How to Scale Your Tech Startup for The Win

Aki Inkeroinen, Dominik ZyskowskiEspeo 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

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

Business Challengesand

Growth Enablement

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

Time

Re

ve

nu

e

Target

Growth

Start and scaling

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

Software Development for scalability

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.

Our technologies

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

Thank you

Aki & Dominik

You can visit us at booth A

www.espeo.eu