Daniel

40 years young, Father of 2, VP Enablement in SaaS company, Solo-Founder with actual revenue (6 months in), bicycle enthusiast - Germany based

[Daniel @hartner12]

22 days. That’s how long it took to form my company in germany.

My own active time: about three to four hours.

Internationally, 22 days is no speed record. In Estonia, the registration itself can often be completed within one working day. But honestly, I wasn’t in any hurry. While the process was running, I worked on my company https://t.co/73gUbcRJwo

Whether the commercial register extract arrives after one day or after 22 makes little difference as long as the waiting doesn’t occupy me.

The timeline:
• April 28: paid for the formation package at https://t.co/dLdMYhGkDx and started the process
• May 5: 30 minutes with the notary. The appointment was arranged by https://t.co/rBWjHC7177.
• May 7: share capital deposit confirmed
• May 20: commercial register extract available

The direct formation costs:
• €118.80 for the formation package through Qonto and https://t.co/FiK9SkSprH
• around €200 for the notary
• €300 for the court treasury

So around €620 in total, plus the business registration fee and share capital.

I owe the low time commitment mainly to https://t.co/FiK9SkSprH (YC F24) and Qonto.

Both guided me cleanly through the individual steps.

I didn’t have to work out who needed which document when. I only ever had to complete the next step.

The much wilder part arrived by post afterwards: advertising, register offers, and invoices designed to look as official as possible.

My favorite was a fake court-fee invoice with Rhineland-Palatinate in the letterhead—even though I’m based in Hesse—and an Italian IBAN.

You have to admire the nerve.

My conclusion isn’t that Germany has no bureaucracy. The formation wasn’t particularly fast either.

But it consumed almost none of my time as a founder. For me, that’s the more important metric.

How much of your own time and money did your company formation actually take?

[Daniel @hartner12]

My most useful Claude Code workaround of the month: making my app tell me what things are called.

I’m not a native coder. I’ve been learning a lot over the past year while building my own tools, but there are still plenty of things I don’t know the name for—or just can’t recall when I need them.

I know what I want to change. I just end up asking for “that thing at the top of the list.”

So I asked Claude Code to add a small helper: hold Alt and hover over anything in the app. It outlines the component and shows its name, plus the components it sits inside.

That file row, section title, stat or source chip now has a name I can use in my prompt.

Then Claude suggested something I hadn’t thought of: Alt+click to copy the name.

Now I hover, click and paste. Much less back-and-forth about which part of the screen I mean.

A small addition, but it’s made working on the app noticeably easier. And I’m picking up the vocabulary as I go.

[Daniel @hartner12]

@HermesWatcher This is so cool. I used to do this via SSH to clean up photos etc. Thanks!

[Daniel @hartner12]

@moiiikaaa This is called democratisation. And we will see so much more.

[Daniel @hartner12]

@nikitabier Is the concept of IP still providing value to society when intelligence becomes abundant? Some are shitting their pants right now. Big pharma and alikes

[Daniel @hartner12]

@karpathy Ok and what is the conclusion then ? You shared Observations, but what's your take away?

[Daniel @hartner12]

Erster fünfstelliger Enterprise-Deal verloren. Tut weh.
Aber: Solo-Founder, kein Sales-Team. 6 Monate, 6 Meetings, jedes Mal saß der COO mit am Tisch.

Allein kommst du weiter, als du denkst. 🧵

Warum es geplatzt ist:

Der Scope wanderte von einem Problem ohne Lösung zu einem, für das der Kunde längst ein Tool hatte. Eins, mit dem er zufrieden war.
Ich hab gegen etwas verkauft, das nicht kaputt war.

Learning:

Dein härtester Wettbewerber ist kein Startup. Es ist ein zufriedener Bestandsanbieter.

Und: Kein Angebot, bevor du weißt, was der Kunde heute zahlt.

[Daniel @hartner12]

@trq212 Preparing legacy systems and data layers to be ready to be crawled by agents and how companies can build a stable truth in their data. What does such a process look like in the day-to-day to make sure what goes in and out is actually reviewed and published by humans?

[Daniel @hartner12]

Dude, if you want to race, go on a fucking racetrack. If I'm in my car with two toddlers in the back and somebody crashes like this Tesla, and I would be crashing into that guy? The fuck are you guys talking about man? Speed limits are a must and Germany is totally retarded in that aspect.

[Daniel @hartner12]

@thsottiaux can you please just reset opus limits this time? Im asking for a friend 😉

[Daniel @hartner12]

@pip_net Smells like full on biased movie...

[Daniel @hartner12]

@ElitzaVasileva @owndotpage On ultracode?

[Daniel @hartner12]

@mattshumer_ Lets fix the music and soud fx engine though. Python Sound is cringe imo

[Daniel @hartner12]

Yes I'm one of the ones moving back to Claude again. However it screams at me again that one should really try to be provider-agnostic. I use my Hermes agent a lot but I have outsourced many workflows and coding sessions to the Codex desktop app, which works incredibly well. Opus 5.5 is in a different league. I wish it would work again with the Hermes agent.

[Daniel @hartner12]

@jaredctate It's crazy. For me it's the exact opposite. I am absolutely blown away by the performance and quality of Claude on 5.5. I even switched back to a Claude Max subscription and I am wondering what I did with Codex in the last 2 months but tomorrow things change again.

[Daniel @hartner12]

@ibocodes Does Jev work with german language use cases?

[Daniel @hartner12]

@bundeskanzler Und das noch als Erfolg verkaufen.

[Daniel @hartner12]

My best friend was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma of the parotid gland. Following surgery in March, he recently completed six weeks of heavy-ion beam therapy in Heidelberg. He is doing well and is currently in remission, although he is dealing with hemifacial paralysis as a result of the treatment. With two young children to fight for, we’re staying strong. With the rapid pace of technological and medical breakthroughs, I truly hope the coming years bring a definitive cure for cancer. Thank you for your work

[Daniel @hartner12]

@CompleteSkeptic Congratz, i am curious to use it myself. just joined the waitlist

[Daniel @hartner12]

@teslaeurope congratz. when do you actually consider to NOT allow humans behind steering wheels anymore?

[Daniel @hartner12]

@jasonlk from your perspective, whats the actual difference of a head of vs a VP? which outcomes are for whom to own?