The birth of the start-up fabriq told by the founders
Born from the desire to undertake, the passion for technology and the challenges to be taken up in the industrial sector, fabriq is now celebrating its 2nd anniversary. fabriq has evolved a lot and it is also thanks to you, our customers and our community who have followed us since the beginning!
Launched by two friends at the beginning of 2019, the Fabriq adventure continues to develop and the team keeps growing. Today, we wanted to share with you a piece of our story by going back to the creation of Fabriq.
Discover the interview with Octave and François, the founders of Fabriq and Renan, the founder ofOSS Ventures, who played a key role in the launch of this great adventure.
François and Octave, how did you meet?
Octave: François and I first met in 2009 in the United States. He was doing an internship in New York and I was doing a master's degree at NYU. We played rugby together in a club called the Brooklyn Barons. We became very close friends and have been ever since! In 2019, when I started working on the fabriq project, François was looking at ways to launch a new startup. I immediately proposed to him to partner with us, without hesitation.
François: Octave and I already had a first entrepreneurial experience and a strong friendship of over 10 years. We shared a strong desire to create a beautiful product and to have a positive impact on the daily lives of thousands of people through technology.
How was fabriq born?
Octave : It all started with a meeting with Renan and OSS Ventures who opened the doors to their industrial partners to do user research. After a few factory visits, it was obvious that there was a high-impact product to build and we set about it!
Renan: Fabriq, it's a typical case of profiles from the tech industry who, after visiting a dozen factories, have a problem and too many possibilities rather than not enough! Where Octave was particularly visionary was on a simple product, at the heart of the factory's processes, and linking all the functions.
Where does the name fabriq come from?
Octave : In a TGV coming back from a customer visit in the north, I scribbled names that came to my mind on a piece of paper. For the record, I wanted it to be fabr.iq at first and I even went looking for a way to get an Iraqi domain name (.iq)!
François: Fabriq because we chose from the start to create a product 100% dedicated to factories, but also because the notion of "social fabriq" refers to the ability of individuals to interact with each other, which refers to the founding idea behind the project: to improve collaboration and communication of information flows on the shop floor.
What motivated you to launch fabriq ?
Octave: I had already set up a company. The question of entrepreneurship was no longer an issue for me. I was convinced by Renan that doing tech for the industrial sector was a huge opportunity to launch a meaningful and high-impact project.
Do you have a funny or memorable story related to fabriq ?
Octave: Small failure in June 2019 when we came to deploy our MVP to our first client on a Monday morning in the Paris suburbs. After 10 minutes, the API crashed after a dozen simultaneous connections. We left at 9am and had to come back at the end of the week to deploy it (which worked this time!).
What is your iteration process? What were the steps in creating the product?
Octave: We started with intensive research by travelling around France and visiting industrial sites. We found three candidates to test a prototype problem-solving tool.
At the very beginning, our prototype was an Airtable that we were installing at these customers' homes. We left it up for 1.5 months in March/April 2019 taking user feedback. The feedback was good and we got the much hoped for "If you build it, we will buy it." from our three customers in question!
So I started coding and in June we had a first prototype to deploy at their place.
Since then, the product has continued to evolve. We deploy new code every day and several new features every week. We are in constant discussion with our current and future users and this is how we build our roadmap and map out the various product evolutions.
What was the first feedback you got when you launched the product?
Octave: Very good! Just the switch from paper/whiteboard to screen was a huge gain in time, transparency, collaboration and usability. That's all it took to convince us to build the product.
What is the added value of Fabriq for an operator, a team leader or an operations manager?
François: From the very beginning we wanted to build a product that could be used at all levels of the performance cascade of an industrial group. With some of our customers, fabriq is used on 6 levels: from the operator to the Group Operations Director!
Operators appreciate the ability to track the progress of a problem once it has been escalated or even to find solutions themselves based on the history in the tool. Team leaders and production managers save 30 min to 1 hour every day thanks to a tool that allows them to centralise and prioritise information on daily routines. The connection between the functionalities (gemba walks, indicators, action plans) brings a lot of fluidity.
For an operations manager or site manager, it is about improving overall efficiency by accelerating the flow of communication and escalation in performance management. Whether we are talking about safety risks, scrap or machine stoppages, the ability of teams to quickly identify the problem and resolve it at the right level of decision has a very strong impact on the overall efficiency of the site, which can represent a gain of 2-3% in overall efficiency once the solution has been deployed.
What are the latest developments in the product?
Octave: The application is constantly evolving. Currently, we are working on a problem-solving tool - a very classic lean tool in the industrial sector. As a next step, we will deploy a "resource" functionality that will host the operational knowledge of the teams.
What challenges did you face?
François & Octave: The industry is on the move, things are moving but they are moving slowly. Sometimes we'd like to go faster and accelerate the digitalisation of production workshops. We quickly learned that by relying on the right people at our clients', within the operational excellence or digital transformation teams, we could accelerate this movement and take up this great challenge. I am thinking in particular of Anne-Delphine Beaulieu, VP Digital Transformation at Lisi, who has made a major contribution to the success of fabriq on a large scale and to its deployment on more than 20 sites in the first year.
In 2 years, the team has grown from 2 to a team of over 15 people! The proof in the pudding yesterday during our anniversary day!
