How We Grew Our Customer Base By Adding Perks And Discounts

Lasse Schuirmann

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Published: October 18th, 2022

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Lasse Schuirmann

Founder, FounderBlocks

$60K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

FounderBlocks

founderblocks.io

from Hamburg, Germany

started

$60,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Lasse recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Lasse recommends to grow your business!

Want more updates on FounderBlocks? Check out these stories:

1. How We Created A $60K/Month Startup Factory (2021) ➜

This is a follow up story for FounderBlocks. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published almost 3 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

Hey, I’m Lasse, serial entrepreneur and founder of FounderBlocks (which once was VIPERdev, you can also see our original story here - apart from founding companies I also like sports, especially running.

If you want to know more about me as a person, feel free to check out my personal site - I have used the process of making this site to become clearer on what I actually want in my life and focus on a few hobbies that I care about.

With FounderBlocks we help people who know their domain very well to launch tech startups related to those problems.

A lot of people nowadays have great ideas for applications but not everyone has the technical or entrepreneurial background to make their ideas a reality. We support founders in the development of their app (with a dev team shared across our startups) while also coaching them in marketing and sales, to get a smooth as a possible start into the market.

We really like to challenge every Idea and it’s a lot of fun to sit together with all those great, adventurous people and accompany them on their journey to see their Ideas become reality, maybe even in a way nobody expected at first.

Every month we’re launching about 2-5 products with the startups we work with.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

We have been able to reach a point where we have a great customer base and new projects and several new startups coming in every month. We’ve focused on getting better as an accelerator, e.g. by adding perks and discounts to our program - e.g. saving 90% on the pricing of HubSpot is a huge financial saver for those startups who need it, we also partner with several infrastructure providers like Scaleway where startups can usually get the server resources they need with us for free for the first year.

This actually saves our startups thousands of bucks, at least over the first year. We don’t have concrete metrics yet, it’s a new thing, but we definitely already have a 4-5 digit amount of euros saved already despite the program being very new.

Of course, we are constantly reaching out to new founders on platforms and events where people are actively looking for cofounders. Although a lot of people come to us after hearing about us from their friends or other Founders. We actually meet a lot of people through other people.

It's also how we sustain our current startups' by showing them we are a team and we can do great stuff together not by just delivering them a service in that way.

We have recently gotten new members to our team and we are constantly looking for exciting people to work with. Since a great part of our team are founders themselves we always have lots of new ideas for products to launch or ways to maybe support StartUps better.

It’s important to incentivize people positively to promote change. Rewarding people who help make it happen is a far more sane and safe approach than penalizing people who don’t.

Marketing-wise, we’re currently evaluating whether to do a big push on SEO and content - we are building a community of founders as we see a lot of value being generated for our startups by just exchanging ideas.

One thing we’re struggling with is showing to the outside world how successful our startups are: Basically, it would make sense to push a social media post, whenever one of our products goes live, does a significant pivot, etc., etc. - however our Mentors are usually so busy with the everyday work of actually making things better that it’s hard to get the team to take the time and communicate this to the outside world.

Recently we've also started building a Founders community, where Founders learn and collaborate together - we found that this can be extremely helpful to accelerate their growth for many startups.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

I think the biggest challenges were related to growth. When a company grows it always gets a bit harder to maintain our democratic and agile spirit.

In our case, we found that the way we do decisions, involving all members of the company gets harder with every new person. We’re currently trying out tools like kialo.com for an asynchronous democratic decision-making process that allows everyone to be heard and for rational arguments to strive.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

One of the major things for me personally, as well as for the team, has been that we started doing “workations” every few months (we’re well on track totaling about 3-4 a year regularly).

It’s obviously an investment, however, it’s a great investment in your and your team's mental health as well as general happiness - when we looked at the equivalent extra salary for every person as if we skipped these events, it was pretty clear for everyone that we wanted more of those workations.

E.g. our last was was to Switzerland, where we rented this little house:

With loads of hiking and swimming spots nearby, as well as no restaurants (using the kitchen is a team event on its own), we had a really great 8 days together while working, hiking, cooking, and swimming.

Another big learning (that wasn’t actually new but made more conscious by some recent events) was that it’s very important to incentivize people positively to promote change.

If we (founders) impatiently want to change our company and culture, we tend to want to push it through quickly. Pushing those changes forward by rewarding people who help make it happen is a far more sane and safe approach than penalizing people who don’t.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

It's always easy to make plans, but I guess every Founder knows that the turnout is unexpected most times. Of course, we want everyone we work with to stay happy and get them to the place they want to be.

Generally, we’re looking to grow more as an accelerator, bundle more of our knowledge into reusable courses to help more startups at a better price point, and grow a community of founders who can share their experience with each other even better than they can today with us.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

I’m still not into books like that - I found that networking with people who are building agencies or accelerator programs is incredibly useful for our growth.

Apart from that, I can really recommend the Bobiverse book series - even though it is a tad more philosophical and maybe fun rather than directly applicable to any business.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

Always test and develop your product with your customers. Talk to your customers and improve your company with them together. At my first startup, it took us over a year until the first customer saw our product - nowadays I usually show the first “product” after a week or even less and get immediate feedback.

Apart from that, see our tips from last time.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Yes, long story short: we hire people who are awesome (mostly independent of their experience) and make them really happy :) For more information, check out this link.

Software Developer

If you are looking for small, noncorporate projects, this will be fun for you.

Cofounder/”Project Manager”

Do you want to effectively be the CTO of our startups? That’s what our cofounders do.

Founders trust nobody more than you to build and develop their products. Be ready to work on an eye-to-eye level with the CEOs of the next-generation companies - and maybe consider co-founding one of those together with our customers on your own.

Designer

If you like designing apps and high-converting flows, this could be right for you. You will be usually confronted with just a business model and your task is to visualize the ideas of the founders as concrete features - but also tell them where they may want to pivot their business model or change something.

Where can we go to learn more?

Website

If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!