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I help founders ship products people stay for.
I'm Stefan Malzner, a product person in Vienna. From the first concept to live users, I work with founders on the whole arc: who it's for, the flows that earn their trust, the customer conversations, and the planning that keeps a team shipping.
I founded Franz, a messaging app I built and grew past a million downloads, named Product Hunt's Golden Kitty for Best Desktop App of 2016. It taught me product the hard way: pricing, retention, and the calls about what not to build, all on a live product with real users. Since then I've shipped product work with teams like Automattic, IOHK, and Globus, after an earlier digital-design era on Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and Volkswagen. Happiest where product, design, and code meet.
Latest writing
All postsMy AI team costs €400 a month. One file added €500.
The whole setup runs on two subscriptions from two companies, one building and one checking. In September a single planning file burnt through a week of tokens in a few hours, and I paid €500 extra to finish the release on time.
My day plays like a jump and run. With five people it never did.
Printing for a young mail client, a freeze, a runaway log, a marketing decision and a stable release, all on one Thursday. It's the lean startup loop from back in the days on steroids, and I hardly ever close the laptop with nothing to show.
Vera runs marketing, Sisi runs ops, and I say yes or no
One of them changes live ad bids inside a fence made of code. The other merges pull requests after I say yes in the morning. Both are folders on a Mac mini, and the folder is the part any company could copy.
I still answer every support mail myself
Since May, 644 support mails arrived and a model drafted an answer for nearly all of them. 16 replies went out the way the machine wrote them. I know this down to the keystroke, and that raw data is the reason the setup gets better instead of just feeling better.