Microsoft Innovation Center Brussels

8th color was founded by Christophe Philemotte and Martin Van Aken in December 2011 (nearly one year ago).

Christophe and I had started IT careers independently, until 2010 when we started discussing with two other friends about creating a video game company. One year on, we had to face the reality: although we were experienced IT professionals, we knew almost nothing about the video game market, about what it meant to run a company, or even the required technical skills.

From this sort of grim status, Christophe and I decided to start somewhere, by creating a software company about a domain that we knew a lot better: software development. In our case, the company’s vision preceded the product: “To make the software industry a better place, for both its workers and customers”. We were building meaningful software in our jobs, and helping people doing it: we wanted to get to the next step by creating product that would help them. As we once heard said: as persons, we did not scale. We wanted more. We wanted magic : make complicated things appear simple.

With this quite broad vision, we enlisted in the Founder Institute incubation program. There we refined, sculpted, shaped our ideas into a product: Sybil. We wanted software companies to take more attention to their key asset: the skills of their developers, and we thought that development skills were something that derived from building software more than reading books. This is what Sybil is: a Developer Talent Management tool that creates developer’s profiles without requiring any input, by analyzing the source code they produce.

The incubation semester may be finished since some months, but we kept the process: iterate and learn. We also kept a lot of contacts, and the habit to just reach to people for advice. Since that time, we have been alternating between doing some consultancy (we did not have any funding, so we had to eat someway), developing Sybil, and showing it to potential customers. As long as you do not face your customers, you do not know if what you are building has any value, so the quicker you know it, the faster you can react. The very first version of Sybil that we demonstrated was coded is less than a day. It was ugly, horribly limited, but it did the job: show off what it could become.

Today, Sybil is running in pilot in three different companies, and we start to commercialize it.

Christophe and Martin’s advices:

• Doing a startup requires time and focus. You won’t do it at night while keeping your job. Find a teammate and jump ship, create a company, give you the chance to succeed.
• B2B startups are not that common. If you want to start one, know that business processes are long in this domain. Be prepared to take time to be able to sell and be paid.
• Get out of the building: go talk to customers. Not in six months, now. Show them something, a mock up, a powerpoint, a video. Ask them to imagine that it works and collect their feedback.
• Listen to everyone ready to give you advice (finding advisors able to point your weaknesses is essential - we benefited of more than our share via the FI, the MIC Brussels Boostcamp and our own contacts), and decide for yourself.