Looking Back: Two Years of Just Tech Solutions
In December 2022, we founded Just Tech Solutions GmbH. At the time, there were two of us, we had a single client, and a vague notion of what it means to work as a service provider in the web3 space. Two years later, it is time for an honest assessment. Not a marketing exercise, but a structured reflection on what worked, what did not, and what surprised us along the way.
What We Built
During the first six months, we primarily did one thing: we listened. We talked to DAO teams, analyzed their infrastructure, and worked to understand where the real pain points were. Most DAOs do not struggle with writing smart contracts. Their problem is everything else: hosting, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, databases, the communication between on-chain and off-chain systems.
From those conversations, our three core areas emerged: infrastructure hosting, custom tool development, and technical consulting. That may sound abstract, but in practice it means things like: operating Kubernetes clusters for DAO projects, building integrations between governance systems and community platforms, and helping teams think through their architecture decisions before the first commit is made.
The Milestones
In hindsight, certain moments clearly stand out as turning points:
March 2023: Our first long-term contract. Instead of billing for individual projects, we agreed on an ongoing partnership with a DAO project. This fundamentally changed our planning and allowed us to invest in our own tooling.
August 2023: The team grew to four people. With M.K. as architect and R.S. in systems engineering, we could, for the first time, handle complex projects in parallel. The decision to hire for specialized roles rather than generalists paid off early.
January 2024: Our first infrastructure migration. A DAO project moved from a traditional cloud setup to our self-hosted solution. The process was painful, educational, and ultimately successful. We turned it into a reusable migration playbook.
June 2024: The month we became profitable for the first time. Not dramatically so, but sustainably. For a company in such a young market, this was important proof that the model works.
Technology Bets That Paid Off
Every technology decision is a bet on the future. Some of our bets worked out:
Docker and Kubernetes from day one: We used containerized deployments even for small projects. This created overhead initially, but when we needed to scale, the foundation was there. Today, we can onboard a new DAO project into our infrastructure within hours.
TypeScript as primary language: The web3 world is JavaScript-centric. Rather than betting on exotic stacks, we chose TypeScript and stuck with it consistently, from frontend to backend services to deployment scripts. Onboarding time for new team members is significantly shorter as a result.
Focus on off-chain infrastructure: Many web3 companies focus on smart contracts. We deliberately chose the other path. Most DAOs need someone to keep their servers running, not someone inventing yet another token standard. This niche was less glamorous but far more sustainable.
What We Would Do Differently
An honest retrospective must also name the mistakes:
Holding on to custom solutions for too long: In the early months, we built bespoke tools for every client. This was good for client relationships but bad for maintainability. We should have moved to modular, reusable components sooner. We corrected course in mid-2024, but the technical debt from those early days still keeps us busy.
Documentation was undervalued: Like probably every small tech team, we treated documentation as a secondary concern. This cost us dearly when onboarding new colleagues. Today, our rule is: no feature is done without documentation. But establishing that culture took nearly a year.
The market moves slower than expected: We had anticipated faster growth of the DAO market in 2023. Reality was more sober. Many projects that call themselves DAOs are operationally still traditional teams with a multisig wallet. This forced us to define our target audience more realistically and to also work with projects that are still on their way toward a genuinely decentralized structure.
What Surprised Us
The biggest surprise was how important interpersonal communication is in a technical services company. We do not sell off-the-shelf software. We work closely with teams that are often distributed across multiple time zones, come from different cultural backgrounds, and operate without traditional corporate hierarchies. The ability to communicate clearly and reliably in asynchronous settings is at least as important as technical competence.
Also surprising was how strong the demand for consulting is, not code. Many of our most valuable contributions were architecture reviews where we explained to a team why they should not build something. In an industry driven by technological enthusiasm, the ability to say no is a genuine differentiator.
What Comes Next
Two years in tech is simultaneously an eternity and a blink of an eye. We have proven that there is a market for specialized DAO infrastructure services. We have built a team that is technically strong and humanly resilient. And we have learned that sustainability matters more than growth at any cost.
For 2025, we are focusing on three areas: deepening our hosting infrastructure, expanding our consulting capabilities in governance tooling, and building our own open-source contributions that benefit the broader community.
To everyone who has been part of this journey, whether as clients, partners, or fellow travelers: thank you. The next two years will be at least as interesting.