Felix Hoffmann, 7Learnings
10 Customers To $1M ARR, All Founder-Led Sales
Felix Hoffmann is the co-founder and CEO of 7Learnings, a Berlin company whose software decides what a retailer should charge. He spent six years as a pricing consultant at Kearney and two years running price optimization at Zalando, Europe's largest fashion marketplace, where he saw predictive pricing working at scale. From his consulting years he already knew almost nobody else worked that way. Today 7Learnings is at multiple seven figures in ARR, with around 40 customers and 60 people. The hard part was never the idea. A demand forecasting model needs a large retailer's historical sales data, and no large retailer hands that over to a company with no product. Felix also spent the early months trying to recruit two technical co-founders in Berlin, which he describes as close to impossible when engineers can earn well without taking any risk. So the first contract 7Learnings signed was not software at all. It was a consulting project. The retailer got help implementing its own pricing approach, 7Learnings got paid, and it kept the right to use the data to build a product of its own. The first paying software customer came through his old consulting network, structured as an A/B test: the algorithm priced half the assortment, the retailer's team priced the other half. The first run was a disaster. Prices came out far too expensive on high-priced products, and in e-commerce you know within a day. They reworked the models, and a later test came back with a 13% profit uplift. Felix also covers how a pricing company prices itself, why he refuses success-based fees, the objection he still hears from almost every retailer, and why he thinks LLMs do not belong in the pricing decision itself.
