Life of teamshufflr – The story so far

You know teamshufflr as the app that helps you easily create and mix teams – but why does it exist, who is the team behind teamshufflr and how did we even get the idea for this tool? Strap in, we’ll tell you the life story of teamshufflr so far. 

It all started in August of 2021. The Corona pandemic was still going on, but Germany seemed on a good path, having invented the first and most effective vaccine and, after some starting trouble, also getting people vaccinated. So finally, after almost one and a half years, friends and colleagues could get together again for the summer – still with restrictions like tests etc., but personal contact was possible. 

The teamshufflr story started at an IoT startup summer party in Fürth, Nuremberg region. There, Felix as the internal chief people manager was in charge of hosting this event – and was faced with an issue: How could he effectively get people that didn’t know each other or hadn’t seen each other in person for a year due to the pandemic into groups to talk to each other and work together? He started with excel but soon realized that it would take him hours to get to a very imperfect result; he didn’t know who would actually show up. So while pondering this problem, he talked to one of his colleagues in the development team, Christoph, to see if he could come up with a better way. Christoph, being a developer who loves tinkering and dealing with unexpected problems, saw that the problem could be solved with a relatively simple algorithm and a little bit of coding. So within a few hours, he had developed a functional app that worked locally and gave out cards with different features – colors, shapes and words – for Felix to print. The first version of teamshufflr was born! 

The first version of teamshufflr cards was made by a locally coded tool – and looked a little different than the ones you find today.

Invited to the summer party was Florian, who worked for another software startup in Nuremberg. After a few beers and seeing how much fun the participants had in their respective teams and how well the idea worked in this setting, he started asking around: Where did these cards come from? Which tool did they use to make them? And he was stomped when he found out that the tool was coded internally just for this event – things that only happen in tech startups. 🤷‍♂️

That same night, Florian went home and started writing out the concept for teamshufflr: the name, the logo and domain were secured in a matter of hours (mainly thanks to the many online tools for these things…). As he was very enthusiastic, Florian spoke about it to Max, his co-founder at the time and a front-end whizz, during lunch break. As soon as Max understood the concept, he was excited to help. In a few days, Max, Felix, Flo & Christoph set up a website, tweaked the algorithm, built the app in a webapp setting, and viola! within three weeks from the initial idea, teamshufflr was up and running! With Florian and Felix heading marketing for the tool and Max and Christoph taking care of the front- and backend, all systems were a go. The easy part was done. 


And so as with many things in life, a lot of curiosity and some skill turned an idea into some pretty exciting stuff. And now we’re off to the incredible journey that is teamshufflr, where we take chances, learn new things and talk to interesting people while we try to build a tool that is useful to you. And we’re really thankful for the great support and amazing feedback we’ve received via Twitter, Instagram and Email, especially from the teaching community! Let’s see where this ride takes us!

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