How to Scale Your Tech Startup for The Win Aki Inkeroinen, Dominik Zyskowski Espeo Software
Aki - background
• Business development, sales and sales management
• Experience of how to create exponential growth
• Several large international ICT enterprises
• EdTech gamification startup
• Software houses
My current role:
• Responsible for Espeo Software business in Finland
• Daily contacts to dozens of startups
Espeo Software
• Polish company with Finnish roots. Founded 2008
• Combines the Finnish business and software consulting
with the Polish programming skills
• With a number of Finnish customers we have done
close cooperation over 8 years
• Sanoma Oikotie jobs, Janton, Ottoboni, Solita, YLE,
Startups, Advertizing agencies and Industrial customers
• We know startups well – during the last 1.5 years we
have started software development for nine new Finnish
startups
• We have clients also in other Nordic countries, in
Central Europe and in the USA
Typical Startup Company
• Innovative business idea
• Group of persons with different skills
• Only one or two software developers
• Need to show the business potential to the investors
• Money and time constraint
• After investment rounds, needs more resources and
external experience to solve the bottlenecks
• When the success hits – often impossible to get
resources fast enough to enable the growth
Our targets for success
• Every startup employee able to use his/her skills
• Customer and investor needs fulfilled
• Fast development cycles of the product
• Scalable resourcing when success peak hits
• Internalization and scalability of the product and
organization
• Exponential growth with correct actions done
Don’t change your message
Keep your customer message
• Selling cycles are long: 3 months to several years
• Make a three year strategy and keep your customer
message
• Every time you change it, the selling cycle
counter starts from zero
• Customers need to hear the same message
several times
• They want to see that your company and the
products still exist
Adapt to markets
• Do actions for growth consistently
• You can use your familiar startup routines up to 40
employees, then you need to standardize
Be fast. Copy from others
Be fast
• … when you get money. Investors expect results in
months.
• You may not have time to recruit new developers
Fail fast
• Fail fast internally. Learn from failures.
• Do not show it to the customers
Copy from others
• Use your valuable own resources for business (idea)
development
• Copy the best practices from others
• Use external professional skills effectively
Reven
ue g
row
th
Planning Activity and continuation
New business
Areas
Partners
Pricing model
Customer
references
Product MVP
Business
model
Exponential Growth - Do it once and replicate
Spaghetti code and bottlenecks
Spaghetti code
• Inexperienced software developers
• Need to get more features into the product
• Need to show credibility to the investors
• All these result as a spaghetti code
Bottlenecks
• Need to fix the code
• Need to grow fast
• No time to recruit
• Scalable resourcing helps
Testing the product
• Testing the (MVP) product with real customers mean
less needs for software development for a while
Key growth issues with startups
1. Bad business idea. No money
2. Not able to show validity for investments
• Not fast enough vs. competitors
• Missing product features
• Inexperienced developers
• Code scalability problems
3. Missing monetizing of the solution
4. Design and user interface help needed
5. Suitable partnering for growth
6. Support and maintenance of the system
Startup needs the following resources to solve the issues:
Business idea owner, Technology owner, Monetizing
owner and potentially a set of own developers
Solution for scaling
• The cost level of the software development can
be halved by using nearshoring
• Spaghetti code cleanup and redesign is done
quickly by experienced software developers
• Business idea validity can be checked at
workshops and bootcamps with business and
software consultants
• When the growth need hits, external resources
can be delivered fast
• External developers can be scaled according to
the needs
• The whole solution development can be
outsourced and the own team can concentrate on
finalizing the business idea
Dominik - background
• R&D projects
• Product companies - e-commerce and online payments
• SaaS startup
• Software development & consulting company
My current role:
• Consult business ideas for software
• Help entrepreneurs define their software needs
• Suggest technologies according to their needs
• Manage software projects
Why do you need to scale your product?
• New requests from customers
• Rollouts to new markets
• Performance issues
• Technical debt
• Faster delivery of features
How to scale fast your development?
• Recruit rockstar developers quickly
• Teach them about your business
• Be involved in architectural decisions
• Give technical ownership to devs
• Reorganize your team
BUT
What about your business, users, revenue, marketing?
How to scale fast your BUSINESS
Let specialists take care of the technology
AND
You handle the rest.
Methodology
Good practices - environments
Good practices - Continuous X
Good practices - Continuous Integration
Good practices - delivery/deployment
● Test-driven development / BDD
● Automated / manual testing
● Code review
Good practices - quality assurance