Hello people, back at it again.

I'm drafting this on August 31st, and not gonna lie, I've been looking forward to this episode. These newsletters are genuinely fun when I actually have something to tell. And this month I have news.

The short version: I spent the full month back in Aachen and it was better than expected. My scholarship finally starts next week. And money is coming closer, not from any grant, but from the business. Let me tell you.

01 Aachen, better than expected

If you remember, when I landed back in Germany in late April I went straight to Hamburg instead of my hometown, even though staying with my parents would have been easier. I've spent basically my entire life in Aachen, like 25 years, and I'm a person with a stronger urge than most to seek novelty and new people. Tough combination: having outgrown the city I've spent more time in than most people, plus that urge. And at some age you just don't want to live with your parents anymore.

Now I've done exactly that for a month. And I was positively surprised. I still do solo work from home most of the time, but I do have two nice flatmates, which is my mom and my dad. We're spending some quality time together and it's mostly all right. Of course, some days I'm like: fuck this city, honestly, and fuck mom and dad, I just want to live on my own again. But most of it was really good.

Also: I have free coworking access here, full of students and founders, people on a shared journey who understand this path much more. In Hamburg a coworking space costs like €300 a month. Here it's zero. And I can walk anywhere. Ten minutes to university, ten minutes to my friends. In Hamburg you go up to 45 minutes by train. It's like the university campus in China again.

And the financial pressure is just gone. I have almost zero cost. No rent, no groceries really. That’s genuinely a game changer. In Hamburg there were more factors draining me than giving me energy. In Aachen it's the other way around.

02 The scholarship, finally

Next week, September 1st, my scholarship finally starts. For the first time I won't be broke anymore. If you remember, I got this thing back in March. It took half a year until the money actually flows. German bureaucracy bruh. For a broke bootstrapping founder who stumbled straight out of student life into founding life, it could definitely be faster. It's €1,200 a month, so still student money, but it pays my cost of living and I've waited for it a long time.

Quick correction on the freelance gig I hyped up last episode: it's still on, but slower and less certain than I made it sound. They have stricter policies than expected and we still need to negotiate. If you know me, I have this tendency to hype things up once I have the very first signal, and then reality hits. So: not dead, but not done either.

03 The sales month

Now the actual news. I spent most of this month doing one thing: sales. Calling companies out of the blue (that's called cold calling), jumping on calls with them, and building a pipeline. A pipeline is basically just a list of companies I move step by step from "never heard of me" to "signed contract."

Small crash course on building a company: there's essentially only two tasks you need to do. Building the product, and selling it. That's it. And especially with AI, building software has never been easier, so the real bottleneck is selling. Someone told me: as long as you don't make $100k a month, your single biggest problem is that people don't know you. I should have understood this way earlier. I spent months building features based on rather vague signals, and the more time I invested without significant customer progress, the more insecure I got about whether this business idea even makes sense. You can't answer that question by building. You answer it by talking to customers.

So this month I made outreach the full priority. Quick reminder what I'm actually building: companies need a certain standard compliance document, and my software creates it much faster and with way less manual work. My potential customers are small consulting firms that produce many of these documents for their clients. So I look those firms up on the internet, estimate if they could be a fit, pick up the phone and call them cold. One thing I learned: when I pitched like a salesman, people got defensive. When I reframed it as "I'm building this software, but before I invest more time I first want to learn from you whether it's going in the right direction", people opened up. 95% the same words, completely different reaction. Just a 15 minute call to learn about their process. Short enough that people say: yeah, why not.

From there it's three calls in total. First a discovery call, where I mostly ask questions (how many of these documents do you produce, what do you charge your clients for them, what's the most annoying part). Then a demo call, where I show them the software. Then an offer call, where I make them a concrete offer. And here it really paid off that I invested so much time into the product. It's surprisingly mature, most core features exist, I can demonstrate things I couldn't a few months ago. That adds a lot of credibility.

04 The happy dance

At the end of the demo calls I ask the money questions. What price would make you say yes without thinking twice, and what price would make you say no without thinking twice. Between those two numbers sits what a customer would realistically pay. Two weeks ago I heard that firsthand from a customer for the very first time. And let me tell you, I was shocked. It was five times higher than I expected. I did a five minute happy dance after that call. 100% confirmed, the happy dance happened.

Full transparency, because I think being open about numbers is so much more valuable than hush hush: this first customer would pay around €20,000 per year for the final version of the software. I was guessing maybe €4,000 for a company their size. Other conversations confirmed a similar range, quite consistently around €50 per document per month. Per month, because these documents aren't created once: my customers maintain them for their clients and update them every month as regulations change. So the software gets used, and paid for, continuously. Me personally, I'm a broke guy who pays €10 for Netflix and that's it. But businesses are not consumers. The numbers businesses throw around are on a whole different level. That's why you always sell to businesses, never to consumers.

To be clear: €20,000 is a number, not money. No contract signed, nothing wired to my bank account, it means nothing yet. But it killed a lot of my uncertainty and anxiety. All the progress before was invisible. This was the first real, visible progress on the business side.

05 The innovation program

Where this is heading: I'm offering a paid pilot, I call it the innovation program. Paid pilot means: the customers use the software while I'm still finishing it, give me feedback along the way, and pay for it. Six months, up to five slots for five companies. Full access to the software, I help with onboarding, regular feedback calls, a heavy discount, and in return I get feedback, a reference and their logo on my website. Payment upfront, which gives me capital for the things I actually need to pay: a lawyer to make the contracts bulletproof, maybe a freelance engineer to make sure the software is secure before real customer data goes in.

The current status:

Customer 1 said yes (ish) to my innovation program offer of €5,400 for the half year, a heavy discount compared to the €20,000 per year they named for the final version. I'm finishing the contract draft these days and aim to close it with him in two weeks.

Customer 2 saw the demo this week, reacted very positively ("I've been thinking about how to digitize this process for a long time") and said he'd be willing to pay around €10,000 a year for the full version. He's about half the size of the first one, so the numbers align surprisingly well. We have the offer call next week.

Customer 3 is the lawyer from two episodes ago. He got busy, so I have to reactivate him, but he already showed a lot of interest. He even said if I don't turn it into a finished software product, he'd hire me to custom build it just for him.

And there are more customers in earlier stages of the pipeline. I'm calling new companies essentially daily to keep it filled.

My two metrics: complete 30 discovery calls, and get at least three companies, ideally five, signing the innovation program. That would be enough proof to fully double down. For a long time it felt like I was just walking on the same spot. This is the first time it feels like the direction I'm walking towards leads to somewhere.

What's next + how to find me

• Aachen for September and October, maybe longer. Costs are basically zero here and it's better than I expected.
• The big ask: I have two days per week free, starting now. With the scholarship I'm allowed to work up to two days a week, and I need money. Anything goes, literally. A café here in Aachen, remote work from anywhere, and ideally high paying freelance stuff. If you know a company owner who needs helping hands two days per week, hit me up.
• Host me for a week or two in September? I'd love to come to your city, bring my laptop, work from there and hang out with you.
• Reply to this email. A sentence is enough.
• Unsubscribe at the bottom, no guilt. We stay friends either way.

Love you guys.

Alper

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