Cutting building survey time in half by replacing clipboards with a mobile app

BuildingMinds is a Berlin-based proptech company digitizing property management. I co-founded their internal "App Factory," a small team tasked with building complementary mobile products. EQ Capture was our first: an iOS app that lets building surveyors digitize equipment data on the spot, instead of relying on paper, cameras, and spreadsheets.

To survey a building's equipment, a professional surveyor spends 3 to 4 days walking every floor carrying a paper map, a pen, a digital camera, and two backup batteries. For each item they find, they scribble on the map, photograph the equipment, and stick on a barcode label.

To remember which room they're in, they take a photo of the paper map with the camera. A digital photo of an analog map. That's the system.

Back at the office, it gets worse. I invited Oliver, one of our surveyors, to our workspace and watched him sit at two screens, manually sorting hundreds of photos into rooms. Two days of focused, repetitive work. One mistake could mean traveling back to the building.

Total time per building: 4 to 5 days. The end result? An Excel file.

I could have run this project from a desk in Berlin. Instead, I showed up at buildings with the surveyors. Over roughly 10 building scans, I carried the same floor plans, climbed the same stairs, and built direct relationships with the Westbridge team so they'd trust us with honest feedback.

My co-founders, Robert and Eddie, had never worked closely with a designer before. I pushed for direct user access partly for the design, and partly because my teammates had never worked that closely with a designer. The fastest way to show what design does is to come back from a site visit with something nobody had thought of, and watch the conversation shift.

The app shipped to the iOS App Store. I built a mobile component library adapting BuildingMinds' design language, and kept the core flow simple: pick your building, select a room, and start capturing. Photos, barcodes, and structured data all sync directly to the platform.