When somebody asks me these days what I’ve been up to last year, I usually answer: “Nothing. I did absolutely nothing.”

At least that’s what it feels like I have been doing lately since I had no plan what I want to do after I closed my startup oratio earlier this year. But looking back I achieved more than I perceived and it was an incredible year full of traveling, activities, learning new things and taking a step back to figure out what I want to do next. …

Exactly one year ago I wrote an internal memo to our team proposing to change our strategy from a short term opportunity to a long term mission. One year later, we are out of business.

The company I’m talking about is called oratio, which I founded together with my co-founder Bernhard in 2015. oratio is a customer communication platform which helps businesses to communicate with their customers on messengers, through personal livechat and automated chatbots. During the first 2 years, we grew an international, remote team of 9 people and grew our MRR to USD 20k. …

The Welcome Sequence is a sequence of messages and call to actions you can show new users when they start a conversation with your Facebook Page.

In this guide you will learn how to setup this sequence and use it to subscribe users to your MailChimp list.

The Conversation Menu or Persistent Menu allows you to have an always-on user interface element inside Messenger conversations. This is an easy way to help people access information in your Messenger channel at any point in the conversation.

Defining of how people will get in touch with your product is something every startup should do very early on. This is essential, because you need to know how you’ll communicate with your potential customers and how your marketing and content strategy will look like.

There are many different ways people can get in touch with your product. They all have a different level of knowledge about the market, they all have different ways of describing their problems and different ways on looking for a solution for their problem. …

Many startups or product teams often struggle with the decision which features to build and how to prioritize which features to build first. Others often think they need to add more features to build better products, while sometimes the opposite would be more beneficial.

Adding the right features can improve your product exponentially, adding the wrong ones can make your product to a feature cemetery, adding too many will dilute the perception of your product in your customers’ mind. It’s more than important to think of which features should be built and which of them should be prioritized.

In the past I have worked in many different product teams and there’s no real one-fits-it-all approach on how this decision and prioritization process should be done. There are some starting points though which helped me to make decisions easier. A while ago I started to draft a list of questions I try to answer before implementing new…

The purpose of a startup is creating a product which solves a customer’s pain - also referred to as product value. Startups don’t fail because they are not able to build a product, most of the time they fail because they can’t communicate their product value and their vision to its customers. Customers don’t buy a set of features, they buy a vision. Creating a customer is creating the right message. Successful communication is sending out the right message to the right audience at the right time.

Successful communication needs a strategy

Communication is not only about some texts on a website, an article on a blog or a post on Facebook. It's about sending a consistent message to your users. It's repeatedly telling what you are doing, what you stand for and how you as a brand want to be perceived by others - in many different ways, on many different channels. …

One month ago I launched MailPort on Product Hunt. MailPort is a side project I’m working on, enabling Marketers to connect their Facebook Page’s Messenger account to email based Marketing tools.

This was the 9th time I was launching a product on Product Hunt and so far my most successful launch. As someone doing startups for more than 7 years, there are plenty of things I learned, especially a lot of ways of how not to approach things. This is one of the reasons I decided to share all promotion approaches, numbers and learnings with MailPort publicly.

Usually before launching on Product Hunt I was doing quite some preparation, like asking people beforehand if they can upvote us or ask a question we had prepared. Even though this approach is often referred to as “best practice”, it’s not. …