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This is a summary of Episode 191 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

It Started in Their Father’s Joinery

The story begins in 1998. Simon’s father founds a joinery in Erding specialising in high-end interior fit-outs. Then he is seriously injured in an accident, and for a while the family lives from one day to the next. Simon’s younger brother Anton makes a decision at the time:

“I’m going to build something that’s good for my dad.”

Over several years, Anton and Ludwig study how people around the world invest in recovery. The first prototype is a red light screwed onto a board. The sauna is not designed from the workshop outwards but from the market’s point of view, as all the brothers are working outside the family business at that point. The patent arrives in 2023, and since then the joinery has built only one product.

One Product, Everything In-House

Simon compares the traditional Finnish sauna to a Nokia phone: it does one thing very well but rarely gets used. In his experience, customers with a Finnish sauna use it five to twenty times a year, because heating it up and maintaining it takes effort. The Halleluja Sauna does not heat the room but uses a specific wavelength to warm the body directly, and it combines heat with light, aromas, frequencies and salt mist.

Prices range from just under €18,000 for the entry-level model to €120,000 for a fully equipped Genesis Pro. Orders are financed through deposits, and the waiting time is several months. Research and development, production, marketing, sales and delivery are all handled in-house. The company’s own delivery teams install the saunas at customers’ homes, currently in around ten countries, with the focus on Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The First Customers Came From the Address Book

At the start there was no CRM, no website, no landing pages and no funnel.

“The first customers came through hard work.”

The Bauers called people they knew. The trust was already there, as the joinery had built a good reputation since 1998. Systems and processes came later.

Today, sales are mainly digital, driven by Meta ads. According to Simon, the budget is well into five figures a month, and in some phases into six. Everything is measured: what does not work gets switched off, what works gets scaled up. Simon reckons a customer needs around 60 touchpoints before buying, including ads, newsletters, podcasts, PR and recommendations.

“Nobody gives a damn what we think. What matters is what the market says.”

Why the Trade Fair Stand Sells More Slowly

The biggest surprise came offline. At a good event with an exclusive stand, Simon spends an hour talking to someone who has never seen the brand before, and then has to chase them afterwards. Online, prospects learn about the product in their own time through ads, newsletters and podcasts, and then arrive with a specific order in mind.

B2B is the second circle: physiotherapy practices, osteopaths and hotels. The main focus, however, is on entrepreneurs, professional athletes and individual households. Some customers have already bought their third sauna, for a holiday home or a second residence.

Bootstrapping and Saying No

Investor requests come in regularly, including from customers who are keen to buy in. The brothers turn them down. Instead of capital, they draw on experience through an advisory board that includes former board members of large corporations.

“We’re not here for the quick money.”

An exit is not on the cards; the goal is a business that lasts for generations. That also means passing up opportunities: a general importer for several world regions is eager to work with them, but for now the Bauers are sticking with no. Their reasoning is that if you only build one product, you can build it really well.

When Growth Hurts

The biggest challenge is not the product but the team. A traditional joinery has become a production operation, and not everyone wants to keep up with that pace. Simon compares it to driving at 300 km/h in the fast lane of the Autobahn. At one point, the team even asked for sales to stop because it was getting too stressful.

“Growing pains can kill you.”

Simon expects the company to have around 50 employees by the end of next year.

What I Learned in the Interview

The founding story here is not the product of a marketing workshop. It comes from a real problem in the family, and in Simon’s view that is exactly what creates the trust customers need for a product in this price bracket.

Digital channels can sell very expensive products. The assumption that people need to touch something like this before buying has only partly held true for Halleluja Sauna.

Growth needs people who come along with it. Bringing the production side of a family business along is much harder than winning new customers.

Full Episode on YouTube (German)

Learnings for Founders

• Start with your network before investing in systems and funnels.

• Measure every channel and switch off what does not work, even if it feels good.

• Do not underestimate how long offline channels such as trade fairs take to close a deal.

• Learn to sell and talk to your customers instead of relying on recommendations alone.

• Go where your customers are to understand how they think.

• Say no more often when an opportunity distracts from your core product.

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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 190 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From agency to own product

Dominik’s background is in e-commerce. He founded an agency with two colleagues, and in 2018 a client came along who ran a leasing company and wanted to build an employee PC programme. The brand name came from him too. Because employee benefits interested almost nobody before the pandemic, he gave up, and the agency carried it on.

You can find example hardware in the Shop of meinMPP.

It soon became clear that running a product does not fit an agency’s business model, and Dominik’s fellow shareholders wanted to shut the project down. He bought the platform out, found two new shareholders – one from leasing, one from service – and launched in January 2022. The inherited software had grown organically and became unmaintainable; a complete rebuild with an external partner followed in 2024.

What employees get out of it

The employer introduces the programme, signs a master leasing agreement and sets budgets. Converting 250 euros of gross salary a month buys hardware worth roughly 4,000 to 5,000 euros; depending on income and tax bracket, the saving against buying outright is up to 30 per cent.

One difference from the bike scheme matters to Dominik: with a bike, both income tax and social security contributions are reduced, whereas the employee PC programme only touches income tax. For staff that is an advantage, because pension entitlements stay untouched; employers save nothing on payroll costs. Prices come from the actual purchase price rather than the recommended retail price, so a Black Week discount reaches the employee.

The margin only arrives two years later

The business model demands patience. Apple accounts for 75 to 80 per cent of order volume, and there is little to be gained on purchase – around one per cent on iPhones. The money is made at the other end: after 24 months the contract ends and staff can buy their device at its residual value. Almost 90 per cent do, and roughly 70 per cent order again straight away.

“The principle is simply to push a lot in at the front, so that at the back there’s a warm shower of money.”

Order volume has doubled on average every year so far, and Dominik is planning at least 2.1 to 2.4 million euros for this year, in which the company will turn a profit for the first time.

Why trade fairs do not work and partners do

The first customer was an energy group in Baden-Württemberg, won through a tender against the market leader. After that it got hard: search volume was negligible at launch, and ads competed with the budgets of IT leasing providers.

“I’m not a salesperson, so I’ve had to learn sales over the past four years.”

Cold calling mostly produced rejections, and trade fairs a sobering ratio: around 100 contacts yielded roughly one deal, usually a small company. Dominik therefore stopped attending fairs and built a partner network of benefits platforms, leasing companies and distributors. More than half of all enquiries now come through it, and platforms increasingly approach him.

“We wouldn’t be where we are today without our partner network.”

One person, heavy automation, away from US tech

That all of this runs with a single employee comes down to consistent automation. Employers have little to do: the payroll export is configured once, after which it is enough to approve new staff and remove leavers. One customer with 200 contracts budgets half an hour a month.

The platform is built in-house on Laravel, with Filament for the admin panel. AI is used in development, but with a clear limit: a human always signs off, and vibe coding is off the table for the shop system. In parallel, Dominik is moving away from US providers – Umami instead of Google Analytics, Twenty instead of HubSpot.

“My goal is to have no US tech at all by Q1 2027 at the latest.”

The approach to data fits: employees register themselves, no staff lists are uploaded, and salary figures live only in the browser cache. With banks as customers, that sells.

Bootstrapping and the capital question

There were offers, including one from the family office behind the largest competitor. Declined. The three shareholders now see it differently, because the bottleneck is Dominik himself. A first in-house developer starts at the turn of the year, and the backlog would keep three or four people busy. Research funding for an AI project on residual value assessment came through on the second try.

What I learned from the interview

A commission model with residual value forces you to pre-finance. If your margin up front is thin and the money arrives two years later, you need patience and a clear grasp of your numbers.

Partner sales can replace trade fairs and cold calling. What mattered was that meinMPP integrates technically where other providers only offer exports.

Automation here is not optional, it is the precondition. Without zero admin on the employer side, a one-person company would not be viable in this market.

The full interview on YouTube (German):

Learnings for founders

• Avoid dependency on single partners – several leasing companies and distributors keep operations safe.

• Work out the ratio of trade fair contacts to deals before booking the next stand.

• Look for partners whose sales teams already sit with your target group, rather than building your own.

• Keep onboarding short if your topic drops off the agenda quickly inside the target organisation.

• Store only the data you need to fulfil the contract – in sensitive industries that is a selling point.

• Get help with funding applications and expect more than one attempt.

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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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 189 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From legal tech to innovation funding

Marten started in 2021 with Lexup GmbH and LexHub, a platform to make legal services accessible to small teams. Within months the three founders turned out to want different things, above all on venture capital. Marten was against it, ended up alone and decided to bootstrap.

The pivot came later that year, triggered by an operational problem. Nothing tells you from the outside when a company needs a legal service. With public funding, plenty does: patent databases and visible development work let Marten identify candidates instead of waiting for enquiries.

“re:fund stands for reinvent funding.”

What actually counts as innovation

Plenty of founders skip the topic because they confuse innovation with fundamental research. Germany’s R&D tax credit, the Forschungszulage, asks for less. Three criteria: novelty as a departure from the state of the art, a scientific or technical uncertainty, and a documented plan of development steps.

“You don’t have to create a radical innovation – an incremental departure from the state of the art can be enough.”

The type of risk matters. Whether customers will buy is commercial and doesn’t count. Whether a technical approach works at all does, if described concretely, with quantifiable challenges and stop criteria.

The scheme works retroactively: the law came into force in 2020 and costs can be claimed four years back, so re:fund usually starts in a company’s past.

Half an hour of screening instead of an online form

Around 95 per cent of the applications re:fund submits are approved. That rate is created before the application, not in it. They call it strategic application planning: sign an NDA, spend half an hour in the development work together, assess the potential and whether the effort is worthwhile. Only then comes a project contract. They happen even when there isn’t enough in it for either side, often ending with a recommendation for a different programme.

Paid on success means doing the work first

re:fund is paid a share of what reaches the client, and only once it has arrived. Submit, wait up to three months for the certifying body, build the documentation, file the costs with the tax office, wait for the tax assessment. Only then does the invoice go out.

“We want to work on a success basis, because that puts us fully in the same boat.”

For a bootstrapper that is brutal. Marten won clients, delivered projects and still couldn’t invoice for a long stretch. He paid himself nothing at first, later minimum wage. His COO, Elisabeth Teske, could only be hired more than a year after the pivot.

“had no revenue at all for a long time”

How to spot a good funding adviser

One point Marten makes repeatedly: the market is unregulated.

“It’s neither a protected profession nor a protected term in that sense.”

His criteria are concrete. First, the background of the person doing the work, not the size of the firm. Second, the fee model – anyone earning on costs claimed rather than on the payout has an incentive to inflate positions that get struck out under audit. Third, the scope: many advisers only handle the certification and leave documentation and the cost claim to the client. That is where the risk sits, because the phase one estimate is not enough for phase two.

Crisis-proof is relative

ZIM, for years the most commonly used innovation programme, was paused without warning. The Forschungszulage, by contrast, has been expanded rather than cut by every government so far. The familiar complaint that Germany funds too little and makes it too complicated he only half shares: the burden of proof here stops every marketing agency from declaring itself an innovator.

“So I think it’s a reasonable middle ground.”

The exit he never planned

re:fund was approached several times, initially without interest. At some point the question shifted from whether they could imagine it to what it would make possible. What decided it was not the highest offer but the partner who promised they could carry on independently.

“you can keep going as a speedboat”

The hardest phase wasn’t building the company, but the months before the signature. Marten is open about having sought support during that time.

“It was never the feeling of jumping for joy.”

What I learned in this interview

Public funding is the cheapest financing available to a bootstrapper and still the least used. Not because the money is scarce, but because the barrier feels higher than it is.

A success fee is a promise to the client and an imposition on the provider: he finances the lead time himself and grows more slowly than he could.

The hardest part of an exit often comes before the signature – not in letting go afterwards, but in the months of running the company alongside the process.

The full interview on YouTube (German):

Learnings for founders

• Don’t rule yourself out – an incremental departure from the state of the art is enough for the R&D tax credit.

• Check your adviser’s fee model. Earning on the costs claimed rather than on the payout is the wrong incentive.

• Get the whole route committed to, not just the application. Documentation and the cost claim decide whether the money survives an audit.

• Budget for the lead time on success fees – twelve months between engagement and invoice is easily possible.

• You only keep the company running as long as you keep yourself running. Marten described that as his limit.

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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 188 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

Twenty, Thirty, Forty Projects Became One Product

There was no lightbulb moment. There was a pattern that eventually became impossible to ignore. As Leon puts it, they kept building very, very similar things for many different clients. Data models, user management, permissions, processes, interfaces. After twenty, thirty, forty projects, they knew the recurring parts well enough to pull them out.

Internal toolkits came first, and the platform grew out of those. What Leon now calls his most expensive mistake is not a wrong decision but a missing one: they could have generalised earlier. Instead, a single very large client project tied them up for a year or two.

One example shows what it buys them today. For an optician and hearing-aid group, they built an app that regional managers use to document their store visits. On Pylo, it took roughly a third of the time it would otherwise have needed.

What Pylo Actually Is

Leon calls it an operating system for your company. Technically it is a backend-as-a-service platform: data storage, permissions, APIs, plus a flow builder and a forms module. The reference points sit in different corners of the market — Firebase and Supabase for the backend, n8n and Zapier for the flows, Tally for the forms.

The difference from conventional off-the-shelf software lies in the assumption behind it.

“Our basic assumption is that we don’t know what the best system for a particular company looks like, which is why we want to keep our system as flexible as possible.”

Customers use it in very different ways. About half run Pylo for individual use cases, the other half as their leading system. Some push millions of records through it, and a four-digit number of people work with it overall.

Under the hood: PHP with Laravel, a modified Postgres build, a separate database for event data, and a flow service written in TypeScript. The frontend is Next.js, the interfaces are GraphQL. More notable than the stack itself is one self-imposed restriction:

“We don’t access the database ourselves when we build a new feature.”

Their own team uses the same public APIs as any customer. No internal shortcuts, no second layer.

Billed by Usage, Not by Head

On pricing, Okeano deliberately went against the norm. No per-seat price, no artificially crippled feature tiers. They bill for what actually accrues: data volume, storage, executed flow actions. The base price is low.

The reasoning is straightforward. Seat pricing punishes exactly those customers who roll a system out broadly across their organisation — which is the case where Pylo delivers the most value.

Marketing a Product That Needs Explaining

Pylo has three audiences: agencies, in-house development teams, and IT decision-makers. LinkedIn serves the decision-makers; developers and agencies are reached through YouTube and technical content. There is no cold outreach. Agencies are a special case, because they can be competitor and distribution channel at once — Leon clearly sees them as the latter.

The most common objection has shifted recently. It used to be complexity; now it is the claim that you could just build this yourself with AI. Leon’s answer does not target code generation but what comes after it: an agent works far better with data that is already cleanly structured. That is what the new MCP server is for.

Why the Agency Is the Better Investor

Around 80 percent of revenue still comes from services, with roughly 10,000 euros in monthly recurring revenue from Pylo. The team splits its time about 60/40 in favour of the product, so the revenue mix lags behind on purpose.

There have been offers from investors. Leon never thought about any of them for long.

“Our goal really is to build the best software in this space. And we believe that bootstrapping may be the slower and harder path, but the more promising one.”

His argument against venture capital is practical rather than principled: with VC-funded products, what often gets built is not the best product but the one that reaches profitability fastest. Without that pressure, Okeano can stay in closed beta for as long as the product benefits from it.

Team size is a deliberate choice too. Seven people is a size they are comfortable with; headcount growth is not a goal in itself. In Lippstadt, that has a side effect Leon describes with a wink:

“There are good developers in Lippstadt, of course, but they all already work for us.”

What I Learned in This Interview

A product rarely comes from an idea. It comes from a pattern you have seen often enough. Okeano built almost the same thing twenty to forty times before anything of their own emerged from it.

Services and products are not mutually exclusive. Here the agency business is not a transitional phase but the funding — with the advantage that nobody outside sets the pace.

Discipline beats convenience. Denying your own team privileged database access costs speed in the short term and guarantees in the long term that the public interface is actually good enough.

The full interview on YouTube (German):

Learnings for Founders

• Watch for repetition in client work. Whatever you build for the third time in a similar shape is a product candidate.

• Generalise earlier than feels right. Leon’s most expensive mistake was waiting, not acting.

• Check your pricing model for built-in penalties. Seat pricing slows down exactly the customers who benefit most from you.

• Treat existing revenue as capital. A running services business funds product development without dilution and without someone else’s timeline.

• Treat yourself like a customer. If you use the same interfaces internally that you offer externally, you notice the weaknesses first.

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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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 187 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The Free Tool Came Before the Company

The order of events is unusual. In 2013, founder Thomas Gareis put a free SEO check online, a year before the company existed. He had his own web projects and turned that expertise into something others could use. Only once it was clear that the tool resonated did the software follow, in 2014.

Back then Seobility was a pure on-page tool competing against Ryte, then still called onpage.org. The difference was the price: SEO for small businesses and freelancers who need optimisation but do not want to pay a premium.

Shortly before Matthias joined came the decisive step, from on-page tool to all-in-one suite. Website optimisation feels like a one-off project to many people, something that is eventually finished. Rank tracking and backlink analysis added a value proposition that lasts, and with it a much higher lifetime value.

There was never a viral moment. The German SEO community was initially slow to warm to new tools.

“It really was simply hard-won through our own SEO work.”

One Per Cent Pay, and That Is the Plan

Around 100,000 registrations come in every year, and roughly one per cent convert to a paid plan. What sounds like weak conversion is in fact how the model works. The free checks still bring in the most traffic and the most sign-ups. Reach was never bought.

The entry point for almost everyone is a check of a single URL. The real value sits one layer deeper, in the website audit that crawls the entire site and surfaces problems invisible at page level. Duplicate content only becomes apparent when everything is laid out side by side.

The free tier was almost too generous for a long time. Limits had to be lowered repeatedly because power users were running the website audit professionally without ever upgrading. Support volume stays manageable regardless, because the analyses largely speak for themselves.

There is also a geographic imbalance: English-language sign-ups now outnumber German ones, yet paying customers remain concentrated in the DACH region.

Deliberately Doing Less Than the Giants

Ahrefs and Semrush start in the triple digits per month. Seobility starts at 49.90 euros. Matthias does not dispute that the large suites do more. He considers it the wrong benchmark, because most users are not full-time SEOs and get lost in that much functionality.

“More features inevitably means a worse user experience at the end of the day. That is unavoidable.”

The strategy is a deliberate 80/20 offering: the functions that deliver the most value, and nothing beyond that. The cost is named honestly – customers who develop into experts eventually outgrow the product and leave. The current construction site is the agency plan, which is defined too heavily by higher limits rather than by capabilities of its own.

What AI Has Actually Changed

The obvious expectation was that everyone would now want to know how visible they are in AI answers. In practice, the MCP server is in far higher demand than AI visibility tracking. Customers want their SEO data inside their own agents, not in yet another dashboard.

“For a very, very long time we were surprised by how little demand there was for it.”

Matthias does not see AI making search engine optimisation obsolete. Most web traffic still comes through classic search, and the biggest lever for showing up in AI answers is, of all things, sound classic optimisation.

Bootstrapping on Steroids

Matthias has his own term for the setup inside saas.group. Accounting, HR, recruiting and analytics run centrally as shared resources that a company of this size could never afford alone. The group deliberately buys profitably grown businesses rather than turnaround cases.

“But they do not steer the company. I do.”

He held no equity when the sale happened. He wanted to prove himself first. The company then performed very well, he became CEO, and the window had closed.

“Modesty may be a good quality, but it is not a good negotiating strategy.”

What I Learned in the Interview

A free tier is product work, not a marketing channel. The SEO check existed before the company and still carries the funnel today. That only works because the free tool is genuinely useful in its own right, rather than built as bait.

Fewer features are a position, not a weakness. The idea that choice itself can slow users down is uncomfortable when your own roadmap is full.

Operator is not a diluted founder role. Matthias does not work a 40-hour week and describes his responsibility as entrepreneurial, even though he neither founded the company nor holds shares in it.

Learnings for Founders

• Earn reach before you buy it. A free tool that delivers real value can work more cheaply and more durably than any ads budget.

• Review your free tier regularly. If power users can work professionally inside it, you are giving your product away rather than selling it.

• Differentiate plans by capability, not by limits. Where only the numbers go up, nobody grows into the more expensive plan.

• Stay close to support. Matthias still answers emails as CEO and calls it the best source for what customers are missing.

• Do not trust your assumptions about the market. Demand did not go to the obvious feature, but to access to the data.

• Negotiate for yourself while the window is open. It rarely opens a second time.

The full interview on YouTube (German):

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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 186 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The produce is harvested specifically for them

The most common misconception about Rübenretter is that it collects leftovers. The produce comes neither from retailers nor from a warehouse, but from the field, harvested specifically for Rübenretter. Without that order it would be left standing and destroyed, because the expensive part is not the vegetable itself but the harvesting, washing, marketing and delivering.

“We’re in touch with the farmer and buy up whatever’s imperfect out in the field.”

Rübenretter therefore pays no bargain price, but roughly what the grower would receive for perfect produce. Not every customer grasps this straight away, which keeps the product permanently in need of explanation. How much of a harvest turns out imperfect depends on the weather; Pascal estimates thirty to forty per cent.

Six boxes in a garage

Pascal trained as a retail salesman in his parents’ fruit and vegetable business. He originally wanted to build an online shop for perfect produce, but the cost of printed boxes stopped him. Then the family sold bent cucumbers at the market stall one week because no straight ones were available, and customers loved them.

“And then we basically just started, completely naively.”

It began in May 2017 with around 2,000 euros for cardboard and six boxes a week, packed in the garage behind the market stall. The first customers came through the press, then through influencers, who back then still posted in exchange for a single box. One brought sixty orders in a day, when the business packed a hundred boxes a week. By the end of 2019 it was no longer a side project.

The Covid rollercoaster

Then came lockdown, and delivering groceries turned into a mass market overnight. At its peak Rübenretter shipped 6,000 boxes a week with forty people on the packing team. The fall was just as fast, because subscriptions are the first thing people cancel. In the worst month it was 1,300 boxes, with fixed costs unchanged. Only this year has the curve turned up again.

The subscription is not an optimisation, it is a precondition

Plenty of customers ask for one-off orders. Rübenretter cannot offer them. Order volumes go to the grower two weeks in advance so he can plan what to harvest and for whom. Without that lead time the model does not work, and it is precisely why almost nothing is thrown away. Margins stay tight anyway, because the customer always has the supermarket price in mind.

“The vegetable itself isn’t the decisive part, it’s everything around it that’s madness.”

Cardboard, marketing and the last mile drive the price. Pascal did the maths on shipping: DHL Express would have raised next-day delivery from 89 to 95 per cent, at seven euros more per parcel. Those six percentage points were not worth it.

Bringing logistics back in-house

At the end of 2024, Rübenretter handed packing over to a large organic wholesaler. In January it comes back. The organic certification brought more imported produce into the range while customers were asking for regional sourcing. Many small farms nearby effectively grow organically but cannot afford the certificate. From January the boxes will be packed without certification, but more regionally.

“The really, really big reason is that we simply miss the product and that’s why we’re bringing it back, because we feel our heart and soul is gone.”

Alongside it runs the second brand, fruvi: perfect produce, boxes customers assemble themselves, one-off orders. Exactly what Rübenretter structurally cannot offer.

Two years of migration, then building it himself

The biggest source of frustration was technical. Two agencies spent two years trying to build a subscription plugin for Shopware 6, because 8,000 subscribers paid by direct debit and Shopify could not handle it. Both failed; with one, contact eventually ran through a solicitor. An in-house build followed, and now, in September, the move to Shopify is happening after all. Pascal builds the warehouse software himself these days using Claude Code.

“And now I can build in every little thing we might need, myself, and it makes the work so much easier.”

What I took away from the interview

What stayed with me most is how much the model depends on the consumer rather than retail. Supermarkets sort for perfection because we shop for perfection.

“They’ll look at the pepper three times to make sure it hasn’t got a mark on it, and then take the perfect one.”

That is why Pascal does not believe wonky produce will ever work in a supermarket, and why Rübenretter exists at all. I also found it striking how matter-of-factly he dismisses the investor question: no principle, no ideology, just no need.

The Full interview on YouTube (german)

Lessons for founders

• Press is a channel, not a business model. Rübenretter grew on newspaper and television coverage. Pascal feels the absence of a recent feature in customer acquisition.

• Some constraints are the foundation. The subscription is not a growth trick but the condition under which almost nothing gets thrown away.

• Weigh service levels against cost. Six percentage points of delivery were not worth seven euros a parcel.

• A failed migration costs more than the project. Two years, two agencies, a solicitor, and a legacy system limping along throughout.

• Direct mail isn’t dead, just unglamorous. Postcards to existing customers and their neighbours beat the elaborate mailer that goes in the bin.

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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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

That has added up to 75 million tickets sold, backed by roughly 400 million euros in advertising budget across 25 markets. The team behind it: about 20 people. A story about iteration, about data turning into a business model, and about the decision never to take outside money.

This is a summary of Episode 185 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

A Spanish Fishing Village, a Warehouse Job and the First University Events

Markus grows up in a fishing village in southern Spain. When the family moves back to Bavaria, almost every school turns him down, and his first English test ends with three points out of fifty. A dual study programme at BMW follows, which he drops in the final year. At the same time, at 17, he starts marketing university events – not with flyers, but through Facebook groups and paid ads. The parties sell out, and organisers come back asking for more.

To fund the young business, he works in a warehouse on the side. The first three clients he handles for free, simply to prove the approach works. University parties turn into clubs, clubs into festivals, festivals into international tours.

The Investor Who Bought an Event and Switched Everything Off

The turning point comes early. An investor buys the second event NYBA is marketing – and then shuts everything down: the website, the Instagram channels built up over months, the entire content library.

“And back then I asked myself, why would you buy something for many millions and then flatten it completely?”

The answer he arrives at on his own: what was bought were the data. From that point on he stores, structures and segments systematically – anonymised, never with personal records, but consistently for more than a decade. That groundwork later becomes the platform NYBA runs on today: it briefs content, checks tracking, issues recommendations and forecasts how a ticket sale will develop.

A Small Licence Fee and a Large Share of the Upside

On pricing, NYBA deliberately moves away from the classic agency model.

“With us there is a small licence fee, simply for having the licence to use the platform”

On top of that comes a share of the results. Pure performance-based pricing was more profitable for a while, but too volatile: a strong fourth quarter and an empty January swing too hard to plan a team around. The licence fee smooths that out, at the cost of slightly lower revenue.

The actual sales argument is measurability. For many clients the digital share of the marketing budget has risen from around ten to between 60 and 80 percent – not because billboards got worse, but because digital finally made it visible which euro sold which ticket. Campaigns run on Meta, Google and TikTok, and depending on the market on Snapchat or Reddit. The most successful live entertainment campaign on TikTok worldwide ran through NYBA.

No Loan, No Investor, No Exit

On financing, Markus is unambiguous.

“First of all, we have never taken out a loan. We have never had an investor. And I am genuinely proud of that.”

The platform represents a solid seven-figure sum – paid for out of the running agency business. Investors now knock two or three times a month. His argument against them is not financial: he went independent for the freedom, and part of that freedom would go back out the door with an investor at the table.

An exit is not a goal either. Markus knows several founders with large exits who say in hindsight it was the worst decision of their lives, because losing the company meant losing the purpose. Bootstrapping has a practical side effect here: when an investment comes out of your own pocket, you collect three quotes instead of one.

“And then you look all the more closely.”

Marketing for Themselves Only Since Last Year

Surprising for a marketing company: for years, NYBA did no marketing of its own. Everything came through referrals and existing clients. Only once the platform was in place, and it was clear that additional demand could be served, did B2B campaigns and a sales team follow.

Looking ahead, Markus sees live entertainment as a counter-movement to life in front of screens – rising screen time, loneliness, fewer real encounters. His guiding principle is the one he started with.

“But I believe this iterating, trying to get a little bit better every day, really is the key to success.”

What I Learned in the Interview

Data beats reach: The decisive moment was not a big campaign but the realisation that a buyer was only interested in the data.

Scale only came with the product: As long as every campaign was built by hand, a handful of events was the ceiling. The platform turned a service into a business model.

Freedom is a hard criterion: Markus does not weigh outside capital in percentages but in decision-making power given away.

Lessons for Founders

• Deliver first, market second: Advertising for yourself only makes sense once you can serve the demand.

• Measurability is the sales argument: Clients shift budget to where they see the effect, not to where it is cheapest.

• Price in volatility: Pure performance-based pricing can be more profitable and still be the wrong call if it makes planning impossible.

• Your own money forces precision: Three quotes instead of one, and only the hires you need.

• An exit is not a given: Handing over the company often means handing over the purpose as well.

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-Service and Web Operations Company “We Manage”.

This is a summary of Episode 184 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

The market’s blind spot

Ben and his partner tried everything on offer. Family Wall, the usual suspects, all of it tested at some point. And every single app carried the same assumption: a family lives in one household, the children live there, end of story. For blended families and separated parents sharing custody, nothing was designed at all.

“Every family app we tested and found still assumes a classic family, the kids live in one household, done. And that simply isn’t the case.”

So Ben started building. First commit in February 2026, written in the hours that were left over: an hour in the morning before the house wakes up, two or three hours in the evening once everyone is asleep. Early on it sometimes ran until three or four in the morning. He has since stopped doing that.

What is interesting is what came out of it. FamilyManager did not stay a niche app for blended families. Calendar, tasks, shopping lists, meal plans, documents, chat and a budget overview work for any household. And by now user groups are signing up that Ben never planned for: couples without children and shared flats. He has built them their own onboarding path. The niche opened the market rather than closing it.

Credits instead of arguments at the kitchen table

The feature that shows the product philosophy best is the credit store. Children earn points by completing tasks, parents decide what each task is worth and what the points can buy. Taking out the bins might be worth ten credits, cleaning the bathroom twenty, because one takes two minutes and the other takes two hours if you do it properly. Fifty credits get you an ice cream, a hundred a trip to the cinema, and if a child desperately wants the 1,200 euro Lego set, the parents simply price it at 5,000.

Originally this was a screen time system. Connecting to Apple’s Screen Time API would have meant a lengthy approval process, so Ben built something more open instead. Across all families there are now more than 600 different rewards stored in these credit stores. He does not define what motivates a family. He only supplies the structure for them to define it themselves.

Encryption as a one-person project

FamilyManager is end-to-end encrypted. In his own database Ben sees nothing but the family name and the email address, everything else is unreadable to him. Hosting sits in Europe, backups run automatically, and there are recovery codes plus a repair mechanism that runs through the second adult in the household.

This is the point where he himself is a little amazed at what is possible today.

“An app like Family Manager would have been almost impossible to build alone three or four years ago, with no funding, with nothing.”

The price he pays is support, which he handles himself, one or two requests a week, plus seven test families who check new versions before release.

Free, subscription, lifetime

The free tier covers a lot: calendar, chat, shopping lists, 100 MB for documents, encryption included. Everything else costs 4.99 euros a month or 34.99 a year, discounted in the first year. On top of that there is a lifetime option at 89.99 euros. A launch discount of 40 euros ran on it and is now expiring.

Roughly 95 percent of users never pay. That is precisely why Ben is not running ads yet. At that conversion rate, an advertising budget would mostly buy users who stay on the free tier. First he wants the fourteen free premium days every new account gets to actually make clear what premium can do. Reach becomes worth paying for after that.

Technology is not the problem

Ben develops with heavy AI support, and he draws firm lines. More than 1,500 automated tests run before every merge and every deploy, every pull request goes through two review passes, and database migrations he handles by hand.

“Claude, for instance, can never write to production in my setup. I always do that myself.”

The real gap sits elsewhere. Two articles on iphone-ticker.de lifted new sign-ups from around thirty to between 250 and 300 a week. A week later they were back at thirty.

“If there is one thing we should be getting better at as solo founders, it really is marketing.”

What I learned from this conversation

Your own pain remains the best product filter. Ben did not analyse a market, he used it and kept hitting the same wall.

A sharp niche does not scare anyone off. The fact that FamilyManager is built around two households has not stopped couples and shared flats from signing up.

AI has moved what a single person can build. It has changed nothing about selling. That is the gap a lot of solo founders are sitting in right now.

Learnings for founders

• Build for a problem you have yourself. You will see the gap nobody else notices.

• A niche is an entry point, not a ceiling. Watch who signs up without being the intended audience.

• Lifetime pricing works without running costs. The moment a backend is attached, you need recurring revenue.

• Fix conversion before you buy reach. Otherwise you are funding free users.

• Press coverage is a spike, not a channel. Plan for what happens after the spike.

• Put guardrails where AI can get expensive. No write access to production, migrations by hand.

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 183 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Affiliate Blog to Their Own Brand

Filip and Simon met while studying e-commerce in Würzburg. In 2016 they launched Pfannenhelden.de, a pan review blog funded through affiliate links. Over the years, something accumulated there that later turned out to be decisive: reach among people who take cookware seriously.

At some point, reviewing turned into the desire to do it better themselves. The model came from the US, where Field Company had launched a cast iron skillet via crowdfunding. Nothing comparable existed in Germany. Filip describes his entry into the category in hindsight:

“I thought to myself, how hard can it be to make a pan? Until we realised: incredibly hard, because we had no idea how something like that is produced.”

The brand name came from a product characteristic: the pan was meant to be stubborn – stur in German – not warping, not wearing out. It is cast by a manufacturer that had previously worked mainly for the automotive industry.

Eighteen Months of Groundwork for a 30-Day Campaign

Before launching, Filip read everything he could find about successful crowdfunding. His key insight contradicts the common assumption that a well-designed project page is enough.

“Most people think – and this is the biggest mistake in crowdfunding – you go to the platform, you put your project up, however nicely designed it is, and there are all these people waiting to back crowdfunding projects. And that’s only partly true.”

So the two built their crowd themselves. For eighteen months they documented the development of the pan, posted in forums such as Grillsportverein and on Reddit, and collected email addresses. Roughly 500 sign-ups grew to 25,000 by the time the campaign started. The existing blog helped considerably.

The Kickstarter campaign went live in October 2020. The €20,000 goal was reached after three minutes, €100,000 after thirteen minutes, and by the end of the first day the total had passed €450,000. After 30 days it stood at €1.25 million – more than the two had expected for the entire campaign.

Then the Real Work Began

The money came with an obligation: 18,000 pans had to be produced and shipped while the supply chain for them was still being built. Tooling, procurement, logistics, quality control – all new, all managed in-house. The first backers ended up waiting almost a year for their order, three months longer than announced. The first deliveries in Berlin were made by the team themselves, by cargo bike.

In March 2021, Filip and Simon appeared on “Die Höhle der Löwen”, the German equivalent of Shark Tank – at a point when not a single pan had shipped. Three of the five investors made an offer: €380,000 for 20 to 30 percent. STUR had entered the negotiation at 10 percent and countered with 12.5. No deal materialised. To this day, the company has taken no outside capital.

The Problem With a Product for Life

STUR gives a 50-year warranty on its pans. For customers that is an argument in favour; for growth it is a challenge. Filip puts it plainly:

“So yes, it’s a buy-once product. We want to find new people who don’t know it yet and sell to them.”

The second lever is the product range. There is now accessory equipment, a roaster and, more recently, an olive oil in a squeeze bottle – the first product that actually gets reordered. Here too, validation comes before investment: is it well received, is it reordered, does a custom bottle make sense? The longer-term idea reaches beyond physical products, towards a brand that teaches cooking techniques and brings professional kitchen tools into private homes.

Sales run through the company’s own shop and through Amazon, though at higher prices there than in direct sales. There are no Black Friday discount campaigns; instead, STUR includes an accessory above a certain order value. Filip’s goal for the coming years is clear: to be in one million kitchens by the end of 2030.

What I Learned in the Interview

A community cannot be conjured up on short notice. Those 25,000 email addresses were the result of eighteen months of work plus four years of blogging before that. Exactly this groundwork determines what happens on day one of a campaign.

Crowdfunding success is not yet business success. The €1.25 million was not profit, it was an obligation. The real challenge started after the campaign.

A buy-once product forces a clear growth strategy. Either you constantly win new customers, or you extend the range with products people buy again. STUR does both.

Learnings for Founders

• Build your crowd before you need it. Platforms do not bring the backers with them.

• Document the development process publicly – it creates a following before there is a product.

• Calculate conservatively and plan for the time after launch, not just up to it.

• Bring supply chain expertise into the team earlier than seems affordable.

• With every new product, test on a small scale first whether it is accepted.

• A fair price all year round is more credible than a discount in November.

The full episode is now 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”.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 182 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Electronics Apprentice to the Textile Industry

Raphaela’s path starts far away from bike pants. She trained as an electronics technician and was close to studying electrical engineering when her company filed for insolvency during her second year of training. In that idle stretch as an apprentice, she realized how strongly the creative side pulled at her.

She added a second apprenticeship, as a fashion designer and tailor, to combine her hobbies of design and sport. Her first job took her straight to Engelbert Strauss, then to Schöffel, where she looked after bike wear and team wear for ski schools and the ÖSV. The expertise in functional apparel that later feeds RaphRoxs comes entirely from those years as an employee.

Why a Brand Only for Women

The idea grew out of her private circle. Through a friend, Raphaela got deep into the women’s mountain bike community and started talking there about her prototypes. The response from the other girls showed her the potential. For larger companies, focusing this tightly on one target group is often a matter of time and cost.

That is exactly where RaphRoxs comes in. The main factor is fit, because a woman’s body has to be cut differently and many brands don’t go into that detail. For the pants she offers seven sizes from 34 to 46, each in two lengths – that makes 14 variants. Otherwise tall women often have to shop in the men’s section, where the pant simply doesn’t sit right everywhere.

All In on One Card

Unlike many guests here who start on the side and only later switch to full-time, Raphaela quit and went all in right away.

“For me it was: I do it all the way or not at all.”

Her last day at work was April 30, 2025, and she launched exactly one year later. Still, she didn’t jump in blind: she had saved consistently since her first apprenticeship, brought in a business consultant who took away her fear, and got a financial cushion from her parents. What stands out is how quietly she took the step. From an earlier attempt she had learned that constant reminders of “but you have a secure job” cost energy – so this time she told almost no one.

Sourcing Was the Bottleneck

The most demanding part of the year wasn’t the design – that’s her craft – it was finding manufacturers.

“I stood in my own way a bit, because I was always afraid that the moment I wrote to them, I’d get an instant rejection.”

It was about rejections from factories she hadn’t even contacted yet. The cutting work, which she masters herself, she deliberately handed to an external expert to save time. Production is intentionally in Europe – the pants in Italy, the tops in Portugal. Making technical textiles in small quantities and good quality there was the real hurdle.

The whole thing is capital-intensive. The pant retails at 179.95 euros and sits in the higher price segment, which Raphaela justifies with Made in Europe, small batch sizes and the community approach. Everything is stored and shipped from a 16-square-meter room in her home.

The Community Is the Marketing Channel

Her target group is extremely narrow: female mountain bikers. That is exactly where Raphaela sees the advantage. The first orders came at launch through her community, without her having time for a polished strategy.

“There’s none of that elbowing, actually none at all, but rather this intense support and helpfulness.”

One girl gets into the pant, likes it, shares it – the next one comes along. At events Raphaela stands at the booth herself, with a QR code for Instagram next to her. She finds this more human than running Meta ads, but admits it’s barely measurable – she can only read the impact from follower counts, sales and how busy the booth is. Right now she sells in the triple digits and is still fully in build-up mode.

What I Learned From the Interview

The launch isn’t the start of the work but the end of a long, invisible phase. A year of product development is actually fast in the textile world – from the outside people only see the finished shop and assume immediate revenue.

A narrow target group can be a sales advantage: because the women’s bike community carries itself, word of mouth becomes a growth engine without an ad budget. And the biggest bottleneck wasn’t a lack of skill, but the fear of a no.

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

Learnings for Founders

• “All the way or not at all” can be the clearer path – but only with a safety net. Raphaela jumped in full-time while having savings, a consultant and family backing behind her.

• Outward visibility says nothing about maturity. Expect a year of groundwork to look like standstill from the outside.

• A narrow niche is a feature. The stronger the cohesion of your target group, the better referral marketing carries – especially without an ad budget.

• Delegate what slows you down, even if you can do it yourself. Raphaela handed off the cutting work to move faster.

• Your own fear is often the biggest time sink. A rejection from a manufacturer is not failure – the sooner you internalize that, the faster you move.

• Never grow faster than you grow as a person and entrepreneur. Raphaela deliberately wants to bootstrap step by step.

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  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 181 of Happy Bootstrapping, she talks about an agency model built on execution rather than pretty strategy slides, about an operating system that has been fully shifted to AI, and about the question of what consulting is even still needed for in the AI era.

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This is a summary of Episode 181 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Rocket Internet via SCAYLE to Her Own Agency

Femke’s path runs through several of the defining names in German digital business. After university, she gained her first experience at Rocket Internet and InnoGames before spending almost ten years in the ABOUT YOU world – most recently at the commerce platform SCAYLE, through which ABOUT YOU sells its shop expertise as software to other retailers. During that time she came to know e-commerce not only as a marketer but all the way down into its technical and operational depths.

THREE.E emerged from that circle in 2024. Femke didn’t start the agency alone but together with her co-founders – some of them came directly from the SCAYLE and ABOUT YOU context, while another co-founder she knew privately now owns the operational and commercial backbone. The team has stayed deliberately compact.

“95% Is Execution”: The Philosophy Behind THREE.E

The name THREE.E stands for Expertise, Execution, and Enablement – and the order is no accident. While many agencies make their money with strategy documents, Femke sees the real work somewhere else.

“We always have a slide that says: five percent of the challenge is strategy, ninety-five percent is execution.”

Instead of delivering a nice deck and disappearing again, the team goes all the way into its clients’ operational engine room – brands like Kapten & Son, RYZON, Tom Tailor, MADELEINE, or Gartenhaus, spanning fashion and home & living. The ambition behind it is unusual for an agency: they want to enable the internal teams and ultimately make themselves obsolete, rather than keeping clients permanently dependent.

E-Commerce After the Corona Boom

The market THREE.E works in was heavily distorted by the Corona effect. Many retailers took the sudden online surge to be the new normal and expanded their inventory, fixed costs, and logistics accordingly. Then came the sobering reality: the curve fell back to its familiar level, to the “normal S-curve,” as Femke calls it. What remained were excess stock and structures built for a level that never became permanent. Since then, many projects revolve around the same questions: How do I get rid of the overstock, how do I get back to profitability, how do I refinance the investments from the boom years?

Loyalty Over Discounting

A recurring theme in the conversation is the value of owning customer relationships. Marketplaces let you buy reach, but the valuable data and the direct relationship with the customer stay out of your hands. Femke therefore argues for building your own channels, clean CRM, and an honest look at customer lifetime value. Loyalty, in her view, doesn’t come from the next discount campaign but from relevance – better the right email at the right moment than maximum frequency. Those who truly know their customers have to invest far less in expensively acquired new ones.

An Agency Running on an AI Operating System

Where THREE.E differs most clearly from classic agencies is in its consistent use of AI. The team has shifted its entire internal operating system to AI – from image, ad, and content creation to analyses that used to require specialized tools or dedicated analysts: attribution models, marketing-mix modeling, click-path analysis.

“It makes us more efficient, it improves our quality, and it simply expands the range of things we can now do ourselves.”

In concrete terms, this makes audits, for example, around 30 percent cheaper. That puts the uncomfortable question on the table that the whole industry is grappling with: if the machine takes over so much, what is the agency even still needed for? Femke’s answer is clear: for experience and judgment. AI delivers analysis and raw material; the difference is made by the people who can assess what actually matters. She stays sober about the GEO hype, too – not every trend belongs right at the top of the roadmap.

Bootstrapped, Boutique, and Deliberately Different

As much as THREE.E leans on efficiency, the agency stays deliberately small. Femke founded the company with two children and doesn’t want to build a business that only works through loud hustle culture. For her, growth is not an end in itself.

“I optimize for satisfaction, not for money. Which, I think, is something you can only say once you already have enough money.”

That attitude is part of the business model: a profitable boutique agency that steers its own size rather than chasing it – and that wants to show founding is possible without self-exploitation.

What I Took Away from the Interview

What impressed me most was how calmly Femke uses AI: not as a marketing buzzword, but as a lever that brings a small team into areas once reserved for big players. And yet she never loses sight of the human side – neither within the team nor with clients. The combination of “95 percent is execution” and “I optimize for satisfaction” is refreshingly honest.

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

Learnings for Founders

• Strategy matters, but execution decides – plan less deck, more engine room.

• AI doesn’t replace a good team; it expands the range of what a small team can do itself.

• Owning your customer data and building real loyalty is worth more than any short-term discount.

• Not every hype (see GEO) belongs at the very top of your roadmap.

• Growth can be a deliberate choice – boutique and profitable is a valid goal.

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 180 of Happy Bootstrapping, I spoke with them about how a private Excel sheet turned into a product, and why one simple market price comparison moves so much in this industry.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 180 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From a Crashed Excel Sheet to Software

There was no business plan at the start – just a linked Excel sheet. Michael used it to manage the elevators of his consulting clients, until the whole construction collapsed three days before a family visit. That was the exact moment the practitioner with the domain knowledge and the developer in the family came together.

What began as a stopgap grew over four years into a real platform. What stands out is that the two never started from a startup mindset, but from a concrete problem of their own – and shaped it step by step into a product that now manages more than 320 elevators.

What EAS360 Actually Solves

Elevators are heavily regulated, maintenance-intensive and expensive. Inspection deadlines keep running, maintenance contracts renew automatically, and repair quotes land scattered across email and paper. EAS360 pulls all of this into one place: which unit was inspected when, which maintenance is due, which quote is on the table and what it costs. For operators and property managers who often look after dozens of units from different manufacturers, that overview alone is already valuable. Missed inspection deadlines, for instance, can get expensive and even carry liability risk – reason enough for many operators to switch. The real lever, though, sits elsewhere: in the costs.

The Market Price Comparison at the Core

Hardly anyone outside the industry knows what a repair or a maintenance job on an elevator should actually cost. EAS360 turns exactly that opacity into an advantage by making every quote entered part of a growing database and comparing it against the market average.

“So that anyone who has no idea about elevators can use the system and see: okay, this is actually the market price.”

Just how strong that effect can be, Michael illustrates with a single customer.

“The quotes coming in for this customer were over 600,000 euros. What we actually commissioned was only 325,000 euros.”

That is roughly 40 percent of running costs saved in a single year – not through some technical marvel, but through transparency. The fact that Michael works as an independent advisor with no ties to any manufacturer gives that promise the credibility it needs.

“And that’s the real help in this market – that you genuinely help people.”

Practitioner Meets Developer

The most compelling part of the conversation is the friction between the two roles. Michael brings four decades of implicit industry knowledge that does not translate neatly into software. Stephan has to turn that knowledge, from Galicia, into data models and interfaces – across borders, across generations, and across the gap between the workshop and the editor.

That the two are related by marriage does not make the collaboration easier, but it does make it more honest: feedback is direct, processes grow along with the product, and the family is team, test environment and corrective all at once.

Selling Into a Stubborn Industry

As clear as the value is, the sales side is hard. The elevator industry is considered extremely conservative, decision paths are long, and digital solutions are met with skepticism. Whoever sells here wins not with feature lists, but with trust and a demonstrable result. EAS360 therefore grows mainly through networks and personal recommendations rather than fast campaigns.

In parallel, the two keep expanding the product: with the new app EAS-Y 360, building caretakers can report faults and document visual inspections directly from a smartphone. A genuine IoT connection to the units is deliberately not there yet – first comes the value for the people who deal with the elevators every day, then the technology.

What I Learned From the Interview

What surprised me most was how little it sometimes takes to create real value in a stuck industry. No AI fireworks, no sensors on every unit – just consistently collected price data and a clean overview.

The second point is the division of roles: a domain expert who knows the problem inside out, plus a developer who implements it cleanly, is a surprisingly robust founding constellation. And third, EAS360 shows that a product is allowed to emerge from your own everyday life, entirely without the intention of “building a startup.”

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

Learnings for Founders

• Solve your own problem first. The crashed Excel sheet was the most honest product-market-fit test imaginable.

• Turn opacity into a feature. Where nobody knows the real prices, a simple comparison database becomes a strong USP.

• Find the right division of roles. Domain knowledge plus development skill beats two generalists.

• Do not underestimate conservative industries. Sales are slow, but the willingness to pay is there once the value is concrete.

• Build in the right order. Value for the users first, then the demanding technology like IoT.

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 179 of Happy Bootstrapping, I spoke with him about his business model: why he optimizes for maximum independence rather than maximum profit, how pseudonyms become a form of risk diversification, and why he still writes without a plot and without AI.

Subscribe now

This is a summary of Episode 179 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Recording Studio to Author

Before Alex Pohl could make a living from writing, he had already lived several professional lives. He studied electrical engineering, worked as an engineer, ran his own recording studio – mostly for death metal bands – and toured as a musician. None of these ventures carried him financially over the long run, and the studio never turned a real profit. Only later did he commit fully to writing. What stands out is that he never chased the traditional route through a publishing house. From the start, he accepted that the market decides what succeeds, especially in art, and he built his career around that reality rather than around gatekeepers.

The Breakthrough and Going Full-Time

After roughly two years, he wrote his first thriller. It was unusual for the genre: over 640 pages, a standalone from an author with no crime-writing track record. And it appeared at a time when two growth levers that feel obvious today simply did not exist yet.

“That was before Amazon Ads. That was before Kindle Unlimited.”

Only paperback and e-book sales counted back then, and the book still climbed to number six in the overall charts. Alex is refreshingly matter-of-fact about it, but for him this was the turning point that proved the model could carry him. From there, he moved into full-time self-employment as an author, and he never looked for a publisher to validate the decision.

A Publishing House Run by One Person

Today Alex Pohl is his own publishing house. His biggest project, the Berlin thriller series “Edel und Stein” (written as Oliver Moros), now spans 21 volumes. Distribution,

covers, pricing and marketing all sit with him. The economic foundation rests roughly on three pillars: printed paperbacks, e-book sales and the per-page payout from Kindle Unlimited. Visibility comes from the Amazon product page, the platform’s organic recommendations and Amazon Ads, which he runs together with a specialized service provider. Around a third of his revenue flows back into advertising. On top of that sits a newsletter with about 30,000 subscribers, built up over the years using free books as an entry point – a channel that belongs to him and works independently of the platform.

Pseudonyms as Risk Diversification

The most compelling part of the conversation is his definition of success. Alex thinks in assets rather than in individual sales.

“Every book I have is an asset. It doesn’t belong to Amazon.”

Every book and every pseudonym becomes a self-contained building block, covering different genres and audiences – risk diversification much like a broadly spread ETF. If one series underperforms, others carry the weight. This mindset leads to a deliberate entrepreneurial goal that does not put profit maximization first.

“A different model is aiming for maximum independence. And that is what I decided on.”

As a distribution channel, he remains dependent on Amazon, and he says so openly. Entrepreneurially, though, that setup leaves him freer than many who answer to publishers or investors.

Writing Without a Plot and Without AI

As data-driven as his distribution is, his line on the craft itself is just as clear. Alex writes without a fixed plot and discovers the story as he goes – that discovery is precisely why he does the job. He uses artificial intelligence for research and for designing his covers, but deliberately not for the actual text. His faith in steady, repeated practice is disarmingly simple.

“The more often and the longer you do it, the better you inevitably get, because nobody ever trained themselves to be worse.”

That conviction explains the output. Alex ships several novels a year, and rather than treating writing as a mysterious talent, he treats it as a craft that compounds with hours on the page.

What I Learned From the Interview

What surprised me most was how consistently Alex pursues a different optimization target than most founders. Not growth at any cost, but independence as the top metric – and, derived from that, an entire portfolio of books and pseudonyms that shields him against individual failures. The fact that he treats a publishing deal not as a goal but as an option he chooses to decline flips the familiar “author finally discovered” narrative on its head. His path shows how robust a one-person business can be when ownership, channels and risk are cleanly separated, and when the person running it knows exactly what they are optimizing for.

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

Learnings for Founders

• Deliberately optimize for one metric. Maximum independence can be worth more than maximum profit – as long as the choice is actually made.

• Build a portfolio instead of a single product. Several series, brands or segments act as risk diversification and cushion the misses.

• Secure a channel you own. A newsletter with direct access to your audience makes you less dependent on platform algorithms.

• Treat your products as assets. What you own stays yours, even if your distribution partner changes tomorrow.

• Separate tool from craft. Use AI where it saves time, and deliberately protect the core that makes your work unique.

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”.

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This is a summary of Episode 178 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From corporate career to going solo

Marvin’s path is anything but linear. After stints on the agency side and in marketing at Schalke 04, he spent more than ten years at ThyssenKrupp, most recently as an executive in the steel leadership team – among the top 270 of roughly 30,000 employees. In parallel, he earned a doctorate on identity-driven brand management in professional football, based on a fan survey with more than 6,000 participants.

Two years ago, he made the cut. He planned the transition soberly, using a severance plan, parental leave and a German start-up grant – not a leap into the cold, but a deliberately cushioned start. Since then, the Feedbackdoktor has rested on three pillars: a coaching and consulting business around leadership and change, the book, and an app idea.

Feedback as a business model

At the center sits the topic that gave him his name. Marvin helps individuals, teams and entire organizations make feedback clearer and more effective – through coaching, training, workshops and corporate packages. His understanding of good feedback has little to do with cotton-wool rhetoric.

“Empathy is not fabric softener. Empathy is very clear, and it’s very hard.”

He builds his reach almost entirely on LinkedIn. He has gathered around 25,000 followers there and, by his own account, belongs to the German “impressions millionaires” with seven-figure reach. He uses that visibility as a social-selling funnel – while making clear that the visible success is only a fraction of the work.

“Inbound is just the tip of the iceberg.”

The road to his own book

That very visibility led to a moment many experts dream of: a publisher approached him with an inbound request. The normal route runs the other way – you write a proposal, knock on doors and usually collect rejections. Marvin had the opposite, and still said no, because two clauses in the contract undermined the trust he needed.

Instead, he pushed the book “Feedback sicher geben und nehmen” through himself as a bootstrapping project, self-published via Amazon. The result: number two in Amazon’s personnel-development niche, with around 90 percent of sales in print. While writing, he relied heavily on AI – for research, keyword optimization and product content – without letting it take the content out of his hands.

“Every single word you read in the book was written by me. The AI did not write it.”

He affectionately calls the AI “the worst employee on my team” – useful, but often headstrong. He stays realistic about his goals, too: 40 books sold per month by the end of the year already counts as a major success for him, with the real leverage sitting in corporate packages. He frames the royalties just as soberly – for a debut work, in the usual single-digit percentage of the net sales price.

He also creates visibility through PR: at deutsche-startups he pitched not a single guest article but an entire series, honestly showing how a book project really plays out when bootstrapped – cliffs included, rather than the polished success story.

From an idea to a platform

The third pillar is still under construction. Originally conceived as a feedback app, the idea has grown into something bigger: an AI-powered “HR department for companies without an HR department” – from recruiting through onboarding to offboarding, designed for the likes of a 25-person trade business. It’s being built with a partner who orchestrates AI agents, while Marvin himself remains the bottleneck. The beta is meant to be ready by the end of the year.

That he manages all of this as a solopreneur – alongside four children in a patchwork family and a fresh advisory-board mandate since the spring – makes the balancing act all the more remarkable. What drives him is less a fixed revenue target than the fact that, today, he gets to choose his own topics.

What I learned in the interview

Visibility is groundwork, not luck. Marvin’s publishing offer didn’t come out of nowhere; it was the result of years of consistent presence on LinkedIn.

Control can be worth more than a publisher’s logo. A rejected contract is not a missed success if the terms don’t fit your way of working.

AI is a tool, not an author. Marvin uses it intensively and still keeps full responsibility for every word – a healthy middle path between hype and rejection.

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

Lessons for Founders

• Build your platform before you need it: reach accumulated over time makes later opportunities and sales almost effortless.

• Say no even to dreams when the terms are wrong: trust beats prestige.

• Think in packages, not single sales: for expert products, the biggest leverage often sits in the B2B business.

• Plan your exit soberly: a severance plan, parental leave and a start-up grant can cushion the jump.

• Use AI honestly: strong as a research and production aid, to be handled with care as an author.

Do you have questions or feedback about the podcast?

Feel free to email me or reach out on LinkedIn. I’d really appreciate it if you took a moment to rate the podcast or simply recommend the newsletter to others – thank you so much!

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 this episode interesting isn’t just the product, but how two people run a real cloud across five regions – bootstrapped, and with marketing that deliberately rubs people the wrong way.

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This is a summary of Episode 177 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From a Covid Hackathon to Their Own Cloud

Jonas and his co-founder Lukas Mauser met in 2020 at a large Covid hackathon. By pure chance the two ended up in the same group – and over the next three years they kept doing freelance jobs together. At some point both had had enough of pure client work and started asking themselves which product of their own they could build.

The answer was right in front of them. With their own clients they kept seeing the same wish: a simple, German cloud to spin up a few Docker containers. Not a huge high-availability setup on Hetzner, not a complex AWS construct – just a few clicks. That simply didn’t exist. So they started building it on the side, first alongside their studies, while Lukas was already working full-time. Once it earned enough, they made it their main focus. Sliplane really got going in April 2024.

What Sliplane Actually Does

At its core, Sliplane is a platform-as-a-service. Instead of dealing with servers, reverse proxies, or certificates, you connect your repository and get a running application. Today Jonas and Lukas – plus one working student – look after around 1,100 paying customers and several thousand virtual machines across five regions: Germany, Finland, Singapore, and two locations in the US.

The ambition behind it is already in the claim: European container cloud. For many customers, that’s exactly the selling point. They don’t want their containers sitting with one of the big US hyperscalers, but with a manageable provider they can reach. Jonas sees their small size as an advantage here.

We’re small and German. When someone shows up in our support chat speaking German, we answer in German – and above all, we actually answer.

Growth Without an Ad Budget

Things get interesting with marketing. Sliplane grows essentially without paid advertising. The most important channel is Jonas’ writing on dev.to – over 160 articles and around 50,000 followers. And the posts that worked best were deliberately sharpened. His best-known piece is titled “Stop using AWS”.

Half the people just insulted me, saying I was the biggest idiot. But the other half agreed with me – and that half was exactly our target audience.

The clever part: even the people who insulted him in the comments shared the post – driving even more reach. The AWS article even made it into an AWS newsletter, where someone commented that this guy clearly had no idea what he was talking about. It became one of the best-converting posts ever. The second big growth spurt came from the n8n hype: when many people suddenly wanted to self-host their automations, they could do it on Sliplane with just a few clicks.

A Self-Built Server Stack Instead of Hyperscalers

What sets Sliplane apart technically from many competitors: the two don’t assemble their platform from off-the-shelf parts, they build it. Under the hood runs a self-developed stack based on Cloud Hypervisor and their own orchestrator instead of Kubernetes – on their own hardware, rented from various bare-metal providers. This keeps fixed costs low and was one of the reasons Sliplane became profitable early.

But this very setup also leaves the business exposed to external factors. The recent price increase at Hetzner was a big topic in the episode, because such moves hit the margin of an infrastructure startup directly. Whoever runs the platform themselves also carries the full risk.

The Downside: On Call 24/7 as a Team of Two

As impressive as the numbers are, Jonas is refreshingly honest about the price they pay. Running a cloud as a team of two means permanent on-call duty. When something fails at three in the morning, there’s no one to hand it off to. It isn’t sustainable right now, he admits himself – but it’s too much fun to set limits.

It’s so much fun right now that it’s hard to draw your own line.

He’s just as open about the question of selling: everyone has a price. But they bootstrap very deliberately, not as a fast track to an exit – and right now, selling would mean giving away far too much potential.

What I Learned in the Interview

What impressed me most was how consistently the best product grew out of a problem the two had constantly in front of them. They didn’t have to invent some grand vision – they simply took their own clients’ recurring wish seriously and built what was missing.

Jonas’ approach to reach is just as instructive. A clear, even polarizing stance beats playing it safe and staying invisible. Anyone who takes a position attracts pushback – and on the internet, pushback is distribution too. The only thing that matters is that the agreeing half is your actual target audience.

And finally, the honesty about the downsides: running a cloud as a team of two sounds like freedom, but it also means night shifts without a safety net. That Jonas says this openly is what makes the episode especially valuable.

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

Learnings for Founders

• The best product often hides in the problem you keep seeing as a service provider.

• Low fixed costs give you early profitability – and with it, independence.

• A clear stance in your content brings more reach than agreeable mediocrity.

• Even your critics share your content – pushback is distribution.

• Whoever runs their own infrastructure carries the full margin, but also the full risk.

• Bootstrapping is a deliberate choice, not a fallback on the way to an exit.

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  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

HappySupport was founded in 2025 and financed through a €200,000 pre-seed round – entirely without giving up equity. Right now there are first paying customers and five pilot customers, but no product market fit yet.

This is a summary of Episode 176 of the “Happy Bootstrapping” Podcast (German).

From Wooden Accessories to a Third Startup

Henrik is a serial entrepreneur, and HappySupport is his third company. He started with BeWooden, a brand for wooden accessories that he grew from zero to a seven-figure e-commerce business. After that, he co-founded neuroflash, one of the best-known AI content platforms in the DACH region. For five and a half years he was responsible for marketing and growth there, scaling the product to more than half a million website visitors per month.

After that long chapter came the cut: since March, Henrik has been putting all his energy into HappySupport. What’s striking is that a second big success doesn’t make the third start any easier. Henrik is deliberately beginning again from scratch – with few customers, no finished business model, and a willingness to talk openly about this unfinished phase.

The Problem: Software Docs Are Almost Always Outdated

The starting observation is simple and applies to nearly every SaaS product. Thanks to AI, digital products evolve faster than ever before, and help centers are constantly lagging behind.

“What we’re solving, in essence, is the problem of software documentation that’s no longer up to date.”

Outdated docs have two expensive consequences: more support requests, because users can’t help themselves, and worse answers from service chatbots like Fin that are built on exactly these knowledge bases. That’s why HappySupport connects to the codebase via GitHub and detects after every commit what needs updating in the help center.

The real USP sits in the recorder. It doesn’t just capture static screenshots but DOM elements and CSS IDs – so the tool actually understands how the frontend is built. From a single click-through, such as “how to reset my password,” it produces an animated step-by-step guide for the docs that can simultaneously be embedded as an in-app tour in the software. To make sure AI handles content well, the team built six article templates – FAQ, troubleshooting, reference – and optimized the docs much like a website.

€200,000 Pre-Seed – Without Giving Up Equity

HappySupport is financed through the BW Pre-Seed program. The bulk comes from a loan provided by L-Bank, plus a convertible loan from an angel – €200,000 in total, without Henrik and Niklas having to give up any shares. On board as business angels are Fabian Silberer, co-founder of sevDesk, and Benedikt Brand, CEO of Flip.

For Henrik, the deciding factor wasn’t the money but the network. Fabian is exceptionally well connected through numerous software investments and made intros right away. Through Benedikt, one of the first paying customers even came in. Especially at the beginning, that’s decisive, Henrik says: win the first customers, gather their feedback, and sharpen the product based on it.

Marketing Through LLM Visibility

As an unknown brand, Henrik bets on a channel he knows from neuroflash that is now taking on a new dimension: visibility in large language models. His first inbound demo call didn’t come through Google or ads, but because an AI recommended HappySupport.

Henrik builds this visibility in from the start. AI ideally wants a question answered in three sentences, not in a 2,000-word article. That’s why the content is modular and structured – at its core the same discipline as SEO, just with AI chatbots as the target audience.

Product Market Fit First, Then Growth

Henrik brings his most important learning from neuroflash. At peak times, revenue there grew substantially month over month, while monthly churn was in the double digits.

“It’s nice in the moment to grow that fast, but for me those are always little warning signs. You don’t have a sustainable business model then.”

At HappySupport, he therefore watches the honest signals: real lock-in and customers who choose the annual plan over the monthly one. Product market fit first, then a repeatable acquisition strategy – in that order. The AI-first approach fits with this: a big VC story isn’t on the table right now, all the energy goes into the product, and with AI you can achieve a lot even with a small team. His bar for quality stays high: “If you use your own product really well and truly value it, then I think you also have a good product.”

What I Learned from the Interview

A second success doesn’t make the third start easier. Henrik scaled neuroflash to half a million visitors and still begins again from zero with HappySupport – including the open phase without product market fit.

Business angels often bring more network than money. Warm intros and the first paying customer via an angel are worth more in the early phase than the check.

LLM visibility is becoming its own marketing channel. When your first lead comes from an AI recommendation, it pays to structure content for it from day one.

Learnings for Founders

• Build software docs that move with the product – outdated content creates support load and bad AI answers.

• Choose business angels for their network and access, not just for their capital.

• Watch the right metrics early: low churn and lock-in say more than fast growth.

• Structure content modularly and to the point so AI chatbots can reproduce it well.

• Consider equity-free programs like BW Pre-Seed as a way to start without selling shares.

• Use your own product daily – it’s the most honest quality test.

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  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

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.

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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”.