GoKawiilFranz turns ten this year. Franz 6 ships now. A founder's note on a weekend prototype, a fundraise we skipped, and why one person is the point.
Franz turns ten this year. The actual anniversary was in March, but Franz 6 felt like the bigger marker, so I am writing this now, with the release.
This is the story of how a weekend prototype turned into a decade of stubborn work, what I almost did and decided not to, and why I think Franz 6 is the version that ripened the longest.
A weekend in 2016
I was freelancing for a handful of companies and running communities on the side. The Vienna Gamedev meetup. Several Slack groups. Discord servers, customer chats, founder DMs scattered across half a dozen apps. My communication had become a full time job next to the work that actually paid the bills.
One weekend I had no client work. I sat down with a vague idea of "what if I just had one window for all of this" and started experimenting with Electron. By Sunday evening I had a prototype that was rough, ugly, and obviously useful. It was the first thing I had built in a long time that I genuinely wanted to keep using myself.
Horst, Grete, and Franz
I was tired of generic startup names. The -ster, the-ly, the unpronounceable made-up words that all blurred into each other. So I had started naming my products after people I knew. Horst, my uncle, became a collaborative shopping list. Grete, who I have never actually known, became a recipe planner that synced with Horst.
When friends asked what I would call the next thing, I jokingly answered Franz, my grandfather's name. A few months later it was real.
March 2016
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