Why Good Ideas Aren’t Enough: What Our Co-Founder Daniel Learned from Building VAMOZ

Listen to the podcast episode with Daniel:

The idea for VAMOZ started in Mexico.

Our co-founder Daniel was at the end of his PhD, had two weeks of vacation left, and wanted to get away during the pandemic. Mexico was one of the few countries that could still be travelled to at the time. So he booked a flight with a small backpack, his laptop, and clothes for two weeks.

In the end, he stayed for more than three months.

He got sick, entry and exit rules kept changing, and at some point he started working from Mexico. What began as an improvised solution worked surprisingly well. His employer was happy, Daniel was productive, and at the same time he kept hearing the same questions from friends, colleagues, and people in his network:

• Why are you allowed to do this?
• Why does my employer not allow it?
• What would need to happen for working from abroad to become possible?

At the time, Daniel did not have a complete answer. But he realised that these questions pointed to a real need.

From personal experience to a market problem

When Daniel returned to Switzerland, he started looking into the topic more seriously. A key step was the exchange with Prof. Dr. Isabelle Wildhaber from the University of St. Gallen, who had worked extensively on employment law questions around home office and new forms of work.

It quickly became clear that temporary work from abroad is not just a question of trust or company culture. It touches several legal areas at once: social security, tax, employment law, immigration, reporting obligations, and more.

Daniel illustrates this with the example of a workation in Rome. From the employee’s perspective, one month in Italy sounds simple: working during the day, exploring the city after hours, maybe attending a language school. From the company’s perspective, however, concrete questions can quickly arise: Is the employee still properly covered by social security? Is an A1 certificate required? Could there be a permanent establishment risk? Which employment law rules apply during the stay?

For Daniel, the key insight was this: workation does not need to be prevented. But it should be enabled consciously.

Validate first, build later

One of the most important decisions in the early phase was not to build software immediately.

VAMOZ did not start with a large platform. It started with a pragmatic solution: legal research, structured decision logic, spreadsheets, manual checks, and PDF reports. It was not elegant, but it was close to the problem.

Before writing code, the team wanted to understand two things: Do companies really have a problem they cannot solve efficiently internally? And are they willing to pay for a solution?

Both could be validated. Only then did Johannes Pecher join as CTO. His role was not to make the problem solvable for the first time, but to make an already tested solution scalable.

Daniel would choose that sequence again.

Many startups invest very early in product, design, and technology. That is understandable because you want to create something tangible. But in VAMOZ’s early phase, it was more important to speak with companies, handle real cases manually, and understand where the pain actually was.

VAMOZ was profitable from the first year. The company was built deliberately as a bootstrapped business with a strong focus on sustainable customer relationships. While other providers raised significant capital and quickly built large teams, VAMOZ chose a different path.

Not because speed does not matter. But because growth without focus can become expensive very quickly.

Sustainability sometimes beats speed

Bootstrapping forces clarity.

You cannot follow every idea. You have to decide earlier what really matters. For VAMOZ, that meant reliability, closeness to customers, and a product that removes concrete work from HR teams.

In B2B, the importance of relationships is sometimes underestimated. Of course, you need a strong solution. But trust does not come only from features. It comes from working together over time.

One moment stayed with Daniel in particular: At an HR event, an HR lead from one of VAMOZ’s large customers came to the booth and brought a small birthday gift for his son. No sales moment, no product strategy, no KPI. Just a human gesture.

For Daniel, that says a lot about what long-term customer relationships can become when they are built with care.

What Daniel would do differently today

Looking back, Daniel is glad that VAMOZ worked with pilot customers early and did not spend too long building in isolation. What he would do even more deliberately today is document learnings earlier and more systematically.

In the beginning, so much happens at the same time. You speak with companies, answer individual cases, adjust processes, and learn constantly. Those early patterns are extremely valuable:

• Which questions keep coming up?
• Which risks are underestimated?
• Which features do customers ask for even though they do not solve the core problem?
• Which messages does the market understand immediately?

These insights help not only with product development, but also with positioning, sales, and customer success.

Book recommendation: Sternstunden der Menschheit

In the podcast, Daniel is also asked for a book recommendation. His pick: “Sternstunden der Menschheit” by Stefan Zweig.

The book describes historical moments where many developments, decisions, and coincidences come together and suddenly lead in a new direction.

For Daniel, that image fits the early days of VAMOZ. The pandemic was a difficult time for many people. At the same time, it accelerated changes that were probably already underway: remote work, more flexible working models, and new expectations towards employers.

VAMOZ grew out of exactly such a moment: an unplanned work situation in Mexico, many questions from Daniel’s network, legal expertise, and first companies that were willing to take the topic seriously.

In the podcast episode, Daniel speaks more about this journey, early decisions, workation risks, bootstrapping, and what the name VAMOZ has to do with a man in Mexico wearing a bright green Speedo.

You can listen to the full episode directly here in the article.