A founder’s journey of building a startup from scratch. If you build something from nothing, your SaaS company starts as PowerPoint slides.

What does an entrepreneur do all day long? Building something out of nothing.

Every business starts with bootstrapping. The founders sit down and decide they will try to solve a problem. For us at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, it started with my co-founder Marc and me sitting down in my living room on Labor Day 2014. On the day others demonstrated for more pay and more workers’ rights, the two of us decided to forgo our salaries and our spare time.

Why?

Because we wanted to solve a problem. Because we wanted to create something out of nothing.

We still didn’t know exactly what problem we would solve, but we had that inner desire to contribute our part to the entrepreneurial universe. It took us some time to iterate towards the problem of information overload in controlled documents.

To illustrate this journey, I will use our sales pitch deck. Looking back, I am pretty embarrassed with what we started with — but that’s a good sign; if you’re not embarrassed later on, it means you were too slow.

Anyway, here are some steps on our pitch deck hitchhike.

21st January 2018

Big Bang plus zero seconds. Here is the initial problem we intended to solve. And it was the initial PowerPoint template I created myself (I am an engineer, not a design guy).

24th March 2018

After a loud discussion between co-founders, our design template improved.

15th November 2018

The universe begins to cool. The first galaxies form. Instead of only talking about the problem we want to solve, the first features appear. Remember, all software only exists on PowerPoint at this time.

19th April 2019

For the first time, software mockups appear. Hand-drawn by my co-founder Christoph (another engineer and non-designer, just like me). The first productive software is still some 4 months away.

13th November 2019

For the first time, live demos on the productive system are part of our standard pitch.

23rd January 2020

For the first time, the full solution appears in our sales pitch deck.

16th March 2020

The universe contracted for some time. COVID-19 hit, and with worldwide lockdowns, aviation ground to a halt.

What would a young company in the aviation market do? We scrambled to see what other markets we could serve. Whilst some industries weren’t a success, others were. We emerged the lockdowns with new customers both in aviation and outside aviation.

22nd October 2020

The first customer statements appear in our pitch deck.

2021

In 2021, the universe started expanding again. The sales pitch deck lost its importance, most sales pitches were now done through online meetings, using the product demo as the cornerstone.

2022

In 2022, we rebranded the company to reflect both our heritage in aviation, but also our growing customer base outside aviation.

Take a moment to scroll back to the very top to see where we have come from.