Meet the Maker Jan-Philipp Peters
from BitsForDigits

Hi everyone! I’m Jan-Philipp, but everyone calls me JP. I’m originally from Germany and after a few years of living and working in Ireland, I moved to Berlin to co-found BitsForDigits.

My fantastic co-founder is Laurits who I met during my studies in Copenhagen. Afterwards, Laurits spent a few years studying and working in London.

During the summer of 2021, both of us decided to quit our jobs to finally start working on building the platform.

There are two ways founders can sell shares. They can issue new shares in a primary offering, or offer already issued shares held by existing shareholders (for example the founder) in what’s called a secondary offering. A primary offering is commonly known as “getting funded” in the startup world, which means the company raises money to be spent on growth etc.

We, however, focus on secondary offerings. Here, founders can sell a few of their existing shares. That means not the company but the founder personally will receive the funds from this transaction.

Partial buyouts are a better option for founders who do not necessarily need money to grow the company but want to take some chips off the table and get experience liquidity (for example to buy a new car or an apartment). They are also a great alternative to full acquisitions in which founders have to sell their entire business.

My professional background is in Sales and Marketing. I worked for Google and Facebook (I have yet to get used to calling it Meta) before. I always built small businesses and projects on the side and wished something like a partial exit would have been an option.

My co-founder Laurits is the one in our team who is more familiar with the transaction side, as he worked at BlackRock.

Do your due diligence and try to reduce the amount of “unknown unknowns”. Buying into profitable companies is definitely a different approach to venture-style “spray and pray” investing, so you will want to test the business’ vitals and understand what the future risks and opportunities are. A good fit with the founder or founders is super important, as you will likely be partners for at least a few years.

On the other hand, look for businesses where you can add value. Being a silent investor is great, but if you can offer relevant industry insights, a good network or other best practises, founders will not only appreciate the help but it will also have a positive effect on your investment.

We meet a lot of founders who are nervous about letting go of their entire business. Imagine selling your company to another maker or fund and they scale it to new heights and all you have to show for is the acquisition price. For those founders, partial buyouts are a good option to experience some liquidity without completely losing what they have built.

It’s going to be one of these annoying “it depends” answers. Many factors play into it, such as how extensive the due diligence needs to be, if the founder and the investor live in the same country and also in how big of a hurry both parties are. We see that many founders of profitable businesses are rarely stressed to sell a few of their shares and they like to take their time to compare competing offers.

The name is the result of hours of brainstorming. We wanted something that is unique, explains what we do (at least to a certain extent) without sounding too generic and is available as a .com domain.

We initially got the word out by leveraging our own network of founders and investors, building in public on Indie Hackers and probably most importantly Twitter.

Grow, grow, grow! We want to help as many founders get their first partial sale done as possible. To do so, we will focus on getting more founders and investors on the platform and build out a lot more features to make the process as smooth as possible.

1. Semrush is our favorite SEO tool (even though I love Ahrefs’ Youtube videos).
2. Campaign Monitor is what helps us get new listings and updates to our users.
3. Integromat, while maybe not a pure marketing tool, is what stitches all of our tools together and saves us many hours of work every week.