The Original problem Otus was built to resolve

One Monday afternoon, 40 sites later

Just like that, on a Monday afternoon, Otus took its very first shape. Like reading an ultrasound scan, we knew what we were looking at. That kicked off a back-and-forth journey of iterating into what we have today. A UX pet project became a working prototype that tagged photos. The prototype grew into a company run alongside AI colleagues that manage our code, accounting and marketing. And along the way, 250 users across 40 sites came on board.

It wasn’t a fast journey.

The problem we kept walking past

I trained as an architect and spent a good part of my career on construction sites. Every site walk left behind a camera roll with a few hundred photos and a chat group where everyone else dumped theirs. Someone still had to turn all of it into a report by Friday.

The photos were less of a problem, taking it is what every phone is built to do. However to take them when they all look largely the same, and then matching it to the plan - that was a real pain for me. I had 800 car lots to photograph in the basement of Raffles City Shopping Centre, and I needed to map these images onto a plan for an LTA submission. This took me 3 days to match and tally. It was clearly not the high value work I studied 7 years to do!

(image of my mark ups in phases to know figure out where I started and stopped in phases, sending it to myself on WhatsApp).

Vinson and I started Otus in 2021 to fix that one thing: put every site photo on the floor plan where it was taken, tag it, and make it searchable.

From pet project to prototype

The first version was a UX exercise. We designed for the people actually holding the phone on site, the RE and the site supervisor squeezing a walk between meetings. If it took more than a few taps, nobody would use it on a scaffold.

The prototype did one job: tag a photo and pin it to a plan. That narrow scope taught us more than any feature list would have. People pinned photos when it was faster than sending them to the group chat. When it wasn’t, they went back to the chat.

From there we added features in the order users asked for them. Offline capture came first, for basements and lift cores with no signal. Then voice notes that transcribe across languages and fill in the form for you, plan revisions, and issues that the assignee can close themselves. Behind the search sits a 489-tag construction taxonomy across 17 categories, including Singapore regulatory tags for SCDF, BCA, PUB, LTA and NEA.

What the numbers say

At Singapore’s 44-hour work week, 60 to 90 hours a month comes to about 1.4 to 2 working weeks. For a project team, that’s a coordinator’s time no longer spent renaming files and building report slides by hand.

The 94% matters most when a dispute comes up. Under the Limitation Act, a defect claim can surface years after handover. How fast you can find a photo decides whether it gets used as evidence or stays lost in a phone backup.

Running a company with AI colleagues

Otus is a small team. We couldn’t hire our way to a product that 40 sites rely on, so we built the company around AI colleagues. They write code with us, keep the books and draft our marketing. [Name the specific tools here if you want to be concrete.]

You can see the pace in the release log. Our October release shipped 50 merged changes in 36 days, covering themes, plans, issues, permissions and an installable web app. A team our size couldn’t hold that cadence any other way.

What took longest

The code wasn’t the hard part. The hardest part was an objection we still hear in most first meetings: “We already pay staff to do this. Why pay more for the same job?”

It’s a fair question. Otus doesn’t replace the person taking the photos. It gives them back the hours they spend sorting photos after the site walk, and it keeps the record findable for when it matters years later.

We also learned which signal to watch. When two people from the same company sign up on their own, without us introducing them, the rest of that firm tends to follow. [Add a number if you have one, e.g. how many of the 40 sites started this way.]

What’s next

SGBuildex data exchange becomes a requirement in January 2027, and BCA’s virtual inspection workflow for site staffs depends on site records that are tagged and searchable. That’s the archive we’ve been building since that Monday afternoon.

If your team is still digging through chat groups for last month’s photos, try Otus free at otus.build. Seats are unlimited per project, so bring the whole site.