The founder story
The double “simple” on our homepage is no typo. It’s a promise with a history. The short version: I’ve been solving the same problem for over thirty years — in one industry after another. Here’s the long version.
— Lars Immega, founder & CEO
In my early twenties I ran the computer systems of a building-components dealer. The sales reps there carried twenty paper price lists through their day — a single quote took hours of page-flipping. I built them a system that turned hours into fifteen minutes. And I learned two things that still hold today: first, the problem is never “we lack software” — it’s “sales doesn’t have what it needs to sell”. Second: I’m a solutions architect, not a programmer. I see the whole field, bring the right people on board — and make sure that what ships is something a rep understands without a manual.
Later I ran the branch office of Europe’s market leader for water dispensers — after just six months I was made head of sales. Not because I could talk about water dispensers better than anyone else. But because I never talked about water dispensers: I brought along soup and hot-drink samples and let the hot-water function speak for itself — plus fourteen days of free testing. People don’t buy machines. They buy the moment something gets easier. Finding that moment before others even see the problem — that has been my job ever since.
Years later I ran a fashion agency in the former stables of the Hamburg police — and got to know fashion B2B sales from the inside. What I saw: sample costs rising, retailers receiving fewer and fewer samples and with them less basis for decisions. For small orders, travelling no longer pays off. A market full of people working with paper order pads, Excel lists and clunky input screens — because that’s all there was.
Out of that pain came ORDERBOOK: present the collection intuitively, capture the order right there — and crucially, offline too, because golf courses and small shops don’t come with Wi-Fi. I wound down the agency, convinced a shareholder — and founded Smartview360.
“I take away your screwdriver and hand you a cordless drill. You didn’t know you were unhappy — until you felt the difference.”
In between lies an entrepreneur’s life: an internet platform bootstrapped from zero to 50,000 marks in monthly revenue, companies shattered by trademark disputes and market prices — and rebuilt every single time. My motto in life is accordingly simple: Get up, wipe your mouth, keep going. In an entrepreneur’s life you stumble, you trip, sometimes you fall — that’s life. What remained: steady growth instead of the big gamble. And loyalty. During the pandemic, customers who had run into hardship simply called us — one conversation at eye level, and their prices were lowered. No pleading, no forms, no haggling. Working with us is like a marriage — for better and for worse. That’s not a marketing line; it’s lived practice, and our longest-standing customers can vouch for it.
If you’ve read this far, you know why we don’t do off-the-shelf quotes: a tool that’s meant to make your life easier first has to understand your life. That’s exactly what Katharina and Frank take time for — ten minutes, no obligation, straight talk.