New beginnings 🎈

I’m happy to share that I started as Chief Product & Technology Officer at Vitals. I just came back from Bucharest, where we’ve met with the entire team, and I’m pumped! :)

It’s quite a cool story as I’m joining a friend whom I’ve known for 25+ years. So here’s the story behind it.

Andrei Stefan is one of the smartest people I know. He was making money already when we were in our early teenage years, writing CDs for the kids and selling IRC bots. Those were the days! As we lived in a small city, of course he was the one who burned my first CD, a game called Black & White. (I hope he won’t kill me for disclosing these things about him 🤫). We stayed in touch ever since.

Our paths were quite different. Him, going all-in on entrepreneurship, hustling hard, founding several successful companies, but never making it big. That’s until Vitals was born, one of the top 5 apps from the Shopify store.

On the other hand, next to my love for startups and founding Hipwerk, I took the corporate path. I worked at multiple companies, both in outsourcing and in product teams, gathering first-hand experience in forming & scaling high-performing teams. That’s what I did at AROBS Group and more recently at tutti.ch.

Earlier this year, during a random encounter in Zürich, we visited the Zoo 🦁 We started talking about life, work, and… long story short, we decided to join forces to grow Vitals. Life can be pretty random and mysterious sometimes :)

So why did I join? Three reasons (other than the story above):

Bootstrapped & highly profitable SAAS, with more than 20.000 shops and 110 million MAUs, perfect 5 stars rating out of 3.800+ reviews and a small team of ~10 engineers.
It’s a Shopify app, a thriving ecosystem that’s still in its early days.
No external shareholders to report to, no boards to manage and no politics. That means we can do outcome driven product development, how cool is that? We just started our first cycle following Shape Up by Basecamp and introduced Opportunity-Solution Trees. More on this in another post.

I’m super excited to see what the future brings! Wish us luck ✌️