We are publishers who build software – not the other way round.
hc-digitalsysteme is the B2B brand of Munich-based happycolorz GmbH. Our mission: help media companies get to AI systems that pay off in daily use – with the honesty of people who have to earn their own reach every month.
From family project to working lab for AI in publishing.
It did not start with a consulting concept, but with a content portal in the family segment: built alongside the day job, grown over years, driven by the question of how a small team can create publishing quality and reach at the same time. Today that portal reaches 500,000+ monthly users, runs a shop with personalised products and a community with 200+ reviews.
The turning point came when we started bringing AI systematically into our own workflows: research support, editing, tagging, SEO workflows, quality assurance. Not as an experiment, but under production conditions – with real deadlines, real costs and real readers. We learned what works, what fails, and how to tell the difference early.
hc-digitalsysteme grew out of that knowledge: the offer to shorten for other media companies the path we walked ourselves. We know both sides of the table – the publisher who answers for reach and revenue every month, and the engineer who builds reliable systems for exactly that. Our own survey with 2,000+ participants, distributed via Presseportal/dpa and picked up by Merkur.de among others, also taught us how data-driven communication builds authority. We pass that playbook on to our clients, too.
What we stand for.
Honesty before contracts
If a use case does not pay off for you, we say so – even if it costs us a project. Long term, that is our best marketing.
Practice before theory
We recommend nothing we have not operated or built ourselves. Our portal is our lab; your project is not an experiment.
Respect for journalism
With us, AI does not replace editorial responsibility. It relieves routine so more time remains for what humans do better.
Enabling sovereignty
You should not have to need us: documented systems, trained teams, hand-over-ready code. Dependency is not a business model.
The people behind it.
With a boutique you don't buy a brand, you buy people. You work directly with the people on this page – not with a sales team that disappears after the contract is signed.
Mathias Ziegler
Founder & Managing Director
Has been building digital publishing products for more than a decade and is responsible for strategy, product and the daily AI practice in happycolorz GmbH's own portal.
Our network
Depending on the project, we extend the core team with experienced specialists for data engineering, MLOps and editorial processes – well-rehearsed, not cast together ad hoc.
Short and verifiable.
- Monthly users on our own portal
- 500,000+
- Years of digital publishing experience
- 10+
- Participants in our own survey
- 2,000+
- Based in
- Munich
How hc-digitalsysteme and happycolorz relate.
hc-digitalsysteme is a brand of happycolorz GmbH (Munich, registered at Amtsgericht München, HRB 244438). Under happycolorz we run our own content portal – our sister project and at the same time the working lab from which this consulting and development offering emerged. The contracting party for all hc-digitalsysteme services is happycolorz GmbH. Separate brand, same accountability.
For the practice details, see our case study; for how we work, see our approach.
Meet us in person.
Thirty minutes on a video call, no slide battle: you tell us where your company stands – we tell you what we would do with it.