Chapter 4: Starting Up

From a university project to a game-changing startup, this chapter reveals the chaos, creativity, and courage it takes to build a business from scratch. If you’ve ever wondered how dreams take flight, this one’s for you.

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Transcript

“Four software engineers starting a company? This can never work.”

That was the common reaction when people first learned about our founding team. In many ways, we were an unusual, even improbable group to start a company. On paper, we couldn’t have seemed more similar - four computer scientists, all of us white, male, German, and in our mid-twenties. We had all come from the same university, and none of us had entrepreneurial experience. By typical standards, we were about as homogenous a group as you could find. Yet, despite these surface-level similarities, our team functioned well precisely because we each brought a unique approach to the table.

Each of us had our own way of tackling challenges, and it was exactly these differences, combined with a deep trust in each other, that shaped our core culture. Our team was strongest when we brought together our different perspectives. 

An experienced entrepreneur later told me that a successful founding team needs four core characters to succeed: someone like James Bond, who’s fearless and willing to take risks, always ready to fight; a Gyro Gearloose, who generates creative, even wild ideas; a Willy Brandt, who unites the team and keeps harmony; and an Albert Einstein, who questions everything, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Our group embodied each of these characters well and this dynamic helped us to thrive. It balanced our risks with caution; our boldness with thoughtfulness; our ambition with care for the team. While our backgrounds and technical skills were similar, these character differences created a team where each of us could lean into our strengths and learn from the strengths of others. In moments of doubt, when we questioned whether four engineers with similar backgrounds could create a successful company, it was these complementary roles that pulled us through. We may not have started as the most diverse team on paper, but our diversity of thought, character, and approach to challenges became one of our greatest assets.

But first things first - we needed a name for the company.

“Oryx” held a lot of meaning for us. In many ways, it symbolized the project’s high energy and collaborative nature. We liked the idea of building our company brand around something familiar, but it wasn’t meant to be. The trademark for “Oryx” was already taken. I’d watched a friend go through the costly, frustrating process of rebranding their business after a trademark issue, and we didn’t want to face the same setback. It was disappointing, but we quickly realized this was a chance to create a name that reflected the direction we wanted to go.

With a small university grant of €2,000 euros in hand, we hired a local creative agency to help us come up with a new name and logo. The branding workshop with the agency was an unexpectedly fun exercise, forcing us to think in metaphors about what we wanted the company to represent. 

Are we a flower or are we a tree? Or rather a squirrel climbing up the tree? It was a fun workshop. We decided that we wanted to be a sign post, guiding companies into the right direction. Sign post translated to Italian is “segna via”. We just changed two letters to make it sound more English and, voila, “Signavio” was born.

We searched Signavio on Google and did not find any website that used this word. Perfect. The same day, we registered the trademark and all important Internet domains.

It was a small but meaningful win - it felt like we were building a real foundation. For the logo, we wanted to keep a nod to our origins in Oryx. The gazelle had become a symbol for the project, representing agility and grace, so we decided to incorporate a sleeker, more refined version into the logo.

Even with the name, logo, and trademark in place, we weren’t yet convinced that Signavio was ready to launch as a formal business. It still felt, in some ways, like a student project. Making this transition would mean serious commitments for all of us. Torben would have to leave his current job, and Nico, Willi, and I would need to shift fully from the academic world into the startup mindset. We all knew it was a big leap, and none of us wanted to jump without a clear reason. 

We set ourselves two goals as a way of testing our commitment. First, we would need to find a paying customer, someone outside our university network willing to invest in our vision. Second, we’d need to secure a government grant that would cover our first year of operations.

These goals gave us a concrete way to measure whether our idea had traction. If we achieved just one of them, we’d move forward with the business. Both seemed like long shots, but we were ready to take the chance. 

AOK Brandenburg represented the ideal first prospect for us - a large, established organization facing significant transformation challenges that aligned perfectly with what we hoped Signavio could solve. We knew their head of process management, Norbert Sandau, from a prior research project. Having an established relationship with him was a huge advantage, and he was open to meeting us, largely because their headquarters were right around the corner from HPI. It seemed like a natural fit.

AOK Brandenburg was the leading health insurance provider in the state, and they were in the midst of a transformation effort. Their entire organization was bracing for substantial change. They were about to merge with AOK Berlin, which meant combining two large, complex organizations into one unified entity. Between the two, they had thousands of employees who would need to adapt to a new structure, a new set of processes, and a new way of working. While both branches essentially provided the same services, they operated with distinct processes that would need to be reconciled.

On top of the merger, AOK was implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. This was a significant endeavor in itself, as it would require them to reconfigure many of their existing processes to fit the system’s framework. They also had regulatory changes to manage, which added yet another layer of complexity. Public health insurance in Germany was under increasing pressure to become more efficient as budgets tightened, so AOK was also working against efficiency targets to reduce costs. All these factors created a “perfect storm” of business process transformation needs. They couldn’t afford to handle these changes inefficiently, and they needed a solution that would help them streamline and unify their processes across the organization.

However, AOK wasn’t starting from scratch in terms of process management. They were already using ARIS, a powerful process management software from Software AG, which was the market leader at the time. ARIS had a robust suite of tools, and many large organizations used it for process modeling and analysis. But the traditional model was expert-driven, and it required a team of trained specialists to handle the complex software. AOK Brandenburg’s experience with ARIS was typical: a small number of experts could use the software, but this didn’t support widespread involvement from employees. For an organization facing the level of change AOK was, having only a handful of people engaged in process management was a limiting factor.

We pitched Signavio to AOK with a very different vision. Our platform was designed to be accessible to a broad range of users, not just process management experts. We wanted to make process management something everyone could participate in, regardless of their technical background. This resonated with Norbert and his team. They recognized that getting more people involved in the transition would be essential to its success. A solution that enabled collaboration and allowed employees at all levels to contribute to process improvements was a compelling alternative to the traditional, closed-off model.

We also offered something ARIS couldn’t. Norbert’s team had been trying to get a few specific reports tailored to their unique needs. They’d approached Software AG for customizations, but the response was either that the requests couldn’t be accommodated or that they came with a massive price tag. This was where we saw an opening. Unlike larger companies, we were in a position to be flexible and were able to tailor an agile offering to meet AOK’s specific needs without excessive costs. We promised that if they adopted Signavio, we would build the reports they needed as part of our service.

It was a bold promise, but we felt confident we could deliver. Our smaller team and commitment to building a collaborative, accessible tool allowed us to offer AOK the flexibility they couldn’t get from a larger provider. Norbert and his team saw the potential, and they decided to give Signavio a try.

Signavio as a company did not exist yet, so no contract could be signed. Still, we wanted to agree with AOK on pricing for the time the software was ready to be shipped. This was an interesting experience for me as I had never negotiated any price before. I had no clue what a good price for AOK could look like.

I remembered the story of Fatboy Slim, the music group that allowed Adidas to use their song ‘Right Here, Right Now’ in an advertisement. When asked how they had approached the conversations with Adidas they said that they asked for such a ridiculously high price so that they wouldn’t regret giving their song - and Adidas simply agreed to their proposal. I couldn’t say what music licensing had to do with software pricing, but I saw a lesson in it: if you’re not sure of the value, aim high enough that you won’t look back with regret.

Beyond this vague inspiration, I knew only the basics of software pricing. From conversations with Torben about his previous company, I understood that enterprise deals often had two major components: a software license fee and a services fee. The license covered the right to use the software, while services included setup and training to help the client get started. In some cases, services could end up being the more substantial part of the package, as larger clients often needed significant assistance to implement and configure their software solutions.

Our initial plan was to offer Signavio as a subscription service with monthly or annual pricing, similar to Salesforce. Subscriptions were quickly becoming the norm in the software world, and we liked the idea of generating a steady, recurring revenue stream. However, AOK preferred to host the software on their own servers - known as an On-Premise license - a requirement we hadn’t anticipated. AOK’s team wouldn’t consider cloud-based solutions due to security policies, which meant we’d need to adjust. Instead of a subscription, we agreed to sell Signavio as a one-off license, with a large up-front payment instead of annual installments. Truthfully, this approach was appealing in its own way. 

“The nice thing about the upfront payment is that it will generate enough cash flow to finance the entire company for the better part of the next 12 months. Every additional customer we close during that time is the icing on the cake.” Torben assessed. We agreed and pushed forward with our first big deal.

Since we had no real frame of reference on pricing within our market, we decided to create our own. With Fatboy Slim’s advice in mind, I proposed €100,000 euros as a total package price. It felt like a high number for our first sale and we felt confident that we were offering AOK significant value - a user-friendly solution tailored to their needs and the promise of new, custom reports. Our hope was that the package price would reflect our confidence in the product and its capabilities.

To our surprise, AOK’s response came back almost immediately: They accepted the price point. 

I remember thinking, Damn, we must have priced it too low. It was an early realization of just how much pricing could influence a deal. In retrospect, we likely could have gone even higher, perhaps around €200,000 euros, given the unique value we were offering compared to existing options - however the learning experience would prove a treasured lesson in itself.

In parallel to our negotiations with AOK, we applied for the EXIST scholarship, a government program in Germany designed to support young entrepreneurs right out of university. The scholarship offered up to €90,000 euros, which could make a huge difference for us in covering the essentials - like office space, initial salaries, and basic expenses during our critical first year. With this funding, we hoped to approach Signavio’s early growth without constantly worrying about how to keep the lights on. 

As we moved closer to formalizing Signavio, we knew we’d have to define ownership by dividing up the company’s shares among the founders. There were five of us: Torben, Nico, Willi, myself, and Professor Mathias Weske. Mathias had supported the project from the beginning, serving as our advisor and mentor, and he was invaluable in helping us establish credibility within the process management space. However, he wouldn’t be directly involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, so we assumed he’d take a small percentage of the shares while the remaining four of us divided the bulk equally.

However, Mathias had a different perspective. He suggested that he and I should take a larger share - he for his industry reputation and expertise, and I for driving the project. Nico and Willi, understandably, felt that since they had done most of the programming and technical work in the past two years, they should receive the largest portions. Torben, in turn, would contribute significantly to our early customer engagement efforts and shared insights from his previous sales experience. It quickly became clear that we each had a different view of what was “fair,” shaped by our unique contributions and perspectives. We needed a way to find a distribution that everyone could accept.

I reached out to a friend in venture capital, who directed me to a blog post about a method known as “cutting up the founders’ pie”. The approach suggested that founders assign shares based on multiple dimensions, each with a specific weight. We agreed on a few key factors for evaluation: prior contributions to the project, domain expertise, individual opportunity costs, and projected future contributions. By scoring ourselves and each other in these areas, we could create a clearer, more balanced picture of each person’s role and value to the company.

Following the exercise, we were surprised by how closely our assessments aligned. The calculations showed that each of us would receive between 18% and 19% of the shares, with the exception of me, who ended up with around 26%. Ironically, we might have reached nearly the same split by simply dividing equally, but seeing the numbers confirmed that everyone was valued for their contributions. Having it calculated on paper made it feel official, almost scientific, and there were no complaints. The process itself brought us closer, too; it was the first time we had to truly articulate how much each person had given to the project and how much we expected to contribute going forward.

Our patience was rewarded when, on May 1, 2009, the EXIST scholarship was approved, securing us the additional €90,000 euros. It felt like the final piece falling into place. The following Monday, on May 4, we went to the notary’s office and officially founded Signavio GmbH. This marked the beginning of our journey not just as collaborators but as business partners, fully committed to bringing Signavio to life.

One of the first things we needed was an office. We were all living in tiny apartments, and running Signavio from the university campus felt a bit too informal. We wanted to establish ourselves as a real company, and having a dedicated office was part of that vision. We needed a space that would allow us to focus, collaborate, and grow - a place where we could truly feel like we were building something together.

Torben was great for scouting out the right spots and took the lead on finding us a place. Before long, he located an ideal space at Goethestrasse 2-3 in Berlin Charlottenburg. The location was ideal: If we put a pin on the map where we each lived, this place was in the middle of us all. 

“I found a super-cool loft in the old imperial post office in West Berlin. A dream in redbricks.” As Torben described it. It had the kind of atmosphere we were looking for - edgy, creative, and professional.

As it turned out, our landlord had been on the verge of renting the space to a fashion model agency but reconsidered after worrying that his team might be a bit too distracted by models walking through the halls every day. He ran a web development agency out of the neighboring office space, and he felt that having a tech startup as a tenant might create a more focused environment. It was a stroke of luck, and we signed the lease.

To celebrate, we organized an opening party and invited all of our friends to mark the occasion. It was a big step for us, and we wanted to share it with the people who’d supported us along the way. As a fun touch, we rented a professional spotlight and projected the Signavio gazelle onto the building across the street, like the Batman signal lighting up Gotham City. 

The party was a great success. Our friends congratulated us on reaching this milestone and wished us well on the journey ahead. There was one unexpected twist, though: some of our guests ended up getting stuck in the building’s old elevator for nearly two hours before the fire department came to rescue them. In the end, though, it only added to the memory. It felt like an adventurous start - one filled with excitement, a bit of chaos, and the thrill of finally setting out on our own.

Back at work, our first goal was to get the product in shape so that we could deliver it to AOK. The open source project was a good start but we had to rewrite large parts of the source code to make it usable for an enterprise context. The open source project lacked a model repository, user management, model lifecycle management, reporting capabilities and many more things that AOK needed as a bare minimum. 

I spent hours building mockups for all the product capabilities on Powerpoint, trying to imagine how the software would look and feel from the user’s perspective. Nico and Willi took those Powerpoint slides and began translating them into code. This became our iterative process; I would design, they would build, and we’d tweak as we went along. It was exciting to watch each feature take shape in real time, moving us closer to a professional product that could stand up in the enterprise market.

To keep up with the workload, we repurposed most of the EXIST scholarship to hire additional developers. We urgently needed help with the software development. Stefan Krumnow joined us as the first new addition, and soon we brought on Björn Wagner and several other students. These hires became an essential part of our initial team, injecting fresh energy and hands-on support that allowed us to accelerate our development timeline. 

With the software steadily taking shape, we turned to the matter of public pricing, knowing it would be essential to position Signavio competitively. For the basic version of the product, we decided on a rate of €30 euros per user per month, and for the premium version, which included the enterprise-level features we had developed with AOK, we set it at €75 euros per user per month. The idea of a €30 rate came from a friend who was developing a prototyping software and was charging €25 per user per month. We figured that since our product had a wider target audience and more robust features, we could set our price a bit higher. For the premium rate of €75, we based it roughly on the equivalent of a one-off license plus three years’ worth of maintenance, translating that total into a monthly fee.

We were ready for our official debut. We chose to launch the first version of Signavio at Process Solutions Day near Frankfurt, an industry conference where we could reach our target audience of business process management professionals. Torben and I packed up a monitor, a roll-up banner, and a few marketing brochures we had printed at a copy shop. For extra flair, we’d prepared a stack of postcards in Signavio’s bright colors and placed them all across the conference hotel - guerilla style, hoping to draw attention to our brand.

Our nerves were high, not only because it was our first public demonstration, but also because our product was still quite shaky. During our 30-minute live presentation, Nico and Willi had to redeploy the software multiple times to keep it running smoothly. Every time the system paused, we knew they were deploying a bug fix in real time. Amazingly, no one in the audience seemed to notice the glitches, and by the end of our presentation, we felt a huge sense of relief.

The response was beyond our expectations. Our tagline, “Business Process Management for Everyone,” combined with a smooth product demo, resonated with the audience. As a small, dynamic startup, we offered something fresh and accessible, and people were seriously interested. The booths of established players like Software AG and IBM - massive companies with huge displays and well-known products - were almost empty, while people queued up at our booth, waiting to learn more about Signavio.

In a way, we were the new kids on the block. The business process management space had a reputation as a dry, traditional field dominated by old specialists. We came in with fresh energy, a compelling vision, and an approach that made the concept of process management exciting. Torben was 24, Nico and Willi were 25, and I was 27 years old. We were all young, eager, and ready to challenge the conventions of a changing industry. 

This launch event was more than just a product demonstration - it was a chance to establish our presence in the market and show that a new way of thinking about process management was possible. We left Frankfurt feeling inspired and ready to push forward with the momentum we had generated, knowing that we were on the verge of something significant.

Starting a company in 2009 was no easy feat. The effects of the 2008 financial crisis were still reverberating, with budgets slashed across industries and corporate caution reigning supreme. IT spending, in particular, was restricted, as companies weighed every investment carefully, focusing on immediate survival rather than innovation. Yet, in some ways, this environment worked to our advantage. At conferences, people were hungry for a vision of what could come next. Attendees were there not just for current solutions but also to glimpse the future - to find hope for growth and recovery.

However, funding a startup was nearly impossible. While we knew venture capital was an option, we hesitated. In fact, we had direct exposure to venture capital right at HPI, where Hasso Plattner Ventures even ran seminars on entrepreneurship and startup financing. It was relatively easy to get feedback on ideas, and we had watched friends pitch their projects and secure venture capital straight out of the gate. But we’d also seen the risks up close. 

One of my friends had taken VC funding for his startup only to find himself ousted by the investors when growth stalled. This left a lasting impression on me. 

I would rather shut down the company than get fired, I thought to myself. Therefore, we did not pursue venture capital for Signavio in the beginning.

We considered business angels instead - individual investors who provide capital to early-stage startups. When we presented at a local angel investor event, the typical reaction was, “Where is your iPhone app?” When I explained that we didn’t need one, they seemed bewildered. 

“The whole point,” they would say, “is to show off an app to friends on the golf course.” 

Back then, business angels were mostly older men who’d made their money as executives at Siemens or other large corporations. They didn’t understand software startups. Trying to appeal to them felt like an enormous waste of time, so we redirected our energy toward building a product and attracting paying customers.

On the cost side, we tried to do the most with the money we had. We had to be disciplined. With our EXIST scholarship, we had just enough to keep ourselves and the company going. To save costs, we even rented out Willi for a few hours each week to Torben’s old employer, where he worked as a JavaScript developer. We calculated the minimum monthly income each of us needed to survive, paring down to €280 euros for rent and around €300 euros for food and the occasional night out. Everything else went back into the company to cover essential expenses and fund the working students who were helping us develop the software. We bought second hand furniture for the office and negotiated discounts wherever we could, especially for events. It was a lean operation.

Events like the Process Solutions Day generated a lot of interest and contacts for us. Only one other “trick” worked even better for Signavio; the “Hare Krishna method.” 

The Hare Krishnas had used a creative tactic of handing out roses at airports for free, which gave them a chance to strike up conversations with strangers about their beliefs. For us, this “gift” was a free BPMN poster we’d designed for download from the university website. Remember, BPMN was the Business Process Modeling Notation which began to grow very popular at that time. People loved our poster. Within 12 months, over 70,000 copies had been downloaded.

One day, while discussing conference plans with an organizer, I mentioned our poster and its download numbers. He was impressed and said, “Wow, you’re generating 70,000 leads with that!” 

I had no idea what he meant by “leads,” so he explained: a lead was a potential customer’s contact information. Unfortunately, we had no information about who was downloading the poster, so we couldn’t follow up with anyone.

We adapted our approach. Most people printed the poster out at home, typically in black and white and in A4 format. Some people had asked us whether there is a high quality, colored and big version that we could hand out. Printed in color on glossy paper and A2 in size. We had already done that a few times for special friends so we knew that the printout was less than €1 euro per piece, at least if you produced in larger quantities.

The response was phenomenal. Our high-quality BPMN poster became an irresistible offer for anyone in the process management space; people couldn’t resist! Every Friday, we gathered in the office and processed the week’s orders. 

Torben would yell through the office, “Ok, everyone: drop your keyboards, please. Time to pack up BPMN posters.”

The data quality was excellent; over 90% of the telephone numbers were accurate, and addresses were 100% correct since everyone wanted the poster to reach them. After two weeks, we called each requester to confirm receipt, ask where they’d put it up, and see if they’d shared it with their colleagues. Without prompting, most people started telling us about their projects and their interest in business process modeling. For a cost of just four euros per order, each follow-up call was worth its weight in gold, and we quickly generated thousands of leads this way.

We were the masters of cheap demand generation. We featured in industry blogs, and because we were the only company offering a free 30-day trial, many people signed up to try Signavio. We also tapped into universities, becoming the first process management software most students ever encountered. We offered universities a seamless way to register their students, complete with teaching packs that included exercises and sample results for professors. Hundreds of thousands of students got into contact with our software through that channel over the years.

Interest in Signavio grew steadily, and we had a healthy pipeline of leads. Torben and I spent countless hours traveling around Germany to follow up, always doing things as economically as possible. We booked one-star hotels, shared rooms, took cheap trains, and drove Torben’s old yellow Renault Megane. It wasn’t glamorous, but it got us to meetings with potential customers eager to learn about “process management for everyone.”

Despite the high interest, we encountered a big problem - no one was actually buying. We secured a handful of small online license orders, but larger deals failed to close. Feedback was mixed. Some cited “other priorities,” “if the product only had feature XYZ,” “bad timing,” or a ban for cloud software, while others said they’d circle back in six months. It was disheartening to face so many obstacles after all our work.

We felt like we were in the worst position. The interest was huge, but we were unable to convert that into sales.This became our biggest fear - investing years in Signavio only to realize we were “riding a dead horse.” I had nightmares about running endlessly without ever reaching our destination. I’d seen friends get trapped in similar situations, clinging to companies with minimal growth. They couldn’t let go, resorting to renting out developers by the hour just to keep the lights on. What a horror; that was my worst-case scenario.

To avoid this, we started setting annual goals. We knew that if we missed our goals by 10 or 20%, we could keep going. But if we missed by 60 or 70%, we’d seriously consider shutting down. The milestones kept us focused, pushing us to move forward but also forcing us to evaluate whether we were making real progress.

Finally, the go-live with AOK marked a massive breakthrough. We delivered every capability we’d promised, and AOK’s head of process management, Norbert Sandau, was pleased. He scheduled a kickoff meeting so his team could get their hands on the software. On the Friday before the meeting, he called me, asking, “You’ll bring training materials for the workshop on Monday, right?” I realized we hadn’t prepared anything for training, but I assured him we’d have it ready.

I spent the entire weekend putting together exercises and guides, and the workshop went smoothly. AOK’s team gave us enthusiastic feedback, and it felt like the validation we’d been working toward for so long, a confirmation that we were finally moving in the right direction. Our first big customer was live!

We truly loved everything about the process management community, and we made it a point to attend every event we could find in the region. It was a niche community back then, with a close-knit group of enthusiasts who shared a passion for business processes. We were surrounded by people we thought of as “process geeks,” and these events felt like gatherings of like-minded individuals who believed in the importance of structured processes and workflows.

At one of these events in Berlin, I crossed paths with a product manager from a local enterprise content management (ECM) company. He was in charge of the workflow segment of their product and saw immediate potential in integrating Signavio into their platform. We were eager to try out any potential collaborations, so we took on the integration project. While this integration ultimately didn’t lead to any commercial success, the relationship opened an unexpected door. The product manager introduced us to Gerrit de Veer, a sales manager for another ECM company, who would play an important role in shaping our approach to sales.

When we met Gerrit, we weren’t actually looking for a salesperson, let alone a full-time sales manager. Up until then, our sales strategy was essentially non-existent. We’d been relying on our passion to bring in customers, but we knew we were missing something. Our hit-or-miss approach wasn’t enough to generate consistent sales. Gerrit, with his wealth of sales experience, was eager to help us understand why deals weren’t closing. We didn’t know exactly what to expect, but from the first conversation, it was clear that Gerrit’s practical perspective was exactly what we needed.

It clicked immediately with Gerrit, and we agreed to bring him on in a part-time role. He joined Torben and me on customer calls and meetings, patiently showing us the finer points of how to prepare for a meeting, how to steer a conversation, and, perhaps most importantly, how to follow up effectively. Gerrit understood that sales was more than just talking to people - it was about being organized and intentional.

Gerrit loved to reminisce about his first customer trip with me. In typical Signavio startup style, I had booked a train and a single hotel room and sent him the confirmation. He replied, “Gero, didn’t you forget something? I only see one hotel room on the reservation.” I assured him it wasn’t a mistake. Sharing a room was our standard policy to save money. We were still operating on a shoestring budget, so doubling up was just part of the routine. Gerrit found the idea awkward, but he didn’t complain. I thought that he should be happy that, at least, I didn’t snore. Only many years later, as our team grew and we hired our first female team members, we dropped this cost-saving measure.

Gerrit’s guidance went beyond the basics of selling; he helped us prioritize which customers to focus on and how to best convert them. He taught us how to gauge real interest and avoid wasting time on deals that would never materialize. We spent a lot of time talking about how to handle objections and move conversations toward a yes. Gerrit also emphasized the importance of involving the right people in each sales conversation, rather than just sticking with the first contact who reached out to us. His insights transformed the way we approached customer relationships, helping us build momentum where we’d previously struggled.

He also helped us understand the importance of volume in sales. “If you’re only juggling three or four deals, you’re unlikely to close anything,” he’d say. “Make sure you’ve always got a steady flow of quality leads in play, so the outflow of deals is constant.” This was eye-opening for us, as we’d been so focused on a few key leads that we hadn’t considered the need for a larger pipeline. With Gerrit’s advice, we ramped up our outreach and ensured we always had multiple opportunities in progress, giving us a steady inflow of customer interest.

Gerrit’s approach to sales was a masterclass in what he called the "triple closing strategy." His philosophy was simple but effective: never let an opportunity pass without trying to close a deal.

“Okay, those are your problems. We can help you.” That was how it always began. He would lay it out plainly, no fluff, confident in the solution we could provide. That was the first close; the initial buy-in. 

Most sellers, as Gerrit pointed out, love to talk - too much sometimes. They dive into lengthy explanations, drowning in features and product capabilities but forgetting to establish that first crucial point of alignment. 

“First, you need to get them to say yes,” Gerrit would emphasize. 

“Are these the challenges you need solved? If we can help with that, then we are on the same page.” And when the prospect nodded or agreed, he’d lean into the second close: “If we can help solve these challenges, are we in business? Can we move forward together?” That clear and direct question cut through the noise, forcing a commitment or at least a step closer to one. Too many times, he’d remind us, salespeople forget to ask. “Get the first closing question done. Then get the second,” he’d coach, knowing the power of securing small to medium deals.

Gerrit brought much-needed skills to our team. He was the only one among us with real sales experience, and his presence reassured us that we could build a viable sales process. He was humble yet driven and he appreciated the nerdy enthusiasm that defined our team culture. With Gerrit’s guidance, we were able to close a series of smaller deals in the coming months, and these wins gave us hope that we were moving in the right direction.

Finally, there was the third close - immediacy.

“When do you want to start being successful? Yesterday?” he’d joke, but always with a purpose. “If you want results, we have to start now. No delays.” 

For Gerrit, any opportunity could lead to a sale. “Even on a demo, you can push for a close,” he’d say. And sometimes, we’d even go as far as implementing small features during a meeting - instantly showcasing our commitment and ability to deliver. He once had two managing directors on an online demo, and by the end, he’d guided them right into using the product live. “You have your browser? Click here,” he’d direct. No hesitation. “It’s not just about talking; it’s about action.”

Gerrit’s strategy was a true mindset, one that he instilled in all of us.

“Even if you’re showing features over a small dinner,” he’d remind the team, “you find a way to close, even if it’s just a small step forward.” It was relentless, it was focused, and most importantly, it worked.

As our only true salaried employee, Gerrit was a bit of an outlier. The founders were still living on tight budgets, and most of our developers were working students. Gerrit seemed to enjoy the quirky energy in our office, and he embraced our camaraderie. For our Christmas party that year, he brought a box of cigars, and we smoked them on the S-Bahn on our way to the party venue. The entire train car must have smelled awful, but we didn’t care. It was one of those unforgettable nights, and the team felt closer than ever.

At the end of 2009, we looked back at our annual goals. As it turned out, we managed to outperform both goals we had! Finding our first paying customer and securing government funding were the green lights we needed. With those successes, we finally felt ready to turn Signavio from an idea into a full-fledged company. Our fears about running a “dead horse” had subsided for now, and we’d actually managed to exceed our annual goals. We closed the year with €120,000 euros in revenue, had €80,000 euros left in the bank thanks to the EXIST scholarship, and even finished with a small profit. These numbers weren’t astronomical, but they were a strong signal that we were on the right path. We’d created something sustainable, and 2009 marked the beginning of Signavio as a truly viable business.