Just Forward is a Frankfurt-based strategy consulting firm founded by Cord Schmidt. Their mission is clear: help Germany’s famous Mittelstand companies (typically €50M - €300M in revenue) figure out what artificial intelligence really means for their future.
Cord and his team work directly with C-level executives, giving them a strategic lens on AI and the potential risks they face, what new opportunities they can unlock, and how their businesses might transform in the years ahead.
“We want to make AI strategy tangible for executives,” Cord explains. “We look to help our clients cut costs, increase efficiency and elevate productivity from a perspective of growth.”
Beyond consulting, Just Forward is also standing behind their own beliefs and building its own dashboard that essentially helps CEOs navigate not just AI, but also their industry through identifying the best tools like FounderNest, so the market landscape becomes very clear. This is currently being tested with several clients and will be an important part of their strategy next year.
Before using FounderNest, Just Forward had a familiar problem that a lot of organizations face: the data was out there, but gathering it was a slow, messy process with a huge amount of noise to sift through to get any real value. This meant that they felt they weren’t fully informed about any given space or industry.
On a daily basis they had to piece together information from lots of traditional databases such as Crunchbase, Google, ChatGPT, other databases and manual scraping. Cord comments, “Having a comprehensive view of a space was becoming more difficult and what drew me to FounderNest was the way it collates all the data automatically in a super smooth way. It’s a lot better than the other tools I was using.”
Other challenges that Cord faced included running deep dives into certain spaces, which again “took a boatload of hours”, according to Cord. Just Forward’s typical approach is to really understand their clients and ask questions such as ‘What does your market look like?” “What does your competition look like?” or “What is it that you’re really trying to solve?” Once they have this information they need to show the most relevant companies from startups to new players and competitive information to market trends. To fully achieve this the research required hours of stitching datasets together, often with help from freelancers or students, meaning deep dives would drag on for weeks with additional costs.
Even after all that effort, Cord and the team still worried they were missing important players or market signals.
“The hardest part wasn’t just finding data, it was trusting the quality of it,” Cord says. “We could spend days pulling things together and still feel unsure if we were really seeing the whole picture.”
For a consultancy that prides itself on agility and comprehensiveness, this wasn’t sustainable and something had to change.
When Cord first tried FounderNest, three things stood out immediately:
“FounderNest brings everything together in a smooth way, and has a huge dataset for us to tap into.” says Cord. “And what really put it over the top was the personal touch. The customer success experience has been one of the best I’ve ever had. It honestly felt more like a partnership than a vendor relationship. Definitely one of the best, if not the best onboarding experiences I had.”
These days, FounderNest is part of Just Forward’s everyday consulting toolkit.
FounderNest’s ability to uncover relevant companies and map a space comprehensively through natural language is a real game-changer for Cord. He says “FounderNest’s natural language is very intuitive and makes our scouting incredibly easy. It’s such an interesting tool and that’s why we love using it.”
Cord also mentions that his clients usually have a list of companies or competitors but want further clarification. “Clients usually come to us with a list of competitors that are already on their radar,” Cord says. “With FounderNest, we can tell them: ‘Yes, but here’s who you’ve missed, and here’s where the real innovation is happening.’ That’s incredibly valuable and our clients love that we can offer that.”
The impact of switching to FounderNest has been big and measurable for Just Forward. From cost savings to saving weeks of additional work are the two big benefits they have seen. Here are some of the results Cord shared with us:
“If you added up the hours our freelancers used to spend, it was a boatload,” says Cord. “Now FounderNest does the heavy lifting. We get to spend our time on strategy instead of cleaning spreadsheets.”
The real win? Clients are surprised by what they learn.
“FounderNest gives us the confidence to show clients the competitors and innovators they didn’t know existed. That makes the conversations much more forward-looking.”
As Just Forward rolls out its AI dashboard for CEOs, FounderNest is set to play an even bigger role, integrating directly into the product to provide continuous insights.
“The more comprehensive and seamless the workflow becomes, the more valuable FounderNest is,” Cord says. “If we can spend less time cleaning data and more time designing strategies, that’s where the real impact is.”
For Just Forward, AI isn’t just a buzzword, but instead it’s leading the future of consulting. And FounderNest is helping them deliver it.
“FounderNest isn’t just a tool,” Cord concludes. “It’s a partner that helps us keep our clients one step ahead in an AI-driven world.”
Cord is also excited by the new features FounderNest is launching such as our AI columns where it lets you ask any question across hundreds or thousands of companies - like ‘Is this company active in the U.S.?’ and get clear, structured answers through the AI engine. Cord goes on to say, “With FounderNest’s AI columns, we can ask a single question across an entire dataset and get instant answers. What used to take hours of manual checking now happens in seconds, and it makes our client recommendations far more precise.”
“FounderNest’s natural language is very intuitive and makes our scouting incredibly easy. It’s such an interesting tool and that’s why we love using it.”
Cord Schmidt (Co-founder and Managing Director)
