I Run a Successful Tech Business, and I Push Against Exponential Growth
After developing apps that became global hits and owning a few large businesses, I have chosen a path that is not common in the tech industry. Here’s why.
I’ve been in software development for a long time, even before girls were on my radar. The road to where I am now has certainly been an interesting adventure. I can’t claim to have made all the right decisions, but I feel confident that I always made “a” decision to keep my career and company moving in the right direction.
With the combination of hard work, and a lot of luck, I personally created apps that had tens of millions of downloads globally. As a video game nerd, all the way back to the Atari 2600 days, the peak of my pride was seeing my company logo on the legendary Need for Speed game box. Once a great success like that is achieved, you ask, where do I go from here?
For me, the answer to that was simple. Do what you love, and be the best at it, without answering to anyone.
Easier said than done? I don’t think so. For me, and my co-founders who share the same vision as I do, creating a boutique operation that doesn’t place exponential growth as the number one priority came very naturally.
Building a Boutique
I have been very fortunate to meet, and work with, incredibly smart and talented people. With their support and teamwork, we built a software house called SwingDev. Each day we get to help startups turn their ideas into great success. Between our offices, we have just over 70 employees and handle only a handful of projects a year, much less than other companies who could be viewed as “competitors”. However, a team of this size allows us to stay focused on something that many companies lack, a vision.
I think that one of the most important things when running a company is the vision. Often I see competitors boast about being on the fastest-growing companies list, but we’ve found great personal satisfaction in being a key factor in putting companies on those lists. Even if we qualify, we’re not desperate for public approval. Many people start companies with the ultimate goal to become rich and be huge. Others are terrified when their business grows faster than they expected, and they just go along for the ride. I see many people lose sight of their vision (if they had one) and forget the reasons why they started their company in the first place.
A company doesn’t have to be a billion-dollar company to be considered successful
I strongly believe, if you have a business, don’t get trapped. You don’t have to be persuaded by the delusion that a company has to be a billion-dollar company to be considered successful. You can be the owner of Zara, or you can have an incredible boutique tailoring shop. In both cases, you can have the success that makes both you and your employees happy, depending on the goals you have set for yourself.
I, along with my co-founders, have chosen the tailors path, which is not common in the tech industry. However, the benefits are extraordinary, to both us and our clients.
Here’s why:
1. We can choose the clients and projects we believe in.
We aren’t forced to work with everyone, and we have the luxury of saying no. While some of the other dev shops are desperate for every project lead, we pick and choose. We work with the founders and projects we believe in or have a specific strategic value. This is good for our team, and it has an enormous impact on our clients. We can focus our energy on the people who matter and deserve our time. Bad clients, and bad projects, can be a cancer to an entire organization.
2. We know each other’s competencies very well. We have experts, true artists, on board. We treat each other as family, and communication is a priority.
I certainly miss the days where there was just a handful of us on the team and I knew everyone much closer, but it’s also extremely rewarding to see how this closeness among the team works at a larger scale. This allows us to be flexible and adjust to the needs of any client or project. We can structure the team exactly the way it needs to be with people who work extremely well together and respect each other.
3. Employee skill-levels are constantly growing.
We exclusively employ very experienced team members. We’re not a training dev-shop. Our clients are fast-growing startups that can not afford mistakes. We invest in our team members by working to improve their knowledge and encourage sharing their skills with others. This constant goal of improvement, as well as working with promising startups, encourages our employees to stay with us longer.
Creating success for our clients will bring us our new ones, and if we don’t look out for our clients, our future success will go away
4. We can be deeply involved in our client’s success
We are a boutique operation, so I never have 50 projects on my mind at once. Our clients deserve our focus and engagement. It’s the only way to have a successful outsourcing relationship. We’re not a team of “yes-men”. We are a team of experienced engineering consultants who look out for our client’s success and advise them in many ways. We take personal pride in our contribution to our client’s success, and it’s a key factor in what drives us to wake up every morning (and sometimes work late nights).
5. We can grow at a pace that we define
I am proud of the way we have grown and the foundations we have built. We’ve grown from just our founders to over 70 team members in the US, Poland, Cape Town, and Brazil. We have built a global company that still operates with boutique-level service seamlessly across countries. We never created pressure to accomplish this fast, we only created the expectation to do it right. Sometimes it’s painful when we are over capacity, but in the long-run, it’s been one of the best decisions we have made.
Sales success, or no selling at all?
One thing that sometimes surprises people is that we have built our entire company without a sales team. I never liked the approach of hiring 20 people to knock on doors to find clients, so we built our entire business on reputation. To this day, we do not have an outbound sales team. We get nearly 100% of our business from trusted partners and previous-client referrals. This has created a culture that everyone at SwingDev realizes — creating success for our clients will bring us our new ones, and if we don’t look out for our clients, our future success will go away. This approach surely took longer to do properly, but it has paid off handsomely. The hard work of our team has built up enormous trust among our VC and client networks, and that will power the future of our growth.
So what’s next?
For me personally, I feel like I have achieved “do what you love” and I can always work harder to “be the best at it”. I’ve found “answering to anyone” never goes away. I find myself answering to others more than ever, but now I am doing it from a position of genuine desire to communicate with the employees, clients, and partners who matter to me.
We’ve built an incredible foundation that we can build on. We will continue to grow in a way that brings the most value to our employees, clients, and partners. I believe our approach sets us apart in an industry where many companies are the same and in a price war with their competition. We stay ahead by playing a different game.
It’s not always easy. Having a vision early on is easy, sticking to it is a lot harder. As you define your company strategy, or are deciding which company to join, I highly encourage you to truly prioritize your goals and embrace being different than the others in your industry. I can tell you from personal experience that it has been one of the most rewarding paths in my professional career.
Are we building a billion-dollar company that prioritizes growth above everything else? Definitely not.
Are we building an extremely valuable company and a global boutique brand that will scale without compromising? Absolutely.
