Entrepreneurship: building companies, told honestly

Entrepreneurship has a poster problem. In the feeds, building companies looks like this: hockey-stick curve, fundraising announcement, 72x growth in five years as the yardstick. The curve hangs in pitch decks of companies that don't have a single paying customer yet. The word sounds like stages, pitch decks and success stories. Miss the curve and you're supposedly short on ambition. Question it and you supposedly never understood the game.

The everyday reality is less glamorous. Building companies consists of a handful of recurring decisions: services or product? When to scale? Who to hire, who to let go? Add the months where nothing shines, and the moments rarely written about honestly. If you make these decisions deliberately instead of sitting them out, you already hold the biggest lever.

This page collects the entrepreneurship articles: decisions, leadership, growth, failure too. Written for founders and leaders in B2B software companies, whether self-funded or backed by investors. And written against the poster: for most companies here, the famous curve is the wrong assignment.

Entrepreneurship, to me, means building companies, told honestly. I started my first software company at 16, sold several and crashed a couple. So I write from practice here, not from theory. Much of it I learned the expensive way, some of it twice. You won't read hero stories here, but the decisions behind them: what worked, what didn't, and how I'd spot it earlier next time.

What you'll learn

• How to make the fundamental choice between services and product deliberately, instead of sitting it out.
• How to tell your company is ready to scale: measurable thresholds instead of gut feeling.
• What leadership looks like when it gets serious: letting go, hiring, deciding.
• Why the 72x curve is the investors' portfolio maths and which yardstick adds up more honestly for you.

Entrepreneurship means holding the sequence, not copying the pace

Entrepreneurship in B2B software means building a company that solves a real problem for paying business customers, with systems that work without you. It's a craft of decisions under uncertainty, not a personality trait and not a calling.

From that follows the thesis of this page: building companies means holding the sequence, not copying the pace. First prove customers stay, then scale. First decide what you build, then add scope. Break the sequence because other people's pace makes you nervous, and you'll repair later at a steep price. The rest of this page is the evidence, decision by decision.

Services or product: what do you build first?

The first fundamental question for many software entrepreneurs: services or product? The agency earns from day one, the product eats years of runway and scales in return. There is no universally right answer, only a deliberate decision.

My experience with both sides is in Service agency vs software product business. Many run both for a while: the agency pays the bills, the product builds the future. It gets dangerous when the transition is never planned and the product stays a side project forever. Then you own two half companies and no whole one.

How quickly a product can stand when you keep the scope honest is in Build a SaaS product in 90 days: narrow, honest, shipped. How you decide what gets built at all, and for whom, is deepened in the hub on software product management.

This decision is not a one-time fork, it keeps coming back. Every larger client project pulls you towards services, because money flows there immediately. So write it down: what we are, what we want to become, by when. Otherwise the bank balance decides, and the bank balance always votes short term.

When is the right time to scale?

Scale only when your own numbers prove two things: customers stay, and customer acquisition pays for itself repeatably. Before that, every new hire only scales the burn. It sounds banal and still gets ignored constantly.

I paid for this lesson myself: I scaled Aioma to 30 people in 6 months and learned that growth mercilessly exposes every weak spot in a company.

Mark Roberge makes both proofs measurable in The Science of Scaling. First gate: product-market fit, meaning evidence that customers reliably get value and stay. As a benchmark he names annual customer retention above 90%. Second gate: go-to-market fit, meaning evidence that acquisition pays. His thresholds: the value of a customer over the whole relationship is at least three times the cost of winning them, and sales costs pay back in under 12 months.

The pace afterwards is a rule for Roberge too, not gut feeling. Scaling is a hiring rhythm, not a hiring event: roughly two salespeople per quarter, watch the leading indicators, then accelerate or pause. His image for the alternative: hire 10 salespeople in January and you'll have 2 left by December.

Stijn Hendrikse describes the same logic in T2D3 as a baseball diamond: first the MVP, meaning the first sellable version of your product, then product-market fit, then scaling, then sustainable profitability. No base can be skipped. He makes product-market fit measurable with a checklist of 10 milestones, ending in three hard numbers: 10 paying customers, 10 public testimonials, 10 new customers via referral.

The short version of both books: sequence beats speed. Skip the foundations and you'll go back later to repair. Both authors write from a US SaaS context, so take their thresholds as hypotheses to test against your own numbers. The thinking error they warn about is universal all the same: growth doesn't hide weaknesses, it amplifies them.

Leadership when it gets serious

Building companies also means hard conversations. Nobody thanks you for letting someone go. Still, deciding who stays and who goes is among the most important calls you make. How I decide, how I run the conversation and how I deal with the rest is in Letting people go.

Hiring is a leadership decision too: better to hire slowly and correct quickly than the other way round. Every person you bring on board changes the company more than the org chart shows. And hard conversations don't get better by postponing them. My yardstick: if I've postponed a decision three times, it has long been made. All that's missing is the courage to say it out loud.

The second leadership discipline is less visible: meetings. Most meetings are theatre. I treat them as decision machines: fixed rhythm, clear preparation, and every session ends with a decision. How a small team decides instead of sitting through meetings is in Meetings that move your company forward. And why I sent teams to the mountains for focused work is told in the profile The Mountaineer.

What does AI change about building companies?

AI makes execution cheap and shifts the bottleneck to decisions. Writing code, drafting copy, preparing data: AI agents, meaning programs that carry out work steps on their own, increasingly handle all of it. What stays expensive: context, judgement and leadership.

That changes company building in two places. First, team size: small teams with well-led agents replace structures that used to need whole departments. What that means in practice is shown in From vibe coding to agentic engineering and Agentic engineering in the DACH mid-market: it rarely fails on the tech, it fails on leadership and culture.

Second, the data foundation. Agents are only as good as the data they work with. That's why a data strategy with a CRM, meaning a system for customer data and relationships, and a clean process for customer relationship management belong in the basic kit. How you turn that into a sales engine is shown in the hub on GTM engineering.

How do you start with entrepreneurship, and which mistakes cost you years?

Start with a paying customer, not with a business plan. Everything else follows from that order. Concretely:

• Decide the business model deliberately: services, product or a planned transition.
• Define who your customer is and which problem you solve before you add scope.
• Measure a few numbers honestly: do customers stay, and does acquisition pay for itself?
• Install a fixed decision rhythm instead of collecting meetings.
• Show up publicly: founder-led content, meaning content from the founder personally, is the one advantage nobody can copy.

The most expensive mistakes are the mirror images of this list: scaling before retention proves it. Copying US playbooks one to one although law, capital structure and culture differ here. Hiring on hope instead of numbers. Postponing hard conversations until they cost twice as much. And maybe the most expensive mistake: wanting to do everything yourself. If you handle every task yourself, you don't own a business, you own a job.

The 72x curve is portfolio maths, the Rule of 40 is the sober yardstick

Which brings us back to the poster. Hypergrowth means extreme growth in a short time. There are famous playbooks for it, and most come from another world: venture capital, the US market, the cheap-money era. Is that a model for DACH companies? Rarely as a goal, but often as a textbook. Both books named here are worth reading, at arm's length: take the tools, not the targets.

The best-known example is Stijn Hendrikse's T2D3 formula: triple revenue twice, then double it three times, the formula for 72x growth in five years. That growth curve is the investors' portfolio maths, not a law of nature for your company. A venture fund needs a few extreme outliers for its portfolio to pay off. You don't.

The sober alternative sits in the same book: the Rule of 40. Growth rate and profit margin should add up to at least 40. For self-funded DACH companies that's the more honest yardstick, because it weighs growth against profitability instead of treating growth as absolute. And Mark Roberge's The Science of Scaling only allows scaling once your own numbers prove it anyway.

The thread through all of it: I build systems that stay when I leave. That goes for sales, for product and for the company itself. A company that only runs while the founder is in the room isn't a business, it's a stage. And a growth curve that only holds while fresh money keeps flowing isn't proof, it's a countdown.

Building honestly: what counts in the end

✅ What shines: Holding the sequence works in every capital structure. Prove retention first, then scale, at a rhythm instead of in one push: that logic carries the self-funded company as much as the startup with investors.

❌ What doesn't shine: Sequence makes no headlines. Build cleanly and you grow slower than the poster promises, and you explain that to the people around you again and again. Patience looks like standstill from the outside.

⚠️ Warning: The biggest trap is the copied target. Adopt the 72x curve without the capital structure behind it and you scale the burn, not the company. Numbers from US playbooks are hypotheses, not orders.

The poster from the opening isn't wrong, it just hangs in the wrong office. The hockey-stick curve is a fund's calculation, not your building plan. Your building plan sits in your own numbers: customers stay, acquisition pays for itself, the system holds without you. If you want notes like these on a regular basis, subscribe to my newsletter.

Below you'll find all articles on this topic, each described in plain language.