This is a conversation about the courage when building a company, why sheer revenue is a dangerous vanity metric, and why the overwhelming majority of e-commerce brands still completely ignore a highly profitable marketing channel.
Admetrics: If you were hired today to rescue a struggling e-commerce ad performance, what would be the first three levers you'd check in the first 48 hours?
Johannes Mansbart (CEO & Co-Founder, Chatarmin): First, I'd check the product-market-fit. Often, this one is missing and whenever customers who don't yet have a product-market fit ask me for advice, I always say: don't start with WhatsApp yet. Struggling ad performance is almost always due to a lack of message-market fit and offer-market fit.
So: test more creatives, try out more hooks, generate better top-of-funnel marketing, and thereby find a winning angle where the storytelling, messaging, and offer align so well that your new customer acquisition is scalable and profitable. You can then target them on the backend using WhatsApp.
Admetrics: What was the most expensive mistake of your career so far, and how has it permanently changed the way you work today?
Johannes: Hiring the wrong people too quickly and firing them too slowly. If you have the right people, you as a founder will soon be unemployed and have a lot of fun. If you have the wrong people, your company is dead.
What has specifically changed: In the beginning, you do everything, always, and immediately. Over time, your calendar gets emptier. At first, you work 100% on the customer; later, you work 100% on the team. That is a massive transition that most founders struggle to handle.
Admetrics: Tell us about a project that was successful precisely because you deliberately ignored common industry best practices.
Johannes: Every single one so far. Chatarmin, too, was built exactly as my co-founder and I imagined it, without overthinking. We just did it. No investor and no consultant would ever sign off on that. But the world belongs to the naive and the brave.
I recommend this to all young founders as well, because otherwise, they have too much respect for the blueprint, too much fear of the strategy, and never get to the execution stage. The first step is the hardest. So: just do it. And at a certain point, you stop looking back because the customers force you to just keep working.
Admetrics: Which golden rule in e-commerce that was absolute gospel five years ago is now considered harmful or misleading?
Johannes: Tinkering with AI was very adventurous five years ago and didn't work. Image generation was bad, copy tools were bad. Nowadays, content creators and copy creators are extremely good; AI should be used everywhere.
What is harmful today: hiring too many people too quickly. I use AI for almost everything: financial planning, controlling, pitches against competitors, marketing analyses. My goal, however, is to not need AI anymore because I have such a great team that builds the company without me.
Admetrics: In your opinion, which metric is completely overrated by most people, even though it holds little real significance?
Johannes: Revenue. Most founders flex with revenue, but it means nothing. You can make infinite revenue if you attarct the wrong customers, charge too much for your products, or sell products that you take money for but never deliver.
The most important metric is satisfaction, within the team and among the founders. A founder who isn't happy immediately projects that onto the team, and from there onto the customers. That only creates paranoia, fear, and dissatisfaction. And that is the last thing you want.
Admetrics: If you had to bet your entire budget on a single trend for 2026/2027, where would you invest?
Johannes: In young founders bootstrapping in the software or agent space. It has never been cheaper or easier to build a product and a company. And there are more frustrated young people than ever before who are realizing that a university degree doesn't equip them for the life they truly want. Those are the people I want to work with the most, to build and scale an infinite number of digital companies.
Admetrics: How is AI currently being used for tasks that were previously simply impossible, instead of just using it purely to save time?
Johannes: First of all, German and Austrian companies are now daring to approach AI. Compliance is no longer a blocker. Secondly, AI delivers real results. Anyone currently building actions and processes with natural language or Claude Code notices: things are happening that were simply impossible before.
Everyone who understands this early on and is already selling AI products to SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) in the DACH region has an unbelievable head start. Everyone else who is still thinking in terms of traditional software and manual processes is at an extreme disadvantage. The digitalization gap is widening constantly: the winners are moving to the top, and the middle tier won't be viable in the long run.
Admetrics: What is one belief you have about e-commerce that almost no one else in the industry agrees with?
Johannes: That WhatsApp marketing works. We've been doing this for three and a half years and have almost 500 customers, but that isn't even 5% of the market. There are thousands of highly successful e-commerce companies in the German-speaking region that still don't use WhatsApp. And the same goes for AI in customer support. Two levers that are barely being utilized. And we are working on changing that.
This conversation is part of The Ecom Leadership Series, where we decode the critical success factors for e-commerce growth together with industry experts. We focus on the essentials and deliver practical, field-tested insights directly from day-to-day business operations.
