Ten Years of Franz · Franz

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Behind the build Article<br>Ten Years of Franz<br>Franz turns ten this year. Franz 6 ships now. A founder's note on a weekend prototype, a fundraise we skipped, and why one person is the point.<br>May 1, 2026 · 8 min read<br>Share

Franz turns ten this year. The actual anniversary was in March, but Franz 6 felt like the bigger marker, so I am writing this now, with the release.<br>This is the story of how a weekend prototype turned into a decade of stubborn work, what I almost did and decided not to, and why I think Franz 6 is the version that ripened the longest.<br>A weekend in 2016<br>I was freelancing for a handful of companies and running communities on the side. The Vienna Gamedev meetup. Several Slack groups. Discord servers, customer chats, founder DMs scattered across half a dozen apps. My communication had become a full time job next to the work that actually paid the bills.<br>One weekend I had no client work. I sat down with a vague idea of "what if I just had one window for all of this" and started experimenting with Electron. By Sunday evening I had a prototype that was rough, ugly, and obviously useful. It was the first thing I had built in a long time that I genuinely wanted to keep using myself.<br>Horst, Grete, and Franz<br>I was tired of generic startup names. The -ster, the-ly, the unpronounceable made-up words that all blurred into each other. So I had started naming my products after people I knew. Horst, my uncle, became a collaborative shopping list. Grete, who I have never actually known, became a recipe planner that synced with Horst.<br>When friends asked what I would call the next thing, I jokingly answered Franz, my grandfather's name. A few months later it was real.<br>March 2016<br>I launched Franz on Product Hunt in March 2016. It got more than two thousand upvotes, which was an absurd number at the time. Later that year Franz won the Product Hunt Golden Kitty Award for best desktop app of the year.<br>The weeks after the launch are still a blur. The download counter, the press requests, the inbox flood, the Twitter mentions. I remember being extremely tired and extremely sure that this was the thing.<br>Franz 1.0, March 2016. One window for everything that was not email yet. The fundraise we did not do<br>The success pulled the usual gravity. I spent most of 2016 in fundraising conversations. The angels who came in early were genuinely supportive and remained so throughout. Some of the traditional VCs who joined the conversations later wanted special terms that did not feel right. We also got accepted to one of the better known San Francisco accelerators.<br>Their term sheet did not harmonize with what the VCs wanted. There was a real mindset gap between Vienna and San Francisco that I did not fully understand at the time but that I felt every time I was on a call. My son was born in the same window. I was suddenly negotiating fund structure with one ear and learning how to be a parent with the other.<br>We probably could have closed a substantial round. But by the time I had a clearer head, I noticed something else. We had spent months on raising money and almost no time on building product. Building product is what we do, and what we do best. So we stopped.<br>The donation that decided everything<br>Franz was still a free app and my savings were running out. I was answering hundreds of support emails a week for a product that was making me no money and a lot of problems.<br>I posted an in-app notification asking users to donate to keep the development going. Within a few hours we had funded roughly half a year of work.<br>That decided monetization for me. Not as a financial calculation but as a confirmation. People loved Franz enough to pay for it without being asked twice. From that moment on the question was no longer whether to charge but how to do it well.<br>After Franz 5<br>Franz 5 shipped about seven years ago, with paid plans built in from the start. The years after were not quiet. They were head-down. The release log kept filling. Workspaces shipped and quickly became the feature I rely on every day to keep work and personal communication apart. Franz Todos arrived as a way to stop bouncing between an inbox and a separate task app every fifteen minutes. The list of supported services kept growing, and existing ones kept getting fixed whenever vendors changed their pages underneath us. The pandemic years were unexpectedly strong, both financially and creatively.<br>Most of the work was the kind nobody sees. Notification handling, sync, performance, security, auto-update, cross-platform packaging — the parts of the app a user never thinks about got rebuilt more times than I can count. A single-window client running on macOS, Windows, and Linux, hosting a dozen third-party web apps that keep changing underneath you, is a constant maintenance job. That maintenance was the work, and it never stopped.<br>Plenty of what I tried in those years never shipped. Maybe eighty percent...