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