About me
Hey, I’m Tobi. 👋
I consider myself to be a European, born in Germany, primary school in Switzerland, highschool in Sweden, back in Germany since then. In 2011 I was fortunate enough to be around entrepreneurial people as I finished my engineering degree in Hamburg and a side project with my co-founders Nils and Lucas turned into a business within weeks.
Since then, we’ve successfully raised funds and completely failed at it, too. We built a direct sales team and then transitioned to a fully online, inbound marketing process. We’ve switched customer focus from very traditional mechanical engineers to hipster creative agencies. We started off wearing shirts and sometimes even suits to the office (honestly 🤦♂️) and today a hoodie is considered professional attire. From being chronically broke to investing 7 figures per year into new product development out of our own cash flows — it has been something of a journey.
What we do? At HQLabs we build and run B2B-SaaS with a team of around 30 engineers, marketers and consultants. Our original product “the HQ” is one of the top 3 ERP solutions for professional services and creative agencies in the German speaking markets (20k+ paid users). Our second baby “awork” is a project management and team organisation tool that enables teams to adapt and work productively in today’s fluid work environment (500+ teams currently sign up every week).
What I love about being an entrepreneur: The challenge, the endless learning and the luxury of choosing who I’d like to work with.
What I hate about being an entrepreneur: Not much, but I’d like to be more flexible.
As first time founders you tend to get used to learning everything and knowing nothing. About anything. And what you thought you knew usually turns out to be wrong. Fortunately enough, at some point that perpetual circle of trial, error & repeat actually starts to show results. And finally, I got invited to podcasts, guest lectures and found myself tutoring accelerator batches — without paying for the exposure. 😱
So we realised: There are a couple of things that we actually got right over the years and together with the background leading up to them, they are what we consider to be “i wish someone had told us about that” topics.
In that spirit, I’m going to publish a series of decidedly long-form articles here on Medium describing our business development, operations, culture etc. I’ll get into some of the nitty gritty details of how we organise a (awesome!) SaaS controlling process as well as explain the values we try to follow when making cultural decisions — including templates, lessons learned and more. We’re not Salesforce or Dropbox (yet 😉) but I’d like to offer something often lacking from the unicorn origin stories: helpful advice. For two groups especially:
- companies in the 10 to 50 FTE range that look for actual best practice
- everyone interested in the quest for the best way to work and how to develop the future of work in a time where its changing quickly
I really want this to be helpful. So if you think it’s not — please let me know. I’m a big boy, I can take it. Do I also want to build an audience, a personal brand and get you all to sign up for our products? Hell, yeah! #marketer4ever 💜😘
