Not really with a brilliant idea, but actually from a dissatisfaction of our founder Manfred Heiss. He wanted to merge the data around his vehicles (a car plus motorbike) that was distributed across numerous paper files into a central place and became annoyed, because he couldn’t find a solution that gave him quick access and helped save valuable time.

Therefore, he decided to take this into his own hands. Of course, a solution was supposed to be electronic and digital, however, first attempts to implement this with Excel in the cloud were not really promising.

In search of better solutions and after many talks with family and friends, Manfred soon realized that he was not the only one with this problem. So, he decided to develop a software where also friends and family can store their vehicle data. Without further ado, he simply called it “Meine Autodaten”, which translates into “MyAutoData” or abbreviated “MAUD”. As experienced software manager in the automotive industry (Manfred worked for BMW and Oracle) he had gained the necessary know-how to succeed.

It didn’t take long until the desire came up to leverage this data. However, everyone for himself and absolutely individually. This gave birth to the idea to simply follow the example of numerous big companies: they make lots of money with our data – even though they are not the legal owners. The fact that we are actually the legal owners of our data is not just confirmed by the GDPR, but also raised the need for self-administration.

As owners, we know ourselves best when and if we need something for our vehicles, e.g. new tires, a visit to the garage for an oil change, a new insurance or maybe even a new car/motorbike. This led to the idea of simply reversing the current B2C practice into a C2B practice. It means: If we need something, we simply request it from the companies directly and online. They therefore save themselves huge advertising and administration costs. We save ourselves a lot of time and even benefit from attractive prices.