Startup Characteristics
Founded in 2012 by Michael Koch and Tobias Böh, cm3p currently employs two further employees. As a spin-off of the Hochschule Mannheim, cm3p understands itself as a provider of high-end mobile application solutions for clients in the pharmaceutical and medicine engineering industry. Furthermore, the company recently started to develop products to support market research companies to capture further growth opportunities. In doing so, cm3p understands itself as an innovative business solution provider and trustful partner for its B2B clients.
Cm3p sells highly customized mobile application solutions within the B2B industry. Divided into two subsections, medical and research app solutions, the key functionalities of their products strongly depend on the customers’ needs. Therefore, it is hard to define a common ground for the services offered apart from them being highly customized and strictly focused on the B2B sector.
The main source of income is sales income of the services sold. Until now, there is no licensing model or anything comparable in place. Prospectively, this is about to change especially within the research app services, since the idea is to charge fees for software usage depending on volume and associated workload for cm3p.
Personal Characteristics
Cm3p has been founded by Michael Koch and Tobias Böh, two former Hochschule Mannheim students. Both obtained a Diploma in computer engineering and a M.Sc. degree in information technology. During their academic career, both founders were able to gather first experiences within the medical engineering industry and proved themselves in various mobile application projects. Cm3p is the first start-up they founded and is currently growing. The motives to set up their own company can be routed back to their joint experience in the EMB-Lab of the institute of medical engineering in Mannheim. When they experienced the thrill of being in charge of their own projects, they developed a determination to find a own business model and become self-employed that finally resulted in cm3p. At this point , Michael and Tobias are not thinking about beginning something new - they see their future in c3mp and are looking forward to watch it prosper.
Business Development and Challenges
Cm3p went through three major phases of growth with the last phase not yet completed - and further ones to come! Initially, cm3p was founded to realize a project that emerged out of the cooperation of a large multinational company with the EMB-lab that exceeded the research assignment of the lab. Understanding the underlying potential of the general business idea, the founders of cm3p quickly emancipated from their academic background and strived for higher goals like increasing their customer base. Currently, the company is developing a new product range to enter the market research industry and increase growth rates. This refocus is accompanied by new hires to come in order to cope with the prospective workload.
They faced various challenges of both internal and external nature. The most relevant is closely associated with the firm’s business idea. By now, the most realized projects are of confidential nature and NDAs prohibit to reference to projects in order to promote the own firm. This results in the dilemma that their services demand for a high level of trust which is hard to obtain with no previous references to assure the actual capability of fulfilling the given tasks satisfactorily!
Michaels and Tobias’ vision is to establish themselves as trustful business partners for large multinational pharmaceutical and medicine companies. Pursuing this, they anticipate that building up a reputation might be the most challenging task in order to achieve the position they strive for.
