After 4.5 years, I logged in again to an old MVP of the project I started with @AlexanderSpahn before building! It's nostalgic to see what we were building when Covid came, forcing us to shut it down back then. But glad it came, we could start Veertly and recently sold it to Swisscom 🔥 This was a peer-to-peer parcel delivery network. And to fully understand our problem back then, we needed to deliver some packages! We asked some companies nearby if they had Christmas gifts to deliver to their customers. And we got 200 packages to deliver in Switzerland, for the Christmas of 2019. This was the best way we could ever have to put our hands dirty and feel the pain of all stakeholders, in particular the delivery people. We had to: - Grab the packages from the customer - Organize and create different delivery routes - Decide which routes to do and which ones to outsource via the Swiss Post - Try to create a prototype to help our deliveries and track them - Physically move around the cities and deliver the packages - Manage the not-delivered ones and resend them... It was a very nice adventure, but I am happy to have pivoted to Veertly and focused only on the Virtual world! Physical world problems are so much more complex. I truly admire all the founders who are building startups in that space. My lesson from this story: 𝗘𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝘆𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘃𝗲. Do you have a similar story?

I am feeling nostalgic 🥲 Today we sent out our last email to all our customers at @veertly... My memories are revisiting many of these 4 years of adventure: - The first lines of code back in 2019 - The moment @AlexanderSpahn joined me on this journey - The decision to put all in when Covid stopped the world in March 2020 - The first event with 100+ people (what a disaster!) - The first sale in the Summer of 2020 - The incorporation in October 2020 - The first white-label customers - The first call with Joschka - The first hires - The first popup office - The seed round in 2021 (thank you for your trust in our project) - The big events with more than 5k people - The growth of our team - The launch and failure of Gomada - The challenging downturn of the virtual events industry - The hard decisions we had to make - The great partnerships with our customers - The last popup-office - The incredible culture we created (not sure I will ever be able to recreate it...) - The fantastic engineering team I had (I hope to bring you back to my new projects!) - The friends I made - The negotiations for the sale - The day of the sale signature - And the moment I transferred the Github repo to Swisscom This baby that I started from a simple line of code and gave a strange name will now continue to grow under a bigger structure 😊 I couldn't be prouder of all this journey and story. These were the best professional years of my life! 🥹 My biggest learning from this journey: focus on the people around you, that's what makes a great journey! Once entrepreneur, entrepreneur forever. 🚀 When I built Veertly, I was focused too much on the inside, so from now on, I want to be more open to the external world. I am now building my next ventures in public! #buildinpublic

I always feel proud when I check events timeline of @veertly 🥹 Seeing 600+ people concurrently in the same event for more than 8h is rewarding. This was an event yesterday! Such a great story we built that is now going to continue with a bigger brand 🥲

Today, @AlexanderSpahn shared insights on how we were able to rank on page 1 of Google for keywords around team building with our Gomada blog. Check yourself by searching for: - team building companies - 15 minutes games - team building statistics - diversity team building activities Reach out to @AlexanderSpahn or @juschaaf, or myself if you want to know more.