Experienced Entrepreneur Looking For Developer with an Idea
Hi everyone!
I'm 33 years-old, from Germany and I first started my own business at the age of 15 in the year 2005. I bootstrapped my business (an online shop) to 1.5 million euros in revenue in 2015. At that time I also had 4 full-time employees. In 2018 I successfully sold the online shop.
Now I would like to build a new business. I'm looking for a software developer, who also has an idea. I'm interested in starting a SaaS or an online shop, but I'm open to any ideas.
The past 11 months I've been working on https://roboreimburse.com/en (B2B) - but we had technical problems with a DHL Captcha and with Shopify among others, so even though I have 26 interested companies, we currently cannot launch the product and that's why this idea is kinda in the trash.
Therefore I'm available full-time.
Some of my skills: Hiring and managing employees, bookkeeping, cold emailing, optimization, B2C and B2B sales, marketing, talking to people, creative problem solving, and analytical thinking.
Let's build a successful business together!
More information about me: https://hofmannmoritz.com
Recommendation from my past business partner Gerard O'Neill
(Jan '23 - Sep '23):
I worked on a project with Moritz for over half a year, and it was truly awesome. He's extremely motivated and proactive, taking on virtually any kind of task. When not completely sure about something, Moritz would always ask for my thoughts and discuss it with me, which I really appreciated. I've mostly worked alone or with other tech-focused people in the past, but those projects never got anywhere near as far as my project with Moritz. His energy and business experience make him the perfect cofounder, coworker, or partner in general. I hope we get a chance to work together in the future, once I have the time to dedicate to a new venture.
Hello Moritz, I came across your post on Indie Hackers, and your impressive background and entrepreneurial vision truly caught my attention. As a developer specialized in custom web solutions and mobile apps, I share your passion for SaaS innovation and e-commerce. I have a proven track record working with entrepreneurs and startups, and I bring both technical expertise and flexibility to achieve ambitious goals. I would love to connect with you to discuss your ideas or share some innovative concepts I’ve developed. I am open to building a partnership based on trust, commitment, and shared success. Are you available soon for a quick call or video meeting? I’d be happy to learn more about your expectations and demonstrate the value I can add to your project. Looking forward to your reply and the possibility of working together! Best regards,
I'm open for a chat. What would you say are your core skills?
Hi! I'm a business generalist. Since I ran my own business as a solo founder for more than 12 years, I acquired the skills needed to start, run and scale a company. I'd like to highlight three things though. I love talking to people, creative problem solving and analytical thinking. I've sent you an email!
Starting a company in Germany is somewhat frustating. A lot of paper work before doing actual business. I am currently building Beglaubigt.de - the first digital Notary to solve this massive pain. Check it out here: Notartermine Online
Hey Moritz 👋 I'm also 33 and based in Germany. I've been working as a developer for over 10 years now. I have a small side project (wavevisual.com) that brings a nice additional income and now I'm looking for a bigger challenge. Let's connect and talk! https://www.linkedin.com/in/ozantunca/
Hello Moritz, I am interested in my marketplace development (I have lead development of 4 marketplaces until now) and think your experience with online shop can align. I have sent the request on Linkedin (in/parekhriddhi/) - Let's connect and discuss if you would be interested.
-Riddhi!
Hi Riddhi, do I understand that correctly: You develop marketplaces for other people? -M
Until now yes I have developed marketplaces for others. but now I am interested in my own marketplace development.
Hi Moritz.
Would you be developing or do you want to focus on the other areas of the business and let the other founder do the developing?
Hi Dan,
unfortunately, I'm not a software engineer, so I wouldn't be responsible for the development.
-Moritz
aaah, got yah. Are you looking to bootstrap or would you be potentially seeking investment?
My background is with bootstrapping, but I'm open for cases where we go after investments. I've been practicing to pitch a lot in this past year. Also in front of juries.
-Moritz
I am interested to chat with you.. Here is my LinkedIn profile
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachingk/
I've messaged you on LinkedIn.
Hey, i have been working on boundAI(dot)tech. It's a collaborative platform for developers to build gen-ai applications. Looking for someone with sales/marketing background
I've never worked with a no-code platform, and generally your product is not in my area of expertise. We can certainly chat though. I've added you on LinkedIn.
Hey Moritz, I'm very interested. I made cater-buddy.com a wedding dinner planning assistant. It is already live (so you can try it out), currently it only has 1 customer, which was also the pilot user.
If you are interested hit me up at matthias@cater-buddy.com or on Discord kirbby#6158
Hi Matthias,
unfortunately that is not an area I'm particularly interested in. Good luck though!
-Moritz
Impressive track record and skills! Your journey and success with the online shop are commendable. It's clear you bring valuable experience to the table.
I'm interested to have a chat with you.
Hi Naveen, I couldn't find an email address on your profile. Please contact me using [email protected]
-Moritz
Hi!
Looking to discuss soon.
Sent you an email from "IODeep" :)
I replied, thanks!
Hi I am developer, i already released an app and did initial market research, i can't post the link nor email so I sent you an email with app link. It's new kind of e-commerce app.
Hi, I've replied to your email
Hello Moritz, nice article, you seem like the kind of person I need in this phase of my project, I'm building an app that helps people that listen to podcast, can we setup a meet, here is my mail [email protected]
Sending you an email!
thank you seen!!!
What are your top 3 learning of starting a business in Germany?
Here are some things specific to Germany:
Bonus: When switching from a regular job to your own company, you can get a lot of financial support from the Agentur für Arbeit. If you're not eligible and you live in the state NRW, you can still receive a 12,000€ one-time scholarship for starting a company.
Hey @nearmint, thank you a lot, and that you took time to write it.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.
I’m a software engineer. Let’s chat!
https://fightclub.profullstack.com
Hi, I tried to join your Slack community, but a @profullstack.com email is required. Please send me an email instead: [email protected]
https://join.slack.com/t/profullstackinc/shared_invite/zt-2aq34wqlu-ANRyrOcxCctwwfLUHLOwhA
Hi there Moritz,
Shashank here, am a software developer and SAAS enthusiast, was looking to partner up with someone to work on a couple of ideas I have. One of my products is going to go live at:
chatboat.ai
As soon as stripe verification is complete. Have a couple of more ideas in the oven, that I would like to discuss with you. You can email me at [email protected] on my personal email, after which we could set up a call to see how to go ahead.
Email sent :)
Hi Moritz,
I'd love to chat. I'm building a few projects at the moment that are all starting to see some traction.
Simon
Hi Simon,
interesting! Would you mind emailing me? [email protected]
-Moritz
Hi Moritz, I'm sorry your current project didn't work out as expected.
Development:
Nevertheless, that is one of the things that an entrepreneur has to go through so I am Karanveer and I recently took a pause from game development (worked with publishers like Voodoo, SHAREit etc) and one of our products touched 10 million downloads on ios and android combined. Now taking a break from technical development.
But, I was scouting around this platform and came across this post.
I am also aware of the MERN stack and NEXTJS with Supabase which is a BAAS.
Ideas:
I do have to say that I do have a lot of ideas but I would have to refine and discuss them with you if you are interested and I can also spend my side free time developing them.
May I ask if you'll be interested in something like this?
Hey! Sure, let's chat. Contact me and we will see if we are a fit!
That is great! Email with Subject: "Brainstorm with Mr. Moritz Hofmann" sent.
Hey man! I didn't get any email. Here's my email address again: [email protected]
Got it!
Re: Captcha Problem
Could you not just Pay a VA for this? (Basically remove all automation apart from “send human an email”) I assume the claims are not time critical (in like a “a few seconds” response time). Sound like a good case for a fleet of VAs. (You can get them for roughly 8€ brutto per hour)
Not a tech-first product in the end, but hey if you find customers for it, sounds like a highly automated agency
Hi Simon, good thinking, I had the same idea. It would be a bit hard to make money then though, because the pricing needs to be at a level where the customers feel an advantage of going with us rather than taking care of this with their own employees. It would be possible to start like this though and then potentially add a browser extension that at least makes the form submission more fast.
To be honest, I don't fully understand why the developers gave up. I was working with the first one from January '23 - September '23 and with the second one from November '23 - January '24.
Maybe it was discouraging for them that not only the Captcha problem was there, but for example Shopify didn't accept our app yet - they always wanted some additional changes.
There were several "hard nuts to crack"..
But you can contact me and we'll have a look together.
Hi Moritz, I've been building a publishing platform for independent authors. My account is too new so I can't post a link. Suffice it to say, it's a product idea without a market. Happy to show more.
My true passion is in the no-code space and I'm hoping to evolve toward that if I can get some traction and runway. Let me know if you're interested in a chat.
Hi Toby, the publishing platform Juicy does sounds interesting. Send me an email, I'd love to chat! But you say that it's a product idea without a market. Does that mean you were unable to find any paying users?
Can't you connect directly with DHL and Shopify and whatever other company and work together instead of trying to brute force through their systems?
Hi! The DHL API doesn't offer anything in regards to reimbursement claims. That's probably because they have a conflict of interest: If a claim goes through, they have to pay.
I meant contacting DHL directly to make an arrangement specifically for your business, without relying on existing programmatic solutions.
Actually it was not possible to get more than an automatic reply from them. The only way to even talk to a human there is to have a contract with them.
What was the problem with the DHL captcha ? I tried basic tools on it and get 70% of success.
They look simple to solve with more work on it.
Do they have IP-based or more elaborate security ?
We tried with new ips and other things. Basically the captcha is invisible, they just show a permanent loading icon in the case of bot trying to use the form.
If you like we can look at this together. The developer who was working on it can show you around as well.
Oh, right. I had the wrong captcha. I googled "DHL captcha" and took the first result which allows you to track your parcel with a 10 digits number. On this page, the captcha was a simple image that I ran through some text2image tools.
I didn't come across the invisible captcha.
I assumed too quickly. Sorry about that.
No problem. I'm talking about the Captcha for the reimbursement claim form. This form can only be accessed once logged into the DHL Geschäftskundenportal (https://geschaeftskunden.dhl.de/). We have an account for that, you only get access if you have a contract with DHL. I got the access through a customer. If someone wants a go at the Captcha situation, let me know.
Technical problems with Captcha? Your website talks about automation, and the name has "robo," in it, so I'm assuming you were trying to get a bot to pass a Captcha test?
That is some extremely top level botting shit. Those require government spy agency level engineering. Only a truly great bot engineer spending many years working on it or a mountain of money could create such a thing.
Which is why I am looking for someone with an idea. I am trashing RoboReimburse.
I'll fix it for half the company. It'll be nothing for this hypothetical person I mentioned earlier. I just need proof of these intents to buy.
Please contact me by email, then we will see whether we can come to an arrangement. The job here is definitely not only fixing the Captcha problem.
Happy to connect!
Email sent!
Would you connect with an app development agency?
Not interested, sorry