The Birth of HackerFleet

An innovation studio for the ambitious

I know what it’s like to build a product no one wants.

In college I ran a successful internet radio station. We had around 1 million users in Latin America.

With the music industry changing, we decided we would build a new product. The future.

We spent many months researching, designing, and building only to find out nobody wanted it. Not even a little bit.

We felt defeated to work so hard and come away with so little.

In the coming years I studied disruptive innovation through a masters program and continued to build startups across a wide range of industries to understand what makes innovation successful.

HackerFleet: the solution to product innovation

This is an important reason why I’m so excited to share my new venture: HackerFleet.

Our mission is to collaborate with the movers and shakers of the world to execute disruptive ideas.

The 6 year old in me celebrates a world where HackerFleet moves human progress further, faster. The business man in me approves of the deliberate, procedural way we can help ambitious startups and forward-thinking corporations de-risk their product innovation process.

But before telling you more about that, I’ll tell you why a “HackerFleet” needs to exist in the first place.

Startups and corporates struggle with innovation

Current best practices to follow software development are wrong.

Even great designers, developers, and product people fail because their process is broken.

Traditional product development uses a tiered process:

Step 1 → Idea
Step 2 → Research
Step 3 → Design
Step 4 → Build
Step 5 → Launch

This process is flawed because it relies on assumptions and predictions made early in the process to determine success. The result is that many products take months or longer before validation in front of real users.

This is the wrong way to build innovative products. It emphasizes just building something, instead of building something we know is valuable.

But even with the right process companies fail to hire and manage talent to that can effectively execute.

This was clear to me at my time at CoderSchool (and before that CodePath).

In the beginning of the year Walmart sets ambitious hiring goals.

“We will hire 500 engineers this year!”

By the end of the year they have hired 50.

In southeast Asia I see startups spend over 6 months to hire their first employee. And then after they hire their first engineer they realize that an engineer (or a group of engineers) does not make an experienced product team.

Across the board, from solo founders to Fortune 5 companies struggle to select, attract, and retain the product talent they need to execute. This is even after they have a product they’re sure people want.

These problems are why HackerFleet is so exciting.

We build products to succeed and then offer engineers, designers, and product folks to execute product development.

We do this by ensuring that innovation is a series of steps rather than a hail mary.

We bring order to innovation chaos.

How we execute innovation 10x faster.

“Operate using the best product development methods and people in the world. Provide execution across technologies, at scale.”

This means Phds and product experts from Stanford and Google collaborating with data scientists and software engineers in Vietnam.

What does a de-risked product building process mean?

It means taking all the hypothesis, conjecture, prediction that usually determines product building and religiously checking it against the strongest measure of truth — your users.

How we work with ambitious companies

We provide Scalable Software Development & Scientific Innovation Process

Assemble a team in days. Scale as needed.

Operate an effective innovation process that runs parallel to ongoing development.

But HackerFleet is bigger than us

Our aim is not solely to build a company. It is to spark a movement to push innovation around the world forward, smartly.

We want you to be apart of this movement.

Even if you don’t know the first thing about product development or innovation. We started that way too.

We believe the more we share what we learn, the stronger our community becomes and the stronger we become with you.

Interested in becoming a product whisperer or innovation scientist?

Need a disruptive innovation partner?

Marcus Ellison is the CEO of HackerFleet, a global venture building studio.

Get in touch: marcus@hackerfleet.com