Hello, I am asking whether anyone here has used the "gründerzuschuss" financial support that is offered to unemployed people who would like to start their own business in Germany? Did it work well for you? Anything you wish you had known?

As background, I have a PhD from the USA and came to Germany as a postdoctoral employee. My postdoc turned out to be a bit of a nightmare due to the hierarchy and limitations of the job, but I still finished my contract term, and landed in a state of unemployment. Along the way I realized that 82% of scientists and artists in Germany 🇩🇪 are on temporary contracts [1], meaning that there is something deeply wrong with expecting scientific employment to serve as a stable foundation for one's economic life. I need to seek a more sustainable job and am considering being self-employed, although I am worried that the taxes, retirement contributions, and health insurance fees may be so high that the headaches and financial pain could outweigh the benefits.

Also as background: I imagine myself creating a services company, using my doctoral training in USA anthropology and my prior experience as a writing teacher to help EU social scientists publish their results in USA-based journals. 🎓 You may ask: is there a market for this? I would respond that my former research group did pay for both writing seminars and also language editing, and they were quite fluent but not native speakers; also, the rhetorical structures of qualitative nonfiction can be nationally-specific, hard to understand and deploy, and generally worth talking about.

My German is only A1 but next week onwards, I will be taking an integration course. Plus, I have been here 4 years so I have hopefully gained some baseline cultural competence along the way 🤣

Thanks in advance if anyone wants to tell me about their personal thought process regarding the gründerzuschuss in Bayern, or their experiences reaching out for it while an unemployed foreigner!

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/research-metrics-and-analytics/articles/10.3389/frma.2024.1301354/full

by Significant-Tip-2327

1 comment

  1. A1 German is not sufficient to navigate self-employment in Germany. I suspect that you’ll not have enough paying customers to be able to afford enough professional assistance.

    Although I definitely agree that there is a need for proofreading of academic papers, I think that Geiz ist Geil in Germany.

    Have you tried contacting potential clients and asking how much they’d bw willing to pay? In my experience many people don’t realise how much time and effort it takes.

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