12
people in a team built from zero
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Startupa client from Belarus, a global product
A startup: from an idea to a product and a team
The investors had an idea and money; I built the product, the team and a working application out of it.
3
months to the MVP
99.99 %
availability of the application
01
The situation
The investors had put money into the idea of an application for algorithmic trading and for learning to trade. There was an idea and there was money. There was no product, no team, no plan. I was hired as the person responsible for the whole IT side, in the role of solution architect and tech lead. That meant the idea had to be turned into something concrete first, and only then could we settle who would build it and on what.
02
What I did
The product
I developed the investors' idea into a concrete product: what the application does, who it is for and what it is made of, described precisely enough to be built.
EffectInstead of an idea there was a description of the product, and against it the work could be planned and the people chosen.
Infrastructure and documentation
I turned the product idea and the requirements into IT documentation — the architecture, the infrastructure and the order of the work — before the first line of code.
EffectThe team started from finished documents, and from the first day the application grew on a planned infrastructure instead of on stopgap decisions.
The team: developers and a designer
I hired 12 people from zero: developers and a designer. I wrote the roles, ran the interviews and brought the new people into the work.
EffectThe product was built by a team of its own, with roles and responsibilities settled from the start.
Requirements and standards
I gathered the requirements, set the standards of work, ran the code reviews myself and put in CI/CD pipelines: every change tested and deployed automatically.
EffectEveryone worked to one standard, mistakes came out at review, and only tested changes reached the application.
The MVP and six months of development
I brought the application to an MVP three months after the work began, and for the next six months I developed it and ran its support: new features, fixes and keeping it running.
Effect99.99 % availability, no serious incidents, regular releases of new features.
A team that stands on its own
I set up the processes inside the team and brought it to self-sufficiency.
EffectFrom then on the team maintained and developed the product itself.
03
The effect
The application served thousands of users at 99.99 % availability, with no major bug and not a single outage. In the same period similar projects on the market, with poor architecture and a badly planned application, were broken into through unprotected entry points; ours, despite the suspicious attempts detected, held everything thanks to an infrastructure planned in advance. The IT side succeeded in full: out of a vision came a product, and out of nothing a team that serves it.
04
Other examples
This example is the Reorganisation of the company and its processes service.Reorganisation of the company and its processes
International tradeA trading group in 12 countries14 companies, 12 countries, different currencies, languages and legal systems, and every sales document created and sent by hand.About 95 % of sales documents go through without manual work, and the overdue payments recovered are counted in hundreds of thousands of euros.MoreConstructionIn progressA construction firm: analysis and planA heavily indebted construction firm with a structure standard for the trade, in which the work, the money and the decisions do not add up to one whole.The analysis identified 75 problems, and out of them came a one-year plan of 12 work packages that the firm is already carrying out.MoreOnline tradeA trading company built from zeroThe owner wanted to start trading from nothing and asked for the whole thing turnkey: from what to sell to working systems.Goods, orders, delivery, payment and documents run through one system, which holds more than 500 products.MoreSmall businessesSmall businesses: one scheme since 2021Small businesses, mostly in services, come with the same concrete scenario: they need clients, bookings and order in the mailbox.Since 2021 the same order: analysis, organisation, launch, support, and various processes automated, from 50 to 95 % less manual work.More
05
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