The Beginning
Hans Jørgen Wiberg lost his sight as a child in Denmark. By his early twenties, he had adapted to the rhythms of a blind life — the white cane, the screen reader, the careful choreography of navigating a world built for sight. But there was one frustration that never left him.
Every single day, he needed a stranger's eyes.
He needed someone to read a medicine label. To tell him which of his five identical-looking shirts was the white one. To describe the menu at a restaurant or the bus number approaching the stop. These were not dramatic emergencies. They were the small, grinding indignities that compounded into a kind of quiet exhaustion.
In 2012, Wiberg was sitting in a café in Copenhagen when a friend mentioned that video calling on smartphones had become cheap and instant. The idea hit him like a physical force: what if he could tap a button and, within seconds, connect to any willing person on the planet who could lend him their eyes?
Not a service. Not a customer support line. A human being. Live. Real. Free.
He called his co-founder, Christian Schiødt, that afternoon. Within three weeks, they had a prototype. Within six months, they launched Be My Eyes.
The Breakthrough
The first version was almost embarrassingly simple. A user pressed a button. The app randomly connected them to a volunteer via live video. The volunteer looked through the phone camera and narrated what they saw. That was the entire product.
They launched with fewer than 20 volunteers in the Copenhagen area. On opening day, they received four calls. Three were from blind friends testing it out. One was a real stranger who needed help identifying a can of soup.
The soup can became a metaphor Wiberg used in every interview for years. "This is what accessibility really means," he would say. "It's not about ramps. It's about soup cans."
The growth was slow, then sudden. By the end of 2013, Be My Eyes had 10,000 downloads and 500 volunteers. By 2015, it had crossed 100,000 users. The app spread through word of mouth in the blind community — a network that is remarkably tight-knit and deeply skeptical of anything that feels exploitative.
This is where Wiberg's understanding of his own market became a genuine competitive advantage. He knew instinctively what would make a blind person trust an app: the volunteer had to see the user, not the other way around. The user controlled the camera. The connection had to be instant — no waiting on hold. No scripts. No corporate politeness. Just a person asking, "What can I help you see?"
He also understood something about the volunteers. They didn't want to feel like charity workers. They wanted to feel useful in a small, specific way. The app was designed to make helping take less than 90 seconds. Most sessions lasted 45.
The Near-Death Experience
In 2017, Be My Eyes nearly died. Not from lack of users — those kept growing. The problem was money.
The app was free. Volunteers were unpaid. The company had no revenue. For five years, they had been running on a combination of European innovation grants, a small amount of angel funding, and the founders' personal savings. Wiberg had burned through roughly €180,000 of his own money. Schiødt had done the same.
The grant that funded their operations was set to expire. They had six weeks before the servers went dark.
Wiberg spent those six weeks cold-calling corporate partners. He had already noticed that brands were using Be My Eyes organically — blind customers were photographing product labels and asking volunteers to read them. This meant that companies with poor label accessibility were generating thousands of support requests that their own customer service teams never saw.
He pitched this insight to Hilton Hotels, Microsoft, and a Danish grocery chain. The pitch was simple: "Your blind customers are already calling you. Let them call through our platform instead. We'll handle the technology. You handle the support. And we'll show you exactly where your accessibility is failing."
Hilton signed first, in late 2017. Microsoft followed in early 2018. The company called this product "Specialized Help" — a paid tier where companies provided trained agents to assist blind users with their specific products and services.
By 2019, Be My Eyes had raised €5 million in Series A funding. Revenue from Specialized Help crossed €2 million for the first time. The team had grown to 28 people.
The Philosophy
What makes the Be My Eyes story distinct from most "founder solves own problem" narratives is Wiberg's refusal to build what he called "a blind person's app." He didn't want to create a walled garden. He wanted to create a bridge.
"The worst thing you can do for a minority community," he said in a 2020 interview, "is build them a separate world and call it inclusion. Inclusion means the rest of the world moves closer to you. Our app doesn't translate the world into blind language. It asks the world to look at what we see through our fingers."
By 2024, Be My Eyes had over 10 million users across 180 countries and more than 200 languages. It supported 4.5 million volunteers. Corporate partners included Hilton, Microsoft, Spotify, L'Oréal, and several national postal services. The company employed approximately 85 people, mostly in Copenhagen with a smaller office in New York.
Revenue was estimated between €12 and €18 million annually, derived almost entirely from Specialized Help contracts. The core app remained free. Always free.
Wiberg himself remained the face of the company. He gave the keynotes. He did the product reviews. He insisted that every new feature be tested by a panel of 12 blind users before shipping — a rule born from the early days when he realized that sighted developers, even well-meaning ones, kept building things that technically worked but felt wrong to use.
What This Means for You
Wiberg's story is not a feel-good anecdote. It is a case study in market intimacy.
Lessons for Filipino Entrepreneurs:
Build where you bleed. Wiberg didn't research the accessibility market. He was the market. In the Philippines, you have communities and problems that no McKinsey deck has captured — the jeepney driver who needs to manage 14 different payment apps, the OFW family that needs a transparent way to split remittance expenses, the sari-sari store owner drowning in supplier catalogs written in English. Your lived experience is not a limitation. It is proprietary data.
Constraint forces clarity. Be My Eyes was simple because it had to be. Wiberg couldn't design complex interfaces for users he couldn't see. Filipino entrepreneurs often over-engineer products to impress investors or imitate Silicon Valley. Ask yourself: what would this product look like if it had to work for the person who needs it most, with the least bandwidth, in the worst conditions?
Monetize the partner, not the user. Be My Eyes stayed free for blind users and charged companies instead. This is a model that works beautifully in the Philippine context. A community health worker shouldn't pay for your telemedicine app. But the LGU that saves ₱500,000 in referral costs should. A street vendor shouldn't pay for your POS system. But the brand that gets real-time shelf data should.
Speed of trust matters more than speed of code. Wiberg's app worked because the blind community trusted it. That trust was earned by building with them, not for them. In the Philippines, community trust is everything — from barangay-level distribution to online communities like r/Philippines. The founder who builds alongside their users will always outcompete the one who parachutes in with capital.
Hans Jørgen Wiberg could not see a single pixel of his own app's interface. He never needed to. He knew what it felt like to be invisible in a room full of people who could see. He built a company that made sure no one else had to feel that way.