Wombase is a startup participating in the 7th season of the CIG R&D LAB educational and scholarship program at Lviv Polytechnic National University. It is an inventory accounting system for the repair and construction companies that helps workers to independently determine where the right tool is located and record its transfer using a website or mobile application.
– The founder of our startup learned about the problems with inventory accounting from his father, who has been working in a repair and construction company for about 20 years. «In the first two weeks, we formed hypotheses of problems and potential solutions and discussed them first with 10 target companies, then with 20 more, and so on, so that this year alone we have communicated directly with 140 Ukrainian repair and construction companies», said a team member.
– How did it all start?
– Our team consists of second-year students majoring in the Internet of Things program at Lviv Polytechnic, which has been updated by the Lviv IT Cluster, so we have known each since the beginning of our studies. Andrii and Oleksii have been working on the product since the idea came up, and Sasha, Oscar, and Mark have joined us for clear goals.
The five of us have been working on this project for over a year now, and we have clearly defined responsibilities in the team. During this time, we have also participated in many acceleration programs or initiatives, so we have a wide range of people we can address to whenever we need to.
– What were your launch steps?
– Initially, we had no experience in market research or startup development in general, so we started with the simplest thing possible: we interviewed employees of our founder’s father’s company and formed a first description of the problems and potential solutions. Our cooperation with PrideBud, which had been using our product for 8 months, helped us a lot. Recently, we launched a full version of the product, which has already been implemented by one Ternopil company.
All stages of our product development began with surveys of potential customers, we have a huge database of companies that already know about our project, and we continue to call at least 20 new companies a week. Thanks to our participation in the CIG program and CFE’s IdeasLab accelerator, we managed to attract significant mentoring support and partially raise the necessary funds, so we have already recorded a pitch video in English and Polish and are starting to scale the survey to the Polish market.
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