Werkstatt 76 · Karlsruhe
German bureaucracy, prepared for you in a language you actually speak. You still submit it yourself.
01 · The problem
Every person who moves to Germany must register their address with the Meldebehörde within two weeks of moving in. It is not optional: § 17 Abs. 1 Bundesmeldegesetz.
Almost nothing that follows works until it is done. No tax ID, so no legal salary. No bank account. No health insurance registration. No residence permit appointment. No mobile contract.
The instructions exist. They are in German, spread across 10,943 municipal websites that each say it differently.
Turning up without the Wohnungsgeberbestätigung. The landlord is legally obliged to provide it (§ 19 BMG) and most newcomers do not know that, do not know to ask, and cannot write the request in German.
A wasted appointment in a city where the next free slot can be weeks away, with a statutory clock still running.
02 · Why nobody has solved it
What data is collected is fixed nationwide (§ 3 Abs. 1 BMG). Whether you need an appointment, what it costs, which form, which counter: that is decided by each of 10,943 municipalities and published only on its own website.
The Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz limits who may advise. A product in this space either stays on the correct side of that line by design, or it cannot operate.
Send somebody to the wrong office with the wrong paper and you have cost them the thing you promised to save. Correctness is the product.
Our answer is structural: we never state a fact a municipality has not published. Every per-city claim carries the German sentence it came from and the URL it was read on. Where a city is silent, we say nothing rather than guess.
03 · What we built
We prepare. You submit. Always. The app never files anything on anyone's behalf and gives no legal advice.
Names, dates of birth, addresses and your signature are held on your phone. The server keeps an anonymous profile and event names. That is a design decision, and it is also the reason a data-protection review is straightforward.
The whole plan is computed on the device, so it survives an office basement with no reception.
04 · Where we already are
The public app, the operator back office, the nationwide municipality registry and an Android build all exist and run today. This is not a mock-up made for a funding application.
Karlsruhe is the depth case: Stadt Karlsruhe plus 27 of the 32 Landkreis municipalities, with up to seven registration procedures each.
They publish no procedural facts of their own. Shipping an empty page for them would look like coverage and deliver nothing, so they are recorded as gaps. The content pipeline records who checked each source and how.
05 · Market and route in
Karlsruhe first. KIT and HKA bring several thousand international students and researchers a year into one Kreis we have already covered in depth, alongside the region's employers.
Then the machine repeats. The rules engine is federal and already serves all 10,943 municipalities. Adding a region is a content operation with a verification trail, not a rebuild.
Market sizing, immigration figures per year and the Karlsruhe cohort numbers: to be inserted from Destatis and the universities' own reporting.
The asset is a per-municipality corpus where every fact carries its source sentence and its provenance. That is slow to build honestly and obvious when it is faked. A competitor can copy the interface in a month and not the corpus.
The same engine already models the wider landscape: residence permits, tax registration, trade registration, vehicles, civil status. Registration is the wedge because everyone needs it first.
06 · Business model and use of funds
The guidance, the checklist, the suggested values and the booking hand-off. This tier hosts no municipal document, so it carries no reuse exposure and can ship to every published city immediately.
We print the prepared pack and post it to the user, ready to hand in. Price: EUR figure to be set.
Assisted phone contact with an office when the user's German is not ready for that conversation. Price: EUR figure to be set.
Exact amounts, monthly stipend rates and the Sachausgaben split are in the business plan and follow the current EXIST Richtlinie: figures pending.
07 · Team and ask
Role, background, what they own in this company.
Role, background, what they own in this company.
Role, background, what they own in this company.
Role, background, what they own in this company.
EXIST funds up to three stipends per team. The fourth founder's arrangement is set out explicitly in the business plan rather than left for a reviewer to discover.
We are asking for twelve months of EXIST-Gründungsstipendium to take a working product from one region to a market.
In twelve months we intend to have:
The product already works. The grant buys correctness at scale.