The Masterplan
With Rania Lamprou, co-founder & CEO of Simpler.
There are two types of students. The first type isn't quite sure about their career path. They choose something they enjoy and see where it leads. This looks like my story. I liked finance but hadn't found my exact direction when I was at the university. I worked in audit and corporate finance before ending up in a bank (and leaving it quickly!). The second type of student knows exactly what they want, and this looks like Rania Lamprou's story.
Born and raised in Greece, Rania was a passionate traveler during her studies. After three years at the University of Athens, she moved to Zaragoza, Rotterdam, and Milan. During this time, a clear vision emerged: she wanted to build a startup. Highly determined, she carefully planned the first steps of her career. Her goal was to join early-stage companies and learn how to grow a business from 0 to 1. She wanted to work across different roles, stay close to key decision-makers, and gain as much knowledge as possible before launching her own venture.
Her first step took her to Silicon Valley — arguably the best place to learn about startups. At Pinnata, a B2C app with offices in Athens and the US, she worked directly with the CEO on fundraising and business development. Next, she moved to Avocarrot (later acquired by Glispa), where she worked in business development and product roles. Her final learning experience was back in Greece, serving as Director of Product at Market Group.
After six years exploring the tech world and learning everything about building a startup, Rania was ready. She had gained expertise in marketing, fundraising, sales, and product — creating the broad skill set she had always wanted.
It was time to take the leap.
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During her years in early-stage companies, Rania never lost sight of her ultimate goal: building a startup. She was always thinking about her next move, already in the ideation phase. It was in 2021, during the Covid pandemic, that the idea for Simpler was born. “I was renovating my apartment during Covid, and everything I wanted to buy had to be ordered online. I noticed the frustration of having to buy from different stores, dealing with different experiences, repeatedly entering the same information. After purchasing, it was chaos. I couldn't even remember what I'd ordered from where.”
This personal experience, combined with her understanding of the challenges of improving conversion rates for merchants, was the pivotal moment that gave birth to Simpler. The company's mission would be to simplify online purchasing, making it as easy as possible for customers to complete their transactions. This approach would help merchants increase their conversions and revenues.
To build Simpler, Rania brought on two university friends: Alex Kyriakopoulos and Spyros Mandekis. Together, they built a 5-person team and raised their first $1 million pre-seed round. To find their initial customers, Rania applied the sales skills she'd learned in previous jobs and developed a clever approach to reach merchants. “Instead of going directly to merchants, I approached the developers who build websites for these merchants. This strategy revealed an important go-to-market channel for us.”
But very quickly, the team encountered a significant challenge: the complexity of managing the entire checkout process. “We're building an end-to-end checkout platform that connects with everything a merchant needs. We're talking about payments, shipping, coupons, pricing rules, loyalty — basically everything. The tricky part is that every merchant's system is different. We have to integrate with these unique systems, and each has its own plugins and add-ons with specific needs. Our job is to take all of this complexity and transform it into a single, seamless experience that feels effortless for the shopper. That's what we do.”
Initially, the team believed they had created a self-serve product, but reality proved different. Many merchants struggled with integrations and configuration, trying to understand how Simpler could fit into their systems. Support tickets exploded, covering everything from API issues to coupon errors. This situation was unsustainable and clearly showed that significant improvements were needed — especially in the onboarding process. Without addressing these challenges, efficient scaling would have been impossible.
There's a saying in startup circles: If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. Rania explains that while this advice works in very early stages, it becomes problematic at scale. If a product causes friction or breaks frequently, growth will only magnify those problems. Scaling demands reliability more than speed. For the Simpler team, the crucial moment was recognizing that stability had to come before growth tactics. This meant investing heavily in the product, even if it temporarily slowed their progress.
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That strategic decision is proving successful.
Today, Simpler has over 250 merchants and more than half a million registered shoppers. The company expects to increase its revenue tenfold by the end of 2025. They recently raised €9 million in a pre-Series A round to expand into the U.K., Italy, and Spain. “We are focusing on Europe. That's why I'm based in London and spend a lot of time in Athens, where our product team is located,” Rania explains. “Our scaling strategy involves setting up local teams in key countries. We'll have sales and marketing teams in Spain, Italy, and France, while keeping our product and R&D team entirely in Greece.”
Rania has spent years preparing for this moment, which has helped Simpler avoid common startup mistakes. However, as she explains, no amount of preparation fully readies you for actually running a startup. Observing challenges and opportunities is one thing — being responsible for navigating them is entirely different. Despite the uncertainty, taking this leap is worth it. The rewards far outweigh the struggles. For those truly meant to build something, there's no more exciting place to be.
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Thomas