It is an industry that makes up a substantial part of every country's GDP, but at the same time, you would be hard-pressed to find an industry that has experienced lower productivity and innovation growth over the past 100 years. The construction industry is one of the dinosaurs that hardly changes direction. However, one trend can no longer be avoided - digitization. And this is exactly what a startup from the Ústí Region helps with - Stavario!
When the application for the ICUK business incubator came in 2019, we knew that the topic that the startup was dealing with was a big one. Coming up with innovations in the construction industry was not easy. Applying it in practice is even more difficult. However, Josef Beneš, the founder of Stavaria (formerly known as Vím o svem), was full of optimism, enthusiasm, energy and, above all, had extensive experience in the field!
From shovel to application
Josef is not from the IT field. Nor did he come from a large company where he would be in charge of the innovation or digitization department. Josef started at his uncle's construction site, where his first experience with construction was digging the foundations of the family house. Not with a digger. Nicely by hand, using a shovel and a pickaxe. It didn't deter him. On the contrary, a few years later he founded his construction company and began to gather considerable experience in the construction industry. However, he was bothered by the constant paperwork and spending time in the car, driving from construction site to construction site to solve problems.
Paper is not excel and excel is not an application
"There are many situations where you feel like you're just filling out paper for paper's sake," describes Josef Beneš. "I wanted to find a way to create the "paper" by itself, register it, and add other numbers to it.” And so he set about developing an application that would help him with this. From the beginning, he calculated that an investment of a few hundred thousand crowns would be sufficient and he and other colleagues would bring the application to a successful conclusion. "Looking back, this mistake was probably the biggest and most expensive mistake of my career," adds Josef with a laugh. Anyway, the first module of the entire application was created, which was attendance. Using this, he digitized the arrivals and departures of construction workers in the company. Gradually, he began to implement other functionalities into the application, such as an online construction diary, property registration, Gantt chart, online chat with users in the application and much more. And that it is these things that help construction companies in their efficiency speak for themselves by the number of operating companies in the application - there are already more than several hundred of them!
All or nothing strategy
In order for Josef to finance his company, in which he saw enormous potential, he sold almost all of his personal property, and not only that. Other investors joined the company, led by the Nation 1 fund with an investment of around 1 million dollars. At that time, it could be said that the Stavario startup was the most valuable startup in the Ústí Region. “Negotiating with investors was an incredible experience and an eye-opener. Probably no startup is prepared for so many questions and documents that large investors require. But these are things that will ultimately help you clarify your goals and the path to them." says Josef in the podcast #Nový start from the Innovation Center. Negotiations with investors took more than half a year. But without them, the development of the application would stop.
The life of a startup behind the marketing curtain
That the life of a startupist looks like one big party with shiny presentations? This is how it may seem if you only see the stage, where everything is smiling and elaborate. Josef is very open in this regard, and his story sometimes reveals a cruel reality. "The background behind the curtain is a massacre. I often went to Brno for meetings in a car that I borrowed from my parents. I had a sleeping bag in my trunk to sleep in the car because I knew I had no way back that day. It was a cashflow issue, but it was still annoying. The staff also held me up several times. And the background of a start-up company? After all, I managed the company during the day and assembled things at night so that we had somewhere to sit in the office. And I made my own apartment out of the room we had left in the offices." Josef honestly sums up the difficult beginnings of the business. And adds: "There was also a problem with the investment itself. When people read in Forbes that I got a $1 million investment, they thought I was a millionaire. But you have the money to develop the company. They don't actually belong to you, although you have them on your company account."
Business support is not to be despised
With his startup Stavario, Josef went through many business programs that help in their beginnings. Whether it is the StartUp Go business incubator from ICUK, the CzechStarter program from Czechinvest, the ČSOB StartIt accelerator or the Vodafone idea of the year 2020, where it made it to the final of the TOP 10 startups in the Czech Republic. "Starting a business is one big signpost and you don't know which way to go. That's why I'm glad to have joined ICUK's business incubator, which helped me get oriented and steered in the right direction to build a fast-growing startup! I recommend it to everyone who doesn't want to go around in circles and explore the paths that someone has already walked before you." Josef looks at programs for budding entrepreneurs. In 2019, the startup Stavario won the ICUK Special Awards in the competition for the most innovative company of the Ústí Region.
Interested in more? We recommend watching the entire episode of the podcast #Nový start from the Innovation Center of the Ústí Region, where we interviewed Josef Beneš.
Stavario's journey with ICUK
Participation in the ICUK business incubator
Winner of Startup Go Grill in April 2019 - public presentation of startups
Innovative company of the Ústí Region 2019 – ICUK Special Award
Vodafone idea of the year - TOP 10
Investment from Nation 1
