The last Webmonday gave me that chance to meet several German entrepreneurs. Fascinating because it is such an usual success story is surely www.regis24.de. Co-founder and CEO Max Maendler told me more about his startup:

Q: What does regis24 do?

Regis24 facilitates access to government services in Europe. In Germany,
for instance, most Government services are provided at the local level.
One of the services the 10.000-odd local authorities provide are the
so-called 'registers': these databases on private people and on
companies are 'open', which is to day you can send inquiries to those
databases. Which is extremely helpful if you have lost track of your
customer, because she has moved to a different town, or if you want to
verify whether the person you are dealing with is legally allowed to
sign contracts for the company he is working for.

The problem used to be that companies had to send their inquiries by
mail, put a checkinto the envelope for the constituency fee (which
varies from local authority to local authority), know where to send it,
mail it, then wait for 6-8 weeks and hope to receive a reply with the
information they were looking for. We took that off-line traffic online,
providing the hub or infrastructure to handle those inquiries
electronically. About 60% of inquiries we process electronically through
integrations we have built with local authorities, the rest we do
manually. And we charge a commission for every set of data we process.
The beauty is, its a subscription model, or an 'addiction-modell', if
you want: once you have a customer, they send you new inquiries every day.

Q:What would be similar companies in the US in that business?

The US does not have a government-run register on people and companies.
Well, the intelligence community might, but you don't get to access their
databases. So if you look at it from a consumer perspective, companies
like Choicepoint might provide similar information. From a business ops
point of view, however, were are much more in the "muck-shoveling"
trade: two thirds of our employees spend their time processing data,
entering information into we bforms, validating that information, etc.

Q: Why did everybody overlook this business niche and why did you guys spot it? Or do you have competitors?

We do have a competitor: it's a joint venture of Deutsche Post (the
national Postal service company) and Bertelsmann (a large media
company). We differentiate ourselves by bringing a technological
approach to the problem, rather than sending inquiries out by mail.
Which means we are much faster and cheaper. Plus by being smaller, we
can be more flexible and responsive.
Other than that, it's less that this niche has been overlooked than
maybe that no one else really chose to be there. Maybe because there's
too much muck. It's not a sexy glitzy web2.0 thing, there's a lot of
hands on dirty work that needs to be done. Not everybody wants to be in
that spot.

Q:How big is regis24 now - where does it want to grow to in the next 3 years?

Regis24 was founded by Martin and me in 2003. We have no external
investor, in fact we started with nothing but 12.500 EUR in the bank.
And survived. By now we've grown to 100 employees and north of 10
million EUR in yearly revenues. There is still opportunity to grow
Regis24 in Germany, but we are also looking at other contries with
similarily ill-functioning administrative systems where a service like
ours could be helpful.

Q:We heard last Monday that you may want to diversify into other ventures - anything particular you find of interest?

The government-opportunity is huge in Germany, lots of muck to be
shovelled. We are currently beta-testing a number of new services. The
good thing is our current customers all need those additional services,
so the sales part should be easy.

Q: What is your personal judgment of Germany as a breeding ground for entrepreneurs?

Split. On the one hand, especially in comparison over here, you have the
feeling you live in the historical hinterlands of web 0.1. There's just
no such thing as the eco-system over here. We've been fascinated by the
amount of highly motivated people with interesting busines ideas over
here who just go out an do it. There are still too many young people in
Germany who are too afraid of taking risks.
On the other hand, Berlin is a much easier environment for setting up a
company. Office space is dirt cheap (60% of offices in the capital are
empty, which can bring rent down to 30 cents a square foot). You can
find talented employees for as low as a third of the cost compared to
the Valley. And competition is much lower.

Q: Will your next business be in Germany?

Probably. Although the thought of coming over here is very tempting.

Thanks a lot for the interview!