itemzz — Zero to One

itemzz is a modular home operations platform. I conceived it, co-founded the company, and built it from zero alongside a full-time leadership role at simplesurance and Allianz Partners — self-initiated, self-funded, without a client, brief, or institutional support.

As co-founder and sole product and design lead, I owned everything except engineering: product vision, business strategy, research, UX design, brand direction, design operations, and all external collaborator relationships. My co-founder built the engineering.

itemsnest GmbH is registered in Berlin. itemzz.com is a live product. This is the full zero-to-one story — what was built, how decisions were made, and what the data said at each stage.

There was no brief. The problem had to be found, validated, and framed from zero.

The structural observation: no product connected what people own to everything that should flow from that ownership — protection, maintenance, servicing, finance, and insurance. The insurance industry in particular depends on people knowing what they own. Most don't. Policies are guesses. Coverage is incomplete. The post-purchase relationship is sparse and transactional.

The initial hypothesis was peer-to-peer storage. A structured research programme with 15 households validated the concept. Users understood it and wanted it. The data then surfaced a structural problem.

In Germany, peer-to-peer physical storage had no legal definition. The market did not yet legally exist. Competitive analysis across three reference companies confirmed this was not a local condition:

• ·Stashbee (UK) — $4.32M raised over nearly a decade, still striving toward profitability in 2023.
• ·Clutter (US) — $200M raised from SoftBank. Merged under financial pressure. Reported heading toward bankruptcy.
• ·Neighbor (US) — $53M Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz. No publicly reported growth or funding since.

Three companies. Over $250M combined. All hit the same structural wall. The data was clear before any engineering investment was made.

Before building anything, I defined the architecture of what itemzz was designed to become: a modular services ecosystem where each service operates as a separate line of business, triggers adjacent services, and generates compounding subscription income. The MVP was not a reduced version of this vision. It was the deliberate entry point — the service most realistic for available budget and resources, designed to build the foundational data layer that all other modules would run on.

The idea attracted a developer co-founder. I secured personal credit and founded itemsnest GmbH in Berlin. Every company decision — product, legal, business, design — was made independently alongside a full-time leadership role. A legal office was engaged. A brand agency was briefed. Freelance collaborators were sourced and managed. Every spend was a deliberate trade-off decision against finite resources.

Fifteen households validated the peer-to-peer storage concept. Research confirmed genuine demand. The competitive intelligence confirmed the regulatory barrier was structural, not temporary. The pivot decision followed directly from the data — before any significant engineering investment was committed.

Rather than committing to one design direction early, the process produced multiple lo-fi and hi-fi iterations across deliberately different materialisations of the same concept. These variations were intentional — a structured approach to design decision-making: surface the range of possibilities, test which direction best serves product ambition, user clarity, and build feasibility, then commit. Evidence over assumption, applied to craft.

From the selected direction: a brand agency briefed for visual identity, freelance collaborators for the card system and base UI library, and freelance screen designers working from page and feature definitions I wrote for every screen. Quality bar, review cycle, and creative direction mine throughout.

Two-person company. Figma as source of truth. Shortcut for ticket management. Slack for communication. Daily co-founder meetings in the early phase, converting to bi-daily as the build rhythm was established.

Zero to one — a fully functional consumer product built from concept to live deployment, with every stage of the product-market fit journey owned end-to-end.

Registered company — itemsnest GmbH registered in Berlin. A real company, built on personal credit, not a side project.

Data-validated pivot — research confirmed demand, competitive intelligence confirmed the barrier, engineering investment was protected. The three reference companies that continued on the original path spent $250M+ and confirmed the same conclusion.

A documented methodology — deliberate variation prototyping as a structured approach to design decision-making is repeatable, teachable, and applicable to any product team operating under resource constraints.

The decision I am most confident about in retrospect is the pivot. Not because the storage concept was wrong — research confirmed it was right. But because the regulatory barrier was structural and the competitive evidence confirmed it was not solvable through better product design. The discipline of acting on data before sunk cost is the discipline.

What I would do differently: engage the insurance industry earlier as a potential distribution partner rather than building the product independently and positioning it after. The core insight — that an asset inventory layer solves the insurance industry's most persistent structural problems — was right from the beginning.

What itemzz confirms about how I work: the same instincts applied in enterprise — structural thinking, data-informed decisions, building infrastructure before execution — are not role-dependent. They are how I approach any product problem, at any scale, regardless of context, budget, or mandate.