#5 What actually works: Hard-won lessons from growing a startup

Startup-Café Community is a free space where founders and builders come together to learn from those ahead of them, share wins and failures openly, and draw inspiration from each other’s journeys. Startups can feel like a lonely road — here, you’ll find people who understand, listen, and walk alongside you. Every future-builder, welcome.

Are you actively building a product, a business, or running a young startup? Come learn from a founder running a thriving B2B SaaS business, and see what it takes to grow from first customers to scale.

This time at Startup-Cafe Community, we sit down with Simon Schramm, CEO & founder of Sortful, a B2B inventory management SaaS that has successfully grown from an incubator project to the CHIP 2024/2025 leading software over the past 3 years.
Simon will share how he:

• Landed the first paying customers
• Defined product-market fit
• GoToMarket
• Scaled without losing focus
• Learned from wins, mistakes startups commonly make

Agenda:
1️⃣ I’ll guide through business questions early-stage founders care about — product-market fit, Go-to-Market strategy, and growth hurdles. Everyone is welcomed to raise his/her question related to those topics.
2️⃣ Audience Q&A — ask Simon questions about your own projects.
3️⃣ Founder journey — Simon's personal reflections, life lessons, and the realities of building a startup.
☕️ No slides, no pitch — this is a founder-to-founder fireside conversation.

📍 Where: Zollhof - Tech Incubator, Nuremberg. Zollhof 7, 90443 Nuremberg
🕒 When: [19:00-20:30, 4th Sep 2025]

💡 This session is for doers actively building and scaling a product, as well as business owners, suppliers, or partners in the B2B SaaS ecosystem who want to connect, exchange insights, and explore potential collaborations.