This Entrepreneur Raised $330 Million To Democratize Coaching For All Career Levels

Now on his third startup, Yannis Niebelschuetz has already raised tens of millions of dollars to scale his global mission of making coaching more accessible for entrepreneurs and their employees. 

On the Dealmakers Show Niebelschuetz talked about the benefits of travel in entrepreneurship, acquisitions, cofounder dynamics, focusing on what you can control in your business, the power and value of coaching, and how he and his brother have created the world’s leading digital coaching platform.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

Travel & Entrepreneurship

Time and again highly successful entrepreneurs that have appeared on the Dealmakers Podcast have linked travel with their incredible careers as founders and investors. Yannis Niebelschuetz is certainly no exception to this either. 

Born in Berlin, Yannis spent much of his youth growing up in Germany. Including attending university there. 

Since then he has lived in Denmark, Ireland, the United States, and in Spain twice. He says that the experience of not just visiting, but living abroad really enables you to grasp the local culture and the people. As well as to break down prejudices and preconceptions people may have from afar and outside. Today, he credits these periods of living around the world with helping him to successfully build the global companies that he has. 

These adventures have certainly also helped him come up with his various startup ideas. 

If You Want To Learn Startups, Just Get Started

So many aspiring entrepreneurs think that they have to spend years learning before they are ready to start. The truth is that there is never a perfect time to start, and it will always be hard. 

You’ll learn a lot more, a lot faster, by just jumping in. Including finding what you really want to do, like, and don’t like. Remember that your first startup is unlikely to be your last. Whether you are successful or not, you may co-found and participate in many ventures during your lifetime. 

This is certainly true for Yannis and his brother. They launched their first venture while still in college. It was a perfume company, with a website that enabled you to order and customize your own perfume, and bottle design. 

They quickly scaled that business up to having over 200,000 customers. Then after four years decided to shut it down. They just didn’t have the customer retention they needed, and it just wasn’t working. So, although emotionally devastating, after putting in so much effort, they folded it.

Yannis says that experience taught him that he is much more interested in B2B business and selling enterprise software than going B2C. 

He also learned a lot about leadership, and the importance of coaching. All of which has fueled his following successes.

Moving To Barcelona

Taking a break to recharge and find his next idea, Yannis moved to Barcelona, Spain. After about five weeks, one day sitting on the beach he found his next business idea. He ran home, only stopping to grab a case of Redbull to fuel his coding. 

This company was a usability testing platform with tens of thousands of individual freelance tests who would go through websites and apps, and record their experiences. A venture that was acquired and is now owned by Vista Equity, one of the largest private equity companies in the world. 

Next, his wife landed a job with Google in Dublin, Ireland. So, they moved there, and Yannis took a two year position with LinkedIn to further his insights on how big tech companies operate globally. He helped them develop their European business. 

Then one day walking the streets of Dublin in the rain with his brother they made the decision to go at it with another business of their own again. 

This time they wanted to do something a little more meaningful and impactful. They leaned on their previous experiences, including the struggles they had working together before, and the value they found in coaching. They had also seen how ineffective coaching was being done in other organizations. With occasional workshops or seminars that just never seemed to stick. 

So, together they moved back to Berlin with their laptops, and began coding Coachhub. Which has now become the world’s leading digital coaching platform. 

CoachHub

CoachHub connects employees with certified business coaches online. What they do differently is to charge an annual subscription, which provides their customers with all the coaching they need throughout the year. 

In the past five years CoachHub has grown to 600 employees of its own. Including 100 that have migrated in from LinkedIn.

They have a distributed, remote workforce. With Yannis recently moving to NYC to head up their growth in the US market. 

CoachHub has also raised $330M in capital itself. All to fund the mission to democratize coaching, and to make it accessible, and affordable for everyone. 

Storytelling is everything which is something that Yannis Niebelschuetz was able to master. Being able to capture the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides is the key. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Listen in to the full podcast episode to find out more, including:

• Perseverance and grinding it out to make your startup work
• The power and value of coaching as a founder
• Founder dynamics
• How to launch in new international markets
• The need to focus

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