Dear friends, customers and business partners!
Schmidt & Schmidt celebrates its 10th anniversary this autumn.
It would be insincere to say that all these 10 years passed unnoticed. It has been a long and difficult journey. I remember me and Alexey, my brother and regular business partner, registering the company in September 2011. We had just finished our studies at the University of Passau. I only had 300 euros in my account. This money became our first capital, from which the fees for the registration of the GbR Schmidt & Schmidt were paid.
After reading smart books and listening to smart university lectures, the first thing I did was write a 50-page business plan. The naivety of our startup at the time still shocks me now: We haven't quite succeeded in what we wanted to implement in a few months back then. The remaining money was then used for participating in start-up events of all kinds, communicating with investors, networking and optimizing the business plan for the next events.
Then we traveled all over Germany, visited Austria a few times and learned a lot. The most important lesson was not to waste time on business plans and start-up events. When we came back from another trip we just started working, building a website and developing products. There was no shortage of ideas about what we could do (or what we thought we could do). Our first serious sale to our first real customer took place after 9 months. The contract then signed is kept in our office as a memento.
Then came the hiring of the first employee, the opening of our first office (initially the first employee was sitting at the table in the kitchen), my move to Moscow and the opening of the Moscow office, changes to the registration data and much more.
Now I look back on the difficulties and incredible achievements we have experienced and understand that we are still at the very beginning of the long and interesting journey. We still have so much to learn, so much to try and so much to do. And without our team we would never have been able to take this path. I would like to express my deep gratitude to our employees for being there for us and our customers every working day (and sometimes also on weekends).
I would like to thank our partners for their honesty and their commitment to the common cause. We work with many of them from day one. And of course I would like to thank our customers for their trust in our services and I very much hope that we will continue to work together successfully for the next 10 years.
Congratulations on the anniversary!
Andrej Schmidt
Managing partner
