Leadtime was born out of real-world challenges faced by the Regensburg-based SaaS company "eins+null" over a decade. The founders, driven by determination and ingenuity, developed a marketable product in the niche market of cloud-based sales platforms for the energy industry. However, their success posed new challenges, and scalable processes and systems became crucial. In their quest for a suitable digital tool, they realized that a comprehensive solution was missing. This led them to create their own tool called "CONNEX," which evolved into Leadtime, offering innovative concepts for requirements management and benefiting IT companies, web agencies, app manufacturers, and other system houses.

A decade in the making: Our journey to Leadtime

Leadtime was developed over ten years based on real problems from the daily business of the Regensburg-based SaaS company "eins+null". The company is the manufacturer of a cloud-based sales platform for the energy industry. The two founders stumbled upon this exciting niche more by chance than anything else. With diligence and inventiveness, the two developed a marketable product step by step.

And after the breakthrough was finally achieved, the founders initially had difficulties keeping up with the success. Scalable processes and systems had to be anchored in the organization. And selecting a suitable digital tool was key to this.

Wanted: a holistic solution instead of a patchwork of poorly connected tools

However, finding such software was not easy: As mentioned earlier, the business model was based on a complex B2B software product that required a lengthy, face-to-face sales process. For new customers, this product was extensively customized as part of an initial project. After go-live, the company provided support for the system indefinitely.

A software product for eins+null would therefore have had to cover at least the following topics:

• The processing of sales opportunities, especially the handling of a buying center on the customer side.

• The creation of complex quotations

• The planning and execution of projects with deadlines and budgets

• A helpdesk to organize support requests

• Functionalities for invoicing and dunning processes

• An employee administration, including vacation and overtime management

• A time recording

An internal tool called "Connex" as the inspiration for Leadtime

“Connex” - The ticket billing software developed by "eins+null" for its own use

Finally, the two founders decided to build their own tool: Based on observations of the company's processes, they created "CONNEX," a collection of self-developed extensions for the open-source "Redmine" ticketing system used by the company.

The development of CONNEX was significantly influenced by three works of management literature:

• Eliyahu Goldratt's "The Goal" led the founders to a new view of their company as a networked system where bottlenecks can be identified and eliminated to increase throughput. Incidentally, the name "Leadtime" also alludes to the work.
• Jeff Sutherland's "Scrum" deepened understanding of complex projects, especially in terms of time estimates, invisible dependencies, and visualization of hidden work.
• Mark Horstman's "The Effective Manager" provided new insights into the methods managers can use to spur their employees to best performance.

Connex has fundamentally moved eins+null forward, growing the company from about 300Tsd euros in revenue in 2015 to nearly 4 million euros in 2022.

Leadtime - The holistic ERP system for digital agencies

After selling his shares, Lukas Ebner has left the company to make Connex available to other system houses under the new name "Leadtime" in a completely redesigned version. Co-Founder of the new company is Stas Persiianko, an ingenious developer who together with Lukas has implemented all the tools of the Connex suite over the years. Third man on board is Dominik Flubacher, who supports the team with his sales know-how.