About us
A small, experienced product studio from Nuremberg. We have shipped digital products since 1998—and our focus has not changed: technology should help real people, not get in their way.
Dear Friend was founded by Werner Hoier, who has worked in professional digital product development since 1998. As co-founder of Streetspotr and creator of miCal, he helped set early benchmarks for successful mobile and platform products in Europe.
For more than ten years we built for agencies, mid-size companies, enterprises, and startups—while launching our own ideas along the way. In 2017 we left the agency world to focus on digital products with lasting value: less disposable marketing, more usefulness for the people who actually use what we ship.
Today we concentrate on our own apps, and we take on selective collaborations when we can make a genuine difference—always with the same standards: honest partnership, clear thinking, and products built for real problems.
User-centered—in the age of AI
AI has made building faster than ever. That makes user-centered product work more important, not less. When everything can be generated at speed, the hard questions return to the surface: Whose problem are we solving? Does this help someone in daily life? Is it trustworthy, understandable, and worth their time?
We use AI in our own work—research, prototyping, writing, and implementation. It is a powerful tool in the studio. But we do not treat model output as the product. We stay close to users, validate assumptions early, and keep humans in the loop for decisions that matter. Speed supports craft; it does not replace it.
That mindset shapes the apps we build and the partners we work with: privacy where it counts, interfaces that respect attention, and technology that earns trust over time.
We are digital natives across mobile, web, and platforms. Each of us goes deep in design, product, or engineering, with enough breadth across the rest to ship coherently—as a small team, that holistic view is still what good products require.
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