Category: Sustainability

Categories
Business Decision-making Entrepreneurship Social Impact Sustainability

Software Company in Germany: What Worked, What Didn’t, and What I’d Do Differently

Reading Time: 5 minutes.

More than 5 years ago, I started a bootstrapped limited liability company (LLC) in Germany for my software-as-a-service (SaaS) project “1st things 1st” and non-profit donation platform “Make Impact dot org”. From an egoistic perspective, it was supposed to be the key to financial freedom for me and allow me to help my closest relatives. From a vocational perspective, it should have brought more self- and global awareness to people using the platforms. From a rational perspective, it should have built the legal grounding for the donation platform that I had been building. Unfortunately, internal motivation didn’t match the external circumstances, and this article is my short overview of the lessons learned.

I founded the company as a UG, which by law should have transitioned to a GmbH as soon as it became profitable enough. As someone who didn’t speak German professionally, I got help from firma.de, who provided me with all the necessary information to get started, helped me with a company bank account, and organized an English-speaking notary appointment. A UG officially requires only 1 EUR as initial capital, whereas a GmbH requires 25,000 EUR. Practically, you need a few thousand euros to start with to cover the costs of the initial months.

Over time, I’ve read several business books and always preferred the motivational ones, such as Rework, over the frightening ones, such as The Hard Thing About Hard Things. One thing that I learned from Rework was to reuse and sell by-products of the main project. For example, while building subscription-based software projects, I was also selling reusable modules used in those software projects. The same could be done with writing books or creating an online course based on the expertise you gain from doing your main stuff. Financially, it turned out that the by-products brought me more money than the SaaS subscriptions, but in theory, monthly SaaS subscriptions should have been more predictable, while module sales were almost random.

From a software development perspective, SaaS development is very attractive because you always iterate on the existing code and make it better and better while adding tests, creating automations, improving search engine optimization (SEO), adapting to AI innovations, etc. From a marketing perspective, you can also always test and improve landing pages and copy, do A/B testing, build a blog for content marketing, etc. However, from a political and legal perspective, there are constantly new laws being published that require you to adapt to new limitations, such as cookie consent banners, GDPR and SOC 2 compliance, the No-Spam Act, the AI Act, and whatever comes in the future. These adaptations always require time to react instead of focusing on building or marketing.

An LLC in Germany has some costs and legal limitations that don’t apply to freelancing or operating as an individual. There are some taxes to pay even if you don’t make any profit, which accumulate to over 1,500 EUR per year, mandatory accounting fees of around 2,500 EUR or more per year, and 1,800 EUR for a virtual office for a legal company address, unless you are OK with registering your company at your home address. Also, don’t forget the usual expenses, like notary fees, IT-related stuff, and office supplies. Even closing a company requires around 3,500 EUR at best for different legal purposes and 1 year of shutting down time, which was a bummer to me. And if you don’t have a rich family or another stable source of income, the journey is harsh.

Over the course of those years, I have built several subscription-based projects, several modules to sell, and other digital goods to use as lead magnets. I have tried launches on product directory websites like Product Hunt, paid ads, blog content marketing, search engine optimization, advanced copywriting techniques, textual and visual social media posts, cold emailing, cold direct messages, funnels with special landing pages, guerrilla marketing, flyers, mentioning my product in books, mentioning my products in entrepreneurial meetings, guest blogging, adapting the websites for LLMs, press releases, and a few more marketing channels. I even did some woo-woo magic, like removing my money-related limiting beliefs or listening to sound frequencies that should have attracted financial abundance. The paradox was that the more effort I put in and the more I perfected what I built, the fewer new users I gained. The other important part was that no matter how much value I believed I brought, that didn’t mean that people were ready to pay for it.

I always tried to keep it ethical: no paid followers, no fake reviews, no fake testimonials, no lies in the copy, no fake employees. Interestingly, there are lots of service providers who contacted me offering Product Hunt upvotes, positive Trustpilot reviews, fabricated Reddit engagement about my brands, leads (contact info of people) from any industry, paid articles in questionable business magazines, and business award nominations to boost my ego and status. Extra money to spend and turning a blind eye to ethics would have helped the business for business’s sake — but that’s not my style.

I was also contacted by probably 50 companies offering outsourced IT services from countries with lower wages than Germany, as well as by many individual IT specialists looking for jobs. So having a company creates some kind of illusory reputation even if it’s a one-man show.

Lastly, having a company means that you have to be very careful and discerning about cold emails, as there are lots of fraudsters sending fake invoices to your accountant, webcam blackmail scams, and fake domain renewal notices. If you share your phone number online, you often also get fake calls from random countries.

What I surely learned from this was resilience and stronger self-confidence, focusing on the bright side no matter what, taking action on my ideas more proactively, and optimizing my time and energy.

What I would suggest to anyone starting a SaaS entrepreneurship journey today is to develop oral communication skills even if your business is totally online and text-based, and get a business background that goes a little beyond supply and demand and assets vs. liabilities. For the product you build, don’t reinvent the wheel — use the tech stack that you already know from the past, where you can iterate quickly on demand. The latest technological hype is not worth it. And even if you are the best IT specialist of your kind and have a very smart or useful product, that doesn’t automatically mean that you will be able to distribute it enough to sustain your company.

Even though it seems that the Internet is an open ocean with unlimited possibilities, I would still suggest starting with a local or online community in which you participate, noticing a problem they have that can be solved with IT, asking if they would be willing to pay, creating a tool without monetization for them. Only when there are real people who would buy the service the tool provides should you start a company. Don’t start an LLC in Germany, but rather stick with operating as an individual or even freelancing. You can’t build a sustainable business and pay the required taxes based only on ambition and motivation.

They say that only 10% of businesses succeed, and the others go bankrupt. Somehow, all those who start believe that they belong to the 10%. I thought about SaaS as a source of passive income. It turned out to be a lottery ticket that cost me notary fees, a bank account, virtual office, domains, servers, email, company taxes, bookkeeping, and lots of time. Was it worth it? I gained lots of experience. Otherwise, I see too many bureaucratic restrictions. So I am closing my company and will continue to implement my ideas as an individual under different legal forms.

Cover picture by Lloyd James

Categories
Ecology Progress Social Impact Sustainability

100 Kilograms of Legumes

A dish of chickpeas
Reading Time: 5 minutes.

A couple of days ago, I woke up with an intuitively received phrase: “100 Kilograms of Legumes”. I wondered what the message was about. Was it about taking a measurable action to help people in need? Was it about launching a fundraising campaign where people could take action? Or was it about getting protein-rich food for myself and my kids to save money on food?

Legumes are plants that produce seeds inside pods. The edible seeds are a major source of protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. Common legumes include lentils, peas, chickpeas, kidney beans, black beans, soybeans, and peanuts.

After checking with ChatGPT, I learned that one can make 1,500 meal portions from 100 kilograms of dry lentils, chickpeas, or other legumes. That could be a couple of weeks of nutrition for 100 people in need, or lunch for a small family of four for the whole year. The cost of 100 kg of legumes is between 250 and 500 EUR.

This intuitive message, combined with ChatGPT research, led to more rational posts on my Instagram feed and pushed me into a more analytical mindset for the rest of the day. As a result, I later started analyzing the sustainability of the donation platform I am building: make-impact.org.

make-impact.org – what is it about?

Make-Impact.org is going to be a centralized European donation platform that inspires and enables people to support the causes they care about most. By making charitable giving more engaging, transparent, and accessible, the platform aims to increase support for humanitarian and development aid projects across Europe and beyond.

I believe that businesses are the primary drivers of progress, innovation, and economic growth. However, progress often comes with unintended negative consequences. For example, the production of plastic has made many useful goods affordable and accessible worldwide, but the resulting waste now fills landfills and harms wildlife. Similarly, advances in AI have improved productivity and accelerated information exchange, but they have also made some jobs obsolete, creating a need for retraining and education.

These side effects of progress do not disappear on their own; they need to be addressed. While businesses are often the driving force behind progress, it is usually cause-oriented organizations that deal with the damage left behind, whether environmental, social, or humanitarian.

There are also many initiatives that meaningfully improve human well-being while remaining largely unrecognized, such as community centers, public parks, urban gardening initiatives, open-source projects, Wikimedia, public art funds, museums, and libraries.

I believe that donations should not be forced by law, but rather based on awareness, free will, and financial strength. People need a clear way to understand where help is needed in this complex system, and how they can actually contribute. Make-Impact.org should clearly show real-world problems and make it easy to understand how much money is needed to solve them. It connects awareness with action, so people don’t just see the issues, but also know how to respond in a meaningful way.

The project is a few times larger than my current capacity to manage, but over time I hope to meet the right people to help me launch and run it. My current goal is to implement it technically within the next 6–12 months on weekends, and see where it leads: “The way will show the way”.

Conversion from visitors to donors

The estimate is 100,000 to 300,000 donations per year via Make-Impact.org. That would be roughly 275 to 820 donations per day.

Let’s see how many visits a website would need to handle to support that number of donations.

  • Visits from search engines or social media of uninformed users (so-called cold traffic) often result in a 0.1%–1% donation conversion rate.
  • Highly targeted visitors who already intend to donate: 1%–5%+ is possible.
  • Returning users and supporters of specific causes can convert even higher (and that will be the main goal of the platform).

To reach 100,000–300,000 donations/year, the platform would need roughly:

  • At 0.5% conversion: 55,000–164,000 visits/day
  • At 1% conversion: 27,500–82,000 visits/day
  • At 2% conversion: 13,750–41,000k visits/day

27,500 visits/day is approximately 19 visits per minute, or 1 visit every 3 seconds on average.

Conversion from one-time donors to recurring donors

The platform should support both one-time and recurring donations. Non-profits often prefer recurring donations because they allow better long-term planning.

Recurring donors also tend to stay engaged much longer than one-time donors. On average, they remain active for about 5 to 8 years, compared to just 18 months for one-time donors.

Another study found that the average lifetime of recurring donations is about 7.77 years, and up to 77% of recurring donors continue donating year over year.

Therefore, the goal of the platform is to optimize engagement so that users either choose recurring donations or regularly return to support causes. Openness, transparency, gamification, respectful communication, mailing lists, and collaborative campaigns could all help achieve this.

Technical infrastructure

The platform can be monolithic at first, hosted on a single server. This minimal setup could cost around 40 to 100 EUR per month, including domain, web server, database, media storage, email provider, and backups.

The server can scale vertically by adding more CPU and RAM. However, at some point, traffic will grow too large and performance may degrade.

When the number of donors reaches hundreds of thousands, it is recommended to switch to a serverless or multi-server architecture (likely using Docker and Kubernetes). At that stage, monthly costs could exceed 1,000 EUR.

Money transfers would likely be implemented using Donorbox or Betterplace integrations, or by redirecting users directly to non-profit websites, which ideally would notify Make-Impact.org about transactions via webhooks or a REST API.

Typical donation sizes in Europe

Donation amounts vary by country based on average income, cost of living, familiarity with recurring giving models, trust in online donation systems, and tax incentives.

In many platforms, the average one-time donation is around 20–60 EUR. A typical recurring donation is 5–20 EUR per month. People in Southern and Eastern Europe tend to donate smaller amounts per donation compared to those in Northern and Western Europe.

Northern and Western European countries like Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden generally show higher average donation sizes due to higher income levels and a stronger donation culture.

Common one-time donations:

  • 20–50 EUR — very typical online range
  • 50–150 EUR — common for strong engagement (campaigns, disasters)
  • 150–500+ EUR — occasional major gifts

Recurring donations:

  • 10–25 EUR/month — very standard
  • 25–50 EUR/month — strong supporters

In Southern European countries such as Italy, Spain, and Portugal, disposable income is generally lower.

Common one-time donations:

  • 5–20 EUR — very common online range
  • 20–50 EUR — engaged donors
  • 50–100+ EUR — less frequent

Recurring donations:

  • 3–10 EUR/month — entry-level recurring support
  • 10–20 EUR/month — committed donors

In Eastern European countries such as Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, incomes are also lower, which is reflected in donation amounts.

Common one-time donations:

  • 3–15 EUR — frequent online range
  • 15–40 EUR — strong engagement
  • 40–100+ EUR — less common

Recurring donations:

  • 2–8 EUR/month — typical range
  • 8–15 EUR/month — strong supporters

Marketing

At an early stage, acquiring a new donor usually costs between 50 and 250 EUR, depending on how people are reached and in which region. Online campaigns are often cheaper, while direct outreach or in-person methods tend to be more expensive. For Make-Impact.org, a realistic starting point would be around 50 to 100 EUR per new donor per year. If some of them become recurring donors, their lifetime value can grow beyond 120 EUR per person.

Customer acquisition cost is quite high compared to average donation sizes. The math is not mathing yet, but there are ways to improve it.

Some ideas:

  • Short, emotional videos can be very effective — people respond strongly to impact stories. AI-based storytelling could also combine raw data into more compelling narratives.
  • Partnering with brands or companies where employer matching or rewards amplify donations.
  • Gamification: milestones, progress bars, or friendly leaderboards to increase engagement.
  • Shareable challenges, such as a “7 Days of Giving” campaign.
  • Collaborating with influencers or micro-influencers aligned with the mission.

Funding

I am looking for long-term funding options so that taking commissions from donations is not necessary. Make-Impact.org should remain open, transparent, and informative to build trust. Any ideas are welcome.

Final words

Take the numbers here with a grain of salt, just like a dish of legumes. ChatGPT might be hallucinating or estimating based on limited data from a few countries. Still, this overview gives a better sense of what might be ahead for this project.

Wish me luck, and join the waitlist.

Cover picture by Adrianna CA

Categories
Ecology Life Sustainability

17 Django Project Ideas that can Make a Positive Impact around You

17 Django Project Ideas that can Make a Positive Impact around You
Reading Time: 4 minutes.

This post first appeared on the DjangoTricks blog.

For more than a decade, I was focused only on the technical part of website building with Django. In the process, I have built a bunch of interesting cultural websites. But I always felt that those sleepless nights were not worthy of the impact.

They say, “Don’t work hard, work smart!” I agree with that phrase, and for me it’s not about working less hours. For me, it’s working as much as necessary, but on things that matter most.

So after years of collecting facts about life, I connected the dots and came up with make-impact.org – a social donation platform, which became one of the most important long-term projects. All my planning goes around this project.

And I believe I am not the only programmer who sometimes feels that they want to make a positive impact with their skills. So I brainstormed 17 Django project ideas. You can choose one and realize it as a hobby project, open-source platform, startup, or non-profit organization; alone, with a team of developers, or collaborating with some non-technical people.

Idea #1: Low Qualification Job Search

The job market is pretty competitive, and not all people can keep up with the train. You could build a job search website for jobs that don’t require high education or lots of working experience. It could be helpful for people with language barriers, harsh living conditions, or those who are very young or very old. You could build it for your city, region, or country.

Idea #2: Discounted Meals and Products

Get inspired from Too Good To Go and build a progressive web app for your city about discounted restaurant meals and shop products whose expiration date is close to the end, but they are still good to eat.

Idea #3: Personal Health Advisor and Tracker

Build a website for setting your personal health improvement goals and tracking the progress. For example, maybe one wants to start eating more particular vegetables every week, jogging daily, lose or gain weight, or get rid of unhealthy addictions. Let people choose their health goals and check in with each progressive step. Allow using the website anonymously.

Idea #4: Online Primary and Elementary School Materials

Some people don’t have access to schools in general or miss some classes because of illnesses. You could build a global and open wiki-based primary and elementary school education website for children and adults. It should be translatable and localizable. It would also be interesting to compare the same subject teachings in different countries side-by-side.

Idea #5: Psychological Support for Women

You could build a website with a video chat providing psychological support to discriminated or violently abused women. The help could be given by professionals or emphatic volunteers. The technical part can be implemented using django-channels, WebSockets, and WebRTC.

Idea #6: Rain-harvesting Companies around the World

Rain harvesting is one of the available ways to solve the problem of the lack of drinking water. There could be a platform comparing rain-harvesting companies all around the world. What are the installation prices? What are the countries they are working with? How many people have they saved? This website would allow people to find the most optimal company to build a rain harvesting system for them.

Idea #7: Closest Electric Car Charging Stations

Use the Open Charge Map API and create a progressive web app that shows the nearest electric car charging station and how to get there.

Idea #8: Escrow-based Remote Job Search

As remote jobs are getting more and more popular, there is still a matter of trust between the employees and employers. “Will the job taker complete their job in a good quality?” “Will the company pay the employee on time?” There are Escrow services to fix this issue. These are third parties that take and hold the money until the job is done. You could build a remote job search website promoting the usage of Escrow.com or another escrow service provider.

Idea #9: Open Work Locations

You could build a website listing coworking spaces and cafes with free wifi in your city. It should include the map, price ranges, details if registration is required, and other information necessary for remote workers.

Idea #10: Most Admired Companies

There could be a social website listing the most admired companies to work for in your country. Companies could be rated by working conditions, salary equality, growth opportunities, work relations, and other criteria. Anyone could suggest such a company, and they would be rated by their current and former employees anonymously.

Idea #11: Tiny Houses

The cost of accommodation is a critical problem in many locations of the world. You could develop a website that lists examples of tiny houses and their building schemas and instructions.

Idea #12: Catalog of Recycled Products

You could work on a product catalog with links to online shops, selling things produced from collected plastic. For example, these sunglasses are made of plastic collected from the ocean. Where available, you could use affiliate marketing links.

Idea #13: Information for Climate-change Migrants

You could work on a website for climate-change migrants with information about getting registered, housing, education, and jobs in a new city or country with better climate conditions.

Idea #14: Fishes, Fishing, and Overfishing

Scrape parts of FishBase and create a website about fishes, fishing, and overfishing in your region or the world. Engage people about the marine world and inform them about the damage done by overfishing.

Idea #15: Plant Trees

Create an E-commerce shop or Software as a Service and integrate RaaS (Reforestation as a Service). Let a tree be planted for every sale.

Idea #16: Positive Parenting

Create a progressive web app about positive parenting. For inspiration and information check this article.

Idea #17: Constructive Forum

Create a forum with topic voting and automatic hate speech detection and flagging. For example, maybe you could use a combination of Sentiment analysis from text-processing.com and usage of profanity words to find negativity in forum posts.

It’s your turn

I hope this post inspired you. If you decided to start a startup with one of those ideas, don’t forget to do your research at first. What are the competitors in your area? What would be your unique selling point? Etc.

Also, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts. Which of the projects would seem to you the most crucial? Which of them would you like to work on?

Cover photo by Joshua Fuller