Startups
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Here’s an interesting take on Germany’s exit tax, which I have written about before: Leave Germany before your business gets big. What do I mean by that? I mean that once you’re a business owner in Germany and your business has reached a certain size, you are essentially barred from ever moving out of the…
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At OpenRegulatory, we’re a small team of 4 people, and everyone receives the same salary. There are a lot of tangents I could go down from here – like: Etc., etc. But those are for another day. Today, I’ll be talking about paying everyone the same salary, regardless of location, and regardless of role at…
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So you want to build a business. You have two options: (This, by the way, assumes we’re already way too deep in the “startup bubble”, where the only two viable business models appear to be based on consulting or a product. We blissfully ignore the wider economic reality that there are lots of other viable…
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No Co-Founder Needed: Being a Solo Founder
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10 min read
You don’t need a co-founder. Just be a solo founder. It’s easy, and it’s great. But, as always, it depends. On what?It depends on you. My point is that the whole discussion of solo founding vs. co-founding is not a very rational one – sure, people online are shouting at each other that one thing…
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This article is a bit of the missing piece on on the differences between a holding-GmbH in Germany versus a “normal” GmbH. I briefly mentioned the holding setup in how to found a GmbH company in Germany here, and I summarized all my “hacks” for founding and running German companies here. So now it’s time…
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Goodbye, DiGAs: The DiGA Bubble Is Bursting
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7 min read
DiGAs are reimbursable Health apps in Germany. Here’s a quick primer on how they work. Let’s say you show up at your doctor’s office, said doctor can say “hey, you’re suffering from depression and I only have 5 minutes to talk to you because public health insurance only pays me a tiny amount for this…
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Notes and Hacks on Germany’s Exit Tax
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18 min read
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…
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Running a Profitable SaaS Company Is Brutal, Brutal Pain
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16 min read
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,…
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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…
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Estonia’s e-Residency Is Awesome And Sucks, Too
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17 min read
If you’ve read my recent rant about how painful it is to found a company in Germany, you probably realized that I was quite annoyed about bureaucracy in Germany at the time – what you didn’t know, however, was that I was also looking at founding a company in Estonia via its e-Residency, or moving…