SoundSnip was the first company I have founded in my life (together with Thomas as my co-founder). It was an innovative app for saving moments in your life retrospectively after they happened.

Result

We grew a user base of more than 2000 people, got covered multiple times by the media, won awards and, most importantly, learned a LOT.

Since many student-startups tend to fail even before product development kick-off, what I am especially proud of: We were a startup with a working product on the market, and paying customers (we didn’t earn a lot, but people paid for the value they received).

What does the app exactly do?

SoundSnip gets you back the most important moments in your life. After they happened.

With the app you can capture the last minute of what just happened. Whenever you want to. Say, you run into a moment that you would like to remember. Just quickly tap your phone or smart-watch and the last minute of audio gets saved permanently.

Check out the website: soundsnip.net

What is it that you want to rewind? Capture…

• the sentences of native speakers that you never understood while learning a new language
• quirky sentences that your friends shout out
• the promise that a friend makes you
• the key points of a meeting without getting distracted
• the chords and music ideas while playing an instrument or singing
• your child’s first words

Story (2014 - 2018)

I started programming the app while I was in China (2014) to make it easier for myself to learn Mandarin. I wanted to be able to capture what Chinese people said to me when I didn’t understand something, in order to look it up later. Therefore, I started building an app which was able to save the last minute of audio retrospectively after you’ve heard it.

This was right at the time when the first Android Wear smartwatch came out, and I made sure SoundSnip would run on that device. It was one of the very first Android Wear Smartwatch apps on the market.

Developing SoundSnip was a fun and extremely frustrating experience at the same time. I spent months and months inside coffee shops in Shanghai to develop the app.

When the app was finished in its first version, I went back to Munich. There, I met up with Thomas, a young, ambitious marketing expert. Together, we wanted to make SoundSnip more famous. We founded a company, mostly to have some legal protection - we didn’t really plan to become the next “Facebook” with this idea. Thomas managed to get us into UnternehmerTUM who supported our startup by providing mentors and workshops.

After two more super exciting (often also exhausting) years, we decided to stop the project. We didn’t see any good way to turn it into a profitable business (we earned money, but not nearly enough to make up even for our own time investment). Thomas got a really great job offer and I wanted to focus on QuickBird which I had founded shortly after SoundSnip together with Stefan.