We recently had the chance to meet the three founders of BrickVisual – Attila, András and Josi – at their new office, an amazing loft with a huge piano in the middle of the space, on the ‘Buda’ side of the capital of Hungary.
What’s your story? How did you all meet?
We all met at at a former job where we worked as colleagues. Josi is an economist with a great international professional network (he was responsible for the sales), and Attila and András are architects. What we do is architectural visualisation, but we spice it up with many things that our competitors do not do; for instance, we were also assigned to commercial videos related to green energy, short movies for construction projects and even time-lapse visualisation. One of our colleagues is a music composer, so we even created our own music for the videos. All in all, our unique selling point is a generalist approach, we do not have a tight specialisation, meaning we can provide solutions on a wide scale.
Could you tell us something about your growth and your markets?
We started up last May in 2012, the three of us in a 20-metre-squared room. Later we moved into a low level office, and then 3 months later into a loft, and finally a month ago into our current office. At the moment, we are 20 people all together. Firstly we approached companies with a presence in Hungary, like Skanska and V17, but soon realised that the local market is not strong and big enough, so we decided to reach out to global markets.
We started selling ourselves as the first step, and later managed to build cooperations with local partners in several countries; we have sales colleagues in Norway, Austria and we cooperate with a creative agency in Australia. We are also working on projects in Switzerland, Canada, Ukraine and South Africa, but our biggest markets are the US and Norway at the moment. In the US we were working on the 7th tower of the new World Trade Centre and are now working on some parts of the Transportation Hub.
It seems you are going forward really fast. What is your secret?
Looking back to the start we all were naive and brave, these are still the most important competencies we have. 🙂 We actually realized that the talent pool for 3D visualization in Hungary is great. This and the fact that the wages in Hungary in this profession are generally lower than in the countries where we are present gives us a very significant competitive advantage. These guys are mainly architects as a profession, who self-educated themselves for 3D softwares. But we also have to admit that we are running out of experienced talent locally, so we are also looking to other countries; for instance we have just hired an Italian guy in our team.
What about your finances? Have you raised money?
We are really proud of having built our company without any investment, purely bootstrapped. We have been approached by investors a couple of times but we refused all of them. Our revenue for 2013 will be close to €1 million and this is our first full operational year!
Amazing! Finally, could you tell us something about your plans?
Professionally our main focus is a better integration of our services: image production and movie production, including flight through films, which can demonstrate the space and architectural beauty in a visual way. Market-wise, we are planning to expand into more countries, like Singapore, Belgium, The Netherlands and other countries where construction is a prospering business.
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