Interview with Jimdo founder Matthias Henze [Anzeige]
Do you want to start your own business? Then make it as easy as possible for yourself! In an interview with Jimdo Founder Matthias Henze we clarify the most important questions and he talks about his own experience.
Matze has 18 years of experience with the self-employed and small businesses. He himself has never been employed. Immediately after university, he and two friends founded Jimdo. Initially, Jimdo was a Website Builderthen the online shop was added and today Jimdo is a platform that freelancers, founders and small companies can use to run the majority of their business.
BASIC thinking: Hi Matze! You regularly talk to people who have founded or want to found a company because they are your customers. Hand on heart, can you personally recommend the step into self-employment?
Matze Henze: Yes, definitely! If someone has a good idea, he or she should definitely go for it! It’s so fulfilling to create something of your own. And regardless of who I speak to or which business it concerns: nobody wants to miss the freedom and self-determination that goes with it – despite all the challenges.
What are the challenges that specifically affect the self-employed?
As a self-employed person, you often have to do everything yourself, apart from the actual business. Whether it’s Constanze, the caterer, Britta, the wedding speaker or Moritz with his bakery, they all handle marketing, sales, customer administration, legal issues, finances and much more alone or with just a few employees. If they do all these tasks by hand, they don’t have enough time for their core business. And most of them cannot afford external experts, especially at the beginning.
The solution: delegate tasks to digital tools
And what is the solution? How can founders and the self-employed master so many tasks at the same time?
By delegating the tasks to inexpensive digital tools. This saves founders a lot of time and effort right from the start. The large and medium-sized companies are all doing this, and they have long had the support of powerful digital ecosystems. But the self-employed and small companies have completely different requirements and needs for such services and tools.
What does that mean? Which tools are suitable for the self-employed, what can you advise?
Good solutions for the self-employed are designed in such a way that they are accessible and intuitive, so that you don’t have to spend hours learning the ropes or having any prior knowledge. It’s best to come from one or two providers so that you don’t have to deal with multiple contracts and keep an eye on costs. In short: It should be uncomplicated and cheap.
Jimdo as support for your business
Which tasks can I currently delegate to Jimdo?
Let’s say you want to get started as a fitness coach, then you need a website to present your business online and to manage contact with your customers. You can take them with you Jimdo pretty fast and without programming and design knowledge. Our logo creator can create a professional logo for you.
In order to be found, we automatically list your business in all frequently searched company directories and take over the SEO optimization. You can then offer online bookings via the website in order to make appointments convenient and contemporary for your customers. The automatic customer database makes it easier for you to maintain regular contact with your customers.
And if you later want to sell your own fitness products, for example, Jimdo also offers you its own online shop. You can integrate your social media channels anywhere, for example to direct your followers to your booking tool or your shop.
And super important: your appearance and your transactions on the net must be legally compliant. A user recently told me she feel legally absolutely safe with Jimdo. And that’s true. Together with Trusted Shop, we have built an automatic and warning-proof legal text manager, which not only creates all legal texts from GDPR to the right of withdrawal, but also keeps them up to date. You can really save yourself legal fees like this.
