Michael Wallbaum

I build the systems businesses actually run on - the operational half nobody sees. Fifteen years of it, mostly information systems and the integration work that holds them together.

Göttingen, then Hamburg, then six years working from Berlin, London, Singapore, Bangkok, Tokyo and Brisbane. Austin, Texas since 2024. I hunt down rare beans for the perfect cup, which is roughly how the current project started.

Now

Building effizient, the operating system for food and beverage producers and distributors - businesses that make or move perishable goods and sell them wholesale, online and out of their own stores. It starts where the daily pain is: ordering, catalogs and pricing, accounting that reconciles itself. Then the harder question - given everything committed to ship, and everything that can be made or bought in time, is this business about to come up short? Payments and working capital sit on top of that.

Coffee is where it started and where it still lives. Roasting is one of the better operational puzzles in food: green bought by the lot months ahead, a roast schedule that has to satisfy orders nobody has placed yet, freshness measured in days, and a wholesale book where every café pays its own price. One roaster runs their whole business on it today - wholesale, online and their own cafés, hundreds of delivery locations, and years of order history carried across from the system they left.

Working with roasters, and then talking to people in craft beer and spirits, tea, olive oil and meat, the same problems kept turning up wearing different vocabulary. So what sits underneath is built for all of them - though coffee is where the depth is, and where it stays.

Before

Co-founded Firal, a referral marketing platform that began as Pay with a Tweet, where I was CTO. Aklamio acquired it. Earlier, engineering at Mondosano in Hamburg and RewardMe in Göttingen.

effizient ran as a software consultancy from 2017 until it became a product: enterprise integrations at Aklamio, banking and financial data pipelines at HomeRun, fulfilment and delivery systems for an online grocery platform, Shopify B2B and wholesale builds for merchants across several categories. Several of them came through Storetasker, where I worked as a Shopify technical architect.

Elsewhere

LinkedIn: The full work history, and the best way to reach me.
GitHub: Public repositories.
shopexperts: Verified profile and client reviews.
effizient.io: The product, and who it is for.