Bootstrapping at 22: What I didn't know about founding a company

Between Booze and Responsibility

I could tell the story more beautifully, with a vision, a moment of clarity and a plan on a napkin. The honest version has two sides, and both are true at the same time.

One side is the booze. To this day Jacqueline calls the whole thing a "besoffene Gschicht", an Austrian way of saying a drunken tale, and says we all simply missed the moment to say no. At no point between the idea and the notary did any of us stand up and say that we hadn't really meant it.

The other side is a drive that I still find hard to put into words. I wanted to take on responsibility, and not the borrowed kind that an employee carries for a project, but one in which I am free. I wanted to move more, do things better and experience all of it myself instead of only hearing about it.

In between lay, if I am honest, youthful recklessness. Or, put more kindly: complete ignorance of what such a decision means in the long run. Today I believe that this very ignorance helped us. Anyone who had understood on the first evening what comes afterwards might never have signed.

I think we too often expect ourselves to know, before a big decision, how it will turn out. Nobody can meet that expectation. You can weigh risks, gather information and ask people who have walked a similar path. What you cannot do is anticipate your own future. In the end, all that remains is the decision whether to set off despite the unknown.

We had met at TOWA, a digital agency in Bregenz and Vienna. Jacqueline, then 29, came from UX, design and development, Islam, whom everyone calls Samy, also 29, from backend and software architecture. Philipp and I were 23, he fresh out of a computer science degree, I a project manager. For comparison: according to the WKO founding statistics, the founders of sole proprietorships in Austria were on average 37.9 years old in 2025, and only a good quarter (25.7 percent) were between 20 and 30.

The hardest hour of the founding was not the notary. It was the conversation in which we had to tell our employer that the four of us were leaving together. We had imagined every scenario, from disappointment to anger. The first sentence one of the managing directors then said was: "I'm proud of you." I think I saw a tear on his cheek. He could have thought of missing people, running projects or a new competitor. He thought of us first. That shaped my picture of what an entrepreneur is.

It was probably my first lesson in what good leadership means. You can see another person's decision as a loss, as competition, as a problem for your own business. Or as that person's development. Not every decision has to be seen from the perspective of your own advantage. Sometimes greatness lies precisely in recognising that someone is taking a path that does not benefit you. I hope that one day, in a similar situation, I will act the same way.

In those weeks I also noticed that people suddenly look at you differently. Not with a particular look, more with a new role: you are an entrepreneur now, and that sounds like something. Yet a founding means nothing at first. It is not an achievement, it is a signature. It does not prove that you can do something, only that you were brave, reckless or arrogant enough to try. What it is worth shows only over the years, namely in whether you stay economically viable and remain fair to customers and good to the people who trust you. Whoever manages that deserves the title. Before that, you merely wear it.

TOWA took ten percent and is still a shareholder to this day, we stay in touch and sometimes work together for clients. But nobody financed us. Every euro with which Digit-One has grown came from customers. Why Digit-One exists is something I wrote down in April 2022. This text is about what I could not know back then.

What Bootstrapping Really Means

Bootstrapping means building a company without investors, without venture capital and without large loans. Growth comes only from what customers pay. That forces you to work economically from the first month, and it leaves every decision with those who run the company.

That is what every definition says, and it is true. What no definition says is how it feels.

We are a GmbH & Co. KG. With this legal form, it is not the company that pays income tax on its profit but each of the four of us personally, plus social insurance, whether the money is paid out or stays in the company account. Anyone who wants to build reserves therefore pays contributions on money that never arrives in their own account. We knew the theory, we knew what the third year means when social insurance recalculates. But knowing a number in a spreadsheet and actually transferring that back payment are two very different things.

On top of that came a goal we had set ourselves from the start: six months of full costs in the bank. Not as a cushion for us, but for the people who work with us. Anyone who joins a young company trusts that the salary will arrive even in a weak quarter, and we did not want to pay for that trust with hope.

The arithmetic was simple and hard. In the first years we paid ourselves less than any collective agreement in Austria provides as a minimum wage, which put us below the at-risk-of-poverty threshold. Every person who joined us earned more than the four of us from their very first day. We worked 60 to 80 hours a week, and afterwards sometimes had to choose between rice and potatoes, mostly figuratively and sometimes quite literally.

I am not telling this because sacrifice is a virtue. It was the price, and I would not recommend anyone to romanticise it. Money was never the reason for Digit-One. But it hurts when you give so much and so little is left for yourself, and you are allowed to say that.

And then there is a price that appears on no invoice. There are obligations that end when you close the office door behind you. And there are obligations that you take home without consciously taking them along: a difficult customer conversation, an open invoice, a decision that has not been made yet. They are not there constantly. But they come, sometimes at dinner, sometimes at the weekend, sometimes exactly when you should be sleeping. For me this is one of the biggest differences between a task and a company. A task can be completed. A company has to be carried.

At some point everything settles. Your standard of living adjusts, you know when which bill for contributions arrives, and you understand what a euro in the company means for your own life. We have grown by around 20 percent a year on average, and today the reserve we had set ourselves is there. The calm that gives was worth every potato.

There is a contradiction in this that I did not see for a long time: we wanted to create security and first had to give up security ourselves. And I now believe that security is more than a number in an account. It also arises from having learned to deal with difficult situations, not to make decisions out of panic, and to know that not every problem is immediately a catastrophe. This second kind of security cannot be saved up. You have to earn it, and you have to rebuild it again and again.

Knowing Is Not Understanding

Knowing and understanding sound like the same thing, and in my early twenties I took them for the same thing. Today I believe there is a path between the two that cannot be shortened, because knowledge comes to you through words and understanding only through the experience of carrying something yourself. You can have a lot explained to you. You can recalculate it, read it up and repeat it until you know it by heart. And yet nothing changes until the matter concerns you yourself.

Looking back on the first years, I see four kinds of knowing that I could not tell apart back then. This is not a scientific model, but my own way of looking at those years.

What I knew and could do. We knew how to create concepts, how to design and how to build good software. The craft was never the problem. I think many founders mix this up at the start: they take the thing they are good at for the company.

What I knew but had not understood. Taxes, social insurance, liquidity. That self-employment costs more time than a job as an employee, and not only at the desk but also in your head, at dinner, at two in the morning. That you sleep differently, whether things go well or badly. Someone had told us all of this. We understood it only once we carried it.

What I did not know that I did not know. How much depends on conversations, on arguing, on enduring, on searching together for a solution with someone who wants something different from you. How much you can grow into such situations. And that the beginning does not end.

What I still do not know. This is the only field that never becomes empty. It is just filled differently.

The point about the beginning is perhaps the most important one. I thought the first years would be difficult and after that it would get easier, like a mountain you have to get over. It is not like that. It stays the way it is. The questions get bigger, the decisions too, and the uncertainty does not disappear, it only changes its form. By now I find that good. A company where there is eventually nothing left to learn would be one I would no longer get up for.

Recently I became a father, and I notice how similar it feels. You can know everything beforehand. You read, you ask, you listen when others tell their stories. And then the child is here and you understand that there is a kind of knowing that does not come through words. It comes only through experience. Entrepreneurship is the same for me. You can know the most important things beforehand, but you can only understand them once they belong to you.

I do not mean that a child and a company are the same. But since becoming a father I think more often about how limited theoretical knowledge is. Something happens that you expected and still did not know. The knowledge before was not wrong. It was only incomplete, and only your own responsibility gives it its meaning.

If I am honest, at the beginning I was sure of almost nothing. Not that it would work, not how long it would take, and certainly not how much it would change me. I was sure of exactly one thing: the team. In hindsight it was the only certainty we needed, because everything else could be learned, and the team was the place where we learned it.

What gave us certainty at the beginning was not numbers, not a business plan and not a forecast. It was trust in the people with whom I took this step. We did not know whether we could run a company. But we knew that we wanted to try it together. Today I consider this one of the most underestimated decisions in founding, and really in anything you begin together: you decide not only what you want to build. You decide with whom you want to go through the difficult phases. That matters more than most of the decisions that come after.

Freedom Is Choosing Your Obligations

We could often have grown faster. We could have bought a property. Last year and again this year we were offered an agency for sale that is very profitable and would have paid for itself quickly. Each time we said no, for the same reason: we wanted to stay free.

Over time you learn that possibilities are not obligations. You could grow faster, take on more projects, hire more people and build bigger structures. But at some point the question of what you actually want to preserve becomes more important than what else you could achieve. Not everything that is possible has to be done.

Outside money always means being steered from outside, to a degree. It buys time, but it also buys an expectation, and that expectation has a schedule that is not your own. Whoever takes money to grow has to grow afterwards to justify the money, and at some point growth is no longer a decision but a duty. Without outside money you grow more slowly. In return, every step belongs to you, and every step has to justify itself to you and not to an investor.

Bootstrapping has something else that is rarely said. It makes you honest. If no customer pays for something, there is no market for it, and no funding round can hide that. From the first month we had to know whether what we do is worth something to someone.

And yet this is exactly where the biggest contradiction of my story lies. We founded a company to be freer, and thereby created an obligation that sometimes keeps us awake at night. We wanted responsibility and did not know how heavy it can be. We wanted to grow, but not at any price. I have not resolved these contradictions, and I think I do not have to. Can you be free when others depend on you? I do not know for sure. I only know that I would not want it any other way.

What I understood by freedom at 23 was to depend on others as little as possible. Today I see it differently. With the founding we did not get fewer obligations but very many more: towards customers, towards employees, towards one another. Freedom does not mean having no obligations. Freedom means choosing for yourself which ones you take on.

That includes the freedom to say no. Right at the start we wrote a catalogue of values and, within it, a list of non-clients that is still in our imprint today: defence and military, political parties, adult entertainment, drugs and anything that does the world more harm than good. The very first enquiry that came in at Digit-One was, of all things, from an armaments company that I had previously looked after as a project manager and that wanted to bring its websites to us. At that point we had not a single client and no idea whether we would survive the first months. It would have been thousands of euros. The refusal was nevertheless quick and easy. Not because we already knew then that everything would turn out well. But because we knew that with a different decision we would give up something that mattered more to us: the ability to still look ourselves in the eye when things get tight economically.

Talking about values is easy when you have enough orders. Whether you really have them shows only when you give up something you urgently need. Values are not what you write down. Values are what you give up when it gets uncomfortable.

A second rule came with it. Before we send a quote, we ask ourselves: would we accept this as a client? Does it bring real added value in terms of cost and benefit? That does not have to be more revenue. It can be a stronger brand, less service effort or a system that simply runs securely. If the answer is no, we tell the client, even if it costs us a job. In the first year we could not always judge our value well. Today we can do it better, and right now we are learning it all over again: with AI and agentic engineering, much becomes faster and cheaper, and the question of where our actual value lies comes up again. Building has become cheap, operating has not, that is part of the answer. The rest we are working out right now.

Growing Into Conversations

Our first client was Sven Steinert with Sustainx, at the time a spin-off from the H&Z management consultancy. He was in a similar situation to ours, except that as an experienced consultant he knew how to talk to clients. We could create concepts, design and develop. But the talking, the arguing, the shared wrestling for a solution at the table, that was hard at the beginning.

We had given a lot of thought to how we convince clients: how we argue, how we present our services and how we explain why we are the right ones.

When Sven wanted to accept our offer, he called Jacqueline. She did not know what to say. We had prepared for everything except someone saying yes. Today I can laugh about it. Back then it showed quite exactly where we stood. We are still in touch with Sven, and he is now managing director of H&Z management consultancy. Today we sit at the table with managing directors of mid-sized companies and speak calmly and naturally about what we can do. Between that phone call and today lie only a few years, but an entire development.

Whether I was underestimated because of my age? No. I underestimated myself. What does it feel like, as a 23-year-old, to explain something to a 60-year-old entrepreneur that he does not yet know? Before such conversations I often had more respect than necessary. And I underestimated the others: everyone listened, nobody wrote one of us off because of age, not a single time. I think young people underestimate less their abilities than other people's willingness to listen to them, and above all how much you can grow into things that still seem too big today.

With the first employees, something shifted that I could not name before. Until then our decisions were our own business. If we had misjudged, we dealt with it ourselves. Since people have worked with us, every decision has a rent attached that is not mine, a holiday that someone else has planned, a life that relies on us. I had imagined leadership as going first. Today I understand it mainly as securing first what others need, and only after that thinking about what you want yourself. That every new person with us earned more than we did was, in this sense, not hardship but the order we thought was right.

A company does not automatically make you better. But it shows you very precisely where you are not yet good enough. Decisions you would have postponed before have to be made. Conversations you would rather have avoided do not resolve themselves. You do not grow into a company, you grow through it.

And you usually notice only in hindsight. There is no morning when you wake up and are suddenly a better entrepreneur, father, managing director or person. The change happens far less spectacularly. You react differently than before. You have a conversation that would have overwhelmed you a few years ago. You stay calm in a situation that would once have thrown you off course. And at some point you look back and realise that you have changed, without being able to name the moment.

Why I Never Thought About Quitting

I never thought about quitting, and I believe I must not. Of course I know that it would be possible. But an option that lies somewhere in the back of your mind ripens a little with every difficulty. After the first bad month it is a thought, after the third it is a plan, and at some point it is an excuse not to give yourself in fully any more. That is why I never opened the door to quitting for myself. Not out of stubbornness, but because I know how easily you walk through an open door when things get uncomfortable.

I do not mean that you have to cling to every decision at any price. Sometimes stopping is the most responsible decision you can make. But for me the founding was never a temporary possibility that I put up for discussion again at every difficulty. We chose this path deliberately, and I wanted to find out what could come of it. I still do.

Mistakes are similarly uncomfortable. Everyone says you learn from mistakes, and I do not want to leave it that flat, even though it is true. We made mistakes and all survived. So far they have only ever hit ourselves and never a client or an employee, and I am not proud of that, but I am glad about it, because that is exactly what would really hurt. What grows over the years is less the ability not to make mistakes than the ability to endure them. You become more resilient. The art is not to become indifferent in the process.

What I Still Do Not Understand

Today someone asked me how stupid you have to be to found a company in Austria. I had told him openly beforehand how much I pay in taxes and contributions and what is left of it for me in the end. I had no good answer, and to this day I do not entirely understand it. Perhaps that is already the answer: with a calculator alone we would never have founded. Whoever only calculates does not found, because the calculation almost never works out at the beginning. What makes it work out is written in no spreadsheet, and it is the same thing that still gets you out of bed every morning in the fifth year.

You can calculate a founding economically. You can set taxes, contributions, risks and possible returns against each other, and that is exactly what we did at the beginning. But you cannot write into a spreadsheet what it means to build something of your own, to make decisions yourself and to take responsibility for other people. It is the same gap that this whole text is about: I knew the numbers beforehand. What they mean, I understood only when I carried them myself. And what stands on the other side of the calculation never fitted into one line anyway.

Entrepreneurship is rarely only an economic calculation. You do not decide only for what ends up in your own account in the end. You also decide for room to shape, for responsibility, for self-determination and for the chance to build something that would not exist without you. Whether Austria is a good or a difficult place for that is another question. The tension between what would be sensible and what you want to build exists everywhere.

But the more honest answer to the question of what I do not understand is a different one: I do not know yet. At 23 I did not know what I did not know, and that is no different today, it has only shifted. The next insight will certainly come, and it will again be one that someone could have explained to me beforehand without my having understood it. According to Statistik Austria, of the companies founded in 2019, only 36.4 percent were still on the market five years later, in 2024. We are now in our fifth year. I am very curious what I will think about today's Benno in five more years.

Sometimes I ask myself what I would say today to the Benno of back then. Probably not very much. That he does not need to worry about understanding everything at once. That some things will be harder than he thinks, and others easier. That he will make mistakes that preoccupy him for a long time, and will experience situations of which he has no idea today. And that it is probably good that he does not know all of this yet.

What I Am Proud Of

Of everything. Of every email, every project, every client, every person on the team and also of every mistake, because all of it is part of what we are today, and only the sum makes sense.

That we work economically, that I was able to build close and honest relationships with clients, that today we are more than ten people and I am friends with everyone on the team, that is one side. The real core is quieter. It is the feeling of moving something every day. I am not proud of that outwardly, but inwardly.

When someone asks me today what I am proud of, numbers are not what comes to mind first. I think of people who started with us and developed. Of clients with whom real relationships have grown over the years. Of situations that would once have overwhelmed us and that we now solve together. And of the fact that an idea that arose one evening under rather unusual circumstances has become a company that is part of the lives of more than ten people.

If I could give a managing director a single sentence before a big decision, it would be this: the most important question is not whether you already know everything, but whether you are ready to carry what you will only understand afterwards.

And to someone who wants to found a company in their early twenties, I would say: you do not have to know what you are getting into. You only have to know with whom.