Bernhard Hauser

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Bernhard Hauser

Bernhard Hauser

📍 Vienna, Austria https://www.hauser.io

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