Igor Tverdokhleb, founder of HansaChat

I'm Igor Tverdokhleb, a software engineer based in Lübeck, Germany. Born in the Soviet Union. I moved to Germany many years ago, worked as a Software Engineer with a focus on backend and Platform Engineering.

I built HansaChat (hansa.chat) — an EU-based company chat for internal team communication. Channels, direct messages, files, audio/video calls, screen sharing, Google SSO, webhooks, and workspace administration. The whole company shares one workspace at a fixed price instead of per-user seats. It's developed in Germany, hosted on IONOS Cloud in Germany, and available in 20+ languages on web, desktop, and mobile.

Three frustrations kept coming up.

First, pricing: Slack and Teams bill per user, so for a company with 50 employees, “let's put everyone on chat” turns into a license calculation every time someone new starts. Especially when this person is not working full time. Imagine the taxi park — 1000 employees. 20 euro each — crazy bill. But 980 employees are not working today. Or maybe a company that works in deliveries — either goods or food or service (e.g. cleaning) — lots of employees but not everyone is working full-time and/or today.

Second, where the data lives: a lot of EU businesses I spoke with want a genuinely European operator — a company based and accountable in the EU — not a US vendor that merely offers an EU hosting region.

“HansaChat offers SSO even on the free plan and it will never be behind any expensive tier.”

Third, security. If you want to enable SSO — which I find quite a basic platform safety requirement — you have to pay for the enterprise plan. The enterprise plan is normally 2.5x more expensive. HansaChat offers SSO even on the free plan and it will never be behind any expensive tier.

The problems had half-solutions but no product combined them cleanly for small and mid-sized businesses, so I started building in February 2026 and never stopped.

It is offering predictable cost and predictable data handling. HansaChat is designed as a simple company chat that doesn't need a PhD to start using it. One fixed workspace price covers everyone — the founding-customer price starts at €39/month billed annually.

There's also a free plan with 10 users and 1 GB storage if you want to try it properly. Everything is stored and processed in Germany.

Early and honest: solo founder, bootstrapped, no external funding, launched in 2026. The product itself is broadly complete — messaging, calls, billing, web plus desktop plus mobile apps, backups, legal framework — and I'm at the stage of turning that into paying customers. Right now the focus is on distribution. There are too few customers yet to say something solid.

A sharp position does most of the work. “EU-first company chat at a fixed workspace price” is easy to explain in one sentence, and the current European push for digital sovereignty gives that message wind. The economic downturn is actually also playing for me — companies are looking for options to save on tools.

Being one person building the technical stack and marketing/distribution at the same time. The harder-than-expected part was everything around the product: development, positioning, legal, GDPR documentation. And distribution: building it was the easy half; getting noticed is the actual work.

1. Near term

   Independent security audit and having more paying customers as proof that fixed workspace pricing works as a business model.

2. Middle term

   ISO 27001 certification (in active preparation) and steady organic growth in the EU region.

3. Long term

   A sustainable, bootstrapped company with 10–20 employees who help me to provide high-quality services.

Success, plainly: a few hundred businesses run their internal chat on HansaChat, it pays my bills, and I still ship code myself.

Heavily — as the build crew.

I planned infrastructure on my own — every field in the database was thought through and hand-crafted. I planned the chat app architecture. I planned how apps are talking to each other. Both are written down in core-concept.md and drive the work of the AI.

AI coding agents helped me write the backend, frontend, tests, docs, and deployment automation; as a solo founder that's the difference between an idea and a shipped product.

AI is also in my marketing pipeline: e.g. the product walkthrough videos are assembled with AI-generated presenters and synthetic voiceovers in multiple languages. I simply cannot record 20+ languages on my own — I speak only 3 languages! I also manage ads with the help of AI — nobody else is able to understand Google interfaces.

“As a solo founder that's the difference between an idea and a shipped product.”

But AI is deliberately not the product itself — HansaChat is a communication tool, and I didn't want to bolt “AI” onto the positioning. I may also think about the BYOK concept if there is demand for AI inside the chat, but the solution was deliberately built for humans, not for AI. AI may still use it though, via the CLI tool.

Don't give up after 1–2 months. It took me 6 months ONLY to build it. You can't build a business in a month. It all takes time.

Nothing specifically. Just join X — the best platform for builders!