Winstate

Why did you found your start-up, what problem are you addressing and how are you solving it?

Many companies want to find new customers, talk to partners and find high-quality applicants. All of these target groups can be found on social media. But companies are failing to utilize their most valuable asset when it comes to promoting their business: Their own employees.

We are building a SaaS platform to enable employee advocacy by turning regular employees into active brand advocates.

Employees can create and share company-approved content on their own social media networks with just one click - and be rewarded and appreciated for it.

How did you come up with the idea of founding your start-up?

While working in different companies, we realized how hard it is to find and share company-approved content. We just couldn't understand it: Why are marketing departments creating all these fancy images, stories and videos, but there's no easy solution for employees to utilize these resources?

What was the most valuable advice someone gave you during your start-up phase?

The most valuable advice was to test our hypotheses. It's perfectly fine to pivot and see how your hypotheses fail. It's just important to come to a firm conclusion in the end. In the beginning, we also went through several pivots until we finally arrived at a product that resonates with the people we talk to.

It can be tempting to come to a conclusion without trying it out - but even the most obvious things can turn out differently if you take the time to listen to your customers and test your hypotheses.

What have you learned so far?

When you're building a startup, you have to move fast - but sometimes you also have to be patient. For example, after we sent out our pitch deck, we switched things around and sent it out again - and then again and again. We were too impatient. That's something to keep in mind: Don't rush everything.

Where did you meet as a team?

Ben and Thomas met many years ago while working at Volkswagen Group - Lukas and Thomas have known each other for more than 15 years. We fit together pretty well: Thomas comes up with all these crazy ideas, Ben is a master at making it look nice, and Lukas turns it all into brilliant code.

Do you still have a social life despite founding a startup?

We love what we do and have built our company on friendship. So social life and working life go well together.

If you could start all over again, would you do it exactly the same way?

Probably not. We've learned so much by talking to lots of different people - if we'd had this knowledge earlier, we would have done a few things differently.

For example, we would have put more emphasis on building our network. We knew it was important, just not as important. There are always new things to learn. But if you have everything at your disposal from the ground up, where would be the fun in that?

Where do you see yourselves in 3 years?

Of course we want to grow, move to a bigger office, hire more people and have a good time. As we are industry and market independent, we can expand into many different countries. In three years, we want to have a stable foothold in Europe so that we can also tackle other continents.

Do you have an office cat/dog/turtle...?

Not yet, but we would like to have bunnies. Ben has two of them at home. If you've had a bad day, you can just pick them up and cuddle them.

If an investor gave you €250,000, what would you do with the money?

We would definitely hire more technicians and spend some of it on paid ads. We are currently expanding our MVP - but after that we want to scale quickly. There's huge potential in additional markets moving forward. Our SaaS solution will come with a self-service online checkout, so it's really just about reaching our target audience and adding essential features.