Startups

  • Disclaimer as always: I’m not a tax advisor, and this is not tax advice. I’m simply sharing my notes with you so that you’ll hopefully save some time when researching your own exit tax situation in Germany (likely with a tax advisor). Cool! With that out of the way, let’s get right into it. What…

  • You might think that running a SaaS business is great. And you’d not be alone! Every software developer, Indiehacker and would-be startup founder is thinking like “oh man, working at <boring day job> sucks, but if I just had a SaaS, I could just lean back and enjoy that sweet, recurring revenue”. The reality, however,…

  • I’ve been running OpenRegulatory for ~5 years now. It’s profitable, there are five people working here, and I bootstrapped all of it, so I still own 100% of the company, with zero investors. Cool, great, well done dude, blablabla.. Anyway, in the meantime, a few people approached me on how to found a company in…

  • While Estonia has famously introduced its e-residency which enables future founders to incorporate their company in minutes, things are still quite different here in Good Old Germany. Germany has a reputation for precision and adhering to rules. I’m not sure how any of these aspects apply to the founding of companies though. It’s just damn…

  • I see many founders focusing on the wrong things when building their startup. I briefly mentioned this observation in my other post. Here’s a more expanded list of things which don’t matter. All of this is my personal opinion, of course – but I thought I’d share it because not many people state this publicly, yet…

  • I’ve talked to quite a few people who were considering founding their own startups. Many of them were quite inexperienced regarding, well, everything, as they were either fresh out of University or currently in a day job which was completely unrelated to startups, the economy and broader reality (mostly doctors). All of them tell me…

  • Today is my last day at Merantix Healthcare. While I am very sad to leave behind a stellar team which I helped build, it’s the right thing for me to do. Why? At any company, there are multiple projects going on: Developing a product, getting regulatory approval, recruiting for a team.. you get it. Whatever…

  • Let’s look at how most software is developed. I’m not talking about those shiny SaaS products like Slack. Those were built for developers, by other developers. No, I’m talking about the large underwater iceberg of boring software running enterprises, governments, hospitals and nuclear reactors. Real-world software. Software outside the Silicon Valley tech bubble. How does any such…

  • Recently, one of my posts made Hacker News #1. That brought back childhood memories. The Paidmail Site When I was thirteen, I launched a hacky Paidmail site. The concept was simple: You signed up to receive ad e-mails. At the end of the month, you got money in proportion to how many e-mails you had received. How…

  • I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein [1]. I was deeply impressed by the section about Gunpei Yokoi, the guy at Nintendo who was the driving force behind the NES and Game Boy. I have fond memories of the Game Boy; everyone who was a kid in the nineties does. This awesome thing you could hold in our hands,…