Co-founders found in their own shared flat

It all started in a shared flat in Hamburg, where Jannik Semmelhaack and Tobias Wandersleb live together. At the time, Jannik was working in e-commerce at Philips as part of his dual studies and, with just a handful of experts, increased sales from 10 to 40 million euros in 24 months. During this time, however, he also had to deal with many customer problems and learned a few things that he benefits from today. For example, the company lacked intelligent, AI-driven processes and better coordination between departments. Jannik missed an independent authority here and recognized a need: it was good for him to see that the “big players” also have these problems.

Tobias was also completing a dual study program at the time, but at Hauni in Bergedorf, where he implemented his first forecasting system at the age of 20. He had thus created the technical basis for building a product with which the start-up VOIDS can help not only companies like Hauni, but also SMEs.

Business idea

The two roommates became friends and finally, in spring 2020, Jannik and Tobias decided to quit their jobs and found a company that offers precisely these solutions: Their startup aims to help medium-sized e-commerce companies resolve imbalances between supply and demand, for example due to unavailability. The founders achieve this through an automated demand management solution that uses AI technologies to increase sales by 10% and profits by 20%.

“Our USP (unique selling point) is our demand shaping solutions. Hence the name of our startup VOIDS, it is short for Vision of intelligent Demand Shaping. This makes us the only company on the market that can help our customers proactively shape their own future goals (e.g. sales growth or profitability),” reports Jannik: “In addition, we have specialised in a large niche: E-commerce companies with a turnover of one to 25 million euros. There is a real gap in the SaaS market here (Saas is short for Software as a Service, a cloud-based software delivery model), as our software is scalable and can be implemented in under 24h,” Jannik explains.

A real success story for the city of Hamburg, as the two entrepreneurs founded the company just last year: Together with their beyourpilot start-up consultant (since July 2023 under the brand “Startup Port”), they wrote the EXIST application in February 2022. Their mentor and project supervisor from the University of Hamburg, Prof. Dr. Michel Clemen, also provided support. The funding commitment of 150,000 euros was then made in August 2022. Shortly afterwards, they were also accepted into the world’s second largest accelerator program Techstars (techstars.com).

Start-up support

“beyourpilot or Startup Port is the first port of call for founders from academia who need help with their first steps, just like us in 2021. Why? Because the team not only successfully supports numerous startups in applying for one of Germany’s most prestigious funding programs (EXIST start-up grant), but also brings an enormous amount of expertise and time to the table,” explains Jannik.

“At the beginning, we weren’t networked at all in the Hamburg start-up scene and also didn’t know what funding opportunities were available. In both cases, beyourpilot was a great help, along with the EXIST application,” Tobias adds.

Competition

“Our biggest competitor is the customer itself and its internal processes,” reports Jannik: “We find that many e-commerce retailers have no planning or plan on the basis of Excel. This means that in 70 to 80 percent of cases, we don’t have to convince them that other providers are better than us.” The challenge for VOIDS is to get customers to not only plan with the startup, but also to see demand shaping as a priority.

E-commerce is in a state of flux: “After peaking in the Corona phase, competition has grown. Retailers therefore need to work on their profile. On the other hand, because of the current interest rates, they can no longer order and store as much merchandise. That hurts. So the market change plays into our hands because that’s where we start,” Jannik explains.

Artificial intelligence

“VOIDS uses a transformer model from the field of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). So we are not far removed from ChatGPT. But we can determine a time series of the future from a time series of the past. Seasonal influences, meteorological influences, our Transformer model can even deal with planning data. This is good for our customers because we incorporate their circumstances into the analysis. It’s a deep learning model for precise forecasts,” says Jannik. The start-up not only offers data processing and visualization, but also data science. Many software solutions don’t have that. That’s why the company can position itself as an AI solution.

Employees

Motivation and talent are most important to the founders when it comes to the characteristics of their new employees: “The big fish like Amazon etc. have been working with data science for years. SMEs can’t do that, or don’t have the resources. Our employees understand this vision and recognize this opportunity. That motivates them. We need real expertise, and it doesn’t come cheap. However, VOIDS makes an important contribution to e-commerce as a whole and to society – that should motivate us accordingly,” says Jannik. The start-up currently has six employees, three of whom are studying part-time. Thanks to the Innorampup funding, the founders will be hiring additional specialists in software development and sales and marketing in the future.

Fails

Jannik and Tobias have been working together for about two years: “Before you join forces as a team, you should go through a longer engagement phase. I can only recommend that,” Jannik reports: “In our first joint pilot project, Tobi and I worked together for half a year. We really went through thick and thin: That was our borderline experience.”

The two of them laughed a lot, especially at the beginning, which Jannik highly recommends to founders: “That’s the thrill. You always have to ask yourself what you can learn from it. First of all, don’t stop and play past the pain point and still have fun”. A lot of things didn’t work out straight away, for example because the database was very modest: “First the stakeholders didn’t want to share any data, then we had to make an effort and then clean up the data, because the first forecast simply looked catastrophic. The figures made no sense. You don’t know why that is. You have a deadline from the customer. When we send it to the customer, they say we’re beginners. A borderline experience. So Tobi met with our development team, which didn’t even exist at the time and was still a mix of freelancers, for seven days. He turned this forecast upside down five times until we had a presentable result. We were also under time pressure because the whole thing was also part of our thesis: We didn’t just want to get a good Master’s degree, we also wanted to prove a business idea.” The two had hardly any experience at the time. Good communication with the co-founder was necessary to take the pressure off each other. That helped a lot.

Team communication

At the beginning, everything goes well: because there are only two of us, coordination is still quite uncomplicated: “But the more there are, the greater the challenge becomes. More topics etc. In this phase we realised that we had problems. Communication was the number one issue we had to work on. We have a retrospective every fortnight where we give feedback. What needs to be improved. It’s sometimes uncomfortable, but in the end you get better,” Jannik explains.

“I recommend to all founders not to bottle up failures, but to talk about them with others. But you should also think about who you ask for advice on which topics,” says Jannik.

Work-life balance

The two founders started the project as friends. So they are business partners and friends at the same time: “It’s not always easy to separate the two. You know each other privately and have to speak your mind and judge things independently: “We had to work on that. If I don’t have any fun for more than two days, I actively ask myself what the reason is. That helps you sleep. If you stop working – which you hardly ever do – then really don’t work. Because if you keep thinking about it, you’ll get into a spiral. After 10 or 11 hours of work, you keep working for at least another 2 hours. That’s hard to bear.” Jannik has therefore sought a balance, for example sport, which he does 5 to 6 times a week. Tobi too. It is also important for him to separate work and leisure time:

“We don’t communicate much professionally via WhatsApp, only via Slack. Topics are parked after work. From 11 p.m., the cell phone goes into flight mode – I can recommend that to everyone. Some people even do it from 8 pm. It’s easier to switch off then.” Jannik then likes to read something that has nothing to do with his work. After his alarm clock rings in the morning, he doesn’t answer his cell phone until 45 minutes later. “I used to do that straight after waking up – if something negative came up, the day got off to a bad start. I wanted to avoid that.”

Future outlook

In the future, they want to focus on two issues at VOIDS: Firstly, on securing follow-up funding, which is explicitly desired and supported within the framework of EXIST funding, and secondly, on expanding the team in order to reach the next milestones in product development.

VOIDS wants to serve around 3,000 SME customers in the next few years, says Jannik: “Then we’ll have a real footprint! We then work with various SMEs that create a lot of jobs. We want them to remain competitive. We consumers also benefit from this diversity. From companies that know what customers want. That is the long-term goal. It’s about contributing to an e-commerce landscape where e-commerce D2C founders can profitably scale their brands, while customers around the world benefit from greater product diversity and a better shopping experience.”

There is still a long way to go until then, which the founders want to take step by step together. Looking back, they have already achieved a lot in a short space of time: “That’s encouraging for the future. One percent more every day. That is success. You have to think like that and then you can sleep better – if you’re not overwhelmed by overly ambitious plans. In my opinion, it’s worth setting lower goals and then achieving more. It doesn’t always work, but it motivates you. Next year, we want to have at least 70 to 100 customers live on the Shopify platform. Then we’ll add other channels such as Amazon or WooCommerce. Then we’ll really make meters,” says Jannik confidently.

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