Second in this series: a founder who’s actually done this before, and this time is doing it differently on purpose.
Done This Before: Building a Second Company, on Purpose, Differently
Ask Johannes Berding what he’d do differently the second time around, and he doesn’t hesitate: get the contacts first.
He’d know. This isn’t his first company. His first was a road-trip planner app, built with a routing algorithm his team wrote themselves, three founders, no outside investment, most of the revenue coming from business clients rather than consumers. It ran for a while. It also taught him, the hard way, what actually matters when you’re trying to sell something to a company that’s never heard of you.
“If you can start with contacts already in place, if you can present something directly instead of showing up at some director’s door ten times over, that’s worth a lot.”
That’s most of why he’s at Beam now, doing this a second time, on purpose, differently.
Not his first funding, either
Before Beam, Johannes had already been through a state-run founder stipend, the kind of program that pays you a salary while you get a company off the ground. On paper, that sounds like the safer route. In practice, he says, it was extremely bureaucratic just to get approved, let alone to draw on afterward. Beam’s process, by contrast, he describes as fast and responsive from the first conversation onward.
Contacts were reason one for coming back to this. Speed was reason two. Getting paid along the way doesn’t hurt either, he’s candid about that, but it’s not what tips the scale for him. What he’ll say plainly is that he enjoys being his own boss, “the freedom of it,” as he puts it.
The problem this time
Johannes’s current project sits inside BEUMER Group‘s Courier, Express, and Parcel world, the same corner of intralogistics that keeps millions of parcels sorted and moving every day. The details of what exactly he’s building aren’t public yet, stay tuned. What he’ll say now is that it’s three months in, the interview and research stage is done, and he’s already in conversation with a potential customer for a pilot.
That’s faster than it sounds. Getting to a real customer conversation inside three months, on a B2B problem, in an industry he wasn’t in six months ago, is exactly why he joined the program in the first place.
Two different strengths
Johannes handles the product side quickly himself, by his own account not always polished, but quick. His co-founder is the one who takes an early, still-airy idea and makes it land in front of a client or a coach. We’ll get to his own story in the next post in this series, his path here looks nothing like Johannes’s.
For now, what’s worth noting is this: Johannes isn’t building his second company the same way he built his first. Last time, he built the structure and the contacts himself, as he went. This time, he picked a program that already had both in place, and he’s not shy about saying so.
Want to build your next company with the contacts and structure already in place? Beam is currently looking for its next Entrepreneurs in Residence. Apply here.