The rise and fall of alocalo: what building a startup taught me about product

In 2020, while finishing my master's degree, I co-founded a startup. I had no product management experience, no formal title, and no real framework for what I was doing. What I had was a builder's instinct, a strong eye for design, and the kind of energy that comes from believing you've found a real problem worth solving.

Three years later, alocalo filed for bankruptcy. We had raised €2.3M, built four products, onboarded 350+ local retailers and 180K+ products. And we failed. This is what I actually learned from it.

The idea

The problem alocalo was trying to solve is real and still unsolved. Local retailers were losing customers to Amazon and Zalando not because their products were worse, but because they were invisible. A shopper browsing for a jacket on Amazon had no way of knowing that a store two kilometers away had the same jacket in stock, available today, with someone who could actually help them choose.

The browser extension was the original answer. Install it once, and whenever you browse a major e-commerce platform, it quietly checks whether any local retailer nearby carries the same or a similar product and surfaces that information in real time. The shopper doesn't have to change their behavior. The local retailer gets a chance to compete. The underlying insight was that the real friction wasn't in the transaction. It was in the discovery layer.

That insight was right. The product built to solve it was increasingly wrong.

What I was doing without knowing its name

I joined the founding team as the person responsible for everything that wasn't code. Design, user research, go-to-market thinking, investor relations, the grant application that eventually secured €2.3M from the European Innovation Council (4% acceptance rate, 180+ pages of documentation). I was running discovery, shaping scope, making product calls, and presenting to investors. I was doing all of that without knowing it had a name.

The moment of clarity came when I enrolled in a product management course at Product Academy in Zurich, mid-startup, mid-chaos. I sat down in that course and realized: this is exactly what I've been doing. The discipline had a name, a framework, a community. That recognition changed everything for me. Not because it gave me new tools, but because it made the work feel like a direction. This is what I want to do, and this is how I want to do it.

That clarity came from alocalo. Whatever else it cost me, I owe it that.

The research that should have changed everything

During this period, I was also writing my master's thesis. The topic: user adoption of the alocalo browser extension, applying the UTAUT 2 model and the Technology Readiness Index to segment our potential users.

The research identified three groups. Mobile technology pioneers: technically fluent, enthusiastic about new tools, but primarily shopping on their phones. Browser extensions don't run on mobile browsers. This group wasn't going to use our product. Price-sensitive digitally fluent users: open to the extension, but not to paying local retail prices when they could get the same product cheaper online. The third group, neutral but open technology testers, showed the highest stated intention to use the product. Mostly women, primarily shopping on desktop, not particularly tech-evangelical. The quiet majority we weren't building for.

I ran this research. I analyzed it. I wrote it up. And then the company kept building a mobile app, a web marketplace, a merchant dashboard. We spread capacity across four products to solve an adoption problem that the research was telling us had a structural cause, not a distribution one.

The gap between what the data said and what we built is the thing I've thought about most since.

Why I didn't push harder

The honest answer is that I was too junior to trust my own evidence, and the structure around me made it easy not to.

The founding team was nine shareholders: three students running the day-to-day operations, a professor, the person who brought the original idea, the university institute that had brokered the founding, a development agency that had helped build the early version , and an M&A adviser who held shares and honestly contributed nothing. The operative co-founders, including me, held a small percentage of a company already fragmented before it had shipped anything. That structure made fundraising harder, created constant governance complexity, and meant that the people with the most equity weren't always the ones with the most skin in the day-to-day outcomes.

When the shareholders pushed for an app, for a marketplace, for broader surface area to solve the adoption problem, I didn't push back hard enough. I had the evidence. I understood what it was saying. But I was 23, this was my first real experience building a product, and the people in the room had more experience, more authority, and a compelling-sounding logic: reach more users, solve the distribution problem, build the platform.

The failure wasn't being overruled. It was not bringing the evidence forward clearly enough, specifically enough, early enough to make it the basis for the decision. That's on me.

What we built and why it didn't work

By the time alocalo wound down, we had four products: the original browser extension, a mobile app, a web marketplace for end consumers, and a merchant dashboard where retailers could manage their listings and see their data. We had also built custom shop connectors for dozens of different retailer platforms to pull live inventory data.

Each product made a kind of sense in isolation. Together they were a company trying to solve an adoption problem with more surface area when the underlying issue was that the core proposition didn't fit the behavior of the people most likely to use it. The users motivated by local retail values weren't comfortable with browser extensions. The users comfortable with browser extensions weren't motivated by paying local retail prices. Building four products didn't resolve that tension. It just spread it thinner.

We also had almost no marketing budget. The EIC grant covered R&D and operating costs, but not growth. We were building for distribution without the means to distribute.

What I'd build today

If I were starting from scratch with the same problem, I wouldn't build a browser extension. I wouldn't build an app.

I'd keep the shop connectors. That infrastructure, pulling live inventory from local retailer platforms, is genuinely hard to build and genuinely valuable. It's the data layer the whole idea depends on. I'd invest there first and deeply.

For the user-facing product, I'd go as frictionless as possible. You're on the Amazon app, or Safari, and you copy a product link. You paste it into WhatsApp and send it to a number. In the background, an AI looks up the product, matches it against the local retailer database, and replies with a link: "This jacket is available at three stores near you. Here's the closest one." If you buy through that link, we take a cut. No installation. No new app to download. No behavior change required at all.

That's the version of alocalo I'd build today. Start with the data infrastructure, prove the matching works, keep the user interaction so simple it almost disappears. If it gets used, think about whether a more capable interface makes sense. Not before.

The irony is that AI would have made this much more achievable in 2020 than it was. The matching, the conversation layer, the ability to handle a product link and return something useful, all of that is now straightforwardly buildable. The window we were operating in was harder technically and we still overcomplicated our response to it.

What alocalo gave me

The company failed. The product decisions were wrong. The structure was fragile from the start. The bankruptcy, when it came, was the result of bookkeeping failures and shareholder conflicts that had been building for a long time.

And I would do it again.

Not because failure is romantic, but because alocalo is where I learned what product management actually is, through doing it badly and then gradually less badly across three years and four products. It's where I learned that having evidence isn't enough if you can't make it the basis for a decision. It's where I developed the instinct to interrogate adoption problems before reaching for solutions. It's where I found the work I want to spend my career on.

The moment in that course at Product Academy, when I realized there was a discipline built around exactly what I'd been doing, remains one of the clearest moments of professional direction I've had. That moment came from alocalo. Everything since has been an attempt to do the work more deliberately, with more conviction, and with a lot less deference to the room.