The AI Agent We Use to Handle Support Requests in Gmail

One of our core principles at Waterglass is to automate repetitive processes to increase efficiencies across our ventures. At our portfolio company Pxl, we provide customer support via email. We also have an extensive knowledge base at help.pxl.to that answers about 60% of all support requests, but guess

The AI Agent We Use to Create SEO Content for Pxl

Following this LinkedIn post from Monday (are we connected on LinkedIn yet?) I want to show you in more detail how I built the Pxl Content Agent, which creates high-quality SEO-optimized content for our portfolio company, Pxl. Why build an AI agent anyway? Let's be honest, LLMs are still pretty

How I build Pxl's SEO Strategy with Mini Tools and Directories

The first couple of months after I acquired Pxl in May, I spent most of my time talking to existing customers understanding how happy they are with the product and what they are still missing. I'm happy to say that Pxl is growing and has been growing steadily especially after

Bootstrap Your Saas (The Fast Way)

Last week, I created a LinkedIn post that generated some buzz (are we connected yet?) and I wanted to expand on it a bit more, because I think it’s an important way of funding a SaaS business aside from VC money. Since the ZIRP (zero interest-rate policy) is over

1 Billion Requests: The Attack on Pxl

Last weekend, Pxl was attacked through a series of high-traffic requests. We are still not entirely sure whether this was a targeted DDoS attack on some of the links of a specific Pxl team or whether it was actual traffic. In any case, what we do know is that the

Micro Interview with Iron Brands from Simple Analytics

Describe what you do in less than 10 words. Privacy-friendly and simple Google Analytics alternative Do you prefer building businesses from 0 → 1, from 1 → 10, or from 10 → 100? 0→1 and 1→10. Those phases are most interesting to me. In 0→1 everything is about being scrappy,

Pxl, the 🔒 Privacy-friendly Bitly alternative?

Have you been thinking about acquiring an early-stage business? Or are you running one yourself right now? Chances are high that you are working on your product's USP, growth channels, and ideal customer segment then. Let's say, the basics. In my opinion, there is a general rule: the earlier the

Add an AI Feature and They Will Come

As you probably know by now, Pxl is all about helping you become a better marketer. We do that by providing you with short links, dynamic QR codes, and Microsites (‘micro websites’ or link-in-bio pages). Our users especially like Microsites, but when I looked closer at the overall UX and

How Pxl’s SaaS Pricing Strategy is Evolving

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about pricing strategies for Pxl, the first acquisition in the Waterglass portfolio I made earlier this year. Throughout the last 1.5 years, a few pricing experiments have been conducted by the previous owner, mostly around custom packages and lifetime deals. These experiments

55 Questions I Ask Before I Buy a Business

When evaluating a new acquisition opportunity at Waterglass, I follow a simple process: asking lots of questions. First, when I check out a listing like the one in the video below, I try to ask myself high-level questions about the business, such as... * What is the opportunity with this business?

3 Things I Started Working on Right After the Pixel Acquisition

After the Pixel acquisition was finalized about two weeks ago, I started working on what I deemed the three most important tasks. Generally speaking, for founders who work on a business for many years, it’s easy to develop tunnel vision when it comes to the product they are building.

The First Acquisition: Pixel

It's done. The first acquisition has been finalized this week! I'm very excited to welcome Pixel (pxl.to) to the Waterglass portfolio. Pixel is a leading short link, QR code and microsite builder for marketers, based in Great Britain (UK). The founder of Pixel will remain on board as an

The Basics of Micro PE: The Right Price and The Right Terms

The market is a wonderful imaginary thing, especially in micro PE. I mean, any deal is about finding the right price for which the seller is willing to sell and the buyer is willing to buy. But between these two prices lies a pretty broad area in which the terms

The Basics of Micro PE: Where and What to Buy

In this edition, you will learn where a micro PE fund looks for opportunities and what criteria they have to meet. I will also dive deeper into some of your most frequent questions, such as: * Who would even sell a company so early? * What do you really get for such

The Independent 'Micro PE' Entrepreneur

For the past 10+ years, I have been working with startups, and B2B SaaS in particular, across different settings: I bootstrapped a startup, At Meta I started and operated a startup accelerator in Berlin, I 'corporate ventured' a startup and I consulted companies in Germany & Austria. With all that experience,

Search-driven vs. discovery-driven products

Whenever I evaluate a venture or consider a potential new product, my first step is to understand how this idea will engage its initial users. On a high level, I categorize them into two groups: search-driven and discovery-driven products. Search-driven implies that users are aware of the problem and actively

"How long are you funded?"

In my experience at Heylog, I often encountered a common concern from larger customers: they wanted to know our financial runway, or more precisely, how long we were funded. This question wasn't just about our current financial health. It was really about assessing the risk of doing business with an

Not everyone needs a bold and ambitious vision for their company

I'm certain that almost every founder has been told at some point that they need a compelling and bold vision for their company to succeed. After nearly a decade in the industry, I can assert that this is largely a myth propagated by investors. To date, not a single customer

Building a business entirely on top of someone else's is usually a bad idea

After last week's news on Beeper, the Android app that plans to unify native cross-platform messaging in one single application, that Apple cut their access to iMessage, I reflected on my time at oratio where we built our own WhatsApp Business API years before Facebook/Meta released their official API

Use AI to enhance your product's capabilities – not to define them

This week's OpenAI Dev Day probably killed thousands of startups in less than an hour. See it for yourself: I'm in a WhatsApp group with a few other founders and we discussed the outcome of the announcements made on this day – some of us even directly affected. OpenAI just killed

New ideas emerge within ecosystems

About 10 years ago I read a book by Steven Johnson named "Where Good Ideas Come From" and the main take-away at the time for me was that no idea is created in isolation, but rather within ecosystems. For example, every app on the market is dependent on the very

Defaults matter

Sometimes little thought is put into the decision on what to set as default option, sometimes however it can be a major factor contributing to a product's success. Defaults matter, because changing them is oftentimes overlooked by users or not even considered to be relevant enough to do the work.

The Independent Technology Business Manfesto

We often hear stories that technology companies "must fundraise" in order to capture relevant market share and become leaders in their industry. This thinking originates from a time where technology companies needed large sums to get started, and then create a business that can scale at little marginal costs. In

Why Nigerian scammers say they are from Nigeria

The other day I read an interesting paper titled Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria? published by Microsoft Research (!). It immediately caught my interest and, to make it short, the outcome is pretty interesting. Although I have to say that it's worth reading the 14-pages paper that

How to block ads on Safari for iOS

I hate ads. I know that for some types of companies they are the only way of earning money, but I absolutely dislike the context switching when consuming content and – generally – the intrusiveness of the whole ecosystem. In this quick post I will demonstrate how you can easily install an

Contracts are not made for when everything is good, but when things turn sour

Of course, not many people want to talk about what steps to follow when they should get divorced or when a co-founder leaves a company. But this is exactly the reason why such contracts are made in the first place. Setting aside emotions and ego, and diligently drafting these contracts

Don't work with assholes

Assholes come in many forms. They can be your customers, investors, colleagues, advisors and sometimes family and friends – though I hope your judgment in friendship is sound. Now in my mid-30s, I've sharpened my skill of saying "No", particularly when it comes to dealing with assholes. And don't get me

One year in a startup is 3 years in a corporate company

Of course, putting an exact factor like 1:3 to life in a startup vs. life in a corporate can only be a guess, but I think the logic still holds true. By the very definition of a company pre product market fit, constant iteration and quick learning in a

Employee departures are tough, but can refresh and refocus a company

This week I let go of a third of the team. I have been thinking for some time now Is this really the right talent? or Although the person is not yet performing, will s/he adapt soon? or What if not, should I fire him/her right away? In

Especially in B2B, you can really sell anything before writing a single line of code

As a product-focused founder, I approach new ideas and opportunities primarily through a product angle. I ask myself, what gaps in the market exist and what USP can be defined on a product-level to solve a relevant problem. One of the strategies I deploy is selling products and services that

Life as a function of time, energy, health & money

As a daily reader of HackerNews, I visit the regularly to browse through latest tech news and other sorts of interesting articles. It's a gold mine of many not-yet-known-to-me niche topics. I love it. One articel that caught my interest this week was about the question 'what do you want?

When to sell stock

Since a few years I have been investing in stocks and ETFs. When I do a selection of assets to invest in, I follow a long-term strategy. For this to work out, I try to answer the following questions before doing an investment: * Do I know the market well enough?

In-person meetings > online meetings

It really depends on the occasion and the context of the business meeting, but my experience is that in-person meetings almost always outperform online or virtual meetings. While online meetings are an incredible powerful tool for talking to and getting to know people at scale, it's in-person meetings where one

Exploring the Dark Cave of the Market: Finding Product Market Fit

Exploring the Dark Cave of the Market: Finding Product Market Fit for Your Startup

How market leaders disappear

A few days ago, the WSJ published a new episode of Tech News Briefing titled How Mobile Chips Overtook Intel and I couldn't help but think that only a few decades ago, many experts would have doubted that giant chip maker Intel would lose massive market shares on the global

What 2-3 things are you really good at?

An interesting conversation with over 370 comments as of writing this article has been going on over the past few days over at Hacker News. User tmatthe posted an article from her blog on Being OK With Not Being Extraordinary and she makes the point that especially on the internet,

How many piano tuners are there in Berlin?

This is a Fermi estimation problem and it's easy. You have probably heard of similar questions (Google asked them in interviews!) and there is a simple lifehack to solve this by finding an answer within an order of magnitude (10^1): How many people live in Berlin: 100k, 1M or

Things I didn't like in my 20s but crave for in my 30s

I spent last weekend with a few good friends in nature where we rented an apartment to hike and explore the surroundings of Berlin. Most of us are now in their early 30s, but some are still in their late 20s. At some point we talked about how our priorities

Apple's house rules

The debate between Hey.com and Apple has definitely dominated tech Twitter this week. In short: Hey.com released a new email client for web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and it's charging a monthly fee for it. This subscription is set up on the web, but Apple insists

How is Telegram going to keep its promise to stay independent and keep its user data secure?

On 12th May 2020, Telegram's founder Pavel Durov posted on Telegraph the following announcement (excerpt): For the last 2,5 years some of our best engineers have been working on a next-generation blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. We were very proud with

The joy of building your own newsfeed

It's probably no surprise to most that algorithms define what we see and what we not see when it comes to news. After all, that's how the constant stream of news and updates keeps being manageable. But algorithms have a dark side as well. As a consumer, they work mostly

How to come up with ideas for your next business

The other day I sat down with a friend for lunch and he said after working for five years at Facebook, he is finally ready to start his own business. "I'm really looking forward to this", he said "but I just don't know know yet what it's really going to

Your SIM card is your identity

I remember the time many years ago when I would get a new phone along with a new SIM card. One of the most important things I did right after registering the SIM was to change the default PIN code of the SIM to something more secure. It was simple

My takeaways from 'After Work Mate' and what they mean for the project #5

The last article focused on the upcoming offline event After Work Mate which happened in Berlin on Wednesday, 15th August! It was finally time to talk to people in the real world to better understand what their motiviation is to join Mate Mate Mate. 🌇 After Work Mate #1: Join us

Coming up: The first 'Mate Mate Mate' event in Berlin and some more promotion #4

The last article was all about attracting more users to join Mate Mate Mate and to get the word out there. For me, it turned that the best strategy is to do an offline event. Why? After I matched another five circles last week (now 11 in total) it turned

A strategy to attract more users to 'Mate Mate Mate' and what I did to improve the workflow #3

In the last article I gave more insights into how the semi-automated workflow is designed from signup to matching three mates with similar interests (which is actually done by myself manually.) One problem is still the match to meet ratio. This is the rate from matching a circle of three

Creating a landing page without coding and a new branding for the project #2

In the first article I kicked off the 'Coffee Circle' side project and gave you a bit more context about the idea and what happened so far. The idea for a service that would match like-minded entrepreneurs to form a circle emerged already years ago. A couple of months back

The kick-off for my side project #1

Not a long time ago I moved (again) to Berlin after working on oratio and ChatbotConf for the past three years. It took me some time to get settled as it was definitely a challenge to find a decent apartment. But thanks to my friends and their support, I was

Ending oratio

Today, I'm turning 30 and I would like to share with you my journey of ending oratio over the last couple of months. As some of you already know, my co-founder David and I phased out our work at oratio over the past few months since we had to let

After two years in, this is what I learned from organizing ChatbotConf, an international tech conference

Just recently in October 2017, we hosted the second edition of ChatbotConf in Vienna. We, that is oratio, a platform for business-to-consumer communication on top of messengers. Organizing tech conferences was therefore never the core of our business, but in June 2016 we figured that bringing together people at an

East Africa through Western eyes: startups & entrepreneurship

Every country has its own entrepreneurial spirit. While many trends and best practices such as the Lean Startup model are considered as common knowledge, their execution varies between countries, cultures and environments. The Kenyan entrepreneurial culture is surprisingly different on one side and surprisingly common on the other side, compared

East Africa through Western eyes: society & technology

About a week ago I embarked on a personal mission to better understand the East African tech and startup scene respectively. My goal was to talk to as many local stakeholders as possible and all in all I got 11 meetings with local startups, developers, expats, investors, initiatives (Internet.org)

Discovering digital Africa

Over the last years working on oratio and several other projects I started to become increasingly interested in digitally emerging markets such as South America, Eastern Europe, South East Asia and Africa. The latter has caught my interest in particular. I realized that most of the entrepreneurs I know in

🎥 Adam Curtis – HyperNormalisation

Yesterday I discovered a documentary that is worth watching if you have a couple of hours available. In its full length of about 2h 40m, Adam Curties explains how in the mid 70s politicans and capitalists – willingly and unwillingly – started to create a different version of today's society and how

The definitive list auf VCs in Austria

Pretty much every time I talk to other founders in Austria, the question about Austria's investors pops up pretty quickly and I repeatedly hear things like It's extra harder to raise money in Vienna compared to Berlin or London Agreed I sent my deck to Hansi but he didn't get