Came to the Coworking Space, Left with an Accelerator Lead

By Georg Malahov

Today an amazing coincidence happened — a textbook case of being in the right place at the right time. I came to the coworking space to get some work done, and it turned out that today, of all days, students from the Schweinfurt engineering university were presenting their projects there. The projects were mostly about robotics, but that wasn't the main thing for me: I met a professor — the coordinator of an entrepreneurship support program and one of the founders of these free coworking spaces.

And I managed not only to listen to five other people's ideas but to present my own. No slides, no preparation — a genuine elevator pitch: pull yourself together fast and tell people about your voice journal in German. I even tried to show it live. It seems the idea is so much in the air right now that outsiders grasp it quickly and react positively.

Then they gave me the contacts of the Startbahn27 accelerator. A real accelerator, like Y Combinator, only local: a six-month program, experts who help with advice, a venue where you can pitch ideas and practice pitching them. Applications open on February 3, next Monday. I'm one hundred percent certain I'll take part, no matter what. And today someone told me an important thing: many will show up there with ideas, while I'll show up with a working prototype — the product exists, you can use it. All that's missing is a landing page and a couple of touch-ups so I'm not embarrassed to show it.

I also got lucky on a topic that had been nagging me for a long time — data protection. Right there in the coworking space I met a man who is responsible for Datenschutz matters and runs a digitalization project in the legal field. I consulted him — and realized it's not as scary as it looks. The key condition: the data I store on my servers must not leave German territory. My hosting is with Hetzner — a German cloud provider; I named it outright, and he said: that works. Hetzner provides a data processing agreement, that agreement goes into my Datenschutzerklärung — the privacy policy — users confirm their consent, and as long as I play by the rules and don't abuse the data, there won't be any problems. That reassured me: a frightening legal question boiled down to a clear list of actions.

One more funny thing: through the professor I met a project coordinator, who immediately connected me with an acquaintance of hers — a designer. And everything sort of assembled itself into a picture: here's Georg, who has an app; here's an accelerator he should join; here's a designer who can make the app look good.

I haven't digested all this information yet, but I'm impressed. For a month and a half the journal was a tool for me alone — and today it turned out you can tell strangers about it in three minutes, and they nod. By February 3 I need a website with a landing page and a couple of improvements in the bot so it's ready to present. Not much time — I'm getting started.