It started with swimming pools

Sebastien Vandendriessche ran a pool supply store. To find customers, he built an algorithm that scanned aerial imagery for swimming pools in people's gardens. Then he looked at the same images again and saw roofs.

That is where Spotable comes from, as co-founder Julie Dumoulin told Start it @KBC for its Garage Stories series. Vandendriessche, Dumoulin and Pieter-Jan Philips were each running something else at the time. They started building on it together at weekends, before there was a company to build it for.

The garage was a storage closet

Spotable's first office was a windowless storage room wedged between two floors at Wintercircus in Ghent. Around ten people worked in it. They called it 'the Bunker'.

"Where others saw a dark hole, we saw our garage," Dumoulin says.

The contractors checked the maths by hand

Construction did not extend any credit to remote measurement. Customers ran Spotable's calculations again themselves, manually, and kept doing it until the time they were saving made the exercise pointless.

By the time of the interview the company had 27 employees, eighteen months of trading behind it, and hundreds of roofers and contractors using it. The three founders had split the company along clear lines: Dumoulin on commercial, Vandendriessche on operations, Philips on technology. They had also agreed something explicitly at the start, that growth would come before work-life balance for the first five years.

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Shipping and selling

Dumoulin's account of the early days is not romantic about any of it.

"Entrepreneurship is primarily just hard, grueling work," she says, and puts her tolerance for it down to growing up on a farm.

Her rule for the first year is narrower than most founders would admit to.

"There are only two things that matter in the beginning: shipping and selling."

Or, as she puts it in three words:

"Sales cures all."

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