Why I never wanted to sell Mailbutler

If you ask most people why they start a company, "exit" is somewhere in the answer. Even if it's not the first word. Raise money, grow fast, sell high, move on to the next thing. It's such a common script that people rarely question whether it's the only one.

I never wrote that script for myself. I just didn't notice it until I actually had to explain it out loud.

How it started

Mailbutler wasn't born from a business plan. It came out of a habit I still have: when something annoys me, I tend to just build the fix.

During my studies, I wasn't happy with the VPN client my university offered. So I built my own — Shimo. Word got around. Other students wanted in. Eventually a few universities asked if they could license it for their whole student body. That's how I stumbled into my first licensing model, without ever intending to start a company around it.

Around the same time, I was using Apple Mail and kept noticing small, obvious gaps. No attachment reminders. No way to schedule an email for later. So I built plug-ins for myself — Send Later, ForgetMeNot, and a handful of others — and started selling them individually. I was a PhD student at the time. This was a hobby that happened to generate income on the side.

Eventually the hobby got serious enough that I had to make a choice: keep it as a side project and go into video coding as a regular employee, or commit to it properly. I went to the Entrepreneurship Center at RWTH Aachen to think it through out loud. That's where I met Tobias, who was advising me there at the time. He saw the potential in the email plug-ins immediately and offered to build it with me. In April 2015, we co-founded what was then called Feingeist Software GmbH — Mailbutler's original name.

The early years were exactly as improvised as that origin suggests. Together, we moved to Berlin, hired our first employee, and worked out of co-working spaces before we could afford our own office. In 2016, we launched Mailbutler properly, combined the individual plug-ins into one product, and introduced a subscription model that people didn't really trust yet — subscriptions for software weren't the norm back then. We also tried, and lost, a mobile VPN app that got pulled for App Store policy reasons. You win some, you lose some. By 2017, we renamed the company to Mailbutler GmbH, because that's what it had actually become.

A lot has changed on the team since those first years in Berlin. That's a story for another post. But the company that grew out of that founding phase, and the way I've chosen to run it since, is what the rest of this post is about.

None of that early scramble was building toward a sale. It was building toward itself. The thing kept growing because we kept wanting to work on it — not because we were following a playbook toward some future transaction.

The offer I didn't take

The "not building this to sell it" idea was never something I sat down and declared out loud. It was just always the unspoken assumption underneath everything I did with the company.

It has been tested, though. Occasionally, investors show interest. Most recently a couple of years ago, when someone offered to invest in Mailbutler. I thought it through seriously. I didn't dismiss it out of hand. But I came back to what I already believed: I didn't want to give away shares.

It's not that I don't see what capital could do. Of course it would simplify things. We've never been able to spend heavily on marketing, and we can't compete with the salaries that investor-backed companies offer their engineers. Which means I have to find people who share the company's values and vision, rather than people I simply outbid for. That's a harder search. But it's the one I chose. What I get in exchange is something an investor's money can't buy: I still control the direction of the company. Nobody outside it sets my expectations, my targets, or my timeline for when this is supposed to pay off.

The moment you take outside capital with a return expectation attached, a clock starts. Someone, somewhere, is now waiting for a payout — on a schedule that isn't yours.

Every decision after that gets weighed, at least a little, against that clock. I wanted the freedom to make decisions on the company's timeline, not an investor's.

What we optimize for instead

If you're not optimizing for an exit, you have to know what you are optimizing for. Otherwise you're just drifting. For us, it comes down to two things: how we work, and what the money is for.

On how we work — the team has real flexibility. We work asynchronously, without strict deadlines. Whatever time of day suits you as an individual is fine with us. Nobody needs permission to take an hour in the park in the middle of the afternoon. We control our own milestones and pace.

Never any overtime. Not occasionally-never. Never.

Product direction isn't handed down from the top either. Every two weeks, the whole team sits down in a roundtable where anything can be raised — product, internal process, whatever's on someone's mind. We decide by consensus. Everyone gets a real say in what we build and how we work.

On the money side: I make sure everyone, including myself, is paid fairly. I reinvest the rest deliberately. Not "grow at all costs" reinvestment. Considered reinvestment, aimed at a company that stays healthy to run — not one that's being fattened up for a buyer's spreadsheet. Success for me was never going to be measured by a valuation on an exit day.It's measured by whether the company is still healthy, the team still wants to be here, and I still want to be here, next year and the year after.

The actual point

I'm not telling this story because I think everyone should refuse investors, or run their company exactly the way we run ours. That's not the takeaway.

The takeaway is simpler: know yourself. Know your own values, and what actually matters to you — not what a business book says should matter, not what a "real" founder is supposed to want. Then run your company in a way that's coherent with that. Authenticity isn't a marketing angle. It's what happens naturally once your decisions actually match your values. Your team can feel it when it's real — which is exactly why they trust you, and why you can trust them back.

Don't let anyone else tell you what a company is supposed to optimize for, what a boss is supposed to look like, or how success is supposed to be measured. That's yours to define.

I never set out to sell Mailbutler. I set out to build something I'd want to keep showing up for. Eleven years in, that's still the plan — and it's the lens I'll be writing through for the rest of this series. When I write here about why we pursued a certification, how we think about AI, or a decision that looked strange from the outside, this is the "why" underneath all of it.