Nippli: Customer problems don’t have to be poli­ti­cally correct #DHDL

Miriam put on a hell of a perfor­mance. All five lions present were blown away by the then 22-​year-old, they all made her an offer, they didn’t even want to fight, she was supposed to decide freely who she would give the 20% of her company shares in Nippli to for 90,000 euros.

Hardly anyone would have thought that the day before who had read the pre-​broadcast articles and espe­cially the accom­panying comments on the net. As is so often the case, the focus here was on the product, but many readers seemed not to have read beyond the mere descrip­tion of the func­tio­na­lity – or this infor­ma­tion was missing. After all, a founder who is already opening her third busi­ness at the age of 22 should already be impres­sive per se.

Somehow she seems to be able to do something that many other people actually wish they could do: under­stand how to solve custo­mers‘ problems and also market corre­spon­ding problem solvers.

Now she had disco­vered a new problem: emer­ging nipples under thin fabric. And already the net commu­nity cried out a little. What’s so bad about that, why do you have to cover the nipples? You don’t have to, and the founder never said you did. She seemed to have already reck­oned with the reser­va­tions, because she even included a clear state­ment in her pitch to the lions that nipples are something comple­tely natural and that she would by no means be of the opinion that women in parti­cular should cover them – but that some women would like to because they feel more comfor­table with them. It’s actually sad that foun­ders in Germany have to anti­ci­pate what problems someone might have with their product and perhaps even feel compelled to take the wind out of the sails of these reser­va­tions as a preven­tive measure.

And somehow even defend their custo­mers as to why they use this product. One has to wonder if we really live in such an obdu­rate society that simply doesn’t want to under­stand that problems are subjec­tive and not always poli­ti­cally correct. Or whether nipples are really still a topic that makes too many people gasp because it’s so wicked. Neither is worthy of 2022.

If women don’t want to wear a bra, but also don’t want their nipples to show through their clothes, it is something natural and sensible in a market economy that a solu­tion is offered for this. If you don’t have this problem, you don’t have to buy this product.

It was also signi­fi­cant when Carsten Masch­meyer asked prac­ti­cally directly whether it was also suitable for men, espe­cially athletes, because he still remem­bered bloody, chafed nipples as a runner. By now at the latest, it should have become clear to ever­yone who had not under­stood the problem at all at the begin­ning that it is too short-​sighted to evaluate only the very first impres­sion. And to get stuck on what one thinks a product is.

This case also shows a strong connec­tion to one of the funda­mental problems in the German start-​up land­s­cape: People like to evaluate ideas too much. And then far too early. Many self-​proclaimed experts and start-​up coaches are also only too happy to tell early start-​up teams what they think of an idea.

As you can see from the Nippli case, this is total nonsense. It’s all too easy not to under­stand a product properly or to forget an important aspect. Or you don’t belong to the target group and can’t judge at all whether a problem is solved and whether there is a willing­ness to pay.

The young founder provides impres­sive evidence for the latter: more than 26,000 euros in sales in only 1.5 months, without a marke­ting budget, clearly show that yes, people feel that emer­ging nipples are a problem and want to cover them. Regard­less of whether others think it’s good or not. In fact, Nippli would have sold even more if they hadn’t run out of stock several times.

Dagmar Wöhrl then wants to know exactly who helped her not only to develop a product that stands out on the market, but also to set up such successful marke­ting. The answer is always the same: Miriam worked it all out herself.

Because that is precisely the decisive factor: it is not the idea that matters, but how foun­ders imple­ment it. Inves­tors also like to say: „It’s all about execu­tion.“ Only the imple­men­ta­tion is decisive, the idea alone is worth nothing. But somehow no one seems to like to hear that.

However, anyone who has been in the start-​up world for a while will have expe­ri­enced some suppo­sedly great ideas that didn’t make it. Or rather strange ideas that went through the roof. Just remember Airbnb with its initial air mattresses and today’s „worst idea that ever worked“.
That Miriam didn’t have a bad idea has already been confirmed by her custo­mers. That she is a great founder who has the „execu­tion“ fully under control was confirmed to her effu­si­vely by the lions this week.

That the pre-​judgementalists will learn from this impres­sive demons­tra­tion of what can really be behind a suppo­sedly nonsen­sical or even unde­si­rable product is probably more of a hope that will remain unful­filled. Nippli’s new investor Carsten Masch­meyer – as well as the other lions – are perhaps also so successful because they do not belong to those very people.

Instead, they try to get a complete picture before they judge, and gene­rally focus on the foun­ders – not on the raw idea.

Photo (above): TVNOW / Bernd-​Michael Maurer