Sometimes the Wright Strategy Stares You in the Face
How our team built a software studio by listening to our customers...and ourselves
Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators who have subscribed!
I’m your host, Bob, and my mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of ups and downs from my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
Our team launched something new recently, and we’re announcing it today: Shipwright Studio—a software development company that helps startup founders and tech leaders turn their dreams into reality.
Our software leaders, Ross Lewellyn, and Chris Enzweiller, continue to be active in Hearty, our recruiting business for tech companies. But they found the capacity and drive to build an additional business that perfectly fits our long-term goals.
This post is not a sales pitch. It’s a story about how we got here by following our customers’ needs and where our interests led us. Because in a world of OKRs, Five Forces and 2x2s, sometimes the best solution is to go with your heart.
Is there a way we can help?
It’s May 2023, and I open my inbox to find a precious nugget of gold that makes any B2B marketer’s pace quicken: a reply to my outreach campaign.
You see, there are two main ways that services businesses like recruiting, accounting, and creative agencies win new clients: referrals from current clients and cold email outreach to companies that may be in need. Referrals are the best, but they are difficult to implement in a predictive marketing machine. So we spin up CRM stacks, pick targets, and try to write compelling copy. In our case, we focus on tech companies that have posted open jobs and those who have recently raised money from investors—which suggests they will be hiring soon.
It’s usually slow going, but with patience, time, and a clever subject line here and there, leads do come in. Like this day in May when I get a reply from Siena, the founder of a newly-funded app. We schedule a chat for later that week.
As soon as she pops up on my Zoom screen, I can immediately recognize the energy and passion of a first-time founder on a mission. Her app, PULLATracker, helps protect women on college campuses by allowing them to trigger a police alert when they are in danger. It’s an app that needs to exist. And as a father of two daughters, I want this to exist even more.
But Siena isn’t ready to hire yet. She’s got pre-seed capital, which is enough to get an MVP into the world but not enough to hire a full-time developer. So I have to deliver the news that we can’t help. She’s bummed. So am I.
The next day, our team gathers for the Tuesday business check-in. I tell the story of my conversation with Siena and remind our group that this is roughly the 8th time we’ve found someone who needs project work instead of an FTE.
Then one of us says, “Why don’t we find a solution for her?” Suddenly we throw our agenda into the wastebin and pose two questions:
Is there a need here?
Those of us who build tech for a living often immediately jump at the chance to spin up something new. We’re also hungry entrepreneurs who hate to turn down a dollar that’s just lying there at our feet. But there’s limited time and infinite opportunities to chase down.
So, we take a step back from our bias to act and look for additional data points around whether this is a one-off or a real need. We came up with the following:
Have we heard this request before? (Yes) - Siena wasn’t the first. In my conversations with founders, I frequently have been asked if we would be willing to find freelance help. Making this work in a recruiting business is hard, so I’ve had to say “no” each time. This is a need at the very early stages of a startup. But even companies with hundreds of employees and dozens of in-house engineers frequently seek project-based help. It’s a way of handling a one-time need or bringing in focused expertise without committing to a full-time hire.
Would we have used a service like this? (Yes) - At my digital advertising agency in the early 2000s, freelance was typically around 15% of our personnel expenses. At our last startup in the influencer marketing space, we periodically sought an affordable team that could drop in for special projects. But we never found a local shop that we could count on.
Is there room for more service providers? (Yes) - The beauty of service businesses is that there is always room for more. Customers are not tied in with network effects or SaaS models—and the bigger these services businesses get, the worse their quality tends to turn. There are always new customers looking for a better solution.
Can we offer something different? (Yes) - We quickly saw that the same differentiation we have in recruiting could be applied to a software studio: A trusted team of repeat startup builders who have been in their customers’ shoes and can pull together a high-performing team that works wonderfully together.
So it didn’t take long to agree that we could build this business—but should we?
Do we want to do this?
The most “different” thing about having your own company is that you make all the decisions. Sometimes you’re strategic—basing choices on what’s most likely to maximize revenue and profit. But often, your decisions come down to what will be personally motivating. Does this path fit with the work+life style that you’re designing for yourself?
While the discussion to this point convinced us that there was a real business here—and we really wanted the revenue—we didn’t need to do this work, so we seriously considered whether or not it would fulfill us. And to do this, we kept coming around to a theme that is the closest thing our team has to a mission statement: Do what we love to do with people we love working with as long as possible…Here’s how we tackled that one:
Do we love this work? (Yes) - Consulting and building for other teams would be new to Ross and Chris, but they saw how it could bring interesting projects and allow them to build new skills.
Are these people we want to work with? (Yes) - Life is too short to work with demotivating clients. Our team would get to select which types of projects and clients they worked with—which meant they could choose to work with passionate leaders who want to make a positive dent in the world. Plus, we’d grow this business by bringing in additional talent, starting with people we’ve worked with in the past and the killer talent we’ve gotten to meet through our recruiting work.
Are we in for the long haul? (Yes) - When you don’t raise money and love what you do, the future is infinite. We see this business as a way to support our holding company model further—enabling us to build and buy additional companies more easily in the years ahead. We’ve also chosen to work with companies that want to keep us around as a partner for their long haul. We expect one project to lead to many more. Building a business like this isn’t a Blitzscale Speedrun—it takes patience and positive word-of-mouth. And we want to keep doing this for the rest of our lives. We’ve been in startups most of our careers. We like the work and the people attracted by this path. All this came together to inform the Shipwright tagline:
The team to trust for software built to last.
All of this might seem like it happened during a full-day offsite, but it probably took me longer to write this post than it did for us to decide to go for it. Such is life when you’re working with a group of people who all know each other just slightly less than their spouses do.
We put our heads together and came up with a solution, and we’ve been working with Siena for a few months now. But that’s just the start.
Another journey unfolds…
As we’ve spoken to more friends, Ross and Chris have uncovered additional opportunities. They’re now working on multiple projects for passionate leaders with big ideas. Several additional projects are in discussions, too. We’ve quickly gone from “Let’s see if we can get a customer” to “Who do we need to hire next if this work comes in?”
Perhaps our path could be a new way to examine your company’s new product pipeline. What customer needs are you saying “no” to? And what kind of work does your team love to do? These questions could lead to gold in them thar’ hills.
Or maybe you’ve got a service business sitting inside you waiting to be unlocked. Smart people with trusted networks who know any specific skill—like in design, accounting, or leadership coaching—can spin up a new business, starting with a few friends in need. You don’t have to quit your day job…yet.
And if you’ve got a startup dream that you can’t get out of your head yet don’t know how to code, I’d love to introduce you to my friends Ross and Chris…
How we might work together…
My team and I lead Hearty, a boutique recruiting service that helps tech-forward companies hire proven talent. Our senior team of operators sources and screens, saving you time and money. When you need help, let’s chat.
Need help with a software project? Perhaps a product MVP, a project that requires outside help, or a fractional CTO for key strategic decisions? Our team at Shipwright Studio has worked together to build multiple successful startups, and we love helping leaders turn their dreams into reality. We're the team our clients trust for software built to last.
Looking for Influencer Marketing and Content Creation? The team from our previous company is back by popular demand with A2 Influence. We’re ramping up now and would love to share more.
Feel free to schedule time together during my Open Hours for questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic!
BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
The Morgan Housel Podcast
I love listening to podcasts. Like a good book or (ahem) Substack post—and unlike any social post—podcasts can bring you deep into a topic and spur insights and ideas. The problem is it’s still so dang hard to discover quality new ones. That’s what friends are for, though…
Last weekend at a neighborhood holiday party, we all opened our podcast apps and traded suggestions. And just the week before, my dear friend, Randy Limes, suggested The Morgan Housel podcast. Housel comes from a finance background but speaks and writes mostly about life and how we can improve it. His podcast episodes are 15 minutes of mind-openers and are refreshingly free of annoying ads.
If you’ve got any podcast suggestions this audience might love, please add them in the comments here!
Good luck with the new venture!