One of the bigger ones that we’ve done is for a major law firm called Minter Ellison. We’ve actually been working on a document system for an executive to be able to view documents securely on an iPad. It’s cool because it’s the first time you’ve been able to do something useful on your iPad instead of just playing Angry Birds or just checking email, now you can start using it for work.
By an introduction. Someone had recommended us. Most of our business comes from recommendations, so it’s usually someone recommends us to a potential client and they’ll jump on our website and see what work we’ve done before, and then we sit down for coffee, have a chat and go from there. So it’s always word of mouth, we don’t do big adverts or anything like that.
This is going to sound crazy but the best marketing we’ve done is actually doing whatever we can to make the app we built before really great. When somebody is recommended to us, all they do is look on the app store and jump on. Everything we’ve worked on is so public. Once someone has been recommended to us – it might be a client, or someone we’ve met with – then whoever they’ve introduced us to is going to jump on our site or the app store, check out what we’ve built, and if they think it’s crap or if they think it’s no good, it’s all over. So we don’t put something out there for a client unless it’s 100%, because it’s going to reflect on our next piece of work.
The sales team is really me and my business partner Luke Smorgon. We don’t really feel like salespeople because we don’t do the traditional sales thing, we don’t really go out and pitch or stuff like that. I guess, mostly, it’s good work. Occasionally we’ll go back to our previous clients and say, “Listen, if you’ve got a moment, do you mind putting the word out that B2Cloud is the best developer” and stuff like that. Definitely the hardest thing to do is to get a new client but it’s also definitely a lot easier if one of your existing clients has gone out and brought that new client to you.
Luke actually came on board to help with a little service we were offering one of our customers. We were just doing pretty laborious work for Ansell and he was going out and trawling social webs to find out any mentions of them, and he did a great job, he really excelled. He stayed with me and we got to a point in our business relationship where we said “you know what, let’s go in it together”, and that’s where we became business partners. We’re joint owners, so we have a 50-50 share.
The commonality is that we’re both working with clients, but Luke helps a lot with the administrative side of the business, running it, whereas I’ll be more with the development team and out and about doing talks and meeting with clients. That’s really a perfect mix actually.
Because we’re a services business, growth is directly linked to the number of apps we’re building at one time and the number of people we have building those apps, so that’s a linear sort of growth. As a team we’re wary of growing too big, because once you get too big as a business you get into politics and things like that. At the moment we’re not that kind of organisation, we’re up to 20 to 25 people. It’s a good fit, everyone’s open and knows each other, our workplace doesn’t have any offices or any walls; it’s all open. I think growth for us isn’t about becoming a 5,000 person company.
The more apps that we build and the more experience we have, when we go to build another app, our library, our asset, which is our own code that we implement into all the apps that we build, gets bigger. So we spend more time adding to our library of code, and next time a customer comes on, we’re going to have more than we can offer them, which makes the project faster and means less time creating new code and being able to use existing stuff.
We’d like to keep growing steadily, so again we’re not like Angry Birds with a huge growth curve. We’d like to grow 30% to 40% in one year. That’d be great and I think that’s really achievable. Obviously in the early days you’re literally doubling your business every six months or so and then growth tends to sort of slough off a bit, you’re still growing but not at the same pace as in the first six months or year. For us, 30% to 40% would be a good number. If it’s higher that’d be great, but as long as it’s done in a really responsible way so it’s not jeopardising the environment we have here, because that wouldn’t be a good growth, that’d be too much growth I think.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
