The history of wunschlösung part 4

In our little series, we want to give you an insight into how our founders Simon, Christian, Thomas, Carl-Gerold and Thomas got to know each other and how the founding of wunschlösung came about.

Chapter 4: "The early years

The beginning was made. The customers were warmed up. The team was in the starting blocks.


Thomas and Simon acted as jack-of-all-trades and (almost) jack-of-all-trades. Cutting projects, deciding on suitable architectures, backend and frontend programming, setting up servers and running applications - the two of them mastered all this from the FF. It's a good idea when you're founding an IT start-up …


What was new now were all the things that you don't get taught anywhere: How do you get into the commercial register quickly? How does rent subsidy work? Who is this Mr. "De-Minimis" and why does he need so many paper forms? What can be deducted from taxes and how? How do you find a good tax advisor and lawyer? How do you prevent them from declaring the other side responsible? What needs to be considered when hiring employees? - All these questions are familiar to anyone who has ever set up a business. So the newly minted directors had many appointments with tax advisors, bank advisors, lawyers, landlords and public offices. A time they remember with the words "We learned a lot".


Christian, CG and Thomas, in addition to their management consultant and IT project manager jobs, did their best to support them after work and at weekends. After all, there were plenty of other issues to deal with besides the project business, such as acquisition, back-office organisation, workshop moderation, process "perfection" and strategy work.


Speaking of work. It had to happen from somewhere on a permanent basis.


Until a separate office was organised, either the Bagels & Beans (café in Jena with excellent chai latte) or Thomas' Couch (with less excellent coffee) had to serve. Not necessarily comfortable throughout, but absolutely okay for a start and also quite cool for a manageable time.


The first real office was then found in the Technology & Innovation Park in Jena. One room, a 1.5-square-metre communal kitchen - it felt like a two-minute walk down the corridor. Somewhat cool and, thanks to the most favourable, still unrenovated ground floor north side location, never too bright. So ideal conditions for techies. Not perfect, but it was 'ours' and for that reason alone it was a huge milestone," the elders recall today.

(Warmth), safety and cleanliness were thus guaranteed. What was missing was … everything else. Or as the tax advisor says - office and business equipment. So hardware was procured, office furniture ordered, but also a lot of things brought from home to make it as cosy and functional as possible on a small budget. Improvisation was the order of the day, but that's exactly what makes the founding period so charming - at least as long as the coffee machine holds out. What turned out to be a really good decision in retrospect was the investment in electric height-adjustable desks. They still work today and make working so much more pleasant.


As an up-and-coming IT start-up, a website was naturally also on the to-do list. In accordance with Hermann Hesse's poem "And there is magic in every beginning", the first website was up and running in a record time of 2 days. To avoid any mischievous comments at this point: The current website (as of May 2021) is NOT the initial company appearance.


The first projects began, the code generators as a central element of the tech stack, i.e. the technology base, were constantly developed further. The entrepreneurial freedom to be able to change things quickly if they bothered them had an effect not only on the code generators, but also on the teamwork.
A large part of the motivation of all five founders was a high standard for the software solution right from the start, i.e. no fiddling around and a way of working that is fun. And that in the long term.


But how did it actually come about that a freshly founded start-up immediately gets involved in such big projects for well-known clients like Coca Cola, Kellogg's, Red Bull and Co.


The key was a combination of start-up support from cooperation partners who opened doors and were also able to benefit from the new opportunities themselves - and what one might call a "value proposition": To quickly digitise complex business processes. Not as disposable software, but as stable, flexible, but also scalable and expandable enterprise software that still runs after being "kicked three times".


This is how the contract for one of the first really big online platforms came about.


The client had a PHP online portal in use that had already gone into the state of "spaghetti software" (no one can see through it any more). An extension with new desired options was thus no longer possible or at least very risky. The existing software partners had estimated 6 months and more for a new implementation, which clearly exceeded the deadline by which the new features were needed. So THE chance to show what the team and the code generators were capable of. After two months the first version of the new portal was ready, after three months it went live and replaced the existing solution. The users were happy, the client was happy, the cooperation partners could say "We told you they were good at this" and the wunschlösung team was also happy - at least after a short recovery phase.

But as romantic as that may sound, of course not everything went smoothly in the wunschlösung. Just like in every other start-up, there were phases in which it was not clear whether everything would work out. Projects in which you have to learn the hard way and end up having to bring in money to keep your promises. Cooperations that start promisingly but then don't bring the desired benefits for both sides and are scrapped again. But it is not least this learning curve that makes it so appealing when you decide to "do" something.


And of course there were some - the start-up anecdotes from the early days. Simon still vividly remembers how he and Thomas reimplemented the entire technical basis of the REST APIs (web interfaces) in the car on the way to a first presentation to the customer, because it turned out just before the end that the desired API format could not be implemented with the old solution. Literally when we pulled into the customer's car park, everything was then checked in and fortunately worked smoothly. You don't have to have that every day, but it does happen in the start-up phase.


Despite all the setbacks and adventures, the positive order situation quickly made it necessary and possible to hire new wunschlösers. Within the first year, the team grew to six and later nine employees. Finding good people was not easy even then, but at least not quite as hard as it has been since 2019. By the way, we are always looking!


Regular Mario Kart tournaments on Super Nintendo provided the necessary "brain dump" during the breaks. And the first Christmas present was finally followed by the important and reliable survival aid: a fully automatic coffee machine still in daily use in the Jena office today, which conjures up a very tasty cup (even for tea drinkers) at the touch of a button. Incidentally, the Christmas present the following year was a company Playstation. How selfless founders can be to commission Father Christmas in such an altruistic way :D.


So those were the beginnings of wunschlösung. Since then, we have been working steadily to get better. We are excited to find out where our journey will take us next!