Why Tobias Hagenau is leaving HQ Labs

First he built a start-up within a start-up, now he's turning everything on its head. These are the founder's plans.

It was a bold experiment right from the start. Over the past few years, Tobias Hagenau has built up a start-up within a start-up with Awork, trying to strike a balance between a start-up with 20 percent growth per month and an established scale-up. Now everything is different.

In a joint move, the founders of HQ Labs, including Tobias Hagenau, are selling their scale-up to the Hamburg-based software investor BID Equity. The investor thus secures access to HQ Labs' 700 existing customers. Agencies can use the platform to manage projects, resources and customers, including time recording and controlling. Hagenau and his team have spent around ten years building up the start-up and have turned it into a scale-up during this time with the help of money from the Hamburg Innovation Starter Fund, among others.

However, there was not really much new to experience for Hagenau. The start-up was established, instead of growth it was about administration and the questions: How long can you continue to modernize your own technology and at what point does it simply have to be a hard line and time for a new start? At least that's how Hagenau put it in an interview with Startbase, in which he also talks about the founding of Awork. According to Hagenau, the new department was initially only intended to be a way of playing, one in which "we are back-to-basic". Instead of a comprehensive platform, Awork should only be capable of time recording and project planning, simple and straightforward, as at the beginning of the original founding phase.

Initially, the two ideas ran in parallel. But while HQ Labs only grew slowly, Awork reportedly grew by 20 percent per month and quickly generated millions in revenue. This has apparently prompted the founders Nils Czernig, Tobias Hagenau and Lucas Bauche to say goodbye to the old HQ Labs idea and build something new with Awork.

They are investing three million euros from the sale of their shares in HQ Labs in the now independent Awork. The team that previously worked on Awork within HQ Labs will also be leaving with the founders, according to the two companies. Customers such as Viva con Agua, Thjnk, EnBW and Henkel Beauty Care are already said to be using the company's software. "By spinning off Awork into a separate company, we can finally move freely in the market for work management software and concentrate on growth and expanding our international competitiveness," says Tobias Hagenau.