Productive Mobile, Technical Co-founder

A platform that turned existing enterprise web applications into touch-friendly mobile workflows without changing their backend systems.

Former colleagues invited me to move to Germany and join their new B2B SaaS startup as CTO. The problem posed a tough but interesting challenge: large companies depended on heavily customized web software, such as SAP ERP systems, that was expensive and risky to replace. Our challenge was to add a layer over those systems, turning desktop interfaces into focused touch workflows without changing the underlying backend systems. The first prototype was a Ruby on Rails-based, JavaScript-heavy platform. Users moved a DOM highlighter over an existing web application, selected related sections, and transformed them (with lots of mobile-specific CSS and JavaScript) into a mobile interface. This eventually evolved into Productive Mobile Studio, a visual editor that let IT teams and non- technical users create small mobile applications for selected tasks instead of rebuilding an entire CRM, ERP, intranet, or other internal system. This role brought many firsts: co-founding a company, seeing startup capitalism up close, securing Deutsche Bahn as the first enterprise pilot, working with an all-JavaScript stack, and using React when it was the new cool kid challenging jQuery and Backbone.js! It also taught me hard lessons about the struggles and failures of being a co-founder. I left in February 2016. The company raised a reported €3.4 million seed round in March 2018 and later became Matterway.