How did we get here?

I've been getting asked this question a lot recently. How did 3 techies with no business experience suddenly end up with clients in 50 countries...?

In the beginning

Myself, Dan Hardiker and Alain Moran had all worked together for several years at an e-learning company. It was one of those companies where no matter how much effort you put in, nothing ever succeeded. We got to the point where we just couldn't go on like that and decided to take the plunge and start our own company.

We didn't have a company name, we had no experience of running a company, we had very little funding (about £20K total), we didn't know what we were going to sell, we had no clients and had no idea of how to get clients.

Based on these strong foundations we decided to take the plunge and set up a company!

The first problem was that we couldn't set up a company without a company name. After much heated debate we decided on "Adaptavist" - a mixture of the words "Adaptive" and "Activist" which we take to mean "Directly Adaptive". Regardless, starting with the letter "A" the name met our stringent company naming requirements.

What should we do?

Now, most people have detailed business plans and market research before they set up a company. Not us, that's far too much like hard work.

It took us about 4 months to work out what to do. In fact, it wasn't us who worked out what to do - it was our first client over in Canada that set our direction.

We knew we needed a website and decided that whilst we argued internally over what to do (everything from adult entertainment "get rich quick" schemes to dentist appointment booking systems) we'd get a site up and running in our spare time (of which we had lots back in those days).

We'd become fans of Atlassian's latest product - [Confluence] - a wiki that actually made content easy to find rather than impossible to find (try using Mediawiki and you'll see the difference). It had all the cool features we wanted:

• On-line browser-based authoring
• Built-in search engine
• Plugin architecture so we could extend it in all kinds of crazy ways
• RSS feeds, dynamic navigation and lots of other useful stuff

Problem was, it looked grim! So, we quickly threw together a theme plugin that gave us a bit more control over the design and navigation and our website was ready for action!

Within a month, we got a phone call from Canada: "We want a site like that". That quickly led to the first batch of Adaptavist plugins and services:

• [Confluence license reselling]
• [Confluence hosting]
• [Theme Builder plugin]
• [Bespoke Solutions]

We didn't know it at the time, but those were solutions lots of people wanted to use. Within 18 months we had about 450 clients in 47 countries. Our last re-count came to over 500 clients in 50 countries and we've not had time to re-count for several months now as we've been so busy.

It's just grown from there - as we get more clients, we see trends in what they need and develop plugins and solutions that suit their needs. Our clients generally dictate the direction of Adaptavist. We find out what they want, develop it and sell it to them. Simple!

Growing Pains

We've had lots of growing pains along the way. Admittedly, most were the result of none of us having a clue how to run a business and we've had to learn the hard way and very quickly.

Running a business in the UK is a nightmare

If we'd know how much of a nightmare running a UK-based business was, we'd probably have moved to the US or Australia or some other country that's not living in the dark ages.

Here in the UK, we're taxed to oblivion from the outset. As a rapidly growing company, the UK's taxation levels are really prohibitive and cause lots of pain.

UK banks and financial institutions

I could devote a whole blog to listing the nightmares we've had with banks in the UK. I'll just give one example to give you an idea:

• You can't sell online without a merchant account
• The average merchant account costs £250GBP per month per currency with lots of additional transaction fees, etc. Not good for a start-up company!
• You can't get a merchant account until the company is about 3 years old or has a proven track record of selling online
• You can't get a proven track record of selling online unless you are allowed to sell online!

You get the general idea. So much pain! Luckily, PayPal allowed us to completely bypass the banks and get an online shopping cart up and running with minimal fuss.

From "free time" to "zero time"

Going from no clients to over 500 in less than 2 years caught us by surprise. We went from having endless amounts of time to having absolutely no time whatsoever and all our basic manual processes (like our much loathed sales process) quickly crumbled under the strain.

We suddenly found ourselves so busy that completing tasks became almost impossible. We've been taking on new staff, building a worldwide agent and partner network and several other things to overcome these issues and all the hard work is starting to pay off

Sales nightmares

This is probably a good problem to have. Our rate of sales is continually growing and our original manual sales process literally crumbled under the strain.

You'll notice on our website that we're slowly brining bits of our new Confluence-based e-commerce system online. This will eventually allow clients to create their own quotes, proformas, invoices and make payments directly from our website with just a few clicks of the mouse.

The publicly usable bits are currently linked to the PayPal shopping cart but that will eventually be replaced by our own shopping cart that's been under development for some time now.

Marketing

We're so not going to do any more marketing for a while. We spent about £300 on Google adverts and trebled our sales turnover in a single month - the backlog that followed took us several months to clear down.

Once our new sales system is online we'll start advertising again but for now we'll just rely on word-of-mouth which is giving us more than enough sales to keep us very busy indeed.

The up-side...

As my Granddad once told me, Good things are hard to rear - and he was right.

All the pain barriers we've gone through have made us tough, agile and lean. Even though we've doubled our workforce, grown our client portfolio dramatically and now have 3 hosting facilities, our monthly overheads are only £3k a month more than when we started!

In a short space of time we've had to learn how to work with massive multinational companies, trade worldwide and generally overcome all obstacles in our path. That's a good foundation for the future.

Communications

We've had some huge successes and failures when it comes to communications.

The biggest failure was the use of Kayako eSupport - we used it to keep track of all the sales enquiries, support calls and generally all client-related communications. About a year ago, it started to crumble under the strain and it caused us major problems.

We've been moving everything over to JIRA (our public tracker at http://jira.adaptavist.com and our new secure tracker at https://support.adaptavist.com) and the difference this has made to our business is amazing! Keeping track of things is suddenly far, far easier and infinitely more reliable!

The biggest success we've had has been our internal communications. Most rapidly growing companies endure terrible internal communications problems that only get worse with time.

We've actually found that by using a combination of communication channels that internally the company just runs itself and things are getting easier as time goes on!

Here's what we use:

• All ad-hoc chat between staff is done using IM - we've all got things like MSN, YIM, AIM, etc., for general chat, but we recently set up a secure Openfire server with it's Spark IM client which has proved extremely successful
• We use VoIP telephony from Gradwell which has kept our phone bills super-low and provided us with an extremely flexible phone system
• All general information is stored on our company intranet thanks to [Confluence] - everything from our employee handbook to notes on projects and all kinds of other stuff
• We use JIRA for our public issue tracker and our secure customer support site. Without JIRA keeping track of things would be almost impossible
• We use email for a lot of client and other ad-hoc communications, but most of this has been transferred in to JIRA.

Confluence, JIRA, VoIP and Openfire/Spark have enabled us to maintain almost perfect internal communications in our company, regardless of workload.

Anyway, that's all for now - our first ever client (Bach Academie in Canada) is sending me messages on MSN regarding the next version of their Confluence-powered website...