Why Tobias Hagenau is leaving HQ Labs

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

It was a daring experiment from the start. Over the past few years, Tobias Hagenau has built 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. But 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. In doing so, the investor secures access to HQ Labs' 700 existing customers. Agencies can use their platform to manage projects as well as resources or customers, including time recording or controlling. Hagenau and his team spent around ten years building up the start-up, during which time they scaled it up with the help of money from the Innovationsstarter-Fonds Hamburg, among others.

But Hagenau didn't really have much new to experience. The start-up was established; instead of growth, it was all 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 end and time for a new beginning? At least that's what Hagenau told Startbase in an interview, in which he also talks about the founding of Awork. According to the interview, the new division was initially supposed to be just gameplay, one in which "we are back-to-basic," Hagenau explained. Instead of a comprehensive platform, Awork should only be able to do time tracking and project planning, simple and straightforward, like at the beginning of the former founding phase.

Initially, the two ideas ran in parallel. But while HQ Labs grew only slowly, Awork is said to have grown 20 percent a month and quickly brought in millions in revenue. This has now apparently prompted the founders Nils Czernig, Tobias Hagenau and Lucas Bauche to say goodbye to the old idea of HQ Labs and now 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 leave with the founders, both companies announced. Customers such as Viva con Agua, Thjnk, EnBW and Henkel Beauty Care are said to already be using the company's software. "By spinning off Awork into a separate company, we can finally move freely in the work management software market and focus on growth and expanding our international competitiveness," says Tobias Hagenau.