Interview with Maxime, founder of OOTI

Features to come, lockdown, and back-to-school projects ...

Interview with Maxime Riahi, founder of OOTI

It was beautiful, it was hot, it was summer, and it already seems so distant. Because the back-to-school atmosphere can sometimes feel a bit heavy, at OOTI, we thought we'd continue to be unconventional by sharing some good news with you.

The first one is that OOTI is doing well. This is not necessarily evident in the post-lockdown context. While startups tend to set their sights on a 6-month horizon and often perish after 3 years, we had to come to terms with the fact that we should no longer be considered a startup because things are going well so far. In fact, we dare to project ourselves over several years...

By sheer coincidence, it must be admitted that our service offer was perfectly calibrated for full remote work. "The issue of dematerialization in architectural agencies is not new, but it was not really implemented as a strategy in practice, often postponed" explains Maxime Riahi, founder of OOTI.

But that was before March.
Suddenly, far too abruptly, dematerialization and access to activity management data at a distance became more than just an obligation; they became a condition for the survival of agencies. The OOTI offer then took on a new dimension.

Like everyone else, it forced teams to hunker down in small Parisian apartments where the desire for space and countryside takes root. Then, like all companies, it required a complete revision of the flight plan.

However, in the medium and long term, it is not excluded that there may be beneficial lessons learned. "No one imagines a return to normal. Habits will evolve, practices and customs too, now that even the last opponents of teleworking have also seen its benefits," Maxime continues.

Having said that, there is still just as much, if not more, work to be done.
Because OOTI is an ever-evolving solution, the teams have worked on a massive update, deployed during the summer.

Our developers took advantage of the opportunity to redesign the user experience and navigation design. This means an easier handling based on user profiles (accountant, architect, associate, project manager...) and a more ergonomic design.

What does that mean in concrete terms? "In the case of a user identified as an architect, we have studied each of the dedicated pages, such as time entry, project visibility... And we asked ourselves very simple questions: is it clear? Is it easy to perform the action I want to do?"

The verdict from users: "I believe I can say without hesitation that we have succeeded in our challenge," enthuses the CEO of OOTI.
The program for tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and every day after that, is substantially the same as that of yesterday and the day before yesterday: the OOTI teams will continue to code, develop, and write entire pages of computer code that make it feel like they've entered the matrix alongside Neo. "Well, it's very simple, it's CSS on Python in Javascript."

‍For the average mortals, three axes of development will shape the coming months:

1. Getting together. At your place, at our place, at professional exhibitions, wherever we can exchange ideas about your needs, your expectations, and the perspectives that OOTI can open up for your agency.
2. Growing. Because OOTI is doing well, we need to expand our ranks with new talents full of ideas, projects, and perspectives for our solution. The OOTEAM continues to grow.
3. Innovating. In the future, the solution will offer even more features. To align even more with architects' practices, the platform will integrate a more in-depth management of co-contracting and subcontracting to improve fee and invoicing management. It will also be possible to see, with a click, the agency's workload and that of all its collaborators. Who is available, who is overloaded? What are the forecasts for the next two weeks?

In short, we haven't finished developing the OOTI features that architects are missing...