Scaling means everything and automation is the key to do this effectively.

Being an eMobility leader in various projects across multiple startups, Piotr was responsible for OCPI and OCPP integration as well as EMP and CPO platforms development. With extensive expertise in the open standards field and eMobility tech solutions, he is leading teams of experienced developers and contributing with invaluable knowledge and experience.

Piotr Majcher

It seems like all anyone can talk about in the business world these days is scaling their technology and automating their processes, but the actual process behind this - including the 

Too many organizations are unaware of how much time and effort it actually takes to effectively scale technology and automate processes, leading to frustration when companies discover that the process is more involved and time-consuming than they initially realized. The purpose of this article is to give you a general idea of what scaling and automating really mean, how to determine if a process should be automated, and show you how 

 can help you determine your business objectives and create custom solutions to meet your needs.

Every organization relies on multiple processes to get work done, either as part of their core business or the operations surrounding it. To scale effectively, companies need to understand the details of their processes and find a way to automate them, whether using technology or other methods.

For example, many organizations rely on automated sales funnels, which rely on automated reporting programs to gather relevant data on potential customers instead of relying on employees to complete this labor-intensive task manually.

understanding project delays and how to avoid them

, the planning stage is one of the most critical phases of any project. When you invest time and energy into the planning phase, you are setting yourself and your team up for success later on. That is why the team at SolidStudio always takes the time to learn the details of each customer’s business model in order to create the best solution to meet their needs.

First, we analyze the process itself: If the current process is flawed or can't be improved, then automating it won't improve the situation because it doesn't actually address the underlying issues. By doing our due diligence and analyzing your business, the SolidStudio team can verify that the current process in place meets your organization's needs and can't be improved before determining if the process could benefit from automation or additional technology.

Once the process has been assessed and found to be effective, we know that we are working on a solid foundation, and we can turn our attention toward the question of automation.

As a product development company, our goal isn't to just throw software at a problem and hope it solves the issue at hand. Instead, our goal is to create solutions for our clients so they can achieve their business objectives. While most of our solutions involve using software, even the most elegant piece of software isn't effective if it hasn't been created with the client's actual needs in mind. By taking the time to understand the details of a client's business, we are able to gain a deep understanding of which processes are vital and are worth automating and which processes won't benefit from automation or need to be improved first.

Determining whether or not a process should be automated can be part of a total 

, which involves integrating the right digital technology tools into different aspects of a business to improve productivity and increase the value they deliver to their customers.

The Benefits of Automation: T-Cup & Cracow Local Tours Case Studies

In this section, we will discuss 2 SolidStudio clients who benefited greatly from automating processes that were previously performed manually: T-Cup and Cracow Local Tours.

 is a health and wellness app that helps customers track their health and overall well-being and sends them regular reports based on the data the app has collected. While these reports were initially created manually by T-Cup’s staff, all of the data was already stored in the app itself, making the report generation process ripe for automation.

 for the T-Cup team that allowed them to take the data in the app and sort it into the correct schema so it could be automatically formatted and sent out to clients. By automating this process, T-Cup was able to bring on more clients while also scaling back on the number of workers they needed in the back office, improving revenue while reducing costs.

Cracow Local Tours offers tours to hundreds of tourists each day, and the sheer amount of bookings made it difficult for them to manage their pick-up and one-day trips effectively.

To help them increase efficiency and better allocate their resources, we worked with them to create an ERP system that automatically matched tour drivers with tourists in the same location, thereby reducing the non-revenue generating driving time between tours. This new system also made it much easier for customers to automatically book tickets for larger groups, which are more profitable than smaller groups taking the same tours, allowing the company to maximize earnings while improving the customer experience.

Using technology to scale and automate processes can be a great way to increase efficiency and make it easier for your business to grow if applied to processes that are already effective and can benefit from automation and technology. Before you commit to scaling or automating a particular process, make sure you have a thorough understanding of the processes you are considering automating and have verified that they can't be improved further. The SolidStudio team is here to help you get this valuable information and create automated and scalable solutions that meet your needs.

Case study and runtime observation of Solidstudio - introduction.

After founding Solidstudio, Pawel was an originator in terms of pursuing expertise in eMobility. With the build-up of a solid knowledge-base on industry’s needs & wants, he now keeps a close eye on products’ development. He’s also hugely responsible for the business’ side and designs the business models for our products.

Paweł Małkowiak

There are a lot of software developers in Poland. A lot. It started out slowly, but over the years people realised it’s a pretty good job here - high salaries (compared to to the national median), many job offers from foreign companies, and stable income.

My name is Paweł, and I’m one of them.

I graduated from the University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Faculty of Automation and Robotics, stayed around afterwards and picked up a job as a junior software developer at Ericsson. I switched companies a few times, and every time the change came with a promotion or raise. I worked for companies like Sabre, Oracle, and UBS. They say everybody wants to open a bar with friends at some point in their life and I think that’s what happened to me - I was always talking and thinking about opening my own technology company.

As far as I understood it, there were two ways. One would be to have an IT product and develop it. Another, running a company that creates IT products for others.

Well... we could now jump to summarising my adventures with my own product, but some subjects better be buried... Instead, let’s focus on the bright side and talk about running a software house/software company/software agency/IT company/bespoke software development company and any other term that describes building and delivering software to companies (you learn how many terms there is in the world to describe it as soon as you start to care about SEO...).

I can’t say what’s more difficult: starting a company and making it through the first year or scaling it up so it becomes a real business. Here’s one thing I know for sure: the amount of knowledge, experience, and relationships required to accomplish the latter is massive.

In this series of articles, I don’t want to talk about the real beginning, as I don't want to describe the joy and struggle that are part of running a company for the very first time. Solidstudio has just celebrated its first anniversary. Within one year, we grew from 3 developers focused on a single client to 10 people working with three different clients and with the appetite for more.

As a guy with no business education or experience, I want to take a look at several areas that (at this very moment!) are our main challenges and things we consider as must-have to build a self-organised, financially stable, and trustworthy IT company.

How to run a software development company?

There are many great places to build knowledge about running a company, even an IT company specifically. There are many great books and blogs written by Polish and English authors. Podcasts are still a pretty new thing, but they’re growing fast - for me, podcasts turned out to be the best source of information. Stories of how companies were built, sales lessons, case studies and many, many more.

There is one thing that annoyed me in all of this content - the lack of details. Numbers, detailed descriptions of SEO strategies, numbers of leads that transform into SQL (Sales Qualified Lead - yeah, difficult acronym.. just learned it a few months ago), named examples.

With this article, I want to start a series of posts where I share my experience. It’s not going to be about how to build a successful company. It will describe one’s journey while trying to do that. And it will be a series that features all the details I’ve mentioned above (limited by common sense and legal agreements).

I hope it will be of some use to others and offer valuable insights about the IT industry. I’m still discussing subjects of next articles - if you have any preferences or are particularly interested in a topic, please let me know, I’ll try to figure it out.

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Running and scaling a software company - introduction.

Types of clients to avoid when you run software development business.

Everyone who dreams about starting their own software company needs to answer this question: I know how to build stuff, but where am I going to find my (first) clients?

I’m not going to share a guide to finding clients here. I’m not in the position to give people advice about it. I want to share my observations of the different client types who approach software companies - to be more precise, the client types you better avoid.

I’m not sure whether the more you grow, the fewer such clients approach, you manage to build mechanisms that block them, or you gain more experience and learn how to talk with such clients.

I feel that we’ve been dealing with a relatively high number of such 'cliche clients' in our early days. Another possible explanation is that at some point such clients no longer bother you that much since the people you want to do business with are in your sales funnel too.

Before listing my three least favourite types of clients, I want to note that I think some of them can still be transformed into leads. The question is: will the contract benefit you as well the client or just a client?

A common way to validate your startup idea is discussing it with others. The more you talk, the more your idea can be challenged and improved. It also gives you more information about possible competition. It can even help you find a partner or a customer. I’ve always thought that’s the most sensible way of founding a startup - or any other business, to be honest. It turned out a lot of people feel exactly the opposite.

Here’s an exaggerated representation of the conversation I’ve had many times (

 Hello, I have an idea, and I would like to talk about it as I am looking for a tech partner.

 Hi - sure, we can help you with that. What do you have in mind?

 Well, it is like an Uber for Crypto. But I can’t tell you any more details.

 Ok, I will keep everything confidential, but I need some information.

 Of course! I am sending you an NDA. Please sign it so we can talk.

Well, nothing wrong until this point, an NDA is a pretty standard thing, and it’s understandable to protect a business idea. Then the situation develops...

 I am looking at the NDA, and it says I need to pay you $500k for any single wrongdoing... I’m pretty sure our contract will not be worth that much, can we think about a more rational number?

 (conversation begins to chill) What do you have in mind? $500k is not a significant number if you think how much the idea is worth.

I can add a few more things here: rage, theft accusations, and swearing included. I understand the need to protect your ideas, but if the client starts the cooperation with a trust level equaling zero and is convinced everybody wants to steal from them - no NDAs will change that attitude. Collaborating on simple tasks will become a nightmare.

 Well, I want you to sign this $500k NDA, but I don’t have money to pay you for the work - can it be equity?

2. Treat everything as due yesterday - except the money.

We may laugh a little about the first client, but this second type can cause severe damage. Cashflow is crucial at every point for a service company. Developer salaries, equipment, office - all of that generates substantial costs, and lack of money can let you to bankruptcy in just a moment. The brutal truth is that in the early days, a software company is two invoices from going down.

If the client is not paying, is late with the payment or continuously tries to find ways to postpone the transfer - in my mind, that’s the biggest red flag there can be and a sign to quit any cooperation with the client. As painful as it can be - it will be always less painful than finding out there is no money to pay your staff with by the end of a month.

Sometimes you read an e-mail or answer a phone call that seems to be perfect. The client knows what they want, has an idea about the price, and has structures and processes in place to handle your team. There is only one ‘but’ - it all needs to happen now.

Such a conversation seems so right and tempting at the beginning of running your own company that you may rush into it - you call friendly agencies to ask if they have anybody spare to join you ASAP, move some of the developers from internal projects, and neglect other (possibly important!) leads. Once you have it all or most of it in place, contact goes silent.

Well… it happens - you think. But after a few weeks the same client calls, gives you a decent excuse and the situation happens all over, including the going silent part.

I don’t think there is a way to defend from such client. The difference between an experienced salesman and a newbie, is the latter is so excited about everything that they may go through a number of such cycles before giving up on such client.

At Solidstudio we had the pleasure of working with great clients. Sometimes with ok ones. We managed to cut off not paying customers and avoid signing deals with cagey ones. I believe trust is the most critical value in a business and not having it with the client will prevent you from building a meaningful and lasting relationship that works for both parties.

Running and scaling a software company - Client Types

At Solidstudio, we use a tool setup which is quite popular among IT companies. These two main components play a crucial role in almost every process we run: G Suite and Slack.

We are fans of the LEAN approach, and that’s why we decided not to invest our time and money in tools that we might use in the future, when our company becomes 10 times bigger.

Slack and G Suite are good enough for now. Still, what we missed few times was some automation. There exist Sack applications that provide some level of integration between the tool and G Suite, but they usually have limited capabilities.

Let me show you a use case we decided to try out and how we solved the challenge.

We use Google Spreadsheets for a broad range of tasks at our company. Financial data, reports, different types of KPIs - we track them all in Spreadsheets. Some of the KPIs need to be collected manually. And since they’re stored in a spreadsheet (one of the many that are also important), there is a risk that some of us forget to check it every day.

Pinging people to remind them about updating KPIs,

Sharing the current KPI values with all the interested parties.

To solve these problems, I decided to connect two features/services:

Slack has an Incoming Webhooks mechanism. After a few clicks, we can receive a URL that may be used to send messages to specific Slack channels. It looks like this:

It’s a POST method accepting json body with the message content:

What about the logic responsible for generating the message? It took me just a little time to research this and I found Google Scripts service. Sounds good since the data and processing would be delivered by the same platform. And I wasn't disappointed.

How do I get a spreadsheet? By using this one-liner:

The long id is the string we can take from the browser when we have the spreadsheet open:

Here’s a full example which is able to post reminders if needed, as well as the current KPI value:

Google Scripts provides a way to set up triggers for such functions, and that’s exactly what we were looking for. We have been using this tool since a few weeks and it has worked for us pretty well.

Having such a broad potential for implementation, the Slack notification mechanism integrated with G Suite services is very handy tool. We’re going to use it for other cases like employee reports validation, reminding about invoices that haven’t been moved from the inbox directory in Google Drive, and many, many more use cases.

What Does it Really Mean to “Scale” With Technology & Automation?

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