obob is an easy to use, yet powerful photo tool for professionals working in teams, on the field and in the office. It was created by Moritz Schroeder, Tim Loewel and Killian Eckle. Making a photo with obob means automatically capturing, documenting and organising all the necessary data around the photo. Find out why obob is a product-market fit, what type of investors they’re looking to attract, and why they chose Leapfunder as their online funding platform.
1. Hi Moritz, thank you for agreeing to do the interview. Tell us about obob, the idea that got it all started and the amazing team behind it.
Thanks for having me! For angels, obob is a scalable business in a market that is hungry for practical digital applications and simple tools that save time. For users, obob is an app that captures valuable pictures in one click. The app automatically collects essential context-related data and complements the photo with this information, making the pictures instantly readable to whoever is looking at them. These photographs then serve as valuable business and project data.
The construction industry is a cash-rich market where inefficiencies are widespread, and having a good understanding of how people work in this sector, I saw the need for a simple and usable solution, like obob. The inspiration came due to my time as CMO for Hoccer, a gesture-based file sharing app.
After the first year of development, Würth became interested in our project. They developed a platform and offered us to participate in their project, so Tim and Killian joined Würth IT. obob and Würth now have a revenue share deal.
As for our team, we have Christiaan Janssens, who is managing our developers; John Agricola who is the Project Manager for large customers; Peter Konhäusner who is the CFO; and lastly, Oliver Pritzkow who is in charge of social media. Despite our very different backgrounds, we have a strong common goal: to make the startup fly. Moreover, we are always on the look-out for new people to further grow our business.
2. What problems are you trying to solve? What are the benefits of obob and why is it a product-market fit?
Over 180 million people work on construction sites and millions more in infrastructure and facility management. Every day, the majority of them take up to a hundred photos. These photos are subsequently sent to the office or copied onto hard drives. They are spread over different devices and systems and often get lost or forgotten. Most of the pictures portray projects, however, without the proper meaning and purpose, the context behind them is quickly lost. Consequently, this can result in risk exposure and liability threats in all project phases for construction businesses.
When capturing photos with obob, your pictures immediately contain all vital context information, and they are directly shared and stored. An extra benefit of the app is that you can easily search for specific photographs in your archive. The second main advantage is the time-saving aspect. Using obob enables the user to save an hour per day at least because they don’t have to label and sort the pictures anymore. obob is the photo component for sophisticated enterprise resource planning systems.
3. How much growth potential do you see for obob and what type of investors are you looking to attract?
In the long run, we need a B2C approach and an easy functioning app that is instantly useful and addictive because we want to become the photo app for these 180 million professionals. For short and medium-term revenues, we focus on firms that have more than 100 employees and have a significant amount of people out in the field. Regarding the supply side, we want to showcase how we can accelerate deals for salespeople if their customers share construction site photographs. The pictures taken with the app would become more valuable straightaway, and for us, it would mean a new, highly profitable business.
We tapped into a market with enormous upselling and scaling potential. Investing in obob is an excellent opportunity for Leapfunder angels, especially those who are well connected to industries that can benefit from obob; for example, construction, FM, infrastructure and insurance. The Netherlands, Scandinavia and the UK are particularly interesting for us because of advanced high-tech technologies and documentation requirements. We can assure that language is no barrier for us!
4. You chose Leapfunder as your online funding platform. What makes it the right tool for your startup, and what do you expect from the round?
We truly liked the simplicity of Leapfunder, both for startups and angels. Leapfunder is the right tool for us because of process standardisation and the cap table remaining clean. Besides that, there are fair rules for all parties involved. For obob, this is already the second round. Where else could we have done that without any complications?
We want to expand our development and operations to grow solid business revenue this year. We can take the market by storm, so let’s get our first big chunk!
5. What are your plans for the upcoming months? Tell us about your go-to-market strategy and the plan to acquire customers.
After our first revenue-generating partnerships with some corporations last year, we now have a pipeline to create regular revenues from both corporations and medium-sized enterprises. Besides this, the supply industry has finally woken up to obob’s potential. Digitalisation is a top priority, and they all have budgets that do not directly link to their core activities. They all want access to people using their products and building materials.
Thank you for sharing obob’s story, Moritz! We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavours.
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