From 0 to $200M: How FINN Scaled Fast
Jens Kegelmann joined FINN in 2019 as one of the very first employees, long before the company became known as one of Europe’s most exciting hypergrowth stories. Over the past six years, he has lived through every stage of the journey — from the early days of building something from scratch, to scaling FINN to more than $200 million in revenue and a valuation of $600 million. Today he serves as Vice President of Product Growth, but his perspective is shaped by years of being in the trenches, seeing what worked, what didn’t, and how a small team with a clear vision could grow into a scale-up of international relevance.
In his talk, Jens will share the mindset that fueled FINN’s trajectory. Growth at this level is never the result of one idea or one campaign, but rather a way of thinking that combines speed, experimentation, and discipline. He will take the audience behind the curtain to show how that mindset guided crucial decisions, enabled the company to move fast without losing direction, and helped transform an idea into a business worth hundreds of millions.
This is a candid story about hypergrowth told from the inside. These practical insights are for anyone who wants to understand what it really takes to scale at speed, and how the same mindset can be applied to unlock growth in your own organization.
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From 0 to 200 Million: How FINN Scaled by Reducing Complexity
FINN set out to fix car ownership by turning it into a simple online subscription: choose a car on the website, get delivery to your doorstep, and have insurance, tires, and maintenance handled for you. In this talk, Jens walks through FINN’s journey across funding stages and shares the playbook that took the company from zero to two hundred million in revenue by relentlessly removing complexity.
Seed stage: Validate the single riskiest assumption
Timeline: 2019 to 2020
Revenue: 0 to 5 million in 12 months
Early on, the only question that mattered was access to cars. CRM, website, and traffic acquisition were solved with standard tools. The riskiest assumption was supply. FINN won its first fleet deal with a single brand, Opel, which unlocked real transactions and validated demand.
Lesson 1: Find the one assumption that can break the whole idea. Prove or kill it first.
Series A: Grow fast with no code until it breaks
Timeline: 2020 to 2022
Revenue: 5 million to 60 million
FINN connected a long list of providers and internal processes with no code. Airtable served as the central database. The stack enabled incredible speed, quick partner swaps, and a steep learning curve. Then reality hit: Airtable’s request limit of five requests per second stalled operations for thirty seconds whenever FINN crossed the threshold. Orders failed, care teams were stuck, and partners could not push updates.
What worked anyway
Ship with Webflow and a Google Sheets backend if that gets you learning today
Use Zapier or Make for automation, then swap when you hit a wall
Keep no code for internal tools even after graduating to ProCode on the core path
Lesson 2: Do not reinvent what already works. Use no code or vibe coding to move fast until it breaks. Then replace only the part that broke.
Series B: When the market turns, product owns the business context
Timeline: 2022 to early 2024
Revenue: 60 million to 150 millionRising interest rates changed the game. Car financing became expensive, fundraising slowed, and the growth engine lost fuel. FINN pivoted focus from pure top line to unit economics, operational efficiency, and disciplined OKRs. The product organization embedded itself across functions to understand the full P&L and to prioritize work that actually improved the business.
Lesson 3: Product must understand the business better than anyone. Attach every roadmap bet to a clear outcome in revenue, margin, or cost.
Today: Experiment your way to scale
Timeline: 2024 to 2025
Revenue trajectory: Past 200 million
Doorstep delivery does not scale forever. FINN hypothesized that local pickup stations could reduce cost and increase reliability.
How they de-risked it:
Fake door test: Offer pickup on the site and measure selection. Result: sixty percent chose pickup, strong signal without building anything.
Pilot: Invite hundred customers around Munich to pick up at HQ. Validate operations, costs, and experience.
Rollout logic: Expand only where take rate and cost curves beat delivery.
Lesson 4: Start with the smallest experiment that answers the next question. Graduate to pilots only when the signal is strong.
The operating philosophy
Reduce complexity everywhere. Choose the simplest tool, process, or contract that lets you learn this week.
Replace selectively. Keep no code for internal tools while migrating bottlenecks to ProCode.
Ship imperfectly on purpose. Speed to learning beats theoretical quality.
Make product scrambled eggs. Embed with sales, ops, finance, and supply. No ivory towers.
Practical takeaways
- Identify the single riskiest assumption and validate it before polishing anything else.
- Use no code to integrate partners and iterate fast. Replace only when reality forces you to.
- Tie every product initiative to a business driver. Revenue, margin, or cost must be explicit.
- Test with fake doors, then run small, real pilots. Scale only when both demand and cost data agree.
- Simplicity is a strategy. Embrace imperfection to create speed, learning, and momentum.
Jens Kegelmann
Jens Kegelmann is Vice President of Product Growth at FINN and joined the company as one of its first employees. Having lived through every stage of FINN’s journey, he embodies a hands-on, pragmatic growth mindset, one that’s about getting out of the building, talking to customers, and selling rather than theorizing. Jens brings this approach into his leadership today, helping teams focus on what really drives traction and scale.