One Product Is a Bet – a Portfolio of Apps Is a Business

01 /The Concept

The Mobile First Company is building mobile apps "for every business need."

The name says it all: mobile first. The guiding principle unifying everything they ship is that apps should be designed from the ground up for comfortable use on a phone – not watered-down, clunky, feature-stripped versions of a desktop app crammed onto a small screen.

For consumer apps like TikTok or Instagram, this is already the norm. Their desktop versions are the afterthought. But business software is the opposite: desktop is king, and mobile is either crippled, awkward, or both.

So The Mobile First Company is building mobile-first business software – specifically for small businesses, which lack the resources to commission custom mobile solutions.

The startup isn't limiting itself to any one industry. Retail, healthcare, fast food, construction, home services – all fair game. The apps will cover things like updating CRM records after a client meeting, fast invoicing, taking online restaurant orders, and tracking progress on construction sites.

The plan calls for at least 20 such apps, presumably designed to integrate with one another – forming a unified mobile management ecosystem for any type of small business.

Notably, the startup doesn't identify other apps as its primary competition. It calls out Excel – which the vast majority of small businesses still rely on for everything.

Founded just last December, this French startup has already closed its first €5 million funding round and launched its first product.

That product is Amoa, an inventory management app. Built-in barcode scanning lets users track incoming and outgoing stock in real time – so pulling out your phone to check actual warehouse levels is always a moment away.

02 /Why It Matters

Something unexpected turned up on the Amoa website: it's pitched not just for business inventory, but for personal use too.

The startup describes Amoa as a fit for organized people who want to keep their household in order – cataloging home appliances, furniture, electronics, and other belongings, complete with photos, descriptions, storage locations, purchase dates, and scanned receipts and warranties.

There's also a collector use case: coins, stamps, model cars, you name it.

At first glance this looks like a dangerous dilution of the startup's B2B focus. But think about it for a moment.

The owner of a small business is an ordinary person whose professional and personal lives are deeply intertwined. This isn't a corporate executive whose business systems and personal apps belong to completely separate worlds. A small shop owner can absolutely use the same lightweight mobile tool to manage store inventory and catalog a personal collection – or track spare parts for the car in the garage.

In fact, the dual-use case could be a selling point rather than a distraction. Especially if the alternative is a single spreadsheet serving both purposes. And remember – The Mobile First Company names Excel as its primary competitor.

So the blurring of work and personal life, in this context, might actually be a feature. The startup appears to be testing exactly that hypothesis.

03 /Opportunities

What's compelling about The Mobile First Company's concept is that it avoids two common traps: it's not a single-product bet, and it's not a scattered "everything for everyone" play either.

Every product targets the same audience – small business owners. That means the same marketing and sales channels carry over to each new launch, improving with time. A satisfied customer of product one is the shortest path to selling product two, and the more products a customer uses, the easier it is to add the next.

The real product, underneath it all, isn't any individual app. It's a factory for building apps. Every app gets produced through the same repeatable process: identify what small business owners are tracking in Excel, figure out what's painful about it, and ship a focused mobile app to replace it – using the same team, the same design principles, the same distribution.

A similar model was behind Staytuned, [covered here](/review/zarabatyvat-dengi-proshhe-chem-razvivat-svojo) a year ago, which built a suite of apps for Shopify merchants and raised $46.5 million by applying a consistent acquisition process rather than building from scratch. And Unaric, [covered here](/review/prostoj-recept-sozdanija-bolshogo-biznesa), raised $35 million doing the same for the Salesforce ecosystem.

Compared to those, The Mobile First Company's bet on building in-house rather than acquiring looks like a constraint – but it may be a deliberate one. The cost and speed of AI-assisted development has dropped dramatically. Building custom may now be nearly as fast as acquiring, at a fraction of the cost, and gives full control over the mobile-first UX that is the company's core differentiator.

This is the bigger pattern: AI-assisted development makes the "product factory" model genuinely viable. Lock in a) the target audience, b) a repeatable idea-generation process, and ideally c) one entrenched incumbent to fight (hello, Excel) – and you have a compounding business that doesn't rise or fall on any single product.

The question for anyone inspired by this model: what audience, what incumbent, and what repeatable process could you build around? What factory would you run?