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Congratulations on taking Flissade from concept to a pilot project. Who is your client and how did you  make your first deal?

Our client for our pilot project is the energy supplier in Munich, Stadtwerke München. SWM is a very large infrastructure company. In addition to the energy supply for the city they are also responsible for the underground lines and other public services.

We have been in contact with the Stadtwerke for three years. We were interested in contacting them because they are one of the top land owners in Munich. They have access to many of the last available plots in the city, which have come from changes to the city’s infrastructure. For example, when a heating plant area is no longer in use and is going to be closed, these areas become available for Stadtwerke’s redevelopment into housing ­developments, for example.

It’s important to us that our potential clients are looking to make a long-term investment in their potential development sites. Stadtwerke München were an ideal potential client for us because of their long-term investment view as well.

The architect for Stadtwerke München believed in our product and was one of the first people who said, “I want to try it.”

Until then we had been talking with a lot of investors and developers for private residential buildings who said they liked our product. However, it’s not only the product that has to work. Everything has to work cohesively: the site and all of the companies involved in the supply, manufacturing, testing, distribution and installation. We have to establish a workflow and prove a process in addition to marketing the product. Demonstrating this has been the highest barrier to enter the market, and one of the major challenges of similar startups.

Stadtwerke were interested in using our product for a building which was already underway, and they believed in our process. Their building project had already received planning consent and we were able to get involved even after the design phase and integrate our product as if there was existing building, though it hasn’t been built yet.

As a pilot project, we are installing the Flissade system in the middle of a building. This will be used as a prototype for further projects with the Stadtwerke München and will prove that our process and product work successfully for other potential clients.

What wonderful exposure to have such a large and reputable company feature your product.

All startup founders need a pilot customer. It’s perfect for us to have an energy supplier or any really large company, ideally not from the private sector like public infrastructure.

Were you and Lisbeth always interested in creating an archi­tectural product? Are you doing traditional architecture practice as well as starting your own company?

We’re doing both right now because if you bootstrap the startup, you have to finance starting a business with normal jobs. Many other startups look for investors from a very early stage, but this is something we didn’t want to do. We always wanted to find a way to achieve our goals with our own resources.

Where we don’t have enough, we need to find someone who wants to work with us. Our philosophy is to look for partners that really want to work with us and share their knowledge, know-how and resources, not their money. Maybe this is one reason why the process has taken relatively long. When you have a lot of money in a very early stage, it is easy to grow quickly and build up resources, which is the way it works for a lot of startups.

But when we started, no one was looking at the building industry, building products or architecture for startup opportunity. At that time investors wanted to finance apps, digital platforms, ­e-commerce ideas, not a product that you have to guarantee for at least five years while you’re in project cycles that are taking two years, three years or longer.

“When we started, no one was looking at the building industry, building roducts or architecture for startup opportunity.”

So, we looked to do this from our own resources. Things have changed in the last few years, and now we feel that the building industry, physical products and generally more things from the ‘old economy’ are gaining the attention of investors.

I think now is the right time for us to think about venture capital. Of course, architectural product development is never truly finished, but with a really cool working product and a pilot project, and with all the suppliers and all our partners that are involved now, I think it is the right time for us to talk with investors about entering the market and really making it big.

Can you tell us more about the process of creating the physical Flissade product from scratch? What steps did you take?

Initially, we wanted to show the concept as an initial full-scale prototype, mainly to test if there is a market because we were just out of university and we were thinking, “Okay, how do we do this?” We didn’t know very much about windows, sliding doors, façades, roof constructions, so we said “Okay, if we want to do this, we are going to need partners.”

We knew that there are leading companies in the facades sector, and so we wanted to get in contact with them. Our professor had done some projects with a company from South Tyrol, Italy, who are really leading in the façade sector, and he suggested that maybe they would be interested.

Suddenly, we had a call from one of the assistants of the Chair and she said that the head of marketing and sales of this company happened to be at the university then. This was our first contact at the TU Munich, and then we went to Brixen in South Tyrol and we sat together at a table with the two founders of this company, with 40 years of experience, working on Apple pro­jects and working with 8 Pritzker Prize architects and so on. And the founder said, “Okay, we want to make this, but we want to show the concept as a full-scale prototype at the BAU (Leitmesse Bauen) and so we need to get the first prototype ready in three months.” They said, “We want to do it,” and with a handshake, we got started.

It took nine months to make a contract for the product development process in terms of intellectual property (IP), and financing, and all that has to be integrated in a corporation contract. But for us as Bavarians and for South Tyroleans, we’re really the same type of people with trust in handshakes. This was the way it started and ever since then, we have been working with this company.

From that point on and throughout the product development process, we did much more prototyping. Over time we built three prototypes that were modified to at least five different solutions. After the concept prototype in full scale, we created three prototypes that were tested and optimized repeatedly, and then a fifth prototype that has been working for two years now. We tested the final prototype ourselves for 18 months, to really have our own experience and understand how the product is working, where the points are that could be optimized and so on.

The final prototype is installed as a showroom in our office. It’s a long-term test prototype which is in constant, daily use by the whole office. During a very cold winter it monitored by the team in Munich with sensors to track temperature changes and measure thermal performance. Through this process we have refined the floor construction for our product, for example, which is modeled after the thinnest possible flat roof construction. It drains, it is water tight, barrier-free and has exceptional thermal properties using vacuum insulation panels. It is honestly the most condensed and high-performing flat roof construction I’ve ever seen.

When you met potential partners who were very experienced in the architectural product development areas that you mentioned, did you have a patent on your idea?

Yes. This is one of the most important points when you’re thinking about starting up a company because you start with nothing except an idea and hopefully IP. IP can be that critical piece that makes someone work with you or give you money. The IP strategy was very important from the beginning, so when we had the idea in this small design thing on the TU Munich our professor, who is not an architect, but he teaches about building envelopes and sustainability, he said, “I think this concept is new and I think you should think about doing something with it. And I will call a patent lawyer for you to arrange a first meeting to talk about IP.” If this three-minute conversation hadn’t happened in this very early stage, maybe we would have just thought, “Okay, this looks nice. It’s a good building design but let’s just go on with our studies.”

The important thing to note is that our professor is not an ­architect. He is an engineer and knows more about IP and it’s protection, and I think there is gap of knowledge in this area for architects and in architectural education. You have really to understand that there are ways to help protect ideas with IP protection. Architects and architectural students always think that every time we design something, we should design something new, so no one is really thinking about repeating previous ideas or taking a design out of a project and optimizing it and creating a product.

“IP can be that critical piece that makes someone work with you or give you money.”

I think there are so many students that are studying architecture and have such great ideas and so much potential to think about starting something with it. But they don’t know the concept of how this works because no one tells you when you’re studying architecture that when you are going to work, you have to do business. Nobody tells you, and then you have to set up a way to monitor project costs and time worked and forecast what you’re going to earn from a project and so on, and this is really the problem. No one tells you how to make money.

As architecture students, how did you finance the project, starting with speaking to a patent lawyer?

This was a very exciting time. From the day we talked to our professor, the idea was like a virus. We did a lot of research about what we would need for a patent, that our idea would have to be new and developed beyond the prior art to be protected. We decided we wanted to try it. We met with our patent lawyer who is partner of one of the best attorney firms in Germany. He was always extremely supportive but also very expensive.

“when you’re studying archi­tecture (…) No one tells you how to make money.”

He gave us advice, told us how to carry out the research for the prior art and showed us how we could use our drawings and make the first design for the text description and so on. From then we were ­really deeply involved in this process, learning how to develop the patent. It took a long time, about 24 months until we had something in our hands.

You’re a GmbH now, essentially a German limited liability company. Did you have to incorporate yourselves as a company before getting the patent How does that work?

We founded the company in a very, very early stage. This is something that you don’t really have to do. You just can start ­somewhere and work. It’s much easier not to start a limited company at the beginning because then you have to do accounting, business filings and all that, so it’s very complicated. We did it because we started to work with big companies and wanted to have a professional relationship for contracts, so we decided to form the company when we started, before starting product development.

Was your incorporation also self-financed?

Yeah, in a way, we self-financed one part. The first column was self-financing and bootstrapping.
The second part was support from EXIST Gründerstipendium, FLÜGGE Stipendium and other programs that we could manage to get. It is very, very important for anyone who wants to start a company to research possible opportunities for public or institutional support and funding.

The third source of the financing came from our partners, and this is, I think, more or less the highest of these three sources because all the prototyping, testing, and test institutes were ­financed throughout our partners.

Did you give away any of your equity to your partners for their financial support?

Not until now, no. But I’m not sure if holding on to all the equity is really the best way. Progress may have been a little bit faster for us if we had given a little bit away in the early stage because then everyone is committed.

However, it’s very important for entrepreneurs to consider the core business of a potential partner. Would your potential partner even be interested in equity in your company? Think about how your startup’s business plan is aligned with your potential partner’s goals. In many cases, it might be better to just ­cooperate rather than to share equity.

What are your goals for your next project? What are your plans from here?

Our product is designed for urban developments and our market-focus is not only German-speaking countries, but on metropolitan regions worldwide.

We now have to transform our company from development mode to “let’s get on the market mode”, so we have to change a lot, and we need more resources, so we’re currently talking with investors. We want to do great architectural projects with inspiring stake-holders in big cities wherever they are, and we want to do high-rise buildings. The product itself has a very high performance for a facade product. Our goal is always to get as high performing as possible. If we are creating a product which would work for high-rise buildings, then we will have reached our highest goal.

We’ve tested the product three times in the institute with a full-scale prototype of 5 by 3 meters, and now we have the CE certification for the whole European market, and with really high performance. This is perfect for high-rise buildings because you need this level of performance we’ve achieved. We really have one of the best sliding doors on the market with a higher performance than many of our competitors.

How to you expect you might optimize the product after your pilot project?

We are now in a position where the product is very good, and it works very well, but maybe it can be optimized in terms of how to produce it and the cost. This is an ongoing process. We have also some further ideas for other applications that are confidential for now.

In addition to our pilot project in Munich, we’re also in a corporation with a South Korean company, who are leaders in their market. They really have the perfect products and solutions, and we’ve been working together for almost a year. We did some optimizations for one of their products that we are going to bring to Europe now, and we also hope to enter the South Korean market with an optimized product. These are some of the things that are going on.

Have you grown your team, or is still just you and Lisbeth?

We have a really small team. We are two architects and a product designer, Teresa. She’s working on business development and marketing. We also have a mechanical engineer who is doing a lot of the process development.

We have developed a process that is called “BIM2production”, based on a quite complex BIM object that we can give to the architect or to the investor to implement it in the CAD solution. Everything for every parameter within the product is encoded in this BIM object, and so we can use all the parameters to have a closed parameter-covered process from design to how the parts must be cut, milled, machined, bent, welded, assembled and so on.

The BIM2production process is based on “industry 4.0” and closes the gap between planning and production. At the moment there is a gap between the BIM world and what comes afterwards, everything which happens when creating a product. We work with metalworkers who are basically our clients. With our digital process, we can picture a digital factory which better integrates our product in the supply chain.

What advice do you have for future product designers in the building industry?

Do not only focus on creating a product itself. For us, thinking as architects, it’s always important to find the perfect solution within the product. But we started with only two founders, both architects, and I think it is so important that you have someone with you in the team that is focused on business development. There was nobody doing business development with us when we started, but if you have the chance, find someone who is working in this field for your company.

How do you see the future of the architecture profession and the built environment?

It’s changing very fast now. Digitization is one of the drivers that really changes the whole industry. In Germany, we have a very special situation where the architect is responsible for the design as well for the whole building process. That is changing, because everything is really complex now. To build a building today, it’s not the same as building something in the ‘80s where everything was more or less quite simple.

Now we are working on much bigger things. This will change the architectural world in Germany very fast in the coming years because it’s much better to do what you’re really good at and to have partners that are doing the rest. The building industry is changing – in processes, in supply chains and everything. You can see in the wood sector for example and all the subindustries what the future of the building sector will be.

“We need better, more long-lasting products made by real workers and craftsman within short and sustainable supply chains.”

On the one hand, I think that the role of architects will shrink, and has to shrink, within large architectural projects and more and more work will be done by other expert companies and industries. On the other hand, I hope that the craftsmanship, the “old economy” know-how that developed over hundreds of years will also play a more important role because we need better, more long-lasting products made by real workers and craftsman within short and sustainable supply chains. I really believe in these values.

About Flissade

Daniel Hoheneder
Architect, CEO

Daniel Hoheneder, born in 1983, studied interior design at the ­university of Applied Sciences in Rosenheim and architecture at the Technische Universität München where he graduated in 2011.

In 2013, He founded the start-up company Flissade with Lisbeth Fischbacher, based in Munich.

Daniel is focused on new forms of urban living concepts and flexible ­living spaces with an holistic view on architectural sustainability and on parametric processes for design and manufacturing in the future ­building sector.

Daniel and Lisbeth are also architects, with their office OACHA Architektur Denkmalpflege Bauforschung.

Since 2017 He has also been active in the preservation of regional traditional building culture and heritage preservation for the district of Rosenheim in Upper Bavaria.

Lisbeth Fischbacher
Architect, CEO

Lisbeth studied architecture at the Technical University of Munich, Diploma 2011 as best in year. Her diploma thesis was awarded the Munich University prize.

The post Architects as Inventors: Creating a Product from Concept to Market appeared first on Archipreneur.

This week’s interview is with Simon Becker and Andreas Rauch, founders of CABIN SPACEY.

The Berlin-based startup jumped on the trend of tiny houses coming from the US. But they added an innovative approach to where in a city they would place them.

And so a new genre for urban living was created. These cabins will be located on cities’ existing and yet unused spaces – rooftops, parking decks, gable walls and temporary lots.

The two architects of CABIN SPACEY have recently completed a successful crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, where they raised enough money to build the first prototype.

CABIN SPACEY’s cabins are modular, and built with a functional unit that provides a bed, bathroom and kitchen in one innovative block. The cabins are minimally invasive and can be either temporarily or permanently installed. Their size and shape make them ideal to transport and mass produce as standard products.

The concept of these resource-efficient cabins gives a young generation of singles and couples the flexible housing solution they deserve, and enables cities to keep up with growing demand for sustainable urban spaces and to maintain their own commitment to a smart, green agenda.

Keep reading to learn how these two architects started their own business, how they managed their successful crowdfunding campaign, and what their next steps will be.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

What are your respective backgrounds and when did you partner up?

Simon: I myself studied Architecture in Hamburg and Berlin, and fell in love with the field at first sight. But I always had my head around different things – Smart Cities, urban mobility, ecological designs – and I had a great enthusiasm for innovation and change.

Andreas is a true-bred architect with six years of professional experience on his back. Without any bells and whistles, we established CABIN SPACEY in April 2016 with a few pieces of paper and our signatures – fairly unsexy, but the company was founded. Done!

What made you decide to found CABIN SPACEY? Was there a particular moment that sealed the decision for you?

Andreas: We had the mindset that we wanted to feel free to make a choice: A boss, who is rather an artist and designer than a good manager, long working days, a poor salary, and a reward for the heart. Or: We would accept the challenge and climb into the ring ourselves and take the risk and responsibility to pursue a path that hadn’t been explored before.

Founding CABIN SPACEY was just a means to an end. The concept is all that really matters. You shouldn’t fall into the trap of confusing self-employment with entrepreneurship. It was more the idea of the business that wouldn’t let us go. We gave it a whole year to mature, grow, and become a sharper concept before we stepped into full time entrepreneurship.

Founding a company you believe in is a powerful tool for taking action and realizing the projects you really want to see in this world.

How do you finance your startup?

Simon: Apparently, that’s a key question for everyone toying with the idea to found something. There is absolutely no advice we can give, except to start! Just start your project, no matter how small or how slow, just start. Not being financed is not a nice thing – and it’s definitely not very German – but it shouldn’t stop you from taking action. We financed CABIN SPACEY through side jobs, previous clients, part-time jobs, maintaining websites, financial leftovers, and some love money (money you can access because there are people who love you!).

But we have always seen this as being part of the game. When I do a job for someone else now, I do it as CABIN SPACEY – no matter if it is as a bartender or a professional planner.

Now we’re starting to get our first orders and so we were crowdfunding. But here again – there’s no free lunch. To think that crowdfunding (especially donation-based) would just finance you and the start of your company without any prior grounding is a complete illusion.

You are raising money to build the first CABIN SPACEY prototype on the crowdfunding platform indigogo right now. Can you tell us a little about your process to get the crowdfunding campaign going? How much preparation time was necessary? Any dos and don’ts for our readers?

Simon: Crowdfunding has become unbelievably popular. It seems the golden way to get seedfunding for your project but to really get there you have to do a lot of homework. First, you have to know that there are different forms of crowdfunding, and that not every project is suitable for it.

Andreas: If you are in a really early stage of your business, you can compare crowdfunding to ringing a bell at your entire family, friends and neighbors, and asking them to give you money. Because that is exactly what you will do while you’re running the campaign.

Speaking from our own experience, it’s hard enough to make your friends back your idea and close to impossible to find strangers to contribute – especially in Germany. Even if you have very media attention like we had. But we were lucky to partner with smart in the “smart urban pioneers” competition, so we had a professional film crew, photographer and writer on board.

Producing this material needs care, time and deliberation; one shouldn’t underestimate that. The more time you have to focus on the preparation, the better your campaign will feel and the more fun you will have in promoting your baby.

Dos: If you and your product or service are able to inspire and excite people, you’re ripe for crowdfunding. Having an elaborate structure planned beforehand for the duration of the campaign is key. If you just leave everything to chance, you didn’t do your homework properly. Planning, planning, planning is our advice.

Don’ts: Choosing crowdfunding only because you don’t know how else to finance your project!

You have now raised the money necessary to build the prototype through your campaign. What are your next steps?

Andreas: We locked the doors and have finished the final product development and will then built Model Zero (our first cabin). We had an overwhelming response from manufacturers who came on-board to help provide their building parts in order to see CABIN SPACEY come to life. So we used the campaign as a way to create legitimacy for our project. That was, by the way, the greatest impact of the campaign.

So as soon as the first physical parts of the cabin come together, we will make sure that there will be media around to report our progress. Building a prototype unveils an unbelievably hard truth: one that you have created. Once it’s finished you will get feedback, and be both hated and admired for what you have done. And this is exactly what we are going to face.

This prototype needs to be a proof of concept and a marketing machine all at once. Having had the maximum number of people through the first cabin, we will listen carefully to their thoughts in order to adjust and overwork the product for serial production.

What is your business model for your startup? Can clients buy your cabins, rent them, or do you have another innovative idea?

Simon: Primarily, we want to provide “access” to CABIN SPACEY, and that includes selling the product. But we will start quickly to build up an operator model to rent out CABIN SPACEY ourselves for any short-term demands. The smartest way, which is far from now, will be to license CABIN SPACEY as a product and open further revenue streams through connected services like dry-cleaning, food delivery, entertainment… the list is endless.

The trend for tiny housing came from the US. Why do you think there is such a big market for tiny houses here?

Simon: Honestly I can’t think of any trend that hasn’t originally come from the US, but we feel that CABIN SPACEY serves a combination of trends and demands.

On the one hand, there is a debate about housing shortages and a huge megatrend for cities and densification. On the other hand, the Internet and globalization provide a very low barrier for access to travelling and local independency. That creates a need for easy access to real living space anywhere in the world. And we’re talking about living spaces – not just sleeping spots. “Living” implies culture, intimacy, idleness and, above all, a sense of home. This is something that hotels can’t provide.

How did it feel for both of you as architects to take the entrepreneurial route? Do you still work as (traditional) architects?

Simon: If you choose the path of entrepreneurship over the promise of leisure and a paycheck, you will get one thing for sure: adventure! The last year brought us more contacts, opportunities, fun, events, friends and satisfaction than any job we had carried out before. Being self-employed, however, is not the sole answer to your problems. Even so, it gives you the chance to steer the boat on your own. And, yes, there is a dark side to all this. And you will feel it, constantly. But you’ll likely get these kinds of feelings in a conventional job as well.

Being an architect is great fun and since we’re still working in the field of architecture we sometimes deal with basic, traditional architecture work. And we love that, too.

Do you have any advice for archipreneurs who are interested in starting their own business?

Simon: Architects have an ideal starting point for becoming entrepreneurs: they are used to project- and teamwork, they have a high tolerance for frustrating situations, they problem solve through visualizing, they have an ability to think and work at any scale, they have a deep technical understanding and, of course, they have great spatial thinking. The only thing the average architecture student is missing is access to an understanding of economics. To me, economics is the most exciting field besides architecture. But I see architects burdened with a social responsibility to carefully invent the cities in which we wish to live in the future. We cannot leave that to commercially-driven interests alone. So architects will have to understand the mechanics of the economy – and it’s good fun to challenge assumptions. Promise!

How do you see the future of the architectural profession? In which areas (outside of traditional practice) can you see major opportunities for up and coming developers and architects?

Andreas: Architects have to educate themselves a lot more in the areas of digitalization, programming, economics, and the invisible infrastructure of cities (data, interests, emotions, etc.) It’s not enough to simply understand how a building is drawn and set up if you want to shape and think about the modern cities of tomorrow.

And, yes, the question that permanently hangs above us: What is our job as architects today? The challenge for the old building masters was to create elaborate buildings. The challenge of today has shifted dramatically – but there are still plenty of solutions. Architects and urban designers are predestined to make up their minds and wrap their creative heads around them, even if it is not about solving problems to do with pure architecture and designing infrastructure.

About the founders Simon Becker and Andreas Rauch

Simon – vision and concept

As architect and driving force of the company, Simon has already realized a huge range of ideas across many freelance projects via architectural competitions, product design, and smart city research.

Andreas – architect and product development

Andreas is well versed in all areas of private and public architecture, having had a hand in design, detailed design, and project management. He is in charge of fine-tuning the CABIN SPACEY concept: from its initial design and building laws, all the way down to final realization.

The post How to Finance your Architectural Prototype Through Crowdfunding /w CABIN SPACEY appeared first on Archipreneur.