Not many startups make it. You either scale the right way - or you die. Let's discuss the typical problems and demonstrate solutions focused on software development - based on real-life scenarios of tech startups.

1. How to Scale Your Tech
Startup for The Win
Aki Inkeroinen, Dominik Zyskowski
Espeo Software

2. 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

3. 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

4. Typical startup

5. 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

6. Business Challenges
and
Growth Enablement

7. 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

8. Time
Revenue
Target
Growth
Start and scaling

9. 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

10. 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

11. Revenuegrowth
Planning Activity and continuation
New business
Areas
Partners
Pricing model
Customer
references
Product MVP
Business
model
Exponential Growth - Do it once and replicate

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. Software Development
for scalability

16. 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

18. Why do you need to scale your product?
• New requests from customers
• Rollouts to new markets
• Performance issues
• Technical debt
• Faster delivery of features

19. 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?

20. How to scale fast your BUSINESS
Let specialists take care of the technology
AND
You handle the rest.

21. Our technologies

22. Methodology

23. Good practices - environments

24. Good practices - Continuous X

25. Good practices - Continuous Integration

26. Good practices - delivery/deployment

27. ● Test-driven development / BDD
● Automated / manual testing
● Code review
Good practices - quality assurance

32. Thank you
Aki & Dominik
You can visit us at booth A
www.espeo.eu