Lessons From Building An IT Outsourcing Company With 55 Employees

Nikita Sviridenko

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Published: October 17th, 2022

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Nikita Sviridenko

Founder, Voypost

Founders

Employees

Voypost

voypost.com

from Berlin

started August 2019

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools Nikita recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Nikita recommends to grow your business!

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuou... Eric Ries

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Peter Thiel

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Chip Heath

Want more updates on Voypost? Check out these stories:

It’s a great pleasure to discuss with Starter Story and I’m glad to share a bit about myself.

My name is Nikita Sviridenko and I’ve been into tech for as long as I can remember myself. Moreover, I always had an entrepreneurial mindset and established my first product startup many years ago. After working on a start-up and dozens of experiments, I realized that I know enough about how agile systems and the IT industry work, and can share my expertise in both the tech and management sides of the start-ups.

Currently, I am the Founder & Solution Architect of Voypost, a software development company that has already helped many people all over the World to bring their ideas to life.

Voypost provides IT outsourcing and outstaffing services around the globe. Our key solutions are Team Augmentation, MVP development, Product Development, IT Consulting, and Technical Support.

Since 2019 our team has delivered more than 50 projects from MVPs to full-scale products for big enterprises. Based on our revenue, we’ve grown more than 6 times in just 2 years. As an example, our payroll, in the beginning, was around $10,000, now it can go up to $80,000. And we continue to grow further.

88% of our team members are based in Ukraine, which is known for its affordable development rates and highly-qualified developers. If you are looking for an IT vendor, please consider one from Ukraine. This is the easiest option to assist Ukrainians in surviving these difficult times. In turn, we as a company, endeavor to give as many work possibilities as possible.

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I always wanted to create a great product and had a startup mindset since my teenage years. I had quite a few attempts to build something new and as many of you already know, at the beginning of our journey, Voypost was a delivery service. It was a mobile app with the key feature of delivering parcels by travelers.

Later we tried another strategy and turned it into a p2p (peer-to-peer) shopping app. So anyone could order goods from abroad and get them delivered by travelers. I think it took us 3 years to prove that none of these concepts were working in our market.

In late August 2019, it was a summer day that changed everything. I was walking in the city as always, it is the way to meditate for me, and I got the insight “Why wouldn’t we create MVPs for others?” At that moment I called my small team of 2 people and told them about the idea.

Startups are known for their ability to grow exponentially, and after studying the market, we realized that their number can also grow exponentially. You can read more about this here.

At this stage, we confirmed our idea. All 3 of us (me, our current CFO, and COO) had experience in launching startups and together with my extensive tech background, made us sure that we will be able to reach the results we wanted.

We could have many customers in one month and then no inquiries for another two. It was difficult to plan our budget which once made us decrease the number of team members and almost fully change our approach once again.

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

Once I and my team decided that we were going to help other startups with their products, we needed to validate our idea and see if there was a market fit. I’ve decided that we would do that through my expertise as a Software Engineer as Voypost didn’t have a reputation to be trusted just yet.

It took zero investment cost except for our time and was an actual reveal after I’d spent thousands of euros on my product startup.

We didn’t want to waste any time so we kept our logo and brand name from the delivery app and focused on the business side of the project. This is where our highly individual processes were born. From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want to create “another” agency but rather build a product-as-a-service type of company and started looking for the most modern solutions and approach. The product would be the wrapped-up pack of services that we provide.

Team is your biggest advantage in any type of business. So our management strategy was to gather an experienced team first and find clients later, although we’ve managed to do both things in parallel which saved us lots of time. Another important part of our strategy was speed and flexibility, we were no different from an early-stage startup so we had to experiment and iterate fast following Agile methodology. We had weekly sprints and daily standup meetings which we still do. The IT industry is highly competitive nowadays and if you become a “mammoth” with complex processes and standard hierarchy, you’ll be left far behind your competitors.

Early days

Describe the process of launching the business.

I’m a huge believer in the theory that building an MVP first is the most essential step to bringing a startup to success. Thus, we didn’t build a pretty-nitty website, we started simple, with my page on LinkedIn and jobs websites. We created our first landing page only 6 months later.

In September 2019, we hired our first engineer and launched the machine. I was there in each step of the process from making Sales calls to doing Code reviews and solving financial aspects of things. I think I worked more than 12 hours a day during our first year. Our hard work paid off and we had become profitable in the second or third month and were able to pay salaries and taxes.

Although I was still working on some side projects to pay my rent and sustain life in Berlin, the money that was coming from Voypost was enough to support and scale the business.

We were approached by different companies with my CV and once they were up for a call, I told them about the idea of running my agency and that I was starting it now. I love reading books about business and communication so I’ve never had a problem with that.

Most of our first clients were persuaded easily and eager to give it a try. For sure there were some hard times, it wasn’t a linear way to success, but rather a roller-coaster. We could have many customers in one month and then no inquiries for another two. It was difficult to plan our budget which once made us decrease the number of team members and almost fully change the approach once again.

I remember a critical moment when one of our biggest clients went bankrupt and couldn’t pay for 2 months of work which really affected our finances. However, any challenge on our way made us better and stronger, thanks to these challenges we’ve created what we have now and continue to grow every day.

One lesson from launching is worth mentioning too. We’ve missed time trying to scale fast in a “cheap” way which meant many projects of poor quality and team members that were burnt out while taking too many responsibilities and having to handle multiple things simultaneously. We learned the lesson and changed our strategy.

Screenshot of our first website

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

The first main recommendation for someone who’s starting a business is to recognize the importance of marketing. Delivering the right message to the right audience at the exact right moment - is your first step to differentiating yourself from competitors. You should be able to communicate key ideas through marketing, such as:

What your company exactly does;
Why your services are different from everyone else, and why those distinctions matter;
Who you are in this business as an entrepreneur and founder;

A good marketing strategy takes time and money to build. You’re not going to be able to do that for free, and here’s my recommendation - never underfund that.

Accept failure before you begin; failures shouldn’t be seen negatively. Remind yourself that it's alright to make mistakes and that you should keep trying until you get it perfect.

We launched marketing activities half a year ago and now with its help, we were able to attract approx 20 inbound leads per month. So, you need to think about marketing and promotion as soon as possible since nobody will invest in your product or service when you launch if they are even unaware that it exists in the first place.

In addition, we have a strong referral side, and most of our customers reveal that they’ve already heard good things about us from partners or friends. Moreover, I know we’re doing something right when our clients come back for more and become our long-term partners. Our retention rate is 70%, which means almost all customers.

Before we started marketing campaigns, we grew our network through various kinds of tech events, lead generation via job websites, and cold emails. Some things from that still work today, but now we’re focusing on building a brand rather than just searching for clients directly.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today, Voypost is steadily scaling despite the situation in Ukraine. And we have everything for that: well-established expertise, a multifaceted portfolio, structured and rapid management, proven professionals, and unique processes to deliver quality products on time.

During this year we've already launched a good deal of new services, such as UX/UI design, outstaffing which also includes Junior developers Outstaffing - a unique service in the IT Market that can change the common vision of developers' employment process, because you can grow your future employee without overhead and expenses.

We always try to avoid client-customer connections, because our purpose is to build partnerships. As I’ve noticed before, 70% of our clients come back for more and we’re very proud of it because it shows the quality of our expertise. Networking is one more extremely powerful channel for us because a reference is a major factor in choosing a service provider in any industry.

We have 2 R&D centers - in Germany and in Ukraine (it’s my motherland), and for the last half of the year, we grew to 50 professionals in the team. Interesting fact: 100% of our Sales Team are women. In the near future, we plan to scale to 100 employees in the team. These days we've increasingly confronted with the point of excellent management that constructs some blockers on the way to scale faster.

In the next few years, our course of action is to expand our expertise in Blockchain, AI, and web3, and continue to develop in the outsourcing and outstaffing domains. We also aim to become the top Software development company in Europe. I believe we have all the potential to reach this goal.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

Oh yes, I definitely have. I’ll try to tell you as much as I can remember now. In my belief, mistakes and failures mean growth in any direction, so I’ll speak about the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned from them.

Maximalism. We were trying to cover absolutely everything and say “yes” to everyone. Because of this, in a few months, we were 30 people - and we were absolutely not ready for that. At that time, the processes were not built properly, there was no proper management system for working with people, and everything happened chaotically and was being adjusted on the run. This led to burnout of many of our employees, some of them former.

Too much trust in people and lack of experience in hiring. Initially, when we hired someone, I was very open to people, “allowing them to do anything”. I thought that people would perceive the work the same way as we do, through an open mindset, but as it turned out, not everyone can work end-to-end. Some even took advantage of it, and many times we had to completely redo important work in the middle of the night, in a hurry, to be on time before the deadlines. Due to our inexperience in hiring people and, as I said earlier, great trust in them, we received many burning projects, and financial and time losses. And as time is the main opportunity, we’ve missed a lot of it when making up for these losses.

Procrastination. We have ignored internal problems and HR Management for a long time, as we were very busy chasing clients to stabilize our finances and pay salaries. At that stage, we began to lose people, since we started having problems with motivation.

Rapid handover of responsibility. Due to the rapid formation of processes, new people were appearing in our departments every week, and, accordingly, the team leader role was transferred to the most diligent person. Leaders simply did not have time to adapt and burned out because of too much pressure and responsibility. I did not notice this, because when you enjoy working 80 hours a week, you think that others would too. I thought that our fast growth would be enough motivation for others.

Thinking about finances at least. While focusing on growth, you always forget about finances, and as a result - our margin fell twice.

So, things I’ve learned:

Plan before scaling
Be ready for the worst case
Micromanage first, let go second, not vice versa
Fire fast
To handle accurately motivated employees' time
People first - never forget about HR Management
Any doubts? Don't employ
Value the time. Never take poor-quality projects

If we speak about things that were hard for me to do, at first it was really hard to fire people. As I said, we didn’t have much experience in hiring people and after starting to cooperate with inefficient people, they had to be fired, and for me, it was very difficult. There were cases when people worked for us for half a year, although they could have been fired during the first weeks of work.

As in any startup, there were some challenges that we solved with time. For example, we didn’t have much time for Global overview, planning, and strategy. Thus, one person could perform roles of entire departments. Our COO Maria was responsible for HR, Sales, and PM processes simultaneously. Also, we’ve overcome 2 crises that I’ve mentioned before - Covid19 and the war in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine had a huge impact on my business management skills. I’ve dived deep into crisis management and created a plan. Shared some tips and life lessons in this interview.

And good decisions I’ve made:

Always give opportunities for development and growth to each employee.
Conduct asynchronous meetings on all blockers, questions, and ideas. We used to discuss everything together and our meetings could take up to 3-4 hours which wasn’t efficient at all. Below I’ve mentioned the tool that solved this problem for us and helped to conduct meetings such as Global Overview, Brainstorm, etc async
Set up financial analytics. Check your finances first, scale second and plan ahead

None of these mistakes and challenges would be overcome if it wasn’t for our greatest advantage and luck - we have found the right people. Thanks to this, we have survived and scaled. Other than that, it's certainly hard work that brought us here. “Do easy things and your life will be hard, do hard things and your life will be easy” - I always follow this quote.

Also, I’d like to mention helpful habits that I’ve acquired since our launch:

Wake up at 6 am - otherwise I will sleep away the right state of mind.
Work weekends and take days off to work. Then you can achieve more. Work & life balance.
Focus and don’t get distracted - otherwise, you will never catch up with the goal on time.
Agenda culture - manage your day or the day will manage you.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

My go-to’s now are:

Loom and Notion - save time and create knowledge.
Slack - structures work and separate work from personal life.
Miro - visualizes, structures, and solves any problem.
Airtable - structures data and builds processes.
Amplitude - helps you accurately analyze, track, and learn from data.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

As for recent favorites, I genuinely enjoyed the following:

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - is a novel strategy that is becoming popular all over the world, revolutionizing how businesses are established and new products are introduced.
Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel - completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.
Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath - the absolute classic on how to make your ideas stick and why some ideas succeed while others fail.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Just start your own business immediately if you're thinking about it. You'll never be fully ready.

There are many different ways and approaches, but there will always be doubts, worries, and unfavorable conditions. And always remember that starting a business takes time, effort, and learning from mistakes.

Tips:

Live and learn. Don't equate your achievement with the success of your idea. Knowledge, personal life lessons, and perseverance are the result of your work. Work on building your expertise and skills.
Resilience. Accept failure before you begin; failures shouldn’t be seen negatively. Remind yourself that it's alright to make mistakes and that you should keep trying until you get it perfect.
Stay with the right people. Discover the secrets of recruiting and retaining talented employees. A well-structured selection process allows you to find people with whom you will grow considerably faster.

Mistakes:

Doing something solely for the money. Take the time to figure out what makes you tick. Follow your passion and earn money by doing what you really like.
Covering everything at once. In a nutshell - multitasking. Such a thing reduces your efficiency and performance because your brain can only focus on one thing at a time. As a result, lacks the capacity to perform both tasks successfully.
Overlooking the importance of marketing. Failing to recognize the role of marketing in launching a business and underbudgeting the long-term marketing costs. No matter how original your idea for a product or service may be, there are already plenty of companies like yours in existence. Never forget about it. Only marketing gives you an opportunity to stand out in a crowd and differentiate yourself from competitors.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

We hire our staff only in Ukraine, although Voypost is actively looking for a partnership with local business development representatives (DE, AT, UK) to expand our customer base. The ideal partner will take over the initiatives to negotiate with potential customers and close new deals.

The main responsibilities are:

Identify potential cooperation opportunities;
Attract potential clients to cooperate with Voypost;

We offer:

Freelance terms of your convenience;
You sell our rate and anything above will be your profit (Voypost has so reasonable rates);
Or you get 10% from each invoice for a year if the contract was signed.

You can send us your proposal to [email protected] or connect with me personally via LinkedIn.