My Transformation from Software Developer to Entrepreneur

Today I’ve decided to share my story: what brought me where I am right now and which lessons were learned along my way.

My current business is called Flussonic, video streaming software, and server solutions. But before that was a rather long and hard way full of different experiences.

1. First business with my classmate

My first experience was creating a web development agency along with my classmate, where I was more of a technical specialist. My classmate was trying to sell our outsourcing services, but it didn’t work out well. We didn’t have an essential specific set of skills: how to sell, how to communicate with customers and manage their expectations, how to provide a constant deal flow. My main mistake here was not to be involved in the business process itself, I just let my classmate have all the responsibility for that. The idea was simple: I do what I can do, my partner is in charge of sales and business development, and I’m staying out of this. It didn’t work out — either time-wise, nor budget-wise. In addition, we didn’t manage to learn how to attract customers.

Lesson learned: When you’re starting a new business, you need to get involved in all its aspects, especially customer acquisition, and not only rely on your partner.

2. Meaningless job

After that experience, I was working as a web developer in another company where I was promised to become a CTO. It was rather an odd situation: the position was already taken, so I had to fight for it. Six months later I left for another company. That was a good start, but then again I had to leave: I felt like most of my work was going down the drain. I didn’t feel like I was doing something important, I didn’t feel like my achievements were implemented somewhere at all.

Lesson learned: When you’re managing the team, you must show your employees that their work is worth something, that it could be turned into something useful and meaningful.

3. All on my own

I started developing Flussonic in 2010.

I was all by myself when I left my job and started to write code and sell my technology. The first customers found me themselves. I’ve created a website where people could download some of the freeware, and when I realized there’s a certain level of interest to it, I’ve added paid modules. I was an individual entrepreneur by day and developer by night. In less than half a year I sold my first license on the open-source. Slowly I started to realize that business is not what you can do, it’s what you can offer to other people.

We were one of the first companies in our segment. I was developing my business all on my own, with no investments or the right customer development strategy. This kind of work requires a lot of persistence and also the strength to get rid of skeptical thoughts, such as “don’t do this, nobody needs this”.

Lesson learned: The sooner you try to create your own business, the better because it takes a certain amount of time to start selling something that didn’t exist before. This is a sustained hard work, and it’s absolutely normal to work till the sun rises.

4. Building a team

Later I’ve found an assistant to work for me, but I hardly had any money to pay for him. It lasted for two years before we started to actually make some income, more and more people started to buy our software. Since 2013 we could afford to build a team. My wife became the managing administrator, she would take care of the legal part and deal with operational cases. That is something I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to do.

Lesson learned: When you finally have the resources, it’s essential to start hiring people who could do something that you can’t or something that they could do better than you. It’s impossible to do everything by yourself.

5. Walking in the customer’s shoes

Some time after that, we found a number of major customers that gave us a good start. A year later we implemented the subscriptions, which was the most important move for us. We could keep hiring people and stop worrying about the salaries: now we always had money to pay them.

As we kept evolving, I started to develop the Flussonic Watcher project. I hired our first product manager — his task was developing Watcher as a product. It didn’t work out, which brought me to think of how exactly it is to find a product manager that will actually bring us profit? I came up with an idea: I proposed him to use our product, to become a user of the product. But this idea met resistance, and we had to part our ways. After that, I learned how to find product managers that would meet our needs.

Lesson learned: It’s essential to put yourself in the customer’s shoes when you’re working on something, so you could know exactly how it works.

6. Still transforming

We still have people working in Flussonic from the very beginning. We’re still evolving and implementing a lot: for example, we built the right customer support using the unified CRM support system.

When you already have more than 20 people working for you, it becomes hard to keep everything in mind all by yourself. So that’s where the delegation of responsibilities begins. There should be more than just one person involved in the process of decision making.

Right now I’m in the process of transition from a developer to a person that manages teams. It’s hard, it requires time and resources to adjust. I’m creating departments and learning to delegate what I used to do to other people. I’m starting to see that something already works without my own presence, which actually indicates this process of becoming a businessman.

Last but not least: I had to go through a lot of difficulties: lack of money, lack of time, lack of sleep, lack of certainty. But it was all worth it, and I didn’t regret it for a minute. So for all of you, who wants to start their own business, I’d like to say: be persistent and never give up!