For one and a half years, I’ve been contemplating the SMB succession market in Germany. Context: by 2028, more than 500,000 German SMBs will need a successor. And for every three owners looking to hand over, there is one person looking to take over. The problem is real and has massive implications for the German economy (actually most Western countries have the same issue). I felt deeply connected to the problem: we have this challenge in the family.

So for 12 months I went to conferences, joined a group of solo founders, met a bunch of people in the industry, read reports, listened to podcasts, secured multiple domain names and even built a landing page on my personal time. All just fluff... The only real thing I actually did was getting involved in the family business, to the point of eventually taking it over. In the end it did not happen (more on that in another post), but it showed me on a very concrete case that exits need to be prepared years in advance, so that owners can transfer or sell under their own conditions. So I still decided to go full time to fix this.

That became Noren: a fixed-price exit-readiness check for owners planning to hand over in the next 3 to 5 years. I gave myself 3 months to see what sticks.

The hard truth: if you can’t talk to your customer, you can’t know what problem you solve

Once you take the leap, you have no choice but to go, especially when you are starting alone. But this is also when fear of rejection kicks in. The first reflex I had was to build a pipeline of German companies that might need a successor in the short or mid term: one week.

Then, knowing that cold email outreach is kind of illegal in Germany and that sending an email to the info@... mentioning that I help business owners prepare their exits would not be the best approach, I thought I would send letters. So I built a letter builder: take a lead, check the particularities of the company, generate a PDF I could print and send to the owner, marked “highly confidential” so that even the assistant would not open it. I pushed it to the point of having a landing page personalised per type of business, behind a QR code printed on the letter (spoiler: how many 65+ German business owners actually use QR codes...). I sent 100+ letters. Zero responses so far.

Looking back, I had built a machine so I would not have to pick up the phone.

Then I told myself this could not go on and that I had to force myself to reach out. So for one week I cold called the companies I had written to, not without having read one book and watched a bunch of YouTube videos about cold calling: this is where I hit the wall...

As context: I’m French, I speak German fluently but I’m not native, and I’m a rather introverted person, so pushing the dial button cost me a LOT of mental energy. I was so stressed that once I even hung up on someone who started getting angry because we could not understand each other. He was speaking a strong Franconian dialect (northern Bavaria). So I realised I would never be that guy who wins SMB owner clients through cold calling.

In the meantime, I activated my network and talked to a few number of owners (less than 10), all past 60 through intro or succession events. Three types came out of it:

1. The well prepared: already de-risked his business, not involved operationally. Not my target.

2. The one who does not believe he can transfer and wants to close. Just sunset and retire. There is a business in helping these owners wind down properly. Not mine.

3. The one still 100% in the business, who thinks he can work until 80, wants to grow first and prepare later. For him my offer was a nice to have. Owners have very concrete problems: selling more, managing the last operational fuck-up, recruiting and managing people... You are number 30 on the priority list: no urgency, no sale.

This also explained the silence of the 100 letters. They did not fail because of the QR code. They failed because nobody had a problem they needed solved this year.

The people who did recognise the problem were searchers and SMB M&A advisors. All of them confirmed that most businesses are not ready to be sold when they come to market. But they are not the buyers of the service I offered. The ones who see the problem do not pay for it, and the ones who would pay do not feel it yet.

So after 8 weeks (and after trying a mini-pivot into creating a directory of succession service provider in Germany to flatten my ego of having built something - quite futile), I lost the motivation and decided to kill Noren.

While I was working on this I had also tuned my LinkedIn feed, which kept sending me content from other M&A advisors (the market calls them “Einzelkämpfer”) of varying quality (almost all obviously LLM-written), repeating the same topics. I still wonder why posting on LinkedIn makes sense when your target population does not spend time there... This space is won by people who enjoy the phone and the coffee meetings. My edge, after two companies and years of software engineering, is building product. I was not in the right space, and I did not have an angle. I also thought about selling picks and shovels (a tool to run your whole buying process as a searcher, or a target screening tool), but I did not feel it. Acquiring a business myself might be an option one day. Not now.

The trigger: the least regret theory

Then came two triggers over the past few days.

First, a post from Paul Graham on X about combining entrepreneurship with family life.

Second, a fellow French entrepreneur who had the joy of becoming a father a few days ago, announcing that he’s starting a newsletter about sharing his experience as a young dad and entrepreneur. Basically what the Bootstrapping Dad newsletter was supposed to be.

Jeff Bezos shared his method for making choices in life, what he calls the regret minimization framework:

• Project forward: Imagine you are 80 years old sitting in a chair

• Look back: Think about the choice you face today

• Spot inaction: Ask which path of inaction will haunt you more

• Choose boldness: Pick the option that stops future regret

So yes, this might sound silly, but I don’t need to project to 80. Even three years from now, I would regret not having shared what I’m learning as a dad, an entrepreneur and a software engineer. So let’s ship it and learn.

What we need is motion: ship, then iterate, NOT the other way around

The human brain learns from experience and feedback. Like many, I’m a champion of overthinking, building hypotheses about how the world should be, but not confronting them with the real world.

This is a behaviour I observed in many solo founders over the past six months (and it’s very prevalent among first-time founders). You have an idea, you build in your cave, and six months later you realise you haven’t shipped anything and haven’t talked to a single customer. The worst part is that the more time you spend building, the greater the fear of rejection, of confronting your creation with the real world.

To be clear, I’m no better and I struggle with this myself: procrastinating on this newsletter is a great example. In my past two companies I always had a co-founder, so the mutual push was a great motivator.

This time, at least for now, I’m flying solo, and this is hard. Hard because, for the first time, I realise that nobody is gonna take me by the hand and help me find my next venture. After a first idea about building a productised exit-readiness check for SMB owners in the context of company succession, I figured out that 1) this is a vitamin business and 2) distribution is a nightmare (post-mortem coming in a future issue). At that point, I was back to square one.

Taking a step back from my situation, I think the most important thing is motion. To make progress, you need to go out, talk to people, test and learn. Keeping the ball rolling, even if you don’t have something that sticks yet, has three advantages:

• Maximise your opportunity surface: the more you go out and talk to people, the more you get exposed to opportunities and problems you might be best positioned to solve

• Learn to ship: go beyond the shame of shipping something unfinished. You will learn to ring-fence projects, focus on one (and only one) valuable thing, and test whether you can get proof of demand

• Let it be the launchpad for your next move: if what you ship interests nobody, that’s okay. Confronting it with the real world teaches you what to do next

So in a nutshell: better to ship something and iterate than to iterate before shipping. That way we maximise the amount of feedback we get and don’t loop in our own heads.

Worst case, I learn from experience and grow as a person

I’m a believer in Nicolas Boileau’s line:

« Ce que l’on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement, et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément. »

“Whatever is well conceived is clearly said, and the words to say it come easily.”

However, I often struggle to articulate my thoughts, so this is a good way to practice and improve. As when launching a business: you iterate, learn and improve. That’s exactly the logic behind this newsletter.

I don’t pretend to give lessons. I will just consolidate my learnings along the way so that my future self can refer to them. Maybe some readers will find them useful too.

Looking for alignment: you will never get these years back

So OK, you get the idea: sharing an entrepreneurial journey, the good and the bad, technical learnings. BUT I think the most interesting part is the context of doing this while being a present dad of two. The question I will try to figure out for myself (and which might be useful to others) is how to keep the alignment between family life and entrepreneurial aspirations, while we’re often told you need to sacrifice almost everything to succeed (see hustle culture, from Alex Hormozi). I want to explore another way, nearer to what Naval Ravikant advocates: finding alignment between being an entrepreneur and being present to raise my kids and give them a few keys for life. Indeed, as most senior people would say, you never get these years back with your family, so better enjoy them. Again: the theory of least regret.

That’s issue #1. Shipped. Imperfect, three years late, but out the door.

PS: If you’re building something while raising kids, hit reply and tell me what you’re working on or struggling with. I read everything.