How Flownative enables the real estate solution etg24.de to scale quickly

"Working with Flownative feels more like working with like-minded professionals than with a typical service provider. When we sit down together, there is no detour via planning meetings or project managers. We talk directly about technology and how to solve problems."

This is what Aimo Künkel, CTO of etg24, says - for him, this is what makes the partnership between his company and Flownative so special. A partnership based on technical expertise, mutual trust and a shared understanding of how modern software should be created.

From a simple login page to a complex industry solution

The story of etg24 began in 2008 with a comparatively modest project: a website for a real estate management company that wanted to provide its customers with a password-protected area. "But not everyone should be able to do that," Aimo Künkel recalls the requirement. "You don't want to make something like a declaration of division or the business plan publicly accessible."

What sounded innovative at the time - a login area for property management customers - is now standard access to one of the most comprehensive SaaS platforms in the industry. Over 1,000 real estate management companies in Germany now use etg24's software as an integral part of their day-to-day business. Several hundred thousand users access the system every month, which can now do far more than just provide documents.

"It started with: We provide a few PDFs," smiles Aimo. "And now our customers use it for practically everything. Everything that a property management company does can be done directly as a process in our software."

David against Goliath - how a small team achieves great things

When you hear the impressive figures - over 500 unique pages in the system, a database of several hundred gigabytes and around 300 database queries per second - you expect a large development team behind it. But etg24 is a different story.

"We actually have a ratio between manpower and product size that is completely unusual on the market," explains Aimo, not without pride. "We have far fewer people than you would expect and get far more done than a German software company of our size would typically manage."

This particular efficiency has its roots in the corporate culture: "One of the reasons for our success is that we have always been bootstrapped. We have no investors and are founder-led. This has massively shaped our engineering and corporate culture and is an attitude that connects us with Flownative." In plain language, this means keeping everything as lean as possible and concentrating on what makes up the actual core of the business.

For this strategy, etg24 needed a reliable technological foundation. The journey began with TYPO3, but quickly led to the Flow framework. Unlike most users, etg24 relies almost exclusively on Flow not on the CMS Neos.

"We are perhaps one of the few users who rely heavily on Flow, but not at all on Neos," explains Aimo. "For us, everything is a software and not a website - everything starts with a login."

The decision to use Flow has proven to be the right one over the years: "Flow is still there. Flow is still good. Flow is still modern. And that, after more than ten years! We are mega happy with the decision."

But even with an excellent framework, a small team will eventually reach its limits - especially when it comes to in-depth framework optimizations, performance tuning or modern infrastructure concepts. This is where Flownative came into play.

"In larger companies, such challenges are traditionally solved by throwing an insane amount of manpower at it and then waiting until it's finished," explains Aimo Künkel. "This is extremely expensive, but often simply feasible because you have a business model with a gigantic margin and gigantic scale. That's simply not the case for us in a niche market."

How the collaboration actually works

What began with individual consulting services has developed into a close partnership over the years. Künkel particularly remembers a project to consolidate the code base:

"We wanted to pursue a monorepo strategy and somehow had eight Git repositories that we wanted to merge. With as little refactoring effort as possible, of course. We asked Flownative, and a few days later there was a pull request that adapted everything so that it just worked - exactly the way we wanted it to. We took over our Git history from all the other repos. That's just perfect."

Another milestone was the move to Flownative Beach. The vision was clear: a modern, scalable infrastructure without the overhead of a dedicated DevOps team.

"We wanted to have a modern cloud infrastructure - the server should be stateless, and if you just turn it off and throw it away and boot up a new one, then it just keeps going," describes Aimo. The alternative would have been to hire AWS and Kubernetes specialists and invest a year in setting up their own infrastructure.

"With Flownative, we were able to work together relatively quickly and cheaply to achieve a result where we could simply skip an incredible amount of expertise completely. We didn't have to teach ourselves, we didn't have to understand it, and it just works anyway. And we still have a good feeling that it works."

"I really don't like working with agencies"

What makes the partnership with Flownative particularly valuable for etg24 is the nature of the collaboration. Aimo describes it like this: "Basically, I have to say that I really dislike working with agencies. It's usually because, as part of a bootstrap company with people who are simply very enthusiastic about what they do, I don't like working with service providers where the business model is the central factor."

The experience with Flownative is different: "Working with Flownative feels more like working with like-minded professionals than with a typical service provider. When we sit down together, there is no detour via planning meetings or project managers. We talk directly about technology and how we can solve problems. There's also the fact that you have to organize the whole thing as a project somehow and that invoices have to be written and so on. But it never feels like that's what it's actually about."

Mutual trust also plays an important role when it comes to data protection: "There is one thing that is often neglected from a legal perspective, and that is human trust. We have this trust because we simply have a cultural fit."

When there's a fire, Flownative is there to help

The partnership has proved particularly successful in critical situations. After the move to Flownative Beach , unexpected problems arose that could not have been tested in advance.

"We had various problems that we couldn't have seen coming," recalls Aimo. "And in my opinion, you understood when we were on fire. If we then wrote something in the support chat, a screenshot from your observability tool arrived within two minutes and we were able to get started and debug."

Together into the future

For the future, etg24 has clear ideas about how the collaboration should continue. "We want to focus on industry standards and not try to build anything of our own around them," says Aimo Künkel, summarizing the strategy.

Specifically, there are a few further developments on the wish list: A standardized option for REST APIs with automatic swagger file generation, serverless support for Flow applications and the integration of modern database technologies. "We definitely want to step on the gas," confirms Aimo.

As a fully remote company, etg24 particularly appreciates the fact that collaboration with Flownative also works smoothly digitally: "We have been a fully remote company since 2018, not because of or since COVID, but even before that. That's why everything works online for us. And that also works really well with Flownative. That's why it feels all the more natural to work with the Flownative team, and there is all the less difference to internal employees."

A partnership for the long haul

The story of etg24 and Flownative shows how a small team can run a very successful SaaS solution by strategically outsourcing framework expertise. Aimo Künkel summarizes the experience in a simple principle:

"One of the basic rules of long-term software development is: the longevity of a framework is proportional to its age. This has proven to be true with Flow. We have been working on the basis of Flow for a long time now and are very happy with it - and in principle we have been working with Flownative ever since and are also happy with it. That's why we will continue to rely on Flownative for a very long time to come."