My agency is consistently growing and has been profitable and sustainable, year on year, but I've just started a new company. And one that is unlike anything else I've ever done before. Why? š¤
Well, my āwhyā is exactly the reason.
Instead of helping 20 startups per year, Iām giving it a go to help 200, 2,000 and then 20,000.
If youāve read my recent article, you will have learnt that my work as CTO in my family business inspired me to start my own company to help startups and organizations achieve their dreams using technology.
Itās been almost 8 years of helping people with technology in mind, and Iāve helped over 100 companies at Devika by providing technology services. In the last two years especially, business has been really good, and I started thinking about scaling the company so I could help more and more people.
Hereās the math. At the moment, Devika launches a digital product about once a month. So this means we can help 12 people with technology in mind, per year. Letās say 20 if we include smaller projects and consulting.
We could conservatively grow 20% YOY and double in ~4 years. If we doubled our headcount, as well as continued streamlining our delivery operations through use of products like Baseline š , we could help 24 startups per year, 35 at most.
However, according to Blackbird VC, over 1,000 startups are founded in Australia alone each year. In the US, over 5 million startups launch every year. And most of these donāt have the funds for a company like Devika to build their products.
So, how do I help them?
This got me thinking about a product business model. Internally, we had already created Baseline and were using this on every project to deliver faster. Could Baseline help startups outside of our agency?
After many conversations and further product development, we got Baseline to a place where it was ready to be used directly by startups with their own inhouse technical team, and launched as its own company in late 2023. Due to the nature of the product, Baseline is exceptionally scalable.
Thousands of startups can take Baseline and build on top of it concurrently as:
Iāve got a strong background in professional services, and have always been passionate about running a services business, but thereās no denying that in order to help 10x startups with technology in mind, a product business model is the only way to do it.
Instead of helping 20 startups per year, Iām giving it a go to help 200, 2,000 and then 20,000.
Who else has taken their learnings from a services organisation to create the next big product?