They raised 20 million euros. All we had were our personal savings. And we were terrified. They’re gone now. We’re still kicking. But when it was happening, we didn’t know that’s how it would end.
The fear was real
At the time, appointmed wasn’t the company it is today. A well-funded competitor had just entered our market, and we were smaller, less stable, still figuring things out. The idea that a team with that kind of capital could just… absorb the market we’d spent years building felt real. Not paranoid. Real.
So we lost some sleep.
The product looked stunning in their marketing material. Genuinely. Clean design, polished interface, the kind of visual quality that makes you feel slightly embarrassed about your own UI. VC money buys good designers.
What it doesn’t buy is a decade of customer conversations. It doesn’t buy the judgment that comes from watching thousands of therapists try to book an appointment, invoice a patient, or respond to a distressed patient at 7pm on a Friday. It doesn’t buy the boring, unglamorous knowledge of what people actually need versus what looks good in a demo.
Their product was built by people who’d read about healthcare practices. Ours was built by people who’d listened to them for years.
Then we saw the first demos. The interface was still beautiful, but the features weren’t there. Not enough depth to cover what their target customers actually do all day. It looked like a product built from assumptions, not from conversations.
We stopped losing sleep.
100,000 Euros per customer
They got to around 200 customers before the money ran out.
20 million Euros. 200 customers. That’s roughly 100,000 euros per customer, however you slice the math. I don’t know their exact burn rate or their full story, and I won’t pretend I do. But 200 customers from that starting point tells you something about the gap between what they promised investors and what the market actually wanted.
We didn’t do anything clever to survive this. We didn’t accelerate our roadmap, didn’t slash prices, didn’t scramble to add features we thought they might copy. We panicked briefly and then kept building what we’d always been building.
It took us a while to realize that was actually the right call.
Money accelerates whatever is already there
The tempting conclusion here is that VC money always loses. It doesn’t. There are well-funded competitors who execute well, who hire the right people, who take the time to actually understand their market before they spend. I’ve seen it. This wasn’t one of those cases, but they exist.
What I do think is true: money accelerates whatever is already there. If you don’t have that, it just lets you build the wrong thing more expensively.
They had 20 million and guesswork. We had our personal savings and a decade of customer conversations. That’s not a fair fight, but not in the direction most people assume.
The scarcity was in our heads
Not every market has room for multiple winners. Healthcare in Austria and Germany does with hundreds of thousands of practitioners. In hindsight, the idea that one competitor was going to capture all of it was always slightly irrational.
And even if they did, it wouldn't be because of a bigger bank account. It'd be because they out-learned you.
