The story before and behind Zyl (ex-Comet)

Because I pitch COMET a lot (at pitch competitions / investors / press / partners / potential new team members /…), I usually start with the very beginning and the most important: our TEAM.

And the moment I love the most is when I get to say “Comet is the 3rd company we created together in 7 years”. Usually my interlocutors (investors / partners) ask about the 2 previous ones and what they became.

So let’s talk about them for a minute.

The first one (created in 2008) was a student project we turned into an actual company : Prepa-mednet. It was the first e-learning med school for French medical students. Basically, we created the first MOOC in this area and managed to make a turnover of $45k / year from our bedrooms.

After 2 years and a 54% success rate for our students to enter the 2nd year of medical studies (the usual average is around 10%), we had the opportunity to join great student programs, so we decided to stop this first adventure to focus on our studies.

• Aurelien went to Japan (NAGOYA UNIVERSITY) to study computer vision for 6 months + 9 months between STANFORD and the ENPC to follow the incredible ME310 master program
• I managed to enter a great dual program between my computer science school(EFREI) and a great business school (AUDENCIA) for a 18 months program to get 2 master degrees at the same time

We both had to do an internship in order to conclude our master degrees. 5 months before the end, we gathered for few drinks and decided to start our new company within 2 weeks. The obvious choice back then was to create a digital agency advocating the “design thinking” methodology.

IdeaNov was born and we settled in my parent’s garage (what a cliché — it was my girlfriend’s idea, I swear) the October 2011, 5th… Dear Steve, it was our tribute to you (kindof).

Garage style — 11/5/2011

Florent joined us at that time, as a co-founder after his own first experience in entrepreneurship, and we recruited 5 team members including Thomas, our actual iOS developer. 2 weeks later, we signed a serious deal with a famous fashion brand for a crazy project (and a crazy budget) that allowed us to really move the company forward.

Then, Total, Suez, Engie, Chanel and more than 35 others european SME became our customers. We developed apps for them: web apps, mobile apps, and even custom hardware prototypes. We generated a turnover of more than $800k / year for 5 years. Everything was cool, really cool, we even opened 2 sub-agencies (one near the ocean…)

French west coast — Sables d’Olonne — Team Surf session

But after 5 years, we felt boredom. We missed not having our own little product to build.

It was the right time to live a new experience, something challenging and exciting.

And so COMET was born

First meeting about Comet — beginning of 2015

I got married 3 years ago and all my Ideanov’s teammates were invited to my bachelor party in Bratislava. After 3 awesome days, we tried to regroup everybody’s pictures in one place once we were home,…but never did it successfully (we tried dropbox / picassa /..).

Long story short, we finally had our idea :

And what if we could create an app that allows people to gather pictures after any kind of events, effortlessly ??!!

Comet started as a side project because we still had to run Ideanov with our regular customers but we gradually stopped to work for them and we finally could shut down Ideanov. We recruited Alexandre (Android Dev), we launched the first beta on July, 1st 2015 and then launched the public version of Comet the December, 15th 2015.

And since then, things got cool again.

In less than a year, we have had a bunch of achievements :

• July 2015 — we launched the first beta on ProductHunt and finished 9th at the end of the day
• October 2015 — we integrated OrangeFab France, one of the best corporate accelerator in France
• January 2016 — we raised funds ($160k)
• February 2016 — we signed 2 huge partnerships with Orange. Basically, we integrated their technology in our apps and in return, Orange communicates about Comet to its user base. We signed 2 deals, one in France and one in Belgium
• April 2016 — we signed our first B2B customers, Coke, Roland Garros, Shneider Electrics and others. (this B2B model provides us with a great distribution model by the way)
• July 2016 — we got more cash from Scientipole & BPI ($100k)
• September 2016 — we recruited our first Business developer (finally a girl in the team)

And since June, even though our metrics we getting good, we decided to step back and understand why we were not growing faster. We realized two critical limitations.

Regardless our best efforts we could not get to transform a picture-gathering app into a product that creates recurrence of use, and even with the picture gathering aspect we really were not being proactive enough.

Luckily for us, we never kept talking with our users. Like, a lot. They shared interesting though obvious new ideas, mainly about their whole photo experience on mobile :

• Their phones are completely full of similar / blurry / badly framed photos that are useless
• Gathering photos after an event is simply impossible as everybody promise…but doesn’t send anything (it’s ok with the actual version of Comet but it could be improved)
• Even with, let’s say, 4367 photos and 143 videos on their phones, they do nothing with them afterwards

AND most of all, manually managing all that is an impossible mission.

So, we began to think :

What if we could automate these arduous tasks ?

6 months later, we have reshaped our vision, redifined our mission and changed “just” everything.

Wanna discover what has changed ? it’s here :)

Cheers.