Daniel Harvey talks about starting a property company that grew to 10 people before liquidation, then finding co-founder Matthias Bellman on LinkedIn. A long first call showed they shared the same vision, so Harvey moved to Berlin to build a company that evolved from agency work into software.
Talk to us a little bit about how you met your co founder. How did you guys kind of form a partnership together? I think that's pretty, pretty powerful information.
Yeah, for sure. So it was around four years ago. I started my first company in my early 20s. It was a property company. It done pretty well and we'd grown, I had some co founders and stuff like that, and we'd grown a little bit to around 10 people in the team. And then like, and then it all went wrong and the company ended up in liquidation. Right.
Oh, wow.
And, and it's funny, like, I left that, that journey not feeling dejected, not feeling negative. I felt so empowered because I'd learned so much as my, as this first journey as an entrepreneur. I'd spent my inheritance from my grandmother on it, right? And people can't understand why. I wasn't depressed. It went bankrupt. I was like, this is amazing how much I've learned and grown and I've adopted a growth mindset and I'd met all these inspiring people. And anyway, I left that experience with the firm belief that if everyone has access to learn from inspiring people, their life will be enhanced. I'd learned from all these inspiring people. My life had been enhanced. And I just, that was my belief. And I had no other plan of what to do with that. I just believed. I wanted everyone I knew and everyone in the world to just be able to learn from inspiring people. And then I came across, I was just on LinkedIn, I came across a German and I couldn't understand how to even say his name. It looks like Matthias Bellman. So I only knew one German person at the time, Dan. And I thought, you know, I might be naive, but maybe they all know each other.
It's a small country, that's why I say it knows each other. It's like a no.
Everyone in Germany knows each other, right? So I got in touch with this German guy that I knew and I said, do you know this Matthias Bellman guy? And no joke, he went, oh, Matthias, Yeah, I've known him for years. No way.
Holy shit. All right.
Yeah, meant to be. So he introduced me, we had a 20 minute call scheduled. We ended up speaking for three hours. And the reason was that we had a very similar vision for the change we wanted to see in the world. We wanted to inspiring people to have a platform to share their message in a more meaningful way, a more impactful way with more people. Right. And before I got off that call, I knew, like, we have to work together. My girlfriend got home from work that night, and I said, hey, Jess, haven't you always wanted to move to Germany? She was like, no, but she's awesome. So within a week, our bags were packed and we were moving to Germany. And we've been building the company together. We started, like I said, about two years as an agency and about the last year and a half as the software and a little transition period in between.
So. Can you now speak German?
I live in Berlin, Dan. And I'll tell you something. Something about Berlin. People in Germany say Berlin isn't Germany. I'm so embarrassed to tell you I don't speak good German. Little bits. But Berlin is like. Honestly, it's like 90% people from all over the world. It's awesome. And everyone speaks English.
Oh, that's good. So it's almost like love at first sight. When you find that perfect partner, you're like, yeah, that's someone that I want to do business.
