22 years of an idea.
One notebook.
One persistent daughter.

Turkey, the late nineties. I had a tight circle of friends — Hido, my best friend, and a group of people you simply spent every spare minute with. In 2003 someone in the group wanted to organize Hido’s birthday. What do we get him? So we sent emails back and forth. Who buys what? Has anyone got the sweater yet?

A year later it was a tradition. Hido just sent round a list of things he wanted. And we worked out between us who would buy what. By email. With reply-all. It was chaos — but it worked.

At some point someone said: “Shouldn’t this really be an app?”

In 2003 I moved to Germany. The wishlist emails kept going — now across borders. In 2007 Hido and I tried to build a website. Failed. Too little experience.

In 2008 I talked about it at work. Colleagues loved it and wanted to help. We collected ideas and wrote concepts — but it kept getting bigger and more complicated. Failed.

In 2009 it got serious: a colleague wanted to invest. We wrote a business plan, found a developer, put together documentation. We entered the NTV/Financial Times Deutschland Startup Challenge — and made it to the final.

mymuesli won. We didn’t. The jury said: good idea, too little capital. After that the air went out of it.

In the years that followed I kept starting again. Always wanting too much, never finishing. Eventually I stopped trying and started writing my ideas in a notebook instead. My idea book.

In 2022 my young daughter found the idea book and started leafing through it. Of all the ideas in there, one caught her imagination — the wishlist. From then on she asked me every month: “When are you finally going to start?”

And every time I had an excuse. Too much work. Too complicated. Wrong moment. Until September 2025.

That was when I understood: I had to do it differently this time. Not with every feature, not with the perfect architecture, not with a team. Just build a simple wishlist that works.

So I wrote code in the evenings and at weekends. With AI helping me, I could work faster than ever before. The first version was finished in December 2025 — just in time for Christmas.

February 2026 brought the moment of truth: my daughter’s birthday. The first real wishlist. Real gifts, real people, real coordination.

It worked.

And then something happened that I hadn’t expected: other people started using Wishlist.de. No advertising, no marketing, no budget. Just word of mouth. Within a few months we had more than 1,000 wishlists.

I’ve kept building ever since. Every evening, every weekend. Not because I have to, but because what people tell us keeps me going. Every message, every bug report, every idea — those are the people building Wishlist.de with me.