Building Business with TYPO3: A 90-Day Playbook for Agencies

Closing out the summit's talks, Luisa Sofie Faßbender, Senior Success Manager at TYPO3, made the case that the opportunity to build a business with TYPO3 isn't theoretical — it's already showing up in the numbers, and there's a clear path to act on it.

Luisa has been in the TYPO3 ecosystem since 2015: eight years as a project manager at an agency, three years at the TYPO3 company building out the European partner network, and seven years leading the TYPO3 Association's marketing team. That vantage point — agency side and company side — shaped a talk that moved quickly from "who's who" to "what do I do next."

Before getting into tactics, Luisa laid out the structure. The TYPO3 Association owns the brand and trademark and stewards a community of over 1,100 members. The TYPO3 company, founded in 2016, exists to help that community turn TYPO3 into commercial success — through services like Extended Long-Term Support (ELTS), certifications, and partnerships.

Membership scales with commitment: a community membership starts at €10 a year and comes with voting rights, while agency memberships run from silver up to gold and platinum, each tier unlocking deeper discounts on certifications, ELTS, and events.

Sitting on top of that is the partner program — 62 partners so far, split across consultant, solution, and technology partnerships. The benefits are concrete: 20–45% discounts on ELTS and a range of other service offerings, visibility through case studies, and the ability to offer clients an additional year of extended support compared to non-partners. In sectors like the public sector, where projects are complex and legacy structures are challenging to update quickly, that extra year isn't a nice-to-have — Luisa noted it's often the detail that wins the tender.

Luisa was direct about what a certification is and isn't. It's not a badge you buy — it's verified knowledge, organized into four tracks: editors, integrators, developers, and consultants. In the German tender market specifically, she pointed out that procurement teams actively screen for these credentials as evidence of capability, not just branding.

This is where the talk shifted from context to a market signal. TYPO3 sits at roughly 0.5–0.69% of the global web. Unremarkable on its own — until you look at the DACH region, where the share concentrates hard in specific sectors:

• Higher Education: 48% of German universities and higher-education institutions run on TYPO3
• Public Transportation: roughly a third of public transit websites in DACH
• Healthcare: 53.66% of university clinics in the DACH region
• Health Insurance: 47% of German health insurance providers
• Government: 43% of federal states, and close to a quarter of German cities

The German government's own decision to standardize on TYPO3 for its website builder wasn't incidental — Luisa framed it as a digital sovereignty choice, made because TYPO3 already had the governance and access-control features other systems would need plugins to approximate.

That concentration also points to where the growth is. About 76% of TYPO3 installations still sit in DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), but Luisa was clear-eyed that North America is a market TYPO3 has yet to establish itself in — with governance, security, and the same enterprise-grade sectors (government, education, transportation, healthcare) as the ideal entry point.

None of this works as a pitch without the product holding up, and Luisa kept this section tight: granular access management, predictable release cycles, up to seven years of long-term support, and consistently strong Core Web Vitals performance. The architecture is composable by design — built to drop into infrastructure that already exists rather than demand a rebuild.

Luisa closed with something rare in a talk like this: a plan you can start on the way out of the room.

1. Give it a try. Spin it up with DDEV and Composer, use the online demo, or clone the try-typo3 GitHub repo.
2. Communicate. Join the Slack community — over 10,000 members deep — for real-time help and resources.
3. Become a member. Silver-level membership is the low-friction way to signal commitment and unlock discounts.
4. Get certified. The new certification bundle comes with mock exams built in.
5. Spread the word. Help build the business case for TYPO3 on the ground in the U.S.

The takeaway: building a business with TYPO3 isn't about flaunting a bigger market share headline — it's about recognizing where TYPO3 already dominates, understanding why, and having a concrete next step ready when the opportunity in front of you looks like one of those sectors. As Luisa put it, if you're ever stuck, the partner network is one email away.