Announcing Bireme Lab

Published on March 5, 2024

We launched Bireme Lab as an entrepreneurial venture in our quest for independence. Our goal is to create specialized services for indie makers and small businesses. Our roadmap for Q1 and Q2 2024 includes the launch of a blog, a newsletter, and access to our first product private beta.

State of mind, motivations, and genesis of the Bireme Lab project : small team, big ambitions

Welcome on Bireme Lab, we are Antoine (at left), and Frédéric (at right).

Our journey from startup ecosystem to entrepreneurial freedom with Bireme Lab

We've been working in the Paris startup ecosystem since 2015. First as employees, then as service providers, we had the opportunity to experiment and define our ideal professional career, leading us to the creation of Bireme Lab.
Time restrictions, a sense of routine, limited prospects for advancement and limited remuneration, coupled with corporate strategies leading to poor choices on which we had no say, pushed us to leave the comfort of salaried employment to become independent.

This independence enabled us to progress much faster in a wider range of skills, while multiplying our income by 3. It also enabled us to assimilate and implement the prerequisites needed to create a product, from the emergence of the initial idea right through to market launch.

Thanks to these experiences and the various lessons learned, we decided to create "our pirate ship" to sail the ocean of entrepreneurship and take the next step: Design, develop and sell our own SaaS product.

Why Bireme Lab?

The name "Bireme Lab" brings together two important terms in defining our values and vision:

• A bireme is a particularly fast and agile warship that played a crucial role in naval battles thanks to its speed and maneuverability. Representative of our desire to iterate fast and to adapt quickly. This idea resonates with our desire for freedom and our quest for entrepreneurial opportunities, in the image of a 'pirate ship', ready to explore and conquer new horizons.
• The "Lab" appellation represents a strategic choice to federate our offerings within an ecosystem that will consolidate our image and embody a gage of reliability. All this, in an environment dedicated to research, design and innovation.

Developing an ecosystem to help design, sell and communicate online

It was important for us to be clear about the evolution of the web ecosystem:

• the democratization of artificial intelligence (ChatGPT, MidJourney, etc.). A field that is not aligned with our skills, while at the same time requiring significant financial resources.
• the arrival of numerous low-code and no-code tools (Webflow, Framer, n8n, etc.). Which don't correspond to the type of product we want to offer.
• the democratization of solo-preneurship, SaaS creation and online sales. (Micro SaaS, online training, etc.). In line with our skills and desires.

Here are the reasons why we decided to go for it:

Postulate 1: organizations dependent on overly generalized tools.

We've found that using tools that offer too much freedom leaves the field open to misuse. This is particularly true of small, inexperienced organizations. Example: the use of Notion for project follow-up.

Postulate 2: expensive applications and professional services.

There are an enormous number of tools which, individually, are not very costly, but which, when cumulated, represent a substantial budget, even if you choose the least expensive plans.

Postulate 3: tools too complex for the uninitiated

By trying to be too flexible to adapt to all organizations, some tools require too much expertise and too much time to be easily valuable. JIRA, for example, requires a professional to set it up correctly.

Our goal

Our vision is to offer freelancers and start-ups the opportunity to tackle complex issues without the need for prior training or experience, while minimizing costs.

By adopting a methodology based design approach, we will create products based on best practices rather than open tools where companies waste time organizing rather than producing. Like Apple, which offers a closed but easy-to-use system.

2024 roadmap: from theory to practice