My name is Masiha Arsalan and I’m the co-founder and Business Development Director of Fluid Work. My professional background comes from biotechnology: I’ve been working in this field for about 7 years.
In 2023, my 2 close friends and I decided to start Fluid Work. Since then, we’ve been advising companies and helping them transform their way of working for our rapidly changing environment: we do marketing, develop mobile apps, digitalize operations, and more.
My friends and I have known each other for 15 years, and we’ve been through hell and high water together. We used to work for big companies where we had great ideas, but implementing them right away was hard.
At some point, we realized it was now or never. We understood that building a business would become harder with wives and kids, so we knew we had to do it before then. And here we are. Having started from scratch, we now have numerous employees, from developers to marketers, and our own office.
Of course, our journey hasn’t always been smooth. One of the most difficult things for us is dealing with the German way of thinking. People here like to stick to what works well and don’t like new things.
But we’re determined to change that. We see a lot of potential in the German market. And we understand the German mentality really well – we grew up here.
There was one particular moment when I realized that we were moving in the right direction, and it had nothing to do with numbers.
Once upon a time, we met a boy who was looking for an internship for his school. We took him in and showed him how our business worked. After the internship was over, his teacher called us and told us that we had inspired the boy to work in our field. We are committed to expanding in this direction: encouraging young people to find themselves.
Our greatest achievement is inspiring the people we hire and work with. After all, business is all about people. Money can’t give you the validation that comes from a person showing their gratitude.
I’m the finance guy at Fluid Work, so I know how to handle money. When one of my business partners introduced me to Finom, we started using it immediately, mainly because of the low fees. Here in Germany, we have to pay fees for basically everything, so it was a game changer.
Money transfers are really convenient, it’s easy to create invoices and see what’s due. I also like the ability to store documents and the intuitive interface. And the support is great, they respond really fast.
I really like this one quote: ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.’ That’s why I would tell other aspiring entrepreneurs out there to never ever doubt themselves. Believe me, you don’t want to look back and think, ‘Why didn't I do that?’