AboutMMXXVI
AUGE is a parallel venture studio in Zug. In practice, a family company. Mert builds. Alexandra runs finance, administration, and testing. The toughest product reviews happen at the dinner table.
Every product starts as a problem in our own house: lyrics we could never quite catch, training and food that no app connected, a video feed we didn't want our son to drown in, a car browser missing an obvious tool. A few years ago, each of these would have needed its own venture-funded company. Today a very small team can ship them in parallel. Being a serial entrepreneur no longer makes sense to us. We are trying the parallel version instead.
We are, explicitly, a lifestyle business. We consider that the most admirable kind. The whole point of running a company is choosing which problems you take on. Three rules survive from fifteen years of enterprise software:
Rule 01
Every app must be at least two of three things: fun to build, very useful, and profitable.
Rule 02
No ads, no data sales. We uninstall apps with ads ourselves. A clear paywall is more honest than turning attention into the product.
Rule 03
We use everything we ship, daily. If a product stops earning its place in our routine, it doesn't deserve a place in yours.
Our definition of success
Objective · maximize S
Every product earns its place in our own day before it ships. The bet is simple: if a tool solves a real problem for us, we are almost certainly not the only ones who have it. That is the whole plan.