Toolbox reasons

Founding made easy - with the right tools

From the initial idea to the business plan: Discover practical tools that accompany you step by step on your start-up journey. Whether business model development, financial planning or funding - here you will find digital helpers to make your startup easier. Further down you will find digital tools that will make work easier for you and your team.

The Berlin-Brandenburg Business Plan Competition (BPW) is Germany's largest regional start-up initiative with a wide range of free programmes for people interested in setting up a business in Berlin and Brandenburg. The BPW supports you in the creation of your business plan or a Business Model Canvas. You can expand your knowledge in the BPW Academy. You will receive feedback at the competition and can win prize money. The network helps you build up your own contacts for your start-up journey.

Get to know the free offers.

The business start-up portal of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWK) bundles background information, online tools, learning programmes and other practical aids on the topic of "business start-ups".

The centrepiece of the portal is the expert forum. Here, founders and young entrepreneurs can email questions to experts on all aspects of starting a business, such as start-up funding, pensions, marketing or developing a business plan.

In addition, the portal provides a wide range of publications for business start-ups for download, e.g. BMWK-GründerZeiten. This series of publications offers information, tips and assistance on various topics relating to start-up preparation and business management.

Click here to go to the BMWK start-up portal

The start-up platform accompanies you from the idea to its realisation - with interactive tools, helpful tips and direct access to experts in your region - from chambers of industry and commerce and state development institutions to credit and guarantee banks. This gives you exactly the advice and financing options that suit your project.

Your benefits:
✅ Structured start-up process
✅ Personal advice & suitable financing
✅ Secure account for your data.
✅ Flexible: You decide for yourself what information you share with advisors or banks - and when.
✅ Inspiration through real start-up stories

An offer from the Federal Ministry for Economy and Energy (BMWi) and the KfW, implemented with the support of BusinessPilot.

ðﾟﾑﾉ Click here to go directly to the start-up platform

Artificial intelligence is more than just a trend - it's a real game changer for founders. In our toolbox, you will find practical resources that will make it easier for you to enter the world of AI and provide you with targeted support in realising your start-up idea. We would particularly like to recommend two highlights:

ðﾟﾒﾼ Workshop: Business Plan & Pitch Deck Prompting

In this interactive self-study workshop, you will learn how to create your business plan and pitch deck efficiently and professionally with the help of AI - e.g. for EXIST or other competitions. You will receive structured prompts, helpful templates and strategic tips on how to present your start-up idea clearly and convincingly. AI takes on up to 80% of the work - you provide the vision, AI provides the structure. ðﾟﾑﾉ To the workshop

ðﾟﾎﾥ Video series: AI for founders

Our four-part video series gives you a quick and practical overview of how to cleverly integrate AI into your everyday start-up life:

  • AI basics: What you should know about AI as a founder
  • AI as a founding partner: Create pitch decks, HTML flyers & business plans faster and smarter
  • Audio & AI: Use voice AI for podcasts, transcriptions or meeting recordings
  • Prompt Engineering: Learn how to get better results from AI tools with the right questions

These videos will help you save time, automate processes and realise your ideas even more creatively.
ðﾟﾑﾉ To the video series - watch now and understand AI!

A big thank you goes to Viadrina founder and business consultant Jacob Thomsen, who appears in the video series as the deepfake version and brought the content to life with his expertise and a pinch of humour.

ðﾟﾒﾡ Tip: AI doesn't replace your ideas - it amplifies them. Use our tools to work more efficiently, make better decisions and take your startup to the next level.

If you have any questions or feedback: write to us at any time!

On Canva you create designs and edit them like a pro. Design flyers and posters, optimise images, convert PDFs, insert text into videos and much more. Canva is always free for individual users. Most of the images and graphics are then provided with a watermark. By upgrading to Canva Pro, you have access to over a million photos, graphics and fonts.

Hootsuite helps you plan and manage your social media posts so you can keep track of all your channels.

For fast and effective marketing campaigns, Mailchimp is ideal.

High-quality, licence-free photos can be found at Unsplash, for example. All images are published under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence. This means that you can use them free of charge for private and commercial purposes. Unsplash also offers practical functions such as the option to search for colours or keywords.

ðﾟﾑﾉ wir-gruenden-in-deutschland.de: Information & tips in 13 languages for founders from Germany and abroad - from visas to business plans.


ðﾟﾑﾉ make-it-in-germany.com: The German government's multilingual portal for international skilled workers and start-ups.

Business succession - an alternative to founding a new company


It's not just new companies that need founders - existing businesses are also looking for successors. The start-up service helps you to consider taking over an existing company as an option for your start in self-employment.

Useful tools such as the nexxt change succession exchange and the Brandenburg Succession Centre help you to find suitable companies in the region.

ðﾟﾑﾉ Interested? Feel free to contact us!

The Enterprise Workshop of the Chamber of Industry and Commerce provides digital support in the planning and realisation of your start-up - from the idea to the finished concept. The platform combines the advantages of digital tools with personal advice from experienced IHK experts.

In addition, you will find suitable regional offers from partners who will support you with your start-up project. You work in a password-protected area, can integrate partners such as tax consultants or banks and receive helpful tips and learning content directly in the platform.

Free of charge & usable at any time, the Unternehmenswerkstatt also offers you:
✅ Media library with start-up knowledge
✅ Exchange with other founders
✅ Events & further training
✅ Digital marketplace for offers & requests

ðﾟﾑﾉ More information and direct access

You often need your own website to start your own business. Tools such as WordPress, Wix or Squarespace offer simple modular systems - often even free of charge or with a student discount. Ideal for a quick start!

Digital tools

Whether it's brainstorming, task planning, team organisation, collaborative working or presenting & pitching - we'll show you helpful digital tools that will support you and your team productively.

Asana: is a popular tool that combines project management, task management and communication.

Notion is a productivity tool that allows you to create notes, manage tasks, manage projects and set bookmarks. As a networked workspace for wikis, documents and projects, you can write, plan and collaborate here - with a little help from AI.

Trello is easy to use and helps ToDos to manage small daily tasks as well as larger complex ToDos, alone or in a team, and to keep an eye on everything thanks to various project boards.

Mindmeister is a classic mind mapping tool digitised. This allows you to work on ideas together as a team at the same time.

cryptpad offers a variety of collaboration tools that encrypt your data in the browser before it is sent to the server and others.

Also hackmd or Etherpad make collapsed real-time editing of texts possible. Etherpad should never be used as a long-term repository for important/sensitive content (pads). The pads are cleaned up at regular intervals without archiving. The Viadrina Founders Center accepts no responsibility for the loss of content left in the pads.

Miro is an "infinite" online whiteboard. You can access documents directly from the whiteboard, for example you can also edit Google Docs documents in Miro.

Mural is an online whiteboard for visual collaboration. You can work with virtual post-its on the blank boards and arrange them freely.

Prezi is an online presentation programme with a structure similar to an interactive mind map. The programme is available for various operating systems and works with various apps and platforms.

Forrest: The focus app helps you to concentrate on your work for a certain period of time. You plant a digital tree, let it grow while you work and over time you have created a whole forest with your focus. But beware, if you stop before then the tree will break.

Rescue Time: How do you spend your time on your computer, phone or tablet? Rescue Time analyses your usage and divides it into productive and not-so-productive blocks.

Bring: Milk, eggs, bin liners. These are the things that usually pop into your head when you're doing the housework. Quickly type them into the Bring app and share them with a friend or flatmate. Whoever gets the things can delete them with one click.

Just say no: Do you want to stop bad habits? Then say no to swearing, boogying and smoking. The app helps you to document everything and remind you how good it is to say "no".

Coffitivity - With Coffitivity, you can record background noises from cafés to help increase productivity.

*These recommendations are primarily intended for private use by students and employees. You can find all of the university's official tools here.

Doodle or Dudle are uncomplicated tools for planning appointments.

Slack is a cross-device platform that helps teams keep track of things. You can use group channels, file sharing, tagging and mentions as well as many integrations to manage projects remotely and communicate in a topic-centred way.

Zoom, Go to Meeting, Jitsi and co. for digital meetings.

Start-up service

Visiting address

Viadrina Founders Center
Logenhaus (LH), Room K05
Logenstr. 11, Frankfurt (Oder)