The wisdom of community.

No idea is too early for Makers First. We love rolling up our sleeves to help build from day one. Together, our partners have spent 100+ years working with founding teams — and every day, our community of operators shares knowledge about building from scratch.

Meetups

MEETUPS a year connect our
community of local founders in Germany since 2021

300+

Makers and
Angels attend
our MEETUPS

Starting a company is lonely, and makers have to make difficult decisions every day with imperfect information. In our experience, the best safety net is the advice and experience of fellow makers.

Whenever we get members of our community in a room, magic happens. That’s why our MEETUPS events — ranging from cozy pitch events to major summits — are designed to get real, vulnerable conversations started. People leave with new ideas and actions they can apply immediately to keep growing and getting better. You won’t find any stick-on name tags here — we hate them.

Pitch Assist

After Pitch Assist

The Fundraising Agency You Wish Had

You’re up all hours sweating your PowerPoint. You want to have a sounding board or a second pair of eyes to tell you you’re on the right track. With Pitch Assist, you do. We’re here to bring what we’ve learned seeing our founders raise over €2,5 Mio across 10 rounds. Our team of design and content pros helps Makers improve their odds in the fundraising process — helping them craft a compelling narrative, set the right strategy and build a visual presentation that gets the job done. We work with top tier mentors like Dirk.

Software & Data

Hacking to Get Founders - the Knowledge They Need

Curious founders are the best founders. That’s why we built the Cannabis-Startups network, our platform that connects startup builders across the entire portfolio. And not just their leadership either — we connect all employees at every Makers company. Today, our CEOs can reach out to other CEOs, marketers to marketers, and engineers to engineers to get the data, advice, and support they need. We’re constantly fielding feedback from members of the Network to build tools they actually want and need, meanwhile everyone is warmly invited to join our monthly DEEP-DIVEs.

How much should we expect to pay to make our facility GMP?

Has anyone thought about/ implemented salary or equity transparency for your company?

How to build a compliant brokerage platform?

As a Foundeing CEO, how do you collaborate your co-founders?

We’re creating a materity leave policy – any advice?

Experts

Eventually, all founders run into a problem they can’t solve — they haven’t seen it before or don’t know where to start. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to work with hundreds of people who have defined what success in tech looks like.

Problem-Solving on Demand

Today, these people are our Expert Network. When you need help, we find you the exact right person to dive in and help work through big one-off challenges. Experts include executives with decades of know-how, all willing to meet over coffee or help as official advisors to put you in the express lane.

Claudia Franz is a former Yves Roche marketing manager who now advises startups full-time. From the very beginning, she helps our companies define their branding and carve out space in the market.

Mentor Simone Graef Cannabis Startups

Prof. Simone Graeff-Hönninger (Cannabis-Net Germany & Canada) supports with deep understanding in R&D always a new point of view to get products in go-to-market fast. Since the frist hour she supports us as a mentor.  

 

- We cooperating to push cannabis innovation around the world -

Making hiring that much easier

Hiring is the hardest thing founders do, period. And in this crazy talent market it’s getting more grueling. The average founder dedicates 50% of their time to the task. But our talent team is willing to share this heavy load, making intros to the best people we know for critical hires, rewriting job descriptions, walking through compensation strategies, and helping close win-win deals.

We helped
8 companies
finding their
next intern

We intro’d Aurora
to its Director of Product.

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