Why I am building Alldone.app as a side-business

In March 2020 I will have worked 4 years at BCGDV. During that time I have helped to build over 7 ventures for big companies either as interim CEO or CPO. Just to give an example: I am still very proud of the geospatial developer platform UP42.com (satellites!) which we helped build for Airbus — great company and we had a great time building it :)

However it is about time to start building something on my own again — especially since I wanted to build something like Alldone.app for over 10/15 years by now and in the last few years at BCGDV I constantly felt the need for a tool like this.

So what is it? Alldone.app is a team collaboration tool which helps everybody to work truly agile like the best digital product teams.

Most tools used by digital product teams are very feature rich and can be configured nicely — however this also means they are way too complex for the typical “business” user. Alldone.app now enables all employees in the company — so not only the engineers & designers of the product team — to manage tasks, notes, goals and contacts in an agile way while being as fast/easy to use as the best-in-class apps made for personal use. In Alldone.app everything is integrated and just works without configuration so you can work together nicely as a team with great workflows between the features. Furthermore Alldone encourages your employees to capture their learnings and make it accessible to their colleagues. This way you can establish a true „do-measure-learn-iteration“ in your company making sure the next project will go even better than the current one.

So obviously Alldone.app is amazing and I am planning to write much more about it — however today I want to start things off by writing about why I am doing Alldone.app as a side-project next to BCGDV and not as a standalone venture. Why don‘t I just quit my job like a real entrepreneur and get into it for real?

The short answer is: because I am not building Alldone.app as Venture Capital game. I am building it as a cash flow business … at least for now.

This is something i learned when I read the Tim Ferris book „4 hour work week“ a few years ago. Before reading the book in my mind every startup had to be “VC financed” and the ultimate success of every startup was how much Venture Capital it could raise. I played that game when doing the social network for amateur sports people meinSport.de in 2007 (which ultimately failed because facebook grew too fast and nobody needed a special community only for sporting people) and then again for the mobile gaming company mobilebits.de in 2009 (which managed to get over 30m users but failed to monetize sufficiently to really justify a Venture Capital case). After reading the book from Tim Ferris i became aware of a different category of companies which just aim to do revenue with limited upfront investment. Since there is no crazy investment behind it is also ok if „only“ 1.000 people sign up and pay 10k each / month. While a VC needs a return of potential 10–100x to justify the risk, I would personally be very happy with a monthly revenue of 10k USD/EUR … and if its‘ 10.000 people signing up even better. Also since I am not going full-time, no VC will invest in it anyway. So building it as a cash-flow business is my only chance. However not all startups qualify to be build without VC involvement. Let‘s look at the criteria:

• Low effort / cost to build MVP
• Quick path to revenue in terms of business model
• Potential to grow without major marketing/branding money

The good news is that Alldone.app qualifies in all of these dimensions as a „cash-flow-business“. Because there are so many great frameworks for all the features needed you can build it with relatively low effort. You need probably only 3–5 people for 3–5 months to get an initial MVP out of the door. The business model is also great — it will be a typical SaaS model with a price per month per user so it will start making money from day one. The marketing potential is of course still a bit unclear. It remains to be seen how high CAC and CLV will be. However there is no big reason why it should be super different at scale (with VC money) versus on a smaller scale. Let’s see :)

So I can build it as a cash-flow business … but what are the advantages of building it as a side-business and not as a full-time business?

The main reason is that it allows me to keep my current cash-flow. I am currently 41 and I had a well paying job for the last couple of years at BCGDV so I no longer live like a student. It would not necessarily be fun to go back to the „years of poverty“ I had during my startup times :) Also having cash flow is similar to having revenue. If I setup the business in a way that i can permanently fund it with the cash flow from my job, it is similar to being a business which makes revenue already. It gives you freedom.

This freedom and „side-business“ speed also allows for deeper thinking about the product. Alldone has been growing in my head already for a few years and it has gone through several iterations during that time. Normally these iterations would have costs millions of VC money but due to the slower speed and development lots of stuff is being changed already on the concept level before it is being built.

Another reason is that in my current job I also build ventures partly as a „side-business“ with staffing ranging between 20–100% of my capacity. So in a way i am used to help build a venture „on the side“ — my job trained me for that.

And last but not least: I like and enjoy my current job. It allows you to work with great people and the different, always changing industries are also fun. It can be sometimes frustrating to be caught up in the corporate ways and changes of strategy … but to balance this i now have my own venture with AllDone.app where i control my own destiny.

So that’s it for now as my first article about Alldone and why I am setting it up as a side-business. I am planning to share more stories about this adventure in the coming weeks, months and years. For myself to document important decisions but also as a way to write down learnings which may or may not find their way back into Alldone at some point :) Thanks for reading!

See all the articles about Alldone.app here.