Sumit Kumar started paying attention to his own finances in 2018 and began investing in stocks. The tools available to German retail investors frustrated him. The most capable option had to be installed locally and looked dated, so in January 2020 he started building his own tracker, then called Tresor One, as a side project while working full time as an early employee at Stripe. He solved his own problem first and kept the scope tiny on purpose: one broker, one language, one currency, one market, one asset class.

About three months after launch he introduced a paid plan and the first subscribers arrived. Rather than spend on ads, he built portfolio sharing directly into the product so users would show their dashboards inside Germany's active retail-investing community, and he added an affiliate program so others handled acquisition while he focused on conversion, churn, and the product itself. By the end of the first year the product was at roughly €15k MRR, and it crossed €17k MRR with about 100,000 registered users later in 2021.

The narrow focus was the whole strategy. By being German-only, Parqet could go deeper on local brokers and tax details than any international competitor, which made it the clear best option for its audience. Sumit ran it almost entirely solo at first, getting up at 6am to code before work, continuing through lunch breaks, evenings, and weekends. He has been candid that the pace was unhealthy, and after three years he reached a breaking point: either stop Parqet or leave Stripe.

In January 2022 he quit Stripe to work on Parqet full time. A rebrand from Tresor One to Parqet, forced partly by a cease-and-desist over a similar name, meant rebuilding the brand inside six months. The business stayed bootstrapped and profitable throughout, which Sumit argues became an advantage in 2022 when venture funding tightened and competitors had to pivot toward profitability while Parqet simply kept going. By an August 2024 interview he reported the product was around $108k MRR, still focused on the DACH region.