Chapter 10: Taking a Breath

Scaling isn’t just about growth; it’s about balance. In this chapter, Gero reflects on navigating fierce competition while staying true to customer needs and long-term vision.

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Transcript

The competition started to wake up.

For four years, we were the only serious cloud-based process management solution in the market. When we began, convincing companies to use the cloud was an uphill battle. Major enterprises were hesitant to store their sensitive data on someone else’s servers. But over time, things changed. Companies developed cloud-first strategies and started adopting platforms like Salesforce at scale, proving that the cloud was here to stay.

Most of our competitors had woken up and put cloud and collaboration-centricity high up on their agenda. We knew that it would take them years to truly catch up, but our differentiation was slowly fading away.

We needed to find the next big idea to keep Signavio ahead of the curve.

With Effektif, we expanded to cloud workflow. It worked well as a Signavio add-on and customers found it useful. But as a standalone product, it struggled to gain traction in the crowded market. This taught us a valuable lesson: even promising products can fall flat without the right positioning and without a dedicated sales approach.

Process Mining started to appear on the horizon as well. It generally followed the theme of “Big Data“: the observation that most companies have massive amounts of data lying around, without leveraging it to drive insights and optimize the business. What is special about Process Mining is that it reconstructs the activities of a process and can therefore find bottlenecks, rework or undesired behavior. That way, correlations can be made between outcomes of a process and the paths taken to best get there.

I had a personal connection to this field. My PhD co-supervisor, Wil van der Aalst, created the first algorithms for Process Mining in the early 2000s, and many research groups had expanded on his work. Some of my HPI colleagues developed Fluxicon, a popular tool in the Process Mining community, while Celonis, founded in 2011, was gaining ground commercially.

However, Process Mining was not ready for prime time yet. Extracting data was complex, and most companies weren’t willing to upload their sensitive data to the cloud. At Signavio, we were committed to a cloud-first approach, so On-Premise software wasn’t the direction we wanted to go. For now, Process Mining would have to wait.

At the same time, Signavio adoption at Goldman Sachs went through the roof. Our software became integral to all of their change projects, with thousands of their employees using it every day. We had a frequent dialogue with Goldman, and they regularly shared ideas on how we could increase the value of our product. During one such meeting, a contact at Goldman remarked, “Signavio is wonderful. Unfortunately, it only covers 50% of what is important for a process.”

I was intrigued and asked what he meant. 

He explained, “In banking, decisions are at the core of everything.” He laid out scenarios.

“Under what conditions could they onboard a customer? Which financial products was a customer eligible for? Could they process a specific transaction? Who needed to be informed and when? Processes,” he said, “were all about gathering the necessary data to enable decisions and coordinating the actions that followed. But the decisions themselves - the core, strategic determinations - are the key and therefore need to be managed properly.”

I was intrigued and started digging into the topic. The concept of managing business decisions wasn’t entirely new; rules management systems had existed for years. But this was different. It wasn’t about technical rules hard-coded by developers. It was about empowering non-technical domain experts to design, verify, and simulate complex decisions across an organization. The idea had been gaining traction, particularly within banking and insurance, and there was even a budding movement to formalize it under the name “Business Decision Management.”

What made the difference to me was that even the Object Management Group, the same body responsible for standardizing BPMN, had picked up on the trend and was preparing to release the first version of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN). This felt significant, and I decided to act on it.

I asked one of our working students to build a prototype of a DMN editor within our process modeling software. In just two weeks, he delivered a basic decision diagram editor and a rudimentary decision rules editor. The prototype was good enough to impress Goldman. They loved it and were eager to use it right away.

Will stepped in to negotiate the terms and soon closed the deal - another million-dollar On-Premise license. I’d been warned against building solutions tailored for individual customers. But in this case, it seemed like a worthwhile risk. This was a million-dollar opportunity, built largely with the help of working students, and I truly believed in the broader potential of decision management. If Goldman saw this much value, surely other organizations would too.

This rapid success underscored how customer-driven innovation could unlock potential, but it also presented strategic challenges. While Goldman’s adoption was a high-profile win, the DMN solution proved more laborious to build and struggled to find a broader market. Beyond financial giants like Goldman and JPMorgan Chase, other potential clients weren’t as eager. We realized that customer-specific developments, though profitable, didn’t always scale effectively as general product lines. It was a reminder of the fine balance needed between customizing for key clients and building solutions with mass-market appeal.

Daniel signed up our first customers in Singapore. Gerrit oversaw this expansion, so I wasn’t deeply involved in the groundwork at that stage. Gerrit was a great leader, the kind who kept the sales team motivated and laser-focused on results. Thanks to their efforts, new customers continued to come in, building our presence in an entirely new region.

Whenever I met with customers, I made it a point to ask how things were going. The responses were generally positive - most were satisfied, and I rarely encountered any surprises. Problematic cases usually appeared through support tickets or came directly to my inbox. So I felt reasonably confident that I was aware of any major issues.

Then one day, at an industry event, I had a conversation that blindsided me. A customer approached me and said, “Gero, we really love your product. But we simply didn’t get it to work for us. Therefore, please don’t be surprised that we are going to cancel the subscription upon the next renewal.” 

I was stunned. This customer had never complained. They hadn’t raised a single support ticket nor given us any hint of dissatisfaction. The sales team had no contact either, as there was no upsell opportunity to pursue. We had been completely in the dark about their struggles. To make matters worse, this wasn’t just any customer - it was a trendy fashion brand we often highlighted in sales presentations and mentioned on stage. Losing them would have been a massive loss.

I immediately offered to send some of our best people to help figure out what had gone wrong. Stefan Krumnow took on the challenge and flew out to meet with the customer. What he discovered was eye-opening. They hadn’t fully explored key capabilities of our product that could have addressed their needs. But the bigger issue was a lack of direction in how to drive their internal process improvement efforts. Stefan shared stories and strategies from other successful implementations, sparking their enthusiasm. 

The turnaround was remarkable. Instead of canceling, the customer quadrupled their subscription - from €15,000 euros per year to more than €60,000 euros. It was a powerful reminder of the potential hidden within our existing customer base.

With another customer, a large university, we had a similar experience. They were doing well with our software but they assumed they couldn’t roll it out to all of their employees because of a technical restriction. They were still getting value from Signavio with the small number of users for whom it already worked. Only by proactively reaching out, we learned about this obstacle and sent a colleague to help solve it. This proved to be a game changer for them and they were so happy that they convinced all other universities in the state to adopt our product as well.

At that time, we had several hundred customers, and I couldn’t help but wonder how much potential there was untapped within our customer base. It was clear that we were missing something - a role that fell somewhere between sales and support. Our sales team’s focus was on acquiring new customers and expanding contracts, leaving them less motivated to engage with existing customers unless there was a clear upsell opportunity. Meanwhile, our support team operated reactively, responding only when customers reached out with issues. No one was proactively ensuring our customers’ continued success and satisfaction with the product.

I began researching online and found a few insightful blog articles by Silicon Valley VCs discussing this exact gap. I forwarded the articles to my colleague Steven Lewandowski and asked him to explore the concept further. Steven embraced the challenge and quickly became our first customer success manager. For the first time, we introduced structured onboarding experiences for our customers, and started the tradition of Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with all of our bigger customers. For the smaller customers, we offered automatic nudges to explore further capabilities of our product or how-to guides, all based on our customers’ usage patterns within the product.

Steven connected with thought leaders in the U.S. and helped build a local community in Berlin. Every month, customer success managers from across the city would meet at our office, sharing experiences and learning from each other.

These meetups became a vibrant part of the community, and I relished the opportunity to exchange ideas with other companies. Berlin’s startup scene was coming alive, with more and more enterprise software companies emerging. For the first time, it felt like we were no longer alone.

2014 was the most relaxed year I’d ever experienced at Signavio. The company was running smoothly, and the atmosphere within the team was upbeat and energized. Our momentum showed in many ways - I found myself frequently giving talks at local universities, which not only showcased our work but also became a great way to attract talented young colleagues. We were growing rapidly, hiring enthusiastic new team members eager to be part of our journey.

In the fall, my wife Karolina decided she wanted to return to work. This meant changes for our family routine, so we enrolled our son Jakub in a kindergarten. I took on a new daily rhythm: dropping Jakub off in the mornings on my way to the office and picking him up in the afternoons.

“We’ve always worked as a team,” Karolina said. “When one of us has a new priority, the other steps up to make it work for the family. It’s never been about rigid roles - it’s about what’s needed at the time.”

This new schedule meant I was leaving the office around 3:30pm to spend time with Jakub. Once Karolina returned home in the evening, I would pick up work again. 

This shift felt natural for us: Karolina later reflected on how normal it was. “We’ve always approached things as a partnership,” she said. “It wasn’t about Gero doing less or me doing more - it was about finding a rhythm that let both of us thrive while giving Jakub the attention he deserved.”

I never anticipated how much this change would ripple through the office. Previously, the norm was for most of us to stay in the office well into the evening hours. But once the CEO began leaving in the middle of the afternoon, the culture shifted. For me this was a great transition and I got to spend a huge amount of time each day with Jakub. As a result, more people started wrapping up their work and heading home around 5 or 6pm. Suddenly, having personal time in the evenings became a more accepted - and even encouraged - part of our company culture. We rarely, if ever, returned to the relentless pace and long hours that had defined the early days of Signavio.

Some of our employees started having side projects. One of them even laid the foundation for what is now TikTok! 

With the iPhone boom in full swing, new apps were popping up every day, and Daniel Taschik, one of our talented team members, decided to try his hand at building his own. During the day, Daniel was responsible for managing the server infrastructure for our cloud product. But in his spare time, he turned his focus to app development.

His first attempt was an app called Starlize. The idea was simple but intriguing: users would use their iPhone cameras to shoot selfie videos while lip-syncing or dancing to songs offered by the app. It allowed people to create their own music videos. Some users recorded wild dance routines; others experimented with silly facial expressions. The problem was that recording a selfie video for several minutes turned out to be too much of a commitment. Most people lost interest after just ten or twenty seconds. As a result, Starlize only managed 20,000 downloads - a flop by any standard.

But Daniel didn’t give up. He took the lessons from Starlize and refined his approach, focusing on shorter, more engaging videos. His new app provided brief clips of songs and other fun audio snippets, making it easier for users to create quick, entertaining selfie videos. He launched this new app at a local meetup in Berlin and named it Dubsmash. The response was phenomenal. Within two weeks, more than a million people had downloaded the app. Users were making and sharing videos in droves, posting their creations on Facebook and Instagram.

Shortly afterward, Daniel came to me and said, “Gero, I think I am onto something. People are going crazy about my app, and I really want to pursue it. I have to quit my job.” 

This was a moment of mixed feelings for me. In five years, no one had ever voluntarily left Signavio. But Daniel was blazing a trail, and I wished him the very best for his venture.

Dubsmash continued its meteoric rise. Within weeks, it topped the App Store charts in more than a dozen countries and quickly reached 100 million downloads. The app went viral, capturing global attention. Even celebrities joined in - Jimmy Fallon made a Dubsmash video with Selena Gomez on his show, and Rihanna used it to pre-release content from her new album through the app. It was a spectacular success.

However, there was one major challenge: users primarily used Dubsmash to create videos but then shared them on existing social networks. All of the engagement and interaction took place outside of the app itself. Daniel realized that to keep users engaged and generate long-term revenue, he would need to build a social network around Dubsmash’s content. Unfortunately, this transition proved difficult, and the app struggled to make that leap.

Meanwhile, another startup took inspiration from Dubsmash’s success but refined the concept, focusing on both video creation and discovery. That app was Musical.ly, which was later acquired by Bytedance and rebranded as TikTok. The rest, as they say, is history.

In a way, the first employee to ever quit Signavio was an essential inspiration to the origin of TikTok. It set a high bar for anyone else thinking of leaving. 

From then on, whenever a colleague considered moving on, my playful standard line was, “Does your app have a million users yet? If not, you better stay.”

With the expansion at Goldman, the major cloud deal with SAP, and a steady influx of new customers, Signavio was on an undeniable winning streak. We were catching the eye of investors, all while I was enjoying the most relaxed year I’d ever had at the company.

By the end of the year, we had achieved €5.3 million euros in revenue, €1.6 million euros in EBITDA, and grown to 60 employees. 

Onwards and upwards!