Munich Startup: What does your startup do? What problem are you solving?
Order Link: Employees in inside sales are often overwhelmed by a flood of emails they have to process every day. Order Link supports inside sales in processing incoming email requests by analyzing sales-relevant emails and executing corresponding tasks. These activities include correctly forwarding the email to the right contact person, creating quotes in the ERP system, searching for suitable products, and answering follow-up questions. This saves each clerk an average of 10 hours per week and creates time for what’s important: direct customer contact.
Munich Startup: But that already exists!
Order Link: There are indeed already numerous tools that evaluate emails, structure them, and transfer the data to other systems. However, they overlook the fact that sales is not a one-way street but essentially consists of communication between customer and salesperson. With Order Link, sales is not only supported in data transmission but also in finding exactly the right products for each customer and delivering quick answers.
Order Link emerged from an AI agency
Munich Startup: What’s your founding story?
Order Link: Our two founders Stefan and Lucas first met in 2017 while working on a joint thesis project at a startup. Stefan was already self-employed at the time and looking for a partner to implement a new project. Lucas joined him, and together they founded the AI agency Unetiq in 2018. Over the past five years, with our growing team, we have realized numerous software projects. But the search for new business ideas never ended for us, and we eventually discovered the problem of email processing in sales. To solve this problem, we developed Order Link – which we spun out into its own company in 2022.
Munich Startup: What have been your biggest challenges so far?
Order Link: When we made the leap from project-based to product business, we faced a major challenge. Product development, marketing, and sales differ in many ways from project work. To master this challenge, we had to make fundamental changes: we developed new processes, restructured roles in the company, and intensively engaged with product development.
“A great startup ecosystem”
Munich Startup: How is business going?
Order Link: Order Link is already successfully deployed at initial customers and processes thousands of emails every month in different countries and languages. We continuously work to provide our inside sales customers with even better functionality. At the same time, we have expanded our sales strategy to reach new customers and increase our reach.
Munich Startup: How have you experienced Munich as a startup hub so far?
Order Link: Munich’s great startup ecosystem has definitely helped us a lot on our journey. We both studied at TU München and became involved with entrepreneurship through UnternehmerTUM and found our first customers there. Great accelerators like Wayra helped us grow, and we were always able to get good tips or support from other founders.
Munich Startup: Outsource or do it yourself?
Order Link: The core activities of the business model must definitely always be done in-house. In our case, that’s product development and sales, which also brings new requirements to the product. Things you’re not good at and only need temporarily, like design, should be outsourced so you can focus on what’s essential.
