Startups
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Don’t Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
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15 min read
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…