VenturePlan

This one came from lived experience. I had to write a business plan myself and went looking for tools that would make the process less painful — and found myself choosing between Excel templates and tools that came straight from the early 2000s and havent seen much love since: Rigid templates, zero intelligence, ugly exports, and workflows that made you feel like you were fighting the software instead of building your case. So after another very long day fighting one of those tools, I swore myself never to touch anything like it aver again. So somebody had to come up with something better... Germany has a massive ecosystem of founders who need solid business plans — whether they're working with their local IHK, a Gründerberatung, or heading straight to the bank. They all deserve better tooling than what's currently available.

The app is a full-stack Next.js application backed by Neon PostgreSQL via Prisma, with dev and prod database branches to keep things clean. For the AI layer, I went with Amazon Bedrock hosted in eu-central-1 — GDPR-compliant data residency isn't optional when you're handling business financials in the German market, it's table stakes. PDF generation runs through Puppeteer so the exported documents look exactly the way advisors and banks expect them to. The whole thing is self-hosted on a Hostinger KVM VPS, deployed through Dokploy with Traefik managing routing and TLS certificates.

I started by pulling apart the existing competition, especially where their UX falls short and where their AI integration is either nonexistent or bolted on as an afterthought. From there, I built the core editor and financial planning modules first, then introduced AI advisor personas that adapt their guidance depending on context — what you need when preparing for a VC pitch is fundamentally different from what you need when walking into a bank appointment. Pricing landed on a free tier alongside a €79/month Pro plan after testing against what the market would actually bear. Alongside the founder-facing product, I built a fully integrated Berater Dashboard that lets advisors at IHKs and Gründerberatungen manage and support their clients directly within the platform — opening up a proper B2B channel from day one.

VenturePlan turns what used to be weeks of spreadsheet wrestling and template frustration into a guided, conversational experience that still produces the polished, professional documents founders actually need. It's built specifically for how business planning works in Germany — not a translated American product with a euro sign swapped in. With the integrated advisor dashboard, the platform serves both sides of the table: founders get smarter tools, and the institutions that support them get a modern workspace to do it from.