10th anniversary - our story
Today, we -the Wittig brothers- are celebrating the 10th anniversary of our company. Here we want to tell our story and say thank you!
Prehistory
In 2012, Michael and I joined the same team at Tullius Walden Bank with the mission to build a trading platform for retail customers. We set ourselves the goal of shipping new features every week. Soon, we realized that we needed full control over the infrastructure and deployment process to release a new version weekly. Besides that, we had to fulfill the requirement of hosting the web application in two data centers to achieve high availability. Our research led us to Amazon Web Services. Ten years ago, it was almost inconceivable in Germany that a bank would move important business processes to the cloud. But we were excited about the possibilities offered by AWS and simply went for it. Step by step, we learned how to build highly available architectures on AWS and how to reduce the risk of shipping improvements and features weekly or even daily. Until 2014, we helped to migrate the whole IT infrastructure to the cloud, which ended with us emptying the racks in the colocating data center.
Unfortunately, the business model behind the trading platform did not work. And therefore, Tullius Walden Bank shut down their retail business, and we were given notice.
Founding a company
In 2015, We decided to found our own company, widdix. The name “widdix” is a variation of our surname and a domain name that we had already registered. At the beginning, we didn’t really know what to focus on. As we had built web and mobile applications and had some experience with AWS, we decided to start offering three services: web development, mobile app development, and cloud computing. After a few months, we noticed a high demand for experts in Amazon Web Services as organizations in Europe started to take a first look into cloud computing. Also, Manning asked us to write a book about Amazon Web Services, which we did to fill in the free slots between projects. Moreover, we started to work as freelancers for an early AWS consulting partner in Germany, tecRacer.
Freelancing and Consulting
The story of how we moved the first German bank to the cloud and our book Amazon Web Services in Action were a perfect door opener for winning consulting projects. Over the years, we consulted countless small and large organizations on their way to the cloud. And if you know us, then you know that we don’t just talk the talk, we also walk the walk. We helped small startups to automate their release process and large enterprises to lay the foundation for a change process. We got to know many people and companies during this exciting time. And we shared what we learned with the community via cloudonaut and open-source projects (e.g., widdix/aws-cf-templates or widdix/s3-getobject-accelerator). On top of that, we learned how to negotiate a reasonable daily rate and run a business.
A serious portrait from 2017.
Building products on the side
We had a lot of fun working as consultants, but we always had the dream of developing and selling our own software. There were two reasons for this. Firstly, we enjoy developing products based on customer feedback. Secondly, from a business perspective, selling software is much more exciting than selling your working time. That’s why we worked on products on the side. We aimed to spend at least 10% of our time on side projects.
We’re still doing consulting and in need of a serious portrait in 2019.
Step by step, we tried plenty of things and failed again and again. Here is an incomplete list of projects in which we invested a lot of time and energy but which never took off and were therefore discontinued.
- PageChimp a website builder for medical doctors
- Time Series Guru a time series database as a service
- Education apps for iPad
But luckily, some of our side projects were successful and grew over time.
- bucketAV protects Amazon S3 and Cloudflare R2 from viruses and malware
- marbot configures and receives alarms and notifications from AWS via Slack or Microsoft Teams
Besides building software products, we also produced and tried to sell content like self-published e-books and video courses. In 2020, we improved our video setup.
We are a software business
Since 2023, our dream has come true, we have handed over our consulting customers and are now a software company. This gives us the time and energy to further develop our existing products and, at the same time, build up new products. We have launched a whole range of new products.
You could say that our company is a lifestyle business. We have a lot of time for deep work and can organize our lives in a self-determined way. So far, we have decided against hiring employees. From time to time, we work with freelancers who are experts in their field. Over time, we have involuntarily learned a lot about marketing, sales, accounting and taxes.
With attachmentAV we bring virus and malware protection to more and more platforms.
- Jira
- Confluence
- Salesforce
- WordPress
- Virus and Malware Scan API (SaaS)
- Virus and Malware Scan API (Self-hosted on AWS)
Besides that, we are expanding into new territories as well. HyperEnv is our solution to deploy self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on AWS with ease.
Occasionally, we get sidetracked from building products. For example, by revising our book Amazon Web Services in Action for the third time.
Thank you!
We would like to thank all our business partners and supporters who have accompanied us over the years. We look forward to the next 10 years.