From Usability to Business

We start the series dedicated to the people behind Untile with one of the founders and current CEO, Miguel.

Miguel is late. Being the managing director of Untile has its disadvantages, and demands on his time are one of them. He was in a meeting, so he asked us to push our interview fifteen minutes. You wouldn’t expect the managing director to warn ahead and politely apologise for keeping us waiting for a mere fifteen minutes, but that feels like the standard to expect with Miguel and Untile. By the time we sit down to write this story, we’ve wrapped up another two interviews, with staff and clients, and everyone seems to agree about one thing, which is probably going to be the theme of this whole 12 Years, 12 Stories project: people matter.

“I am originally from Braga. I came to Viana to study”, Miguel says, when asked about the early beginnings of the company. The question wasn’t about him, but there is a sense from the get-go that Untile’s story is his own, and that of the other three co-founders. “I had been working for about thirteen years even then. I always hated staying still. I did everything. I picked fruit, handed out fliers, I even sold pirated CDs, back when that was a thing.”

When he arrived at Viana, to study Computing and Multimedia at the IPVC (Instituto Politécnico de Viana do Castelo), he would end up flat-sharing with three other guys from the same school.

“Three of the founders of Untile already lived together. Myself, Nelson,and Sérgio. We all shared a flat while we were attending university. We invited Ricardo onboard too, and that made the four of us.”

He means Ricardo Correia, Nelson Alves and Sérgio Laranjeira. At one point, at least three of them shared the same flat near the scenic centre of Viana do Castelo, the same Portuguese town that Untile still mentions today in all of their promotional materials as one of their key sources of inspiration.

They were young, they were still in school, and they didn’t have the slightest idea what they wanted to do when they entered the job market. Miguel had an inkling he wanted to be an entrepreneur. “I always liked to make stuff”, he says, with a small glimpse of that young college kid still glimmering through.

So what can four college students, flatmates, with zero experience at running a project do? Make it up as they go along, of course.

“Usability is a measure of how well a specific user in a specific context can use a product/design to achieve a defined goal effectively, efficiently and satisfactorily.”

We Googled that.

“In a usability-testing session, a researcher (called a “facilitator” or a “moderator”) asks a participant to perform tasks, usually using one or more specific user interfaces. While the participant completes each task, the researcher observes the participant’s behavior and listens for feedback.”

We Googled that too.

This is what Miguel and the other Untile founders were up to when they became known throughout the country. Usability-testing is now a standard industry procedure for many businesses, but in 2008 it was still a radical concept. SAPO was developing a solution for this, and that was pretty much it. The flatmates decided they would gather their strengths and create a usability lab to run in an entrepreneurship competition called Poliempreende. Three were in immediately, and Nelson soon joined. It was highly competitive, very demanding, and… they thought they could win.

“We had two goals. We all wanted to graduate together, and we wanted to win Poliempreende. We could think about work, getting jobs, and all of the grown-up stuff later. We wanted to graduate, and we wanted to win.”

The team worked on their usability lab, and it consumed all of their time. That’s when Miguel the workaholic first appeared. The four founders lived together, they studied together, and now they also worked together. Every living moment was about the project. Even when one of the four was cooking, the other three were hanging out in the kitchen and discussing what was next on their to-do list.

It became clear that they had different strengths, and the roles they would end up playing at Untile started manifesting even then. The project took shape, and it worked.

Untile, twelve years before that name would come to be, won the Poliempreende. And, from night to day, they became rockstars. This was the fifth edition of the competition, but it was the first in Viana do Castelo, and their project mightily impressed the business and academic community of the small coastal town.

“It was like we won Eurovision. For like a year, everyone seemed to know who we were, and everyone wanted to talk to us and invite us to things. We even got invites from business incubators, and we didn’t even have a business to speak of.”

To the victor, came the spoils. The company, which would be called Negro Esquisso, officially became something the four thought was worth pursuing.

Why yes, Negro Esquisso. That was Untile’s first name. It happened a little later, and the meaning of the name is that it absolutely has no meaning.

“Everyone always asks us what Negro Esquisso (Dark Sketch) means. We were looking at those stock names that quick business registration sites offer, and they were all hilariously bad. Stuff like ‘Enchanted Horse’ or ‘Sea Knight’. We didn’t have any ideas of our own, and Negro Esquisso was clearly the best one available, so we ran with it.”

And run with it they did. But it wouldn’t take long for the four to understand that even though they were the talk of the town, and everyone was willing to open doors for them, a proper usability lab, something that would allow them to develop their ideas further, would take something more than networking opportunities and free office space.

It would take funding. And that wasn’t as easy to come by for a company made of four young upstarts just out of college, with no experience running a business.

“We always loved making sites, and we had learned a lot about it during our studies. We knew we could pull it off, even if we were a little clumsy in the beginning. We had made all of these contacts during the past year, people who liked us and knew our names, so we thought… We’ll do this for a while, and we’ll fund our lab.”

Their first office wasn’t an office. Miguel describes it as more of a windowless bunker, provided to them by the Oficina da Inovação (Innovation Workshop), which they managed to reach thanks to one of Miguel’s contacts. There, they started building their future. One website at a time.

“We knew some things, even then. We didn’t want to make standard, normal websites. We wanted to push the limits. We still do. We didn’t want casual relationships with a ton of clients. We wanted to make custom products for projects we believed in. For a long time, we thought we were doing it to fund our lab. At some point, however, we realised that these were the projects we were passionate about. The lab never came to be, but we’re still here.”

And, twelve years later, it feels like they’re just getting started.