A story about running a software house
The beginning
In 2013 I've co-founded Epicode software house. Before starting the company we were doing after-hours projects with my business partner. He was handling sales and design. I was handling development. This is also how we split the duties in Epicode. He became CEO and I was CTO. At the beginning, it was quite an easy role in a company of 2 employees.
Working as we liked
We would probably not start Epicode as a full-time job if not the big customer open for cooperation: Grupa Pracuj where we both worked before. Grupa Pracuj was just starting a new startup: emplo.com and needed to build a development team for it. They become our biggest customer and shareholder. It was a good deal. We had financial security and independence. We could do the software business as we liked. Our customers including Grupa Pracuj cared only about results.
Quick start and early success
I've relocated back from Ireland to Poland to start working full time at Epicode. In July 2013 there was me, my partner, emplo.com project starting and 3 other small ecommerce customers we had as a result of our part-time moonlight work before Epicode. Good start to grow. Soon we started hiring and rented an office. After 2 years we were over 20 people: developers, testers and designers.
Growing challenges
Next 3 years has shown us exactly the challenges of growing company over 30 employees. For that you need to delegate and to have middle-management. We were not ready for that. As local "superheros" we felt that we must be directly involved in every project to be sure that it will succeed. We were focusing on project-related work, not on growing the company. There was also a constant feeling that if we hire more people we are not sure if we will manage to get enough customers. On the one hand we always had a big workload, but we were never sure if this workload is stable enough to hire more people.
When running a software house, the biggest challenge is to have proper balance between new projects coming-in and number of hired people. The only cost that matters are salaries. If you hire too many people you can quickly produce lost. Crucial part is to have predictable sales pipeline so that you can plan at least couple of months ahead.
Learning sales
We did an effort to hire a sales person but it has only shown how unprepared we were to scale. That person reached out to over 500 potential customers but didn't even manage to setup a single meeting. It turned out that sales person did not understand what we were really selling. For us it was obvious: we were listening what problems customer wants to solve and then we were proposing how we would approach that by providing appropriate software solution. It usually worked. Our sales meetings were not about sales, it was about free consultancy after which the customer simply wanted to work with us. But this approach did not scale without proper staff training, marketing content and well-prepared case studies. With an ad-hoc sales person concentrated solely on rates that we offer and deadlines that we can meet, the effect was terrible. We were treated like spammers.
Goal bigger than sales - do what you like doing
But the reality was that we were not convinced if we would really like to focus on marketing, sales and growing the company. Once we have got a project we were sinking into delivering it, forgetting about searching the next thing to do after current project will be done. When I was working on non-technical stuff I had a feeling of loosing time and energy on something that is not really my pair of shoes. Using social media for promotion? Blah... We are hackers, developers, creators, not marketers. If somebody does not want to work with us, it's them who should regret. I was not realising how arrogant that way of thinking was.
Our company started to drift into games direction and developing our own game. Many people we had onboard wanted to work on own product which would give much more freedom on how to work. Not to relay solely on B2B sales, contracts and timelines, especially that we were not mastering that processes. Developing a game had a chance to become a high-margin business - with higher risk but also with higher gratitude if it will turn out to be successful.
But for me personally it was not something I wanted to do. I was excited about solving real-life problems that companies or end-users have. I didn't want to close myself in a dark room coding a virtual world. My preference was working with people and business processes.
There is no progress without change
After 5 years at Epicode I decided to go my own path. We had great time at Epicode with plenty of success stories and delivered projects. But I needed a fresh context and new fuel. Now I am excited to be a part of scale-up process at Mash.com. Scaling is something that failed for us in Epicode, that's why I am so enthusiastic about being a part of it at Mash.