The origins of stagewise - Part 1

Hey everyone, Glenn here!

Most of you probably don’t know who I am, so let’s start with that: I’m Glenn, 25 years old, and the founder and CEO of stagewise. I’m not alone in this—I have my great friend and co-founder Julian by my side. We’ve been working on stagewise for about a year now—though, to be honest, the journey started much earlier. We’re based in Bielefeld, Germany, and are part of the Founders Foundation network.

In this post, I want to give you a bit of backstory on our startup, what led us to this idea, and the progress we’ve made so far. So, let’s dive in!

Chapter 0: First Encounters with Web Technologies

Like most students taking computer science classes in school, I started with a bit of Java, HTML, and CSS. But my real focus in software development was embedded systems. I studied electrical engineering in partnership with an automotive supplier and later worked as a C++ developer at a household electronics company in Germany. Not exactly web development, right? Well… exactly.

However, I occasionally dabbled in web technologies—playing around with Ionic, Angular, and similar frameworks for fun. What fascinated me about web software was its accessibility: write it once, and it runs everywhere. Sure, native software has its advantages (many of which, in my opinion, are artificially maintained by platform providers), but for most applications, modern browsers are more than powerful enough. That idea excited me!

Chapter 1: My First Gig at a SaaS Company

My real journey into web development began when I took a side gig at saasmetrix, a startup also based at the Founders Foundation. My job was to work on the frontend of a new feature. While I had experience with personal and hobby projects, this was my first time developing web-based software in a team—small as it was.

It was also my first (and last) experience working with Vue.

Chapter 2: Why Is Giving Feedback So Hard?

While working on that new feature, I kept running into a major issue: team communication during prototype discussions was a mess. The feature was initially conceptualized by the founding/product team and laid out roughly—not bad at all! It was much better than trying to perfectly design everything in Figma upfront. This iterative approach, refining UI/UX step by step, led to better outcomes because we focused on what users actually needed rather than trying to guess the perfect solution from the start. (This mindset, by the way, is core to how we work at stagewise—but more on that another time.)

So, what was the problem? Simply put: pure chaos.

Whenever a software update was ready in the preview environment, feedback would come in from all directions. Some people sent private messages, others used the designated Slack channel, and sometimes, I’d get a quick call to discuss an issue.

Now, don’t get me wrong—getting feedback is great! But working through it like this? Incredibly tedious.

I searched for tools to solve this but found nothing that worked seamlessly in this scenario. The biggest pain points I identified were:

• No single source of truth – Feedback was scattered across different platforms.

• Lack of technical metadata – If someone reported a bug, where could I find the necessary data to fix it quickly?

• High friction for reporting issues – I often heard things like, “I didn’t report it because it wasn’t important enough, and it would’ve taken too much time.”

The one tool that came close was the Vercel Toolbar. But it was only available for Vercel customers and, at the time, was very basic with no integrations into backlog management tools.

Chapter 3: The First Prototype

So, I decided to build a solution myself. My first prototype was a simple browser extension that added a bug reporting toolbar to any website. Let me tell you—it wasn’t easy (more on the technical challenges in another post).

The first version was basic. It wasn’t connected to any external issue management platforms, and—most importantly—it was built without thorough market research or an existing audience. That would turn out to be one of our biggest challenges.

Chapter 4: Enter Julian :)

While refining the prototype and tackling UI/UX challenges, I reconnected with Julian. We had first met at saasmetrix—it was his first software engineering job too! He shared the same drive to build something of his own rather than just settling into a comfortable job. So, we decided to team up and build stagewise together.

What happened after that? Well, that’s a story for another time! Julian will share his perspective in an upcoming post.

Best regards, Glenn