Hamburg Startup Jimdo received the German Founder’s Prize 2015 in the category “Climber”. Another milestone in the successful history of the founding team that created a practical website-kit. Only this month, the company had announced an investment by Spectrum Equity over 25 million Euro.
“If you need a homepage, you won’t be able to ignore Jimdo”, the experts of the German Founder’s Prize judged this tuesday. “Even without knowledge of design or programming, anybody can built a perfect website using Jimdo.” “We congratulate the whole Jimdo team from our hearts! Hamburg is celebrating with you!”, Sina Gritzuhn of the Hamburg Startups initiative tweeted.
“Who would have thought? We started a few years ago on a farm, and now this prize. We are extremely happy, especially because the jury honoured exactly those two components that are so important to us: The simple option to build a website using Jimdo, and the way we’re setting up our company together with our team”, Hamburg Startups cites Matthias Henze, founder of Jimdo.
The Hamburg Startup offers a web-based building kit for the creation of internet pages. Since the foundation in 2007, the company registered more than 15 million websites worldwide that have been built using Jimdo. Today, the company is one of the leading suppliers in the sector of tools for website creation, offering their product in nine different languages and having settled down in Hamburg, San Francisco and Tokyo.
Already during their school years, Fridtjof Detzner (32) and Christian Springub (33) were programming websites and ran a small internet agency. “Our parents had to register the trade because we were still under age back then.” Typing in incredibly long programming code bothered the teenagers. “During editing we already wanted to be able to see, what it will look like afterwards”. Nowadays taken for granted, this was a revolutionary thought back then.
After finishing school, the friends moved to the farm of Fridtjof Detzners parents in order to create the first version of the homepage-kit. “We pulled all-nighters, had breakfast with my mother and then went to bed.” The new tool was initially planned as an additional offer for the clients of the agency, which by now also consisted of Matthias Henze (37). “Then we realised, that the software is actually our product”. The team gave up their successful agency and founded Jimdo in 2007. The continuously expanded kit is being offered in nine languages, offices are located in Tokyo and San Francisco. The basic programme can be used for free, professional versions cost between five and 15 Euro.
Founding Story Source: Deutscher Gründerpreis