Getting ready

Getting Ready

Geek Divers are getting ready for the long trip!

We’re sorting some paperwork that is needed to make our business official and then we’ll be ready to fly to South East Asia to begin our journey.

One step back. Last year in December we wrote our Business Plan and included all the activities that we were planning to do with our company. Geek Divers is our main focus and took over 98% of our Business Plan.

As a Christmas present, my parents surprised us by giving us some of their savings to help us out. They believe in our idea and they’re happy that we want to make something for ourselves. They are entrepreneurs as well and they could understand that leaving the safety of an IT well-paid permanent job was not a reckless decision, but our way to express our intention of being happy.

We decided to give it a go and we quit our apartment rental contract. We agreed that it wouldn’t make sense to spend so much money to maintain a nice apartment in Germany while travelling to South East Asia for at least 7 months this year and maybe more next year. The decision to start a company comes with the realisation that every cent counts and we don’t want to spend several thousand of Euros every year to pay for an apartment that we won’t use. The decision to sell our furniture came right after. We used Ebay Kleinanzeigen (similar to Craigslist) which was the perfect platform to advertise our well-kept furniture and sell it locally to anybody interested.

Earlier this year I received the confirmation that I could be financially helped by the German government with a startup grant (here it’s called Gründungszuschuss -I know, a long and difficult German word! 😉 ). Soon after, Jörg applied for it as well and at the beginning of April he received a thumbs up. Yay! Thank you Mutti Merkel! 😀

In the meantime we worked with a notary who wrote the contract for our UG (Unternehmengesellschaft – another long and difficult German word that stands for a mini-GmbH, more or less like an Ltd company) and registered it in the German Trade Register. Now we’re officially CEOs of our company and we own 50% of the shares each. Exciting – scary – risky and so much fun! 🙂

Right before we returned the keys to our apartment, at the end of March, we had sold all the furniture that we wanted to sell. We kept our bed, the sofa bed, the washing machine and the drier plus some of our winter clothes and shoes and rented a storage box for one twelfth of the price that we would need to spend to maintain our apartment. We did it mainly to have a backup plan in case things go south but also because having a company and Jörg’s family in Germany means that maybe in a couple of years we might decide to rent another very small apartment to use when we come back to the old continent.

 

Between one piece of paperwork and another, selling nearly all of our belongings, moving out of our apartment and into a small room on the top floor of Jörg’s parents’ house (just until we start travelling), we didn’t have time to get bored and we worked hard on Geek Divers development. We were hoping to complete the web and the app by the end of April but we were probably too optimistic, as we definitely need a couple more weeks before we can launch our software. Stay tuned!

And as it always happens when you keep an open mind and a positive attitude, other opportunities knock at your door. We couldn’t say no, right? We made new friends and met old ones and we had “business meetings” that were more fun than any meeting we ever had. We talked about great ideas and we hope to make them happen in a very short time. More about that soon: promise!

They call them “business meetings”… It was fun!
They call them “business meetings”… It was fun!

Our to do list is still pretty long and we need to complete most of it before we leave Germany, but we’re ticking off a couple of tasks every day so I’m sure that soon I’ll be able to book one way tickets for us and then the real adventure begins! We’re looking forward to jumping again in warm waters and hearing only our bubbles. We crave for the smell of neoprene, the awesome diving family and running our business in flip flops – well, on this last one Jörg would prefer just being barefoot! 😀

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