Today I'd like to share how I came up with the idea of starting an insurance comparison company from the very first thought until the very last step of selling it.
\n \nIdea
\n \nIn 2005, I started to work in the insurance industry and like in any new role I had to learn everything from ground up. What is a policy, what is covered and how do I sell it? Some products were self-explaining and obviously did not earn you a big commission, others like life insurance were more complex and harder to sell. I quickly realized that in order to earn good money besides insurance knowledge and good sales skills you need to sell constantly life insurance policies with big commissions (which was rather hard) or a big amount of car and home insurances which were rather a hassle with small commissions.
\n \nAfter I've got my broker license 2 years later I actually decided to move into the IT sphere, where I always knew I belong. But I did not want to leave behind all the gathered knowledge so I looked back and asked myself
\n \n\n\t\n \n"What is the biggest problem which I can solve with my IT skills and the direction in which I'm heading?"
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I saw a few key problems:
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- The market was very fragmented and transparency was an unknown word, which made it hard to compare any insurance. \n\t
- The process from filing to receiving an insurance policy was quite complex. \n
I came up quite fast with the future solution:
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\n\t
- The insurance price and coverage shall be made comparable and easily accessible via an online portal. \n\t
- The process of filing an insurance shall be online and as direct as possible. \n
\n\t\n \nSo I came up with the idea to "Compare and Sell Insurance Online"
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I checked and I was not the first to come up with this idea, as I found out that other markets had similar issues but it was fairly hard to tell how successful they were or are going to be. Also other markets had different peculiarities so I could not reuse some existing solution which at the same time made it hard for others to enter the Austrian market.
\n \nAnd so the long evenings started with building something new and exciting. I came up with the logo and a landing page in the first few days. I started to write some content and to structure the website while I was going to work during the day. I prepared a good part of the website which consisted mostly of content. And then the critical part started. I needed to answer some important questions and one of the first questions was:
\n \n\n\t\n \nWho Is The Customer?
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So I started to pile up different criteria and to analyse the data I already had from my work.
\n \nWhen creating personas I came up with the following considerations:
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- Demographics \n\t
- Aspirations and Fears \n\t
- Technology and Media Consumption \n\t
- Shopping/purchase Habits \n\t
- Superpowers \n\t
- Friends Group \n
Most of the points were obvious, some data was hard to impossible to come up with and other I've gathered along the way.
\n \nIn my case, I had the major focus on "25-40 years old male mid-class car owners" which was the most important and narrow target group.
\n \nOne of the things I really like is the "Superpowers" analogy. When I asked myself which superpowers do I give my target customers, the answer was obvious: The client had the possibility to outsmart most insurance brokers and get the cheapest insurance without paying anyone for the advice.
\n \n \nFrom Idea to Exit
That persona work shaped everything that followed: the product became Versichern24.at, an online insurance comparison portal for the Austrian market. We launched, learned, and grew it step by step next to client work, and a few years later the company was acquired. I wrote about the outcome in Exit for Insurance Comparison Versichern24 and about the market consolidation that followed in chegg.net acquires Versichern24.at.
Looking back from 2026: this was my first full lean-startup loop, from a problem I knew firsthand to a validated product to an exit. The same loop, run with AI agents instead of long evenings, is what I now do at TechFamilyVentures.