Just like Slack, only simpler – that’s how the Flip app should work. The founders want to use it to digitize employees in desk-less jobs. Investor money is plentiful.
When the video conference crashes in the home office, chaos reigns. This was shown by the disruption at Microsoft at the beginning of the year, which paralyzed the Teams communication tool for thousands of users for several hours. According to the US group, more than 280 million people worldwide use the chat service – most of them to make their everyday office life easier.
Employees in so-called “deskless” jobs, such as supermarket salespeople, car mechanics, parcel deliverers, catering workers or nurses in a clinic, often have no access to programs such as Teams, Google Meet or Slack. A problem, finds Benedikt Ilg from Stuttgart. Together with his school friend Giacomo Kenner, he founded the startup Filp in 2018. “We want to bring New Work to the employees on the floor,” explains Ilg.
“Many employees are forgotten in digitalization”
The market served by the 30-year-old is large and ranges from the production sector to retail and healthcare: “There are many employees there who have no voice, are not involved in IT and therefore do not even have an e-mail – Have an address at which they can be reached. They were forgotten in digitization,” says the founder.
He himself worked at Porsche for five years and, after completing his traineeship, worked for the car manufacturer as a project manager in data analysis. There he noticed that workers and fitters in production were left out, for example when it came to disseminating internal news in the company. With Porsche, Ilg and Kenner won their first customer.
Flip is now a communication app that is easy and intuitive to use. This is important because the target group has little experience with digital messenger services apart from Facebook and Whatsapp. “Most operational employees have never made a video call,” says Ilg. The software is therefore structured similarly to Facebook.
Tool to increase employee loyalty
When an employee opens the app, a newsfeed appears first, which is intended to replace the analog bulletin board. There, everyone can post relevant information such as shift schedules and assign tasks. In addition, there is a usual chat function. Survey templates should also ensure more interaction between employees and managers, and employees can also submit ideas for improving processes digitally. Documents such as sick leave, holiday applications and registrations for training courses can be uploaded to the app.
According to Ilg, Flip not only contributes to the digitization of “workers on the shop floor”, but also to employee retention – a factor that becomes more relevant in times of a shortage of skilled workers. According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group from December 2022, frustration among employees in non-desk jobs has increased – over 40 percent of the approximately 4,700 respondents said they were thinking about changing jobs. In addition to a higher salary, employees primarily want social qualities such as appreciation and fairness in the workplace. According to Ilg, the use of Flip at the commercial vehicle supplier Europart, for example, has led to around a quarter of the workforce identifying more strongly with the company.
30 million from celebrity investors
The Flip founders seem to have struck a chord with investors with their software solution. In February 2022, for example, before high investor funds became rare due to the Ukraine war and inflation, the Stuttgart-based company collected over 30 million euros from well-known venture capitalists and business angels. In addition to the investment companies Cavalry Ventures, LEA Partners, Notion Capital from London and the Berlin fund HV Capital, well-known entrepreneurs such as the ex-VW boss Matthias Müller, Roland Berger, the former BASF boss Jürgen Hambrecht, Fritz Österle, ex-CEO of the pharmaceutical retailer Celesio and Flixbus founders Daniel Krauss and Jochen Engert joined Flip.
A great success for the Stuttgart-based company – previously they had only raised four million euros in a seed round. The start-up primarily put the money into building up the team. Today, Flip employs around 140 people at locations in Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne, Munich and London. Ilg emphasizes that people are still being sought – contrary to the mass layoffs that many tech startups are currently making.
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And Flip wants to continue to grow in other ways too – especially in English-speaking countries. “Although the market situation is not easy for many startups, we have come through the crisis well so far,” agrees Ann Kathrin Starkel, who heads the growth strategy at Flip.
However, the startup does not talk about sales figures. Founder Ilg emphasizes: “We could always turn the lever and be profitable.” In general, Flip would economize with money sustainably: “We are Swabians and have not only thought that spending too much money is a stupid idea since the crisis.”
Don’t be afraid of Staffbase
Flip now has over 200 customers – in addition to Porsche, these include Bosch, the food groups Rewe and Edeka, the DIY chain Toom, the Dutch parcel service GLS and the family businesses Rossmann and Kodi. In the market, however, the Stuttgart company has to compete with other software startups such as Beekeeper from Zurich. The Swiss collected around 50 million euros from investors in November 2022.
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Above all, the multi-million dollar unicorn Staffbase from Chemnitz, which offers companies a platform with which they can create their own apps for employees in the office and on the assembly line, is considered a leader in the industry. In 2021, the startup doubled its sales to over 50 million euros. More than 2,000 companies, including Google, are now using the Chemnitz-based solution. Flip boss Ilg takes the competitive situation calmly: “Staffbase has an intranet focus. We are focusing on the digitization of the frontline.”
In his company, Ilg does not observe that companies save on software in order to reduce running costs in the face of inflation and high production costs. On the contrary: He expects that even more companies will invest in communication tools.: “The employees want to be taken along in the crisis, there is uncertainty, many are parting with employees and we see an enormous need for Flip.”
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