Sugar-Free, From Scratch: How Alexandra Pocol Built Simply Keto

When Alexandra Pocol opened the doors of her café in Berlin, the first people who walked in eating a ketogenic diet were the only ones she had ever met in real life who did. "We were absolute aliens," she says. "Otherwise, everyone thought I was crazy." There was, at the time, almost nothing like it in Germany. A decade later, that café has become Simply Keto: a bootstrapped online business of around thirty people, roughly seventy of its own products, and a community that travels across the country to buy sugar-free cake.

It is the kind of story Vivid likes to tell. An operator who could not stop herself from building, who learned to let go in order to grow, and who, at the most precarious moment of all, found that the financial tool she had chosen almost by accident was the one still standing.

The Convert

Alexandra Pocol did not set out to sell keto. She was, by her own account, the opposite of a believer. "I was a high-carb vegan back then, and I thought that fat was generally bad and carbohydrates were incredibly important," she says. The turn came through her then-partner, an entrepreneur with no time to think about food, who came home one day and announced he was giving up carbohydrates entirely, and proceeded to eat the same five things every day. Worried he was harming himself, she started researching, assembling a weekly information sheet for him to read on weekends: what is keto, why is it good, what could go wrong.

After three weeks of her own research, something shifted. "It sounded like the solution to all my problems," she says: the afternoon energy crashes, the poor immune system, the allergies she had simply assumed were normal in someone "super healthy." Three months of info sheets later, she tried it herself. The results were fast and personal. The allergies disappeared, the afternoon naps were no longer necessary, her sleep and digestion improved. When her father changed his diet too, he lost weight he had never managed to lose before and, she says, no longer needed his asthma spray or his diabetes medication.

That was the moment the vegan became the founder. "I thought, okay, wow, keto is the answer," she says. "And then I founded, very spontaneously and very impulsively, with a café, because I wanted to do something."

Selling the Impossible

What she wanted was not a clinic and not a lecture. She had considered becoming a nutritional adviser and rejected it. "I wanted to show people that you can eat cake and things like that, just without sugar," she says. "That you can have a healthy diet without giving everything up, because that is not sustainable. For anyone. Nobody wants to give up everything for their whole life."

The café, she says, was the world's first full-on keto shop. People made pilgrimages to it from the airport; some rented rooms on the street nearby just to have breakfast there. Then the customers started asking for more: baking mixes, baked goods they could eat at home, because they could not come in from Hamburg every week. So Simply Keto became a shop as well as a café, and Pocol became a one-woman production line. "We are bootstrapped, we have no outside capital," she says. "I baked for the café during the day, stood in the café all day, and then baked for the online shop at night." In the early hours, before opening, the team of Robert, herself and two part-timers packed the parcels.

The ambition, even then, was bigger than a bakery. Today the company carries around seventy of its own products alongside third-party ones. "You can get pretty much everything from us," she says. "That was the goal from the start: to be a kind of marketplace for keto."

Learning to Let Go

The hardest lesson of growth, Pocol says, was that she could no longer do everything herself. She remembers going into production at night after her own work, trying to help, and seeing the next day that it had made no difference at all, "a drop in the ocean." Now responsible for around thirty people, she has moved from baking, shipping, content and recipe development to running the company and leading marketing, while the rest happens, increasingly, without her.

"Without letting go, delegating, handing over, you cannot grow, because I simply cannot do everything that is needed," she says. The nuance she insists on is timing. Early on, before you can tell a strong hire from a weak one, you hold the reins tightly; hand over too soon, to someone you are unsure of, and quality can backfire. But once you find people who are genuinely excellent, and the difference, she says, is obvious quickly, the imperative reverses. "Then it is very important to give them a lot of responsibility quickly and not micromanage them. Good employees want to carry responsibility. They want to do their job."

Her closest example is Luisa, now the company's operations manager and, Pocol says, her best friend, a friendship that grew out of working together rather than the other way around. Luisa first turned up as an unpaid volunteer at a trade fair, when Simply Keto had no money for staff, and worked, Pocol recalls, like a top employee from the first day. It took Pocol a year to work up the courage to ask her to join. "Luisa is my Swiss army knife. She does everything," she says. "I can put her anywhere. Without Luisa, I would honestly want to close the whole place down." Around her sits a wider team that includes Lea, who develops the brand's sugar-free, ketogenic, gluten-free recipes and the content that carries them.

Luisa is my Swiss army knife. She does everything. Without Luisa, I would honestly want to close the whole place down.

Alexandra Pocol, Founder, Simply Keto

The Stress Test

Building a business with someone you love, Pocol is candid, is a stress test that not every relationship survives. She has lost friendships to it. She would not, she says, found a company with a partner again. "You never get a break from each other; you work together all the time, and then you go home together too." And yet she is glad she did. Her former business partner, Robert, has since left the company to do something else with his life, and the two remain friends; he still helps her keep it going. "We parted entirely on good terms," she says.

The lowest point came when Robert told her he wanted to leave. "There was the moment when I really thought I would throw it all in, because I never wanted to do this without him," she says. "I cried every evening for weeks." What kept her in was the team. Luisa told her she was not alone; the thirty people around her, she discovered, had none of the fear she did. "They had complete trust in me," she says. "I had built myself a little bubble here, with people I genuinely like. It is actually a bit like family. And that is why giving up is simply not an option."

Her advice to anyone tempted to start a company with friends is neither a warning nor a cheer. Choose very carefully, she says, and weigh in advance whether the person can handle conflict, because conflict will always come. The relationships that break under it, she argues, were probably not the ones worth keeping. "It is basically a fast-forward button. It shows you faster who really fits and who does not." On conflict itself, her method is plain: regulate yourself first, sleep on it, and then raise it constructively. "Don't swallow it. Everything that gets swallowed becomes a much bigger drama later."

The Thing Nobody Warns You About

For the first three years, Pocol had no holiday at all and worked six or seven days a week. The biggest surprise of the whole journey, she says, was simply how much work it would be, a thing she had heard about and, like most first-time founders, quietly assumed would not apply to her. "I had often heard that you shouldn't start a company just for the sake of it," she says, "only if you can't do otherwise, if you absolutely have to. I would now sign that one hundred percent."

She does not romanticise it, and she warns others not to either. The difference between a passion project and a business, she says, is that you can no longer do it only when you feel like it. "It is like a child. It needs care when it needs care, not when you feel like it."

A business is like a child. It needs care when it needs care, not when you feel like it.

Alexandra Pocol, Founder, Simply Keto

She closed the café during Corona, when the online shop was growing so fast that the physical business had become a split focus. It was a hard call, and, commercially, the right one. The growth has been relentless: in the first six years, she says, the company doubled every year, with social media as a major engine and a new product launching, for a stretch, roughly every two weeks. It now occupies a cluster of brick buildings on an island in Berlin, a setting Pocol spotted from her bicycle and refused to let go of.

The Account That Was Still Standing

Pocol is, by her own admission, not someone who enjoys "bank stuff." Vivid changed that. "It is so well structured, you very quickly understand your whole cash flow," she says. "You can tag everything beautifully, then you can really see where the money is flowing, what is coming next, what is still outstanding." For a bootstrapped business that has always run on a tight budget, that clarity is not cosmetic. It is how she keeps liquidity in view, plans ahead, and works out where she can save.

What won her over was less a single feature than the experience of using it. The app turned a chore she had always avoided into something she actively wanted to open, and for an operator running a lean business on her own, that habit pays off in the simplest currency there is: she always knows where things stand.

She is enough of a convert that her plans for the future include it. If she ever opens another store, and a pop-up café remains, she admits, a project of the heart, she would use Vivid's payment system without hesitation. "I'm super happy with the app," she says. "I can't imagine it being anything other than just as good."

For a woman who once believed fat was the enemy and built a company out of changing her own mind, that may be the most fitting endorsement of all: a tool she did not plan to depend on, chosen on instinct, that turned out to be exactly what the business needed when everything else had stopped.