Community Leverage in Startups: Lessons from hellgrün Energie

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

Two to three times a month, something happens that shouldn’t be a founder’s problem: Meta account suddenly blocked. Urgent search for a B2B sales consultant. Office move tomorrow. No internet. Mild panic. This is the reality Roman Steigertahl (MLB 2014) describes to me.

Roman is COO and co-founder of hellgrün Energie, a Cologne-based ClimateTech-meets-FinTech company that builds on-site solar solutions for commercial real estate. He founded the company together with Lucas Josten (CEO) and Wenzel Gerstner (CPO). And what keeps surprising him is not just the complexity of the energy market. It’s how often the solution to very real, very urgent problems starts with one sentence: “I’ll ask in the right WHU WhatsApp group.” Within hours, answers show up. Or introductions. Or someone who has seen exactly this problem before.

Through this low-threshold help, hellgrün found:

• their office
• customers
• consultants
• and multiple “last-minute savers” in stressful situations

No big pitch decks. No formal processes. Just Institutional Memory being passed on in real time. Because politically, the energy transition feels more fragile again. Support is noisier. Priorities are shifting. Yet hellgrün is going all in: They just closed a €1m growth financing round led by Saxovent Smart Eco Investments GmbH, to scale their pipeline for solar power on commercial rooftops. The venture logic is strong: Commercial roofs are massive, underused assets. Tenants want predictable energy prices. Asset managers need ESG upgrades without operational headaches.

hellgrün sits exactly at this intersection. Financing, operating, and managing on-site PV where energy is consumed. No capex for owners. Real CO₂ impact. Better economics. But no matter how interesting your case sounds on paper: Startups are an outlier game! Most don’t fail because the idea is bad. They fail because friction piles up faster than learning. Strong institutions reduce that friction! They compress learning curves. They lower the cost of mistakes. And they make it more likely that talented people stay in the game long enough to win it.

Roman, Lucas, Wenzel: congrats on the round. And thanks for the very real reminder of what community leverage looks like in practice.

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