Hi, I'm Micha.

I build what I was missing when we started our first company.

With Etesie, I help founders find product-market fit and build everything else from it: brand, website, go-to-market, even the app. I'm also a Convex Champion and do open source at Creem. This page is the story of how I got here, with a few colored dots in it.

npm downloads a month
256K+
Figma kit users
6,200+
paid customers
70

Keep an eye on the dots. They'll make sense at the end.

Start the story Explore Etesie

2013 – 2020

Before: a great team of 15, and one backend module.

I started as an apprentice at doubleSlash and ended up leading a team of 15 that built billing and payments for Connected Drive, BMW's infotainment system. Good people, a clear job, a big budget. But it was one backend module. None of us had ever built a whole product.

people on the team I led
15
annual budget I was responsible for
€2.5M

My first startup

Five people, every role covered. Or so we thought.

I was asked to join a startup building practice management software for dentists. The existing software was bad, and we wanted to build a better one. On paper, we had everyone we needed:

  • Business manager of a clinic with ten dentists
  • The dentist who owned the clinic
  • Sales
  • Backend developer
  • Me, as product owner

The catch

Covering a role is not the same as mastering it.

We had badly underestimated what each part really takes.

  • We had Someone from sales We needed Someone who can build a brand and a channel that makes strangers notice us and buy
  • We had A clinic whose processes worked day to day We needed Treatment and billing processes documented well enough to turn into software for thousands of practices
  • We had A backend developer We needed Someone who owns a whole product end to end: frontend, backend and database, hosting, security with user and organization management, and keeping it all running
  • We had Me as product owner, new to dentistry, with no one at my side who knew the field We needed Someone who knew dentistry inside out, either me or a scout at my side, so I could decide where to start

Our first feature

So we started with the safest thing we could think of: a calendar.

There are thousands of calendars out there. How hard could it be? Too hard: even CSS basics like flexbox and grid were beyond us. Finding frontend developers wasn't the problem. Telling a good one from a bad one was, and price told us nothing: a senior freelancer at €5,000 a week couldn't get it working, and neither could a developer at €2,500 a month. Our designer made beautiful screens, but every component was a one-off. So we tried to learn it together with the developers we could afford. Looking back, I should have learned it myself right away.

October 2020 < >>
M
T
W
T
F
S
S
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
€5,000 a week €2,500 a month
Our calendar, roughly.

The real problem

The calendar was a symptom. We didn't know how to build a company.

Dentists said their software was bad, but nobody could say what exactly, or for whom. Some dentists want to make money and go golfing; others optimize their processes every week. Every answer came back to “replace the whole thing, just better”, which is unrealistic for a startup. Two, three years in, we still had no clear product-market fit. These were the questions we couldn't answer:

  1. ? Which problem do we solve, exactly?
  2. ? For whom, exactly?
  3. ? Where do we start, small enough to win?
  4. ? Who do we need, and where do we find them?

Without those answers, we couldn't even know which team we needed.

Meanwhile

Before I understood all that, I did what I could: I learned to build.

Everything was stuck, so I took on one problem after another, mostly alone, and looked for technology a small team could actually handle.

  • Frontend SvelteKit, because it's far friendlier to newcomers than React and Next.js.
  • Users & organizations Okta and Auth0 were too complicated, Clerk was good. In the end I built it self-hosted on Better Auth, with my own UI on top.
  • Backend Convex: simple, reactive, friendly to beginners, and it scales.

Design

Most teams don't need a new design system. They need to understand the good ones.

We needed a brand identity, and good design systems are expensive or built from scratch. Skeleton got us going, but something was always missing.

Material 3 is excellent, but its documentation is overwhelming. We got lost in it too and started building our own, like much of the market. So we made Material 3 simple: a clear guide, connected to Tailwind, and a place where teams manage their system, synced with GitHub and Figma. That became Etesie Design.

And a brand is more than an app. It's ads, videos, blog posts and the voice that carries through all of them, so the system has to cover the whole brand.

designers and developers use my Figma kit and theme tooling
6,200+
paid customers
70
Explore Etesie Design Get the Figma kit
Etesie Design theme editor

Along the way

Most of what I know, I learned from other people. So the building blocks go back out.

Many of the pieces I was missing became open source.

GitHub stars
300+
npm downloads in the last 30 days
256,900+

live from GitHub and npm

Today

Etesie: the cockpit I wish we'd had at my first company.

My first startup didn't make it. But it became the incubator for Etesie: so this doesn't happen to me again, and hopefully not to other founders facing the same questions.

Etesie starts where we went wrong: with product-market fit. Its Masterplan works through the questions we couldn't answer, with an agent that does the research and you making the decisions.

  1. Which problem do we solve, exactly?
  2. For whom, exactly?
  3. Where do we start, small enough to win?
  4. Who do we need, and where do we find them?
Etesie Masterplan preview

From that one model, everything else is derived and stays consistent: your brand and design system, a website with a landing page for every audience, your go-to-market strategy and your business plan.

  1. Product-market fit
  2. Brand & design system
  3. Website
  4. Go-to-market
  5. Business plan
Explore Etesie

Connecting the dots

Looking back, the dots connect.

Every part of the story left a dot. Here they are again, joined by color.

Point at a color to follow its thread.

All three threads lead to Etesie. Purpose, connectedness, beauty: that's what I look for in my work, and what I try to put into it.

The CV version

Where I've worked

  1. Etesie

    Founder

    Etesie is the cockpit of a company: the Masterplan works out product-market fit and derives the brand, website, go-to-market strategy and business plans from it. Etesie Design makes Material 3 understandable and ownable for teams.

    Dec 2024 - Present

  2. Creem

    Open source & developer experience

    I maintain Creem's official SDKs and integrations, including the Convex component, and look after their developer experience. Before the contract, Creem sponsored my open-source work on GitHub.

    Jul 2026 - Present

  3. Masterplan, now part of Etesie

    Founder

    I'm building software that turns one model of a business into its go-to-market plan, landing pages for each audience, pricing, and business plan, and checks the assumptions against real sales and usage data.

    May 2024 - Present

  4. Dechea

    CEO & Co-Founder

    Software that lets dentists plan a treatment in under two minutes.

    Aug 2020 - May 2024

  5. BMW · doubleSlash

    Project Lead

    Led an agile team of 15 people and was responsible for product quality, the €2.5M annual budget, and the project's success

    Jan 2019 - Jul 2020

  6. BMW · doubleSlash

    Project Lead Assistant

    Helped lead and coach a team of 15, responsible for quality assurance and day-to-day delivery

    Apr 2017 - Dec 2018

  7. doubleSlash

    Software Developer

    Built a continuous delivery toolchain and automated tests, wrote training documentation, and implemented client requirements

    Sep 2016 - Mar 2017

  8. doubleSlash

    IT Specialist Apprenticeship

    Vocational training in software development.

    Sep 2013 - Aug 2016

  9. Graf-Soden-Realschule Friedrichshafen

    Secondary School

    Secondary education with intermediate school certificate.

    Until Jul 2013

The next dot
could be you.

I want founders to spend their time on the problem they're solving, not on everything around it.

Founders

Got an idea, or stuck before product-market fit?

Etesie works through the hard questions with you, then builds your brand, website and go-to-market from the answers. And if you need an app, the building blocks are ready.

Explore Etesie Book a call

Developer tools

Building a tool founders rely on?

I work with a few developer tools that fit the Etesie ecosystem on integrations, SDKs and developer experience. Creem is one of them.

Message me on LinkedIn GitHub
ende