This is a story about Gustav and Hugo, co-founders of a MarTech startup called Bruno.ai, who were recently interviewed by Marcin Ziolkowski, CEO of Goddit.
Background Story: These founders have been in the marketing and SEO business for several years. In 2020 they had an idea that they wanted to build the easiest and simplest Ranktracker, a business software.
Marcin: Can you explain who or what a Ranktracker is?
Gustav: Sure. Let’s say I want my eCommerce site selling shoes to rank higher in search engine results for the phrases ‘sneakers’ or ‘football cleats.’ Ranktracker is software that constantly checks how good your website ranks for specific keywords and informs you daily if you gain or lose a position.
Marcin: Have you ever built a software product before?
Gustav: No, never. This was our first time. Our customers love our services, and we thought we have deep enough expertise within the industry to create something unique in the marketing software scene. We thought - how hard can it be to build software since we’ve learnt so much, right?
Marcin: How did you approach this challenge?
Gustav: We reached out to an offshore software agency with an idea. We had a couple of meetings. We felt we connected with the team on a personal level. We presented the idea. We received a fixed quote for the whole project. It looked really good. I thought that if we could build this tool on this budget, it’s going to be a space rocket.
Marcin: How did you evaluate the talent of your software team?
Gustav: They said they could do it, and we believed them. That’s it.
Hugo: We thought we could make software excellent and cheap. It’s a trap.
Gustav: Yes, we were very naive.
Marcin: How did the project go?
Hugo: Initially, it went pretty well. The team was delivering constant updates. Problems started to occur when the team blew their original deadline, which was estimated to take three calendar months.
Gustav: We started to suspect that it would end badly after they blew their 3rd deadline.
More to the Story: Their software project has been in limbo for over a year. The team was making updates every 2-3 weeks. With every bug they fixed, the developers broke two or three other things that worked in the previous version by accident.
And things got worse; a new engineer worked on their project monthly. This type of turnover can be typical of software companies that constantly switch team members due to high turnover. These developments prompted Hugo to reach out to Marcin for advice.
Hugo: After this experience, my trust in software developers hit rock bottom. I thought we would need seasoned and experienced software professionals to inspect the quality of what was done and set a path forward to make Bruno.ai work.
Marcin: The developer's original code was not completely bad. Some parts needed reworking due to performance issues. One of the root causes of failure was poor communication and a lack of understanding of the company's business needs. The vendor didn’t ask basic questions like: ‘how many users does the system need to support to break even every month?
Gustav: The Goddit Team agreed to help us, and we set a new product development strategy. We found new developers who were thoroughly interviewed and hand-picked by Goddit’s founder.
Hugo: We were more than pleased. After two weeks of working with a new software team, the product was live!
Marcin: What is your situation now?
Gustav: We feel we are very much in control of what is happening. Our needs are translated into the software language we didn’t know how to speak. Goddit handles communication between Product Managers and software developers.
You guys have very high standards and work ethics. I manage people daily. I sleep safe, knowing that the product being developed is under the same scrutiny I have towards my marketing team.
Hugo: We see that the developers are devoted to the project. There is no turnover, and communication is excellent. So far, we have delivered everything we wanted.
Gustav: I am blind as a business owner, I can be easily fooled. You guys are my flashlight.
If I were to do it all over, I would first secure a CTO type of competences to evaluate the software team. You shouldn’t be afraid to add this extra cost in the early building phase of your software product.
Hugo: Finally, I also should say that the whole company has learned a lot about software development. Eventually, we will have in-house software competencies, but what has been done so far is not lost. Our Product Manager has learned a lot from you about how to do this right.
Marcin Ziolkowski writes about business software development strategies for early-stage companies. He also founded Goddit LLC. Based in Denver, Colorado, Goddit is a burst tech dev, full-stack software development team providing systems integrations and public cloud AWS and Azure solutions architecture.
