Meet FlowShare, Winner of the Startups of the Year in Hamburg

This interview series celebrates all the phenomenal Startups of the Year Winners. Congratulations! Well-Deserved, Champion. The HackerNoon community is excited to learn more about you!

Meet FlowShare, a documentation software transformed into a workforce upskilling solution that changes the way organizations harnes and keep their procedural know-how.

What does it mean for you to win this title?

Honestly this does come as a most welcome and pleasant surprise to us! But it now means we are rising up to the challenge and the title.

What sets you apart from the competition?

In a sea of browser oriented solutions, what sets us apart is our propriatary Tracking Engine, making our solution compatible with all kinds of software, even legacy or custom, and being able to run on desktop only. FlowShare is compatible, easy to use and adheres to the strictest data security standards.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We are a small but very multi national team where each team members perspective makes an invaluable contribution. What we lacked in experience in the market when we started we made up with perseverance and grit, developing close to our customers needs and never stopping listening and exploring. As founders we build our organizations on the servant leadership principles knowing that our key to success is empowering our team. We offer a lot of flexibility, with remote work, flexible working hours, benefits that are tailored to the needs of our team members (like child care) but we also ask a lot in return - self organization, reliability, and dealing with an organization that is quickly evolving and changing.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

At the beginning of our venture us founders were joking that we have to cover the case that one of us goes off to India to become a Yoga teacher. Who knows, maybe that would’ve happend if business didn’t take off? On a more realistic note while our startup was still in early shows I was a freelance designer to finance our “side-hustle”, now fulltime business FlowShare. If it wasn’t for the startup I would have gone into product / service design, because that would still combine my passion for digital tools.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

As a bootstrapped startup we keep a close eye on our MRR and making sure we stay profitable and grow our business and team at a sustainable rate. Core metrics are typical for a B2B SaaS - Number of Trials, numer of Paid Customers. For our roadmap we do count in the business value (and customer demand) but also the passion. We want our team to be passionate about what they are developing and if someone has a crazy idea - we provide the room for experiments.

Tell us how your startup is changing the world.

Our mission is to bridge the skill gaps in today's workforce, empowering individuals to excel in a rapidly evolving economy.

Why? In the AI-driven economy, the survival of businesses hinges on a skilled and empowered workforce. There is more at stake than ever - they risk knowledge drain & extinction. We believe that the right information is key. That's why FlowShare enables experts to automatically capture their know-how and make it accessible to everyone in the organization.

How do you or your company intend to embrace the responsibility of this title in 2024?

Let’s face it, for the past few years we’ve been living under a rock fishing in the German market and focusing on our desktop tool. 2024 marks a new year of visibility for us. Showing everything we have in a bolder manner and delivering great results for our customers, because that’s at the end the only thing that matters.

What goals are you looking forward to accomplishing in 2024?

Grow our team, visibility and onboarding many many many new users. Also entering the US market.

Which trend(s) are you most excited about in 2024? Share your reasons.

The practical use cases of AI at work and what we can contribute to it. The impact Copilot, SAP Joule and Salesfore Einstein Copilot will have on all SME ERP software vendors. This is the “iPhone” moment whereas before people were happy with what they got - but now that big tech is rolling our realtime help at the fingertips it will change what users expect from their software solutions. People never liked reading manuals but now that they experience the alternative they will never want to read them again.

2023 had been another crazy year, especially in tech, with layoffs and the Generative AI takeover! Which trend are you most concerned about? Be as brief or as detailed as you like.

Most concerned? Specifically for us: the impact GenAI will have on the way we use interfaces. Back in the Alexa days there was a wave of tech enthusiasts proclaiming that soon everything will be voice controlled. Back then it was too early - but now we are looking at AI assistants popping up everywhere and it is just a question of time before the human will no longer need to fulfil complex procedures within and even more complex software interface, instead you speak in clear words what you want to achieve and the AI will do it.

Share your biggest success so far and/or your biggest failure so far.

Winning our first enterprise client a few years ago.

Biggest failure - we received over 300K research grants, but those prototypes never reached market readiness. It was a big gamble. For a small company you either focus on revenue or on research. We wanted both and failed.

We would love your feedback on HackerNoon as a tech publication! How has your experience been with us?

Very refreshing. I love how your entire communication is based on gifs. If an image says more than a 1000 words - a gif tells an even bigger story.

Any words of wisdom you’d like to share with us?

Here’s to other bootstrapped projects out there that take years so see some actual revenue they can live from. Don’t get too distracted by the overnight success stories. A good thing may take time. So take yours to learn and grow, persist and prosper 🚀🚀🚀