When the new thing is the old

Start-ups rarely develop products for older people. As a result, they are depriving themselves of a potentially lucrative target group. A young company from East Westphalia shows how to tap into this target group.

Germany's biggest start-ups have one thing in common: whether Auto1, GetYourGuide or About You, they are all technology-driven companies. This is also because they hope to make traditional business areas - such as fashion retail or the used car business - more attractive to young people and thus outperform established companies.

By contrast, many start-ups hardly have the other end of the population pyramid in mind. "Senior citizens have so far been an underestimated target group for start-ups and tech developers," says Ariane Schenk, spokesperson for Health & Pharma at the digital association Bitkom: "The perception is that they are less tech-savvy and skeptical of new things."

However, this perception has little to do with reality. According to the latest Allensbach market and advertising media analysis, almost 58% of all people over the age of 60 in Germany are online at least once in a while, and more than a quarter even do so several times a day. This cannot be reconciled with the image of pensioners who are hostile to progress. For Ariane Schenk, this is not surprising. They are very open to technologies that enable them to live independently for longer or have more security in their everyday lives. "If start-ups manage to offer user-friendly solutions, there is a lot of potential here," she says confidently.

"Agetech", as the start-up sector for senior citizens is also known, could therefore become the next big thing if enough founders are interested in it. The first initiatives have been launched to raise awareness of this potential in the start-up scene. This year, the second "Agetech Bootcamp" took place in Chemnitz - fittingly the oldest major city in Germany - where founders were able to present their ideas specifically for this target group. Since 2018, the German Seniors' League interest group has been presenting the "SENovation Award" for agetech start-ups together with the insurance company Signal Iduna.

A look at this year's finalists shows just how diverse the potential gateways for creative founders are. The start-up Memoresa, for example, wants to make the processing of estates via a platform socially acceptable. Account closures can be initiated via this platform, as well as a "digital emergency safe" in which a power of attorney or living will can be stored.

Meanwhile, the service provider "besser zuhause" (better at home) wants to help senior citizens to adapt their homes for age-appropriate living. The concept includes concrete measures in the home, help with applying for grants and the integration of technologies for participation.

This year's winner in the Start-ups category was GTK Gesellschaft für technische Kriminalprävention mbH (GTK GmbH) from Hövelhof in the Paderborn district. Oliver Böttcher, the founder of the company, is the man behind the name. His award-winning invention: The RUFUS telephone filter. This is designed to protect senior citizens from fraudulent calls, for example from grandchild scammers. "The telephone filter is a small box that we place between the connection and the telephone," explains Böttcher. The filter contains a "white list" of trustworthy numbers that are put through without further ado. The filter first stops unknown numbers and, for example, asks the caller to have the call recorded. "Anyone who does not agree to this will not be put through," says Böttcher. There are other options that the filter can be set to.

The installation should be as simple as possible so that everyone can implement it themselves. "There is a language menu and the respective cable connections are clearly color-coded," says the founder. In an initial test run, GTK GmbH equipped 100 senior citizens in the Gütersloh district with the filter to check whether it is easy to use and actually blocks unwanted calls. "The test phase ran from August to October 2019 and we blocked 1,000 calls that we were able to classify as fraudulent," says Böttcher. Which shows how serious the problem is for older people.

For Oliver Böttcher, the recognition from winning the prize is a source of satisfaction. After all, he initially had difficulties with his idea in the start-up scene: "In competitions, we usually lost out to highly scalable software solutions or comparison portals," he recalls. There was a lack of understanding for his idea. "Many didn't believe in the market." The telephone filter has now been on the market since September and the first production run of 250 units will be sold by the end of the year, Böttcher believes. The aim is to break the thousand mark next year, and in the long term much more is possible, he says: "After all, there are ten million senior households in Germany."