A mountain is a perfectly respectable place to need directions. A company expense form ought to be less demanding. Hartmut Hahn’s founding idea lives in the distance between those two experiences: the patience we grant ourselves outdoors, and the competence we are expected to summon when a screen fills with unfamiliar boxes.
On a mountain trip, Hahn and his future co-founders were grateful for their navigation system. They began wondering why software offered no comparable guide. He has told that story without the elaborate scenery that startup legends tend to acquire. The useful detail is the question. If a device can help someone follow a route, why should a business application leave its user to discover the route unaided?
Userlane emerged in Munich in 2015. Hahn founded it with Felix Eichler and Kajetan Uhlig, people he already knew through earlier projects. Its initial proposition was easy to picture: instructions appearing inside the software where the work happens. The person using an application could follow a sequence of steps instead of leaving it to hunt for an explanation. Navigation had found another kind of terrain.
The atlas has a timing problem
Hahn’s complaint about software training is wonderfully ordinary. People attend a session. They return to their work. The application changes, or the task occurs so infrequently that its procedure fades from memory. By the time the knowledge becomes useful, it has become difficult to retrieve. A training room and a troublesome screen can be separated by much more than a corridor.
In a 2020 conversation about workplace learning, he described the growing number of applications and their increasingly frequent updates. He also challenged the comfortable word “intuitive.” Familiarity differs between colleagues. A process used once or twice a month can feel strange on every return visit. That is a more sympathetic diagnosis than assuming the person at the keyboard simply failed to pay attention.
The analogy he used was a navigator versus a road atlas. An atlas may contain every answer, provided its reader can first work out where to look. Navigation delivers an instruction while the journey is taking place. Applied to work, that distinction turns timing into a product feature. Help earns its keep at the point of hesitation.
There is a little comedy in the premise. Businesses buy tools to save time, then set aside more time to explain the tools. A practical guide inside an application offers an escape from that circular arrangement. Hahn’s subject is the unglamorous interval between receiving access and knowing what to do with it.
A presentation went out before the product
Before Userlane, Hahn worked in product and management consulting. His career also included business and corporate development at Hubert Burda Media and consulting at Mücke, Sturm & Company. Those are useful places to encounter the distance between a promising business idea and its execution. In describing his decision to start a company, he recalled the frustration of having ideas he could not put into practice.
His version of entrepreneurship leaves little room for the cheerful fantasy of instant riches. Starting a company was something he felt compelled to do. That account makes the next episode easier to understand: the founders went looking for customers with a clickable demonstration and a PowerPoint presentation. A polished, finished product would have to wait.
They used sales conversations to learn which capabilities customers would pay for. Early buyers included Celonis and Personio. Other startups could make decisions quickly, tolerate an unfinished product and offer rapid feedback. The approach gave Userlane a practical education before it pursued organizations with longer buying processes.
A demonstration invites a different conversation from a working system. The buyer has to imagine the result; the founder has to hear which parts of that imagined result actually matter. Hahn’s early sales method placed that conversation close to product development. It also exposed the founders to the uncomfortable possibility that an attractive idea might need to change.
“We just got out there and started selling.”Hartmut Hahn, 2022
Learning whom to help
In his 2020 account of Userlane’s growth, Hahn acknowledged an early mistake: too much attention had gone to software companies, with too little focus on the people using their applications. The eventual change in audience mattered. It brought the everyday experience of employees nearer the center of the business.
That admission gives his history a useful wrinkle. Selling to startups had helped Userlane learn quickly, yet the company needed a broader view of its eventual users. A good early customer can be an excellent teacher without defining the entire destination. Founders still have to decide which lessons travel.
By October 2020, Hahn reported that the team had grown from three to more than eighty people and served more than 250 customers worldwide. He discussed the care required to bring many new employees aboard together. For a company selling better onboarding, its own growth presented a rather pointed examination.
The financing milestones made the change in scale visible. HTGF invested in 2016; a Series A followed in 2018. In July 2020, Userlane raised €10 million in a Series B led by Five Elms Capital, alongside returning investors. The announced uses were international expansion and product development. These were company funds for a next stage of work, rather than a measure of Hahn’s personal fortune.
The conversation after the pitch
One connection began in the formal setting of an investment committee. In 2018, Hahn met Alexander Katzung of B. Braun through HTGF. A presentation led to a conversation during a break. Further meetings followed, sometimes over beer and currywurst at the investor’s Family Day. Enterprise sales had acquired a condiment.
The relationship developed slowly. B. Braun’s accelerator became a route to testing the technology in 2019. The pilot covered internal software processes and digital procurement. By the time the pair discussed the collaboration in March 2021, it had become a continuing commercial relationship.
The elapsed time is part of the story. A person can like a product long before a large organization creates a workable route to buying and testing it. Hahn had encountered that difference from the supplier’s side. Staying in touch gave the initial interest somewhere to go when a suitable process finally existed.
A rarely submitted travel claim was one example discussed in that conversation. It is an almost aggressively modest use case, which is why it helps. The task matters when it arrives. Forgetting its sequence does not require a dramatic explanation. Even capable colleagues may appreciate directions to a destination they visit only occasionally.
Munich was the starting point
Hahn’s international ambition was already explicit in 2020. He warned that a company growing only within Germany could eventually be overtaken by global competitors. The observation makes Munich a base rather than a boundary. A product concerned with the difficulty of using software has an obvious reason to look beyond one national market.
The funding round’s stated aim was expansion across Europe and into the United States. That choice also brought American capital into the company through Five Elms. Backers were financing a Munich business whose customers and competitors could be elsewhere. Its location supplied a starting address, while the commercial problem supplied a wider map.
Public recognition followed the work in different ways. Business Punk included Hahn in its Watchlist 2019 for recruiting and education. Userlane won the HR Startup Award in 2020. Neither distinction substitutes for customers using a product, but both show that his focus on the human side of software had found an audience outside the company.
Another small episode concerns presentation rather than programming. In a public testimonial for a presentation course, Hahn said the team revised a pitch deck after a workshop and won a globalpitch.com competition. It is a fitting detail for someone whose first sales tool was a presentation. Explaining the idea was part of building the business from the beginning.
Counting the clicks, then helping with them
By his Industrial Talk appearance in 2024, Hahn was describing a wider problem than teaching a new arrival to use a new application. Organizations already had extensive software portfolios. They needed to understand which tools people used, where work became difficult, and whether their purchases delivered useful results.
He described analyzing browser-based software and identifying where users struggled. The work could begin with applications already in place. That is an important shift in the founder’s story: the navigation idea had become connected to measurement. Before offering a direction, the company could help an employer see where the journey was going wrong.
The current Userlane proposition pairs Application Intelligence with Contextual Assistance. One examines software use; the other provides help while people work. Its public description extends the same practical concern across an organization’s applications. For Hahn, an installed tool remains only the beginning of the argument. The more interesting evidence comes from what people can accomplish with it.
This approach makes software adoption a continuing responsibility. A launch date offers a neat ceremonial finish, suitable for a slide and perhaps a small celebration. Ordinary work continues after the slide has been archived. Processes change, colleagues join, and familiar tasks become unfamiliar again. The directions have to remain useful after the ribbon is cut.
An old question reaches Copilot
In January 2025, Userlane announced a partnership with fincite to provide in-application guidance for its wealth-management software. Hahn framed the aim in terms of accessibility and helping advisors and their clients understand the processes. It was a specific application of the founding idea, attached to the work of a particular group of users.
Later that year, a Microsoft collaboration brought Userlane’s assistant into Microsoft 365 Copilot. The announcement described contextual support across enterprise applications, built using Microsoft’s AI technology. Hahn’s stated ambition remained closely tied to the employee’s task: timely guidance that lets someone concentrate on an outcome instead of decoding software.
His recent public commentary also resists treating AI as a convenient end to every discussion. Looking ahead to a 2026 SaaSiest appearance in Munich, he argued that AI changes how software is built and sold while customers still need their problems solved. The point is especially apt for his own company. A new interface still has to help a person complete a piece of work.
The mountain story survives these changes because it asks a question that can be tested at a desk. Can someone get from here to the result they need? Hahn has built his career around making that passage easier to see and follow. The destination may be an expense claim, a procurement process or a workflow reached through Copilot. There is considerable business in knowing the next turn.