#06 Growing from 70 to a 5000 people conference

Andy is a German serial entrepreneur. He is currently Founder and Managing Director of Ryte and Co-Founder & Host of the Founder Festival Bits & Pretzels and Co-Founder and Chairman of the performance marketing agency EPHNY.

Andy Bruckschlögl started his first business at the age of 12, selling backpacks on eBay. A year later he founded his first online shop. In order to promote the online store better, Andreas began to learn how to optimize websites for search engines. Four years later he started another online shop for fashion, which unfortunately failed due to the high return rate. In 2008, Andy was hired as a super trainee by online marketing expert Marcus Tandler. With the merge to Tandler.Doerje.Partner, Andreas Bruckschlögl became Head of Inbound Marketing at age 21, taking responsibility for a team of 10 employees. In July 2012 Andy co-founded Ryte (former OnPage.org) – an innovative software for website quality management and -optimization. Today, the bootstrapped company with 42 employees is generating over 3 million € in revenue and is being used by over 500.000 users worldwide. Together with Dr. Bernd Storm van’s Gravesande, he started the first Bits & Pretzels event in September 2014 as a small and cozy founders breakfast. In only two years the event has grown rapidly to a 3-day festival taking place at Munich’s famous Oktoberfest with more than 5.000 attendees from around the world. Speakers at this year's event were academy award winning actor and tech investor Sir Kevin Spacey, Founder of Virgin-Group Sir Richard Branson, Airbnb Co-Founder and CTO Nathan Blecharczyk and many more.

In this episode we will talk with Andy about growing the founder festival Bits & Pretzels from 70 to 5000 attendees as well as growing Ryte's user base to over 500.000 users worldwide and the marketing tactics, which supported this growth.