Help, we are founding a company (Part 1): The initial situation

My partner and I have been talking about starting a company together for over a year. Now the time has come. In “Help, we found!” we will report regularly on how the process of founding a company works and point out problems and reflect our insights.

For more than five years I have been writing a weekly column for BASIC thinking on topics such as founding a company, business law and digitization.

In the meantime, I have not only founded three companies myself, but have also been advising founders as a business lawyer for over 15 years on all the questions that are on their minds.

We start a company

My partner Conny worked at Apple in Munich and CipSoft in Regensburg before she ran the company “Just Active” for ten years and managed hiking groups with it and organized events as regional manager of the Regensburg and Nuremberg leisure clubs.

Even during the Corona crisis, we were talking about wanting to start a company. On the one hand, that was because we get along really well, and on the other hand, we also have different skills that go very well with a company.

Conny is incredibly well organized and is fantastically positioned when it comes to finances. I, on the other hand, am goal-oriented and good at assessing business ideas. Conny studied marketing, I know the legal aspects of foundations and contracts. And together we motivate each other, are opportunity-oriented and can talk well to each other.

In the past year, the ideas became more concrete, but nothing has really caught on. Recently, however, we’ve been on vacation and tossing ideas back and forth. So it quickly became clear that we had a few similar ideas in the e-commerce sector, which in turn would go well with our marketing and social media skills.

How do I start a business?

And then it started: what type of company do we want, what start-up capital do we need, what products do we want to start with? We also quickly agreed that we wanted an exciting name that didn’t sound too technical (which I would prefer).

However, it was also immediately apparent that there was still a need for optimization in terms of fine-tuning. So I’m quite impulsive and don’t want to think everything through to the smallest detail, but rather get started quickly and then adjust.

Conny, on the other hand, would like to have a fairly precise idea of ​​why we do something or why we direct time, money and energy in a certain direction. We will still have exciting discussions here (Conny had to laugh a lot at this sentence…).

Founding a company: “Help, we’re founding!” – Part 1

Maybe this kind of “live report” is also exciting for you. Then don’t miss the upcoming columns under the title “Help, we’re founding!” here on BASIC thinking. We will then tell you what name and type of company we have decided on.

Also: whether and what challenges there were during the formal foundation and how we divided the management.

And of course we also tell you about the everyday challenges as a founder and couple, which emotional hurdles we have to overcome and what we learn about ourselves as people. It will definitely be exciting and we look forward to taking you with us!

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