About SmartKeys
SmartKeys is a working notebook for people who run things: founders, small teams, and operators who have to pick software, live with the choice, and explain it to someone else later.
I’m Felix Römer, and I publish SmartKeys from Ramstein, a small town in southwest Germany. Nothing here is written from a distance. My test bench is a real company. I lead e-commerce and IT at a German online retailer, so when I write about a support automation or a time-blocking routine, it is because I built it, ran it on actual customers or my own calendar, and watched what happened.
No agency behind this. No writing team. One person with 15 years of building and scaling online shops, writing down what held up.
Felix Römer
Founder and Publisher, SmartKeys.org
Featured in
Interviews and expert quotes on other publications, most of them about systems I run day to day.
InterviewA full interview about SmartKeys and the thinking behind it.Read the interview
Expert quoteOn the support automation we built at Simon Profi-Technik, in a roundup of 25 processes worth automating.Read the piece
Expert quoteOn delegating work to software without losing quality, from a piece on how leaders delegate.Read the piece
Expert quoteOn the post-purchase newsletter signup that reached an 11 percent opt-in rate.Read the pieceWhat you’ll find here
Four categories, a podcast, and a newsletter. More than 800 articles so far, and the Latest feed shows what went up this week.
The SaaS and AI tool reviews are the core of the site. I sign up, pay, and run the tool inside a live workflow before I write a word. You get the real price, the limits that bite, what broke, and who should skip it.
Productivity covers routines and systems I have tried on my own week. If it did not survive a Monday, it is not on the site.
Business trends looks at markets, pricing models, and regulation, and what they change for a small company. Written by someone who has a planning call on Friday, not by a think tank.
Future of work follows how jobs, teams, and skills are shifting inside companies, and what I would actually do about it. Less panic, more planning.
Tools
There is also a small Tools page with one thing on it: a free Privacy Policy Generator. I built it because writing a privacy policy is where small teams stall, and I was tired of stalling myself. No signup, and it exports HTML you can paste into WordPress.
I am not turning SmartKeys into a tool company. If a second tool ever appears, it will be because I needed it first.
How I work
The method is not complicated. I take a tool or a method, put it into a real process, and leave it there long enough to see the side effects. Two weeks is usually the minimum, and some things stay for a year. Then I write down the setup, the numbers if there are any, and the moment it annoyed me.
Articles get updated when a product changes its pricing or I find a better way. The date at the top of every piece is real, and I would rather update an old review than publish a new one that says the same thing.
How I use AI on this site
Fair question for a site that reviews AI tools. Here is the short version, with the story behind it.
In 2026 I built an AI support agent for the shop I run. It reads incoming tickets, checks the order in our ERP, drafts an answer from a knowledge base we wrote ourselves, and hands anything it is unsure about to a human. Today it answers two to three times the volume of one support employee. Getting there took months, a lot of wrong answers in the test phase, and a confidence score we tuned until we stopped wincing. I learned two things from that: AI is very good at the repetitive middle of a job, and it needs a person at both ends.
That is exactly how it works here. AI helps me with research, first drafts, transcripts, and the boring parts of editing. It does not test the tools, it does not form the opinions, and it does not hit publish. Every article is read, corrected, and often rewritten by me before it goes live. The verdicts are mine. If a piece reads like it was generated instead of lived, I have missed my own standard, and I want to know.
Independence
SmartKeys earns money through affiliate links and a few selected partnerships. That is what pays for hosting, podcast production, and the tool subscriptions I burn through for reviews. Affiliate links are labelled. When a vendor gives me access to a product, the article says so. If a commission ever changed a verdict, this site would be worth nothing, so it does not.
Who this is for
You build or run something digital. A shop, a SaaS product, a small team, a business of one. You like systems that hold up and tools that remove work instead of adding it. If that is you, you will feel at home. Beginners get starting points they can copy. Experienced readers get the parts I would normally only tell a colleague over coffee.
The person behind it
I have worked in e-commerce since 2010. First as a freelancer building websites and doing SEO for clients, then with my own company, RömerIT, where I ran international online shops for licensed merchandise and sold mostly into the US. From 2017 to 2021 I was CIO at Power Play Ventures, working on a trading platform for the energy market.
Since 2019 I have been at Simon Profi-Technik in Kaiserslautern, one of Germany’s larger online retailers for garden and forestry equipment, and since the end of 2024 I lead e-commerce and IT there. The stack I work in every day is Magento 2, Klaviyo, Zendesk, an ERP, and a growing set of automations built with n8n. Online revenue tripled during my years there, support response times dropped by 45 percent, and in 2026 we put an AI agent into the support queue. That is the environment the SmartKeys articles come from.
I started SmartKeys in 2024 because the useful knowledge in this industry rarely gets written down. It sits in Slack threads and in the heads of people who are too busy to publish. SmartKeys is where I write it down.
Prefer to listen?
Most SmartKeys deep dives are also an episode of the SmartKeys Podcast. Same analysis, recorded for the drive to work.
Get the newsletter
Join 3,000+ readers. New tool verdicts, workflow guides, and trend briefings, sent when they go live. Free, and you can leave with one click.
Get in touch
If you want me to test a specific tool, tell me. Reader requests do get built. If you found an error, I would rather hear about it than not.
Email:
Contact form: smartkeys.org/contact
LinkedIn: Felix Römer and the SmartKeys page