a freemium model that consumed resources without giving enough back.

“Free users always cause the most costs, the most support overhead, have the highest expectations, and complain the most.”

The turning point came from a conversation with Holger Harms, then CEO of Blinkist: go bootstrapped, introduce a premium model, and stay relentlessly focused on the product. The team bought back the investor shares – in what Vanessa describes as a fair and uncomplicated process – and rebuilt from there. Since then, the numbers have moved in the right direction. Last month: €250,000 in revenue.

How Choosy Works – and Why It’s More Than a Recipe Book

Choosy plans weeks forward, not backward. The app combines taste preferences, exclusions (useful for picky eaters), nutritional goals, and a budget limit – then generates a weekly plan that reuses ingredients across multiple meals intelligently. Got leftovers in the fridge? Add them, and Choosy factors them in. According to Vanessa, Premium users save up to €1,000 per year as a result.

“The app knows what a recipe costs, knows what can be reused – and keeps you within your budget. This isn’t a calorie tracker, it’s a real planner.”

The premium model comes in three tiers: €6.99 per month, €49.99 per year, or a one-time payment of €139 as a lifetime deal.

Conversion from free to paid sits at around 10 percent – for comparison, Duolingo, known for its aggressive freemium approach, reportedly achieves just under 5 percent. The lifetime deal has performed surprisingly well: many users prefer a single payment with no ongoing obligation, a preference the team deliberately caters to, even though it generates less recurring revenue over time than an annual subscription.

Distribution: Micro-Influencers, Meta Ads, and Word of Mouth

In the early phase, the team manually reached out to micro-influencers – no fees, purely on a mutual basis. The channel worked because the product solves an everyday problem that’s easy to demonstrate: weekly plan, shopping list, pantry under control. Once you show it once, you already have your audience’s attention. Today, the biggest growth levers are Meta Ads, Google Ads, and organic word of mouth from satisfied users. Brand awareness grew by 150 percent in the last measurement period.

That Choosy has now overtaken Chefkoch in the Google Play Store – without a marketing agency and with a fraction of the resources of an established media company – illustrates what consistent product focus and app store optimization can achieve.

“A great product without any marketing obviously won’t work – but a great product still matters enormously.”

What Comes Next

Choosy is planning expansion into the US market. The decision is strategic: the American market is significantly larger, the app is already available in English, and the meal planning segment is well established there. The team stays small and remote but recently added another tech hire to accelerate product development. The company is structured as a UG based in Bochum. Investor shares have been bought back, and the business runs profitably. Vanessa sees her role as product and growth – and consistently emphasizes that decisions are made when they benefit users, not for the sake of appearances.

The full episode is also on YouTube (german only):

Key Takeaways

• Choosy made the move from VC-funded to bootstrapped – and became profitable in the process.

• The freemium model was a cost driver; it took a clear premium model for the business to work.

• A 10% premium conversion rate shows that paying users validate a product far better than free downloads.

Learnings for Founders

• Launch with a paid version from day one. It tells you whether the product has real everyday value – more reliably than any download statistic.

• Free users are expensive. Support overhead, infrastructure, expectation management – the costs are real, even when no money changes hands.

• App store optimization is underrated. Choosy used it to overtake an established player like Chefkoch without an agency budget.

• Small teams can move fast. Three people, remote, no shared office – and still market-leading in a category.

• Metrics determine focus. The team tracked the wrong numbers for a long time; the turnaround only came once they measured the right things.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

His newer project doloc.io is an AI-powered translation tool for app developers that is just gaining initial traction. In between, there’s a startup he sold, a product that completely failed, and the realization that distribution remains the biggest challenge.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 162 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From the Energy Market to a Backup Tool

Daniel’s first brush with entrepreneurship was Wechselfuchs – a startup for automated energy provider switching that he launched about 14 years ago with his brother Dominik. The idea: use a power of attorney to switch electricity providers every twelve months and capture new customer discounts. After a few years, they sold the customer base to Wechselpilot – not a life-changing exit, but a small return.

The real byproduct of Wechselfuchs turned out to be more valuable: all customer data was stored in Podio, a SaaS platform for SMBs. Daniel wondered what would happen if Podio went down – and wrote a backup script. That script became Cloud Backup for Podio, a standalone product with Stripe integration and a clear value proposition: back up data, browse it independently, export it, and restore it if needed.

“The backup is more of a peace-of-mind thing. Knowing your data is somewhere else. Even if the intern deletes everything.”

Nearly all customers came through Podio’s plugin marketplace – without any active marketing.

The tech stack is pragmatic: PHP on the backend, MongoDB, Google Cloud, and a REST API for the frontend. Daniel deliberately never did a major rebuild, because the stability built up over ten years is priceless.

ValiPod: The Fail Without a Single Customer

In parallel, Daniel tried building ValiPod, a second Podio-based product – a validation tool for cross-field rules. Despite pre-launch interviews with experts, not a single paying customer signed up. The niche was too small, the search term too obscure, and there was no distribution channel. Daniel kept the tool online for free for years before eventually shutting it down.

“My learning: the niche can also be too small. And the distribution game doesn’t always run by itself.”

doloc.io: AI Translation for the Build Process

doloc.io was born from frustration with delayed releases caused by missing translations. The idea: app developers send their language files (JSON, XLIFF) to doloc’s API and get them back translated in seconds – context-aware, because already translated texts serve as an implicit glossary. Unlike traditional translation management platforms, doloc has no separate state, no complex UI, and no asynchronous translation process. Translation happens directly in the build.

The tech stack is modern: TypeScript with the Bun runtime on Google Cloud Run, Supabase for the database, and Astro on Cloudflare for the frontend. Translations run on GPT-4.1 because of its large context window. Operating costs are minimal.

Pricing starts free for up to 100 texts, €12 for up to 2,000 texts, and €45 for up to 10,000. A handful of paying customers are on board. The beta customer is Daniel’s own employer – free of charge, since the idea originated there.

“I’d rather focus on product and tech – that’s what I’m good at. Distribution is the open challenge.”

The biggest challenge remains marketing. Google Ads didn’t work because the relevant search terms are dominated by established translation platforms. Reddit drives some traffic, an IntelliJ plugin for developers generates visibility, and an open-source Angular addon links to doloc. Daniel also tried Product Hunt launches with his brother Raphael – without any lasting effect. His observation: the builder scene there tends to stay in its own bubble. He’s now betting on an affiliate program to reach content creators and newsletter operators with existing audiences in the developer community. Anyone interested is welcome to reach out directly.

What I Learned in This Interview

A product that has been running stably for 10 years at €2,500 MRR doesn’t need to be made bigger. Sometimes a reliable side income is more valuable than a risky growth strategy.

Distribution beats product. Cloud Backup had the Podio marketplace, ValiPod had nothing – with comparable product quality. That makes all the difference.

You don’t need the pressure. Daniel’s “everything is possible, nothing is required” philosophy might sound like an excuse, but it’s a deliberate luxury of indie hacking without external capital.

Learnings for Founders

• Your own problems are the best starting point: Both Cloud Backup and doloc.io were born from genuine personal needs – which automatically validates the core idea.

• The marketplace is your friend: Nearly all Cloud Backup customers came through the Podio marketplace. Platform ecosystems are often the most effective distribution channel for niche products.

• Stability over modernization: Daniel never fundamentally rebuilt the PHP stack of Cloud Backup. Ten years of stability is worth more than a modern tech stack.

• Failure costs little when the cost base is right: ValiPod ran on Firebase and caused no ongoing costs. The only loss was time and mental energy.

• Affiliate programs need meta-marketing: Setting up an affiliate program isn’t enough – you still need to actively find and approach creators, which is yet another distribution problem.

  ---

The full episode is also on YouTube (german only):

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

He founded the company back in 2020 during Covid together with three friends from university. Currently, Visito has 35 paying customers and 154 restaurants on the platform in total.

This is a summary of Episode 161 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From a Covid Night Shift to the First Prototype

Visito’s story actually starts with a completely different product. Sven and his three co-founders Alex, Dennis and Flo had built a social media app called SWOT during their studies – a platform where users could let their community vote on decisions. The app had around 10,000 users but generated zero revenue. When Covid hit and restaurants suddenly had to document guest contact details, an acquaintance called Sven and asked if there was a digital solution.

On a Friday evening at 5 PM, Sven called his co-founders and told them to drop everything – by 3 AM the first functional prototype was ready. At 9 AM, Sven was already walking through Stuttgart selling the system to restaurant owners. He negotiated prices like on a bazaar – €80 at the first place, €40 at the next. His co-founders nicknamed him the “camel trader”.

“Friday evening, 5 or 6 PM, I called my guys and said: Drop everything, we’re building something new. By 3 AM the first prototype was ready.”

The Product and Business Model

Visito positions itself as the “Amazon Prime for restaurants” – a platform that bundles as many digital tools as possible in one place. Core features include a multilingual digital menu with filter options, a reservation system, digital ordering and payment, loyalty stamp cards, internal pop-up advertising, and most recently an AI voice agent for phone reservations.

The pricing is deliberately simple: there’s a free Basic version with a profile and link-tree functionality, plus a Premium package for €69 per month or €699 per year. Currently, around 80 percent of customers pay monthly, while 20 percent use the annual plan. For comparison: one restaurant owner told Sven he paid €10,000 per year to Lieferando (Germany’s dominant food delivery platform) alone – with Visito, even including transaction fees, costs never come anywhere close to that amount.

“We want to make IT affordable and become the Amazon Prime for restaurants.”

Marketing and Growth

At Visito, Sven is the “junior for everything” – sales, marketing, onboarding, support. His three co-founders still work full-time in their day jobs and handle the development. Sales run on a mix of old-school door-to-door visits and social media ads. In Hamburg, Sven printed 200 pitch decks and walked from restaurant to restaurant. Out of 200, five showed interest – the time investment was high, the return modest.

Referrals work much better. One customer near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, who switched from Open Table to Visito, immediately offered to bring in five or six new customers from his network. Sven also organized a hackathon with the City of Stuttgart and DEHOGA (Germany’s hotel and restaurant association), which attracted 37 participants and already produced concrete leads and potential team members.

The Mercedes Severance as a Launchpad

After 14 years at Mercedes, Sven used the severance package as his personal runway. The severance was a standardized process based on years of service and age. According to Sven, the money won’t last five years, but with his wife’s support, he’s given himself a window of about nine months. All revenue that Visito generates goes straight back into advertising – none of the four founders currently pay themselves a salary.

“If someone asks me in ten years whether I dared to do everything, I can now say with a clear conscience: Yes.”

What I Learned in This Interview

Gastro SaaS requires patience: The market is huge – 35,000 restaurants open and close annually in Germany – but the willingness to digitize isn’t universal yet. After five years, Sven has 35 paying customers and is fighting for every single one.

Referrals beat cold outreach: 200 door-to-door visits in Hamburg generated five leads. A single satisfied customer in Berlin offered to bring in several new clients. In the restaurant business, authentic recommendations are worth their weight in gold.

Leaving a corporate job needs a clear timeline: Sven set a time window with his wife, lives deliberately frugally off his severance, and has a clear target: 200 to 250 customers by year-end. There is no Plan B on purpose.

Learnings for Founders

• Use a crisis as a catalyst: The sudden need for digital contact tracing during Covid opened the door to the restaurant industry – Sven and his team built a prototype overnight and were selling it the next morning.

• Keep the pricing model simple: A flat fee instead of per-reservation transaction costs clearly differentiates Visito from Open Table and Lieferando – and is instantly understandable for restaurant owners.

• Let customer feedback drive your product: Visito builds features that restaurants actually request – from the AI voice agent to pop-up ads. The customers are essentially the product owners of the backlog.

• Founder team harmony matters: Four friends, four different minds, but shared decisions – Sven emphasizes that he argues less with his co-founders than with some of his friends.

• Bootstrapping means reinvesting: All revenue flows back into the company. None of the founders currently pay themselves a salary – the focus is entirely on growth.

The full episode is also on YouTube (german only):

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Their main product, a virus scanner for Amazon S3, has 60–70 percent US customers. A story about the 80/20 rule, painfully slow growth at the beginning, and why persistence wins in the end.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 160 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

NEW: The Episode is on YouTube as Full Video Episode (still in German):

The Founding Story

The path to widdix begins with failure. Andreas and Michael worked at a fintech startup in Stuttgart – which didn’t survive. But they took something with them: deep AWS expertise. With this knowledge, they became self-employed, wrote two technical books about AWS, and began developing their own products alongside consulting.

The strategy: 80 percent consulting for cash flow, 20 percent product development for the future. Their first product attempt, a virus scanner for Amazon S3 called Bucket AV, initially brought in almost nothing.

“At the beginning you earned $10, then $20. That’s terribly demotivating because you think you’d have to wait another 100 years for this to become something. But sticking with it – that can actually turn into something after five years.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Bucket AV grew slowly but steadily. Today it’s their largest product, with customers primarily from the United States.

The Product and Business Model

widdix now operates four products in the AWS ecosystem, all distributed through the AWS Marketplace. The main product, Bucket AV, scans files in Amazon S3 for viruses – a niche problem that enough companies have to build a business around.

The product philosophy is radically simple:

“What we learned: Can we explain the product simply and does it fit in three keywords? That’s basically our strategy.”

Operating four products with just two people is a challenge. But Andreas and Michael deliberately haven’t hired employees. Complexity stays manageable, margins stay high, decision paths stay short.

For enterprise customers, ISO 27001 certification was necessary. Cost: around €10,000 per year. An investment that quickly pays off through larger deals.

Marketing and Growth

The AWS Marketplace is the main sales channel. Customers find the products where they’re already looking for AWS solutions. This saves traditional marketing – but also means dependence on a platform.

Growth was never exponential, but linear and slow. That’s exactly what bootstrapping is about: you underestimate how long it takes to establish software in the market. Those who accept that and persist win.

One learning Andreas shares: They drastically raised their prices – and were afraid of the customer reaction.

“We made a fairly drastic price increase and were scared customers would leave – not a single one complained. It’s always a shame you didn’t do it earlier.”

The insight: Most bootstrappers price too low. If nobody complains about the price, it’s probably too cheap.

Challenges and Brother Dynamics

Eleven years of self-employment with your own brother – and never had a serious argument. That’s unusual. Andreas explains it with clear division of responsibilities and similar values. Both want the same thing: independence, meaningful work, no unnecessary growth.

“I can’t imagine anything else anymore. I hope this keeps going well for a long time. Getting hired somewhere – I can hardly imagine that right now.”

The freedom to decide for yourself what you build and how you work is the greatest value for Andreas. No investor, no board, no justification required. Just two brothers building software that customers need.

That also means: inquiries about selling the company get declined. There’s no exit plan because none is needed.

What I Learned in This Interview

Slow growth is normal: From $10 MRR to a real business takes years, not months. Knowing this and persisting gives you an advantage over everyone who quits too early.

Three keywords as a product test: If you can’t explain a product in three keywords, it’s probably too complicated for the market – or you haven’t understood the problem yet.

Raise prices without fear: If nobody complains after a price increase, the old price was too low. Most bootstrappers undervalue themselves.

Learnings for Founders

• The 80/20 rule works: 80 percent consulting for cash flow, 20 percent product development. This way the product business finances itself until it becomes self-sustaining.

• Bootstrapping takes time: You underestimate how long it takes to establish software in the market. Starting on the side and persisting is the strategy.

• Two-person companies can scale: 1,800 customers without employees. Automation and clear product focus make it possible.

• Brother partnerships can work: Clear division of responsibilities and similar values are the key. Eleven years without a serious argument.

• ISO certification as investment: €10,000 per year sounds like a lot, but it opens enterprise doors that would otherwise stay closed.

  ---

  Thanks for reading Happy Bootstrapping Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

  Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

  Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
  Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

The remarkable part: He’s never been invited to a press event by BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, or Opel. A deliberate consequence of his philosophy. A story about authenticity, the long game, and why the cheapest videos are sometimes the most successful.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 159 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

NEW: The Episode is on YouTube as Full Video Episode (still in German):

The Founding Story

The path to CarRanger doesn’t begin with videos, but with a used car problem. Alex and his co-founder Claudio knew each other from university and had spent years buying, driving, and selling cars – realizing the used car market is unfair. In 2017, they founded a company with a service in between. The videos were originally just meant to promote that service.

Then came a problem: A competitor backed by Allianz with TV advertising. “They burned through eight figures. So what? Venture capital,” Alex recalls. The service was discontinued – but Alex was already so invested in the videos that he just kept going. Not for the clicks, not for the money. Because it was fun.

“It took me nine months for the first 100 subscribers. Of those 100, probably 50 were cold outreach in my friend circle. Like: Give me your phone for a second – and boom, subscribed.”

The breakthrough came slowly. In 2019, he could first buy equipment from the revenue. In 2020, he had a full-time cameraman. When that person left, he realized: Revenue stays the same, expenses drop. That’s when it became a business case.

The Product and Business Model

CarRanger tests everything with four wheels – old cars, new cars, used, brand new. The motto: “Everything that moves you.” Alex produces two to three long-form videos per week plus a daily Short. 99 percent alone, all one-take – with slip-ups, stumbles, and hoods that won’t open properly.

The business model: roughly 50:50 between YouTube ad revenue and selected advertising partners. But here’s what’s special: Alex doesn’t take money from car manufacturers for videos.

“I’m not going to be the rich asshole who ripped everyone off. I’d rather have €2,000 less and be a reasonably content person who can still look at himself in the mirror.”

The consequence: From BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Opel, Peugeot, Cupra – never invited to a press event. At 228,000 subscribers. He just gets the cars another way.

Marketing and Growth

Growth on YouTube is not a linear process. Alex describes it as waves – sometimes nothing happens for months, then comes a push. A video about a Dacia world premiere, filmed in 20 minutes between appointments, brought 650,000 views. One of his most successful ever. Videos with lots of love and effort? Sometimes only 10,000 views. “You didn’t even earn back the gas money to get there.”

The biggest insight: Some things you have to accept rather than try to understand. Otherwise you’ll go crazy. What works is consistency – a Short every day, at least two long videos per week, for eight years without a break.

Old content keeps working: A video about a Russian Bukhanka from years ago still brought 63,000 views and €482 in 2024. Alex is building an automobile catalog – eventually a self-running retirement fund.

Challenges and Philosophy

After 16 years in corporate, the switch in fall 2025 wasn’t a spontaneous decision. Alex first reduced from 40 to 30 hours, ran that parallel for two years. Then the complete exit – with eight years of YouTube experience and knowing what he could rely on.

The biggest challenge: Time. With two jobs, family, and wanting to do justice to everyone, he hit 80 hours per week. That was unhealthy. Today he only does CarRanger – and it doesn’t feel like work.

“People give me money to do what I’d want to do anyway. Right now I’m just lucky that people pay me for my hobby.”

Alex deliberately avoids scaling. No head of content, no big production. The one-man-show has a reason: satisfaction over maximum output.

What I Learned in This Interview

The first 100 are the hardest: Nine months for 100 subscribers, half of them friends. Anyone who pushes through that has the right motivation – enjoying the work itself, not chasing clicks.

Authenticity has a price – and a value: No manufacturer payment means no press events. But also no obligation to sugarcoat cars. Viewers pay with their time – Alex is accountable to them.

Old content is a pension: Videos from years ago keep generating revenue. A catalog of thousands of videos becomes a self-sustaining income source.

Learnings for Founders

• Decide early who pays you: Viewers or clients. Doing both authentically rarely works.

• Consistency beats perfection: Eight years without a break, content every day. That builds reach – not the perfect single video.

• The cheapest videos can be the most successful: 20-minute slot, phone video, 650,000 views. Effort doesn’t correlate with success.

• Scaling is optional: Deliberately staying a one-man-show can be the right decision. Satisfaction is also a metric.

• Accept what you don’t understand: Some things on YouTube work without any recognizable pattern. Question everything and you’ll go crazy.

  ---

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Today the company employs 22 people and manages over 60,000 active employees at connected businesses. More than 15 million shifts have been planned. The company is cash-positive. A story about brutal cold calling reality, the journey from restaurateur to software entrepreneur, and a clear philosophy: “Whoever pays calls the shots.”

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 158 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Founding Story

Lorenz’s path to Pentacode doesn’t begin at a desk, but in the restaurant industry. After studying mathematics and computer science, he had already founded two companies, including a restaurant chain with 13 locations and over 500 employees. That’s exactly where the problem lay: there was no suitable HR software for SMEs. The big solutions like Atos were simply unsuitable for mid-sized businesses.

Lorenz started in 2012 with the first version under a different name, and the idea solidified in 2017 before becoming Pentacode. From the beginning, one thing was clear: no outside capital.

“Whoever pays calls the shots – that’s why I never wanted to take outside capital.”

Lorenz has maintained this stance to this day. The only obligations: wages, salaries, and the tax office. No investors interfering. No business angels with their own interests.

The Product and Business Model

Pentacode is an HR workforce management software specifically for mid-sized businesses – time tracking, shift planning, personnel management. The target group: companies that are too big for Excel but too small for enterprise solutions. Billing is based on managed employees.

One third of the 22 employees work in tech. The software currently manages nearly 60,000 active employees and has planned over 15 million shifts. Lorenz deliberately chose to incorporate as an AG (stock corporation) rather than a GmbH – this provides flexibility for the future.

Revenue? Lorenz keeps that to himself. But he shares one figure: the company operates profitably and is cash-positive. For a bootstrapped SaaS company, that’s the most important milestone.

Marketing and Growth

The early days were brutal. Lorenz shares his cold calling numbers with unflinching honesty:

“Cold calling at the beginning: 1,000 calls, 50 meetings, 5 clients. That was the reality.”

1,000 calls for 5 clients. That’s a conversion rate of 0.5 percent. Anyone who doesn’t give up with numbers like that either has tremendous patience or is crazy. Lorenz had both – plus the knowledge that his product solves a real problem. Large HR solutions are too complex and too expensive for mid-sized businesses. Pentacode filled that gap.

Today the situation looks different. “I’m glad I don’t have to do cold calling anymore. New opportunities are opening up that are much more fun,” says Lorenz. The company grows organically, referrals play a major role. The approach: consulting instead of selling. When you understand what the customer really needs, you don’t have to cold call anymore.

The expansion into Austria proved particularly challenging – 700 different collective bargaining agreements made adapting the software complex. German companies easily underestimate such regulatory hurdles.

Challenges and Success Factors

Lorenz names three fundamental requirements for successful entrepreneurship – beyond any business idea:

“You need optimism over a long period of time, resilience, and frustration tolerance. If you get frustrated quickly, you should ask yourself whether you want to put yourself through this.”

Optimism, resilience, frustration tolerance. The entrepreneur either brings these three qualities – or should leave it alone. That sounds harsh, but Lorenz speaks from experience. Organizational oversight during growth is crucial: constantly questioning yourself whether current processes still work.

Privately, he maintains balance with daily exercise, playing cello, and 25 years of marriage. Because entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint.

What I Learned in This Interview

Cold calling is a numbers game: 1,000 calls, 50 meetings, 5 clients. If you know this reality, you don’t give up after 100 calls. Success comes through persistence, not talent.

Independence has a price – and a value: Without investors, you grow slower. But you keep control. “Whoever pays calls the shots” is more than just a saying.

Industry knowledge is an unfair advantage: Lorenz knew the problems from 13 restaurant locations with 500+ employees. He didn’t need to ask anyone what the market needs – he already knew.

Learnings for Founders

• The three success factors: Optimism over a long period, resilience, and frustration tolerance. If you get frustrated quickly, you should ask yourself whether entrepreneurship is right for you.

• Cold calling works – but the numbers are brutal: 0.5% conversion is normal at the beginning. If you know this, you plan accordingly and don’t give up too early.

• Bootstrapping protects the vision: Without external funders, there’s no one dictating the direction. The company grows as fast as cash flow allows.

• From problem to product: The best software is created when the founder has experienced the problem themselves. Lorenz’s restaurant background was his unfair advantage.

• AG instead of GmbH can make sense: More flexibility for the future, even if you’re not currently seeking investors.

  ---

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Together with his partner, he runs the business as a family side project and currently generates between €30,000 and €50,000 in annual revenue. Started with three wines, now 60 in the portfolio. A story about niche strategy, patience, and the question of when a committed bootstrapper should consider outside funding.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 157 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Founding Story

The founding of weinwunder begins with a crisis. When the pandemic shut down the events industry completely in 2020, Andreas needed an alternative. His longstanding passion for wine was there – but online wine retail is a shark tank with established players and million-euro budgets.

“If we want to offer something, we need to have something that nobody else offers – that’s our only chance with a limited budget.”

With this insight, Andreas specifically sought out wineries in Spain and Italy that don’t export their products to Germany. In late 2021, the shop went live – with just three wines. Each one personally selected, tested on site, the relationship with the winemaker built directly.

What started as a pandemic project has since become a real family business. His partner supports him, and the workday starts at 6:30 AM – woken by the cats. “For me, most of this doesn’t feel like work – it’s genuine interest. I’m just really into it,” Andreas says about his motivation.

The Product and Business Model

The weinwunder business model rests on four pillars: the online shop as the core, events and wine tastings as an experiential component, B2B business with restaurants and hotels, and collaborations with other companies. This diversification spreads risk and opens up different customer segments.

What makes the shop special: Every wine in the assortment was personally selected and tested on location. Andreas travels to the estates, builds relationships, and ensures quality. The portfolio has grown organically from three to 60 products – without compromises. Expansion into France is already in the works.

Revenue currently sits between €30,000 and €50,000 per year. Andreas himself calls the numbers “very modest.” But for a side business without outside capital, it’s a solid foundation. The goal is clearly defined: expand in 2026, become profitable in 2027.

Marketing and Growth

In the crowded wine market, Andreas relies on authenticity rather than advertising budgets. The personal relationships with winemakers are his strongest marketing channel – every story behind a bottle is real, every recommendation personally experienced. Events and tastings create direct customer contact and build a community that goes beyond online purchases.

Bootstrapping on the side has clear advantages: no investor pressure, full control over the assortment and growth pace. But it also has limits. Time and capital are constrained, growth is correspondingly slow. That’s exactly what’s bringing Andreas to an interesting turning point.

Challenges and Outlook

After three years of building, Andreas is considering outside funding – despite being a committed bootstrapper. The reason: to take the business to the next level, he needs more capital for inventory, marketing, and the expansion into France.

“I’m 98.9 percent convinced this can work – if we bring the intensity that the capital demands,” he explains his thinking. The challenge with part-time bootstrapping is clear: with limited time and budget, everything takes longer.

But one thing is certain for Andreas:

“This is passion – if the funding doesn’t work out, we’ll keep going anyway.”

Weinwunder is more than a business to him. It’s a passion project born from a crisis, built on real relationships with winemakers and customers.

What I Learned in This Interview

A unique selling point is mandatory: In the crowded online wine market, you have no chance without real differentiation – no matter how good the marketing is. Andreas understood this and delivers wines that nobody else in Germany offers.

Part-time bootstrapping requires patience: Without outside capital and with limited time, building takes longer. But you keep full control over the product and direction.

Passion carries you through dry spells: When the business doesn’t feel like work, you can push through difficult phases. That’s palpable with weinwunder.

Learnings for Founders

• Niche beats breadth: Better to have a clear unique selling point than to compete with the big players. Andreas’ wines are only available through him.

• Starting on the side reduces risk: Your main income provides security for experimentation. You can test, learn, and grow without existential pressure.

• Diversification creates stability: Four pillars – online shop, events, B2B, collaborations – spread risk better than a single channel.

• Bootstrapping isn’t dogma: If outside capital can accelerate growth, it’s a legitimate option. What matters is that the vision is right.

• Quality over quantity: 60 hand-picked wines are more valuable than 600 interchangeable ones. The personal visit to each estate makes the difference.

  ---

  Thanks for reading Happy Bootstrapping Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

  Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

  Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
  Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 156 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Founding Story

Jannis learned his craft at Bild, Germany’s largest tabloid – “that’s where storytelling was burned into me,” he says. In his early 20s, he experienced the online-first transformation under editor Kai Diekmann. Two years later, he was “ruthlessly sorted out.” His next step led him to the Founders Foundation in Bielefeld, where he helped build a startup ecosystem in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region.

From this combination – storytelling expertise and startup DNA – The Trailblazers emerged in 2020. Founded on October 1st, right in the middle of COVID prime time, together with Christoph and Jule. “Ten out of ten people would have said that an external service provider in marketing and communications during such a crisis is impossible,” Jannis recalls. It worked anyway – and immediately.

“Never take advice from someone you would never ask for feedback.”

After three months, they first looked seriously at the numbers and realized: this could be bigger. “Crises are ultimately founder opportunities anyway,” Jannis summarizes his attitude.

The Product and Business Model

The Trailblazers call themselves a communications agency, but that falls short. “Our work must have strategic business impact,” Jannis explains. They don’t work on campaigns – they work on positioning, narratives, and transformation.

One example: For machinery manufacturer Marantec, they developed the concept “from Hidden Champion to Open Champion.” This influences not just communication, but also sales, recruiting, and company culture. For Third Element Aviation – a drone startup – they staged Germany’s first B2B drone flight over a demolished highway bridge in Lüdenscheid. The result: national evening news instead of the local paper. Another example: The “Döner for Democracy” for Aldi Süd – a campaign that emerged from the positioning “Good for Everyone” and generated nationwide attention.

The business model: No start without a workshop. Then unlimited retainers starting at €6,000 monthly. Four-fifths of partners have unlimited contracts. The agency doesn’t do pitches. “When you have a partnership, it starts at eye level,” says Jannis.

Marketing and Growth

Everything runs through LinkedIn – truly everything. Partners, press, applicants. Jannis “played through the game for himself” and from that, the entire LinkedIn business unit emerged. All press features – Manager Magazin, various portraits – came as a result of his LinkedIn presence.

“Don’t just consider that we have two and a half million euros in revenue. That’s solely the result of stories on LinkedIn.”

The key: self-application. “Most communications agencies don’t live the stuff they preach. We do.” Jannis knows what a critical portrait in Manager Magazin feels like. He wrote a book – “Propaganda for the Good.”

He knows the difference between theory and the consultants with 120 LinkedIn followers who want to explain to others how social media works.

Challenges and Positioning

The Trailblazers filter rigorously. Weapons, alcohol, and certain other industries are excluded. Those not willing to “go to the core” don’t fit. The company must fit their own vision – not the other way around.

What bothers Jannis about the agency market: too much confetti on crappy things. “All these metrics are just created so their marketing guru can tell management how great the numbers were.” He wants impact, not impressions. The distinction: Anyone can build a stage and invite 100,000 people. What matters is what you say on that stage.

What I Learned in This Interview

LinkedIn is the only sales channel you need: €2.5 million revenue, zero euros for sales, marketing, or recruiting. Everything came through consistent storytelling on LinkedIn.

Pitches are outdated: The Trailblazers don’t do pitches. “When you have a partnership, it starts at eye level and doesn’t begin with you being the victim.”

Self-application separates good consultants from theorists: Those who advise on LinkedIn should have reach themselves. Those who talk about crisis management should have experienced a crisis themselves.

Learnings for Founders

• Unlimited retainers instead of project work: Four-fifths of Trailblazers partners have unlimited contracts. This creates predictability for both sides and real partnerships.

• Crises are founder opportunities: COVID, Ukraine war – the supposed killers for service providers. The Trailblazers kept going through every crisis and grew.

• Story beats budget: If the idea is good enough, it scales on its own. The drone flight over the demolished bridge in Lüdenscheid brought national news instead of local coverage.

• Positioning before tactics: First understand the DNA, then throw confetti. Without a strategic foundation, every campaign fizzles out.

• Visibility is responsibility: Especially in the current times. Those who aren’t visible leave the field to others.

Happy Bootstrapping is a German podcast where I interview bootstrapped founders, indie hackers, and solopreneurs about their startup journeys.

Over the years, I’ve connected with many successful entrepreneurs who have built e-commerce shops, SaaS platforms, mobile apps, content businesses, or hybrid models.
Furthermore I am a bootstrapper myself and growing my DevOps-as-a-Sercice and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.