It’s a marathon, not a sprint: how putting product quality at the heart of your business gives you long-term sustainability
One of the biggest challenges for an online business is how you make changes to your website or service without affecting your performance and, crucially, without impacting your customers (notably by removing visible downtime for changes pushed to production).
Platform.sh solves that problem by creating a perfect copy of a production website that is hosted in the Cloud so changes can be made and tested before being merged with the live website.
We’ve been talking to co-founder and CEO of Platform.sh, Fred Plais.
How did your company get to where it is today?
We started in 2014 with an R&D project. Our goal was to be able to create “bit for bit copies” of web applications in a very limited amount of time (less than 30 seconds).
We managed to secure a 2MEuro grant from the European Union do it. That project is what became Platform.sh. Five years later, we are a company of 150 people, growing very rapidly.
Did you get funding when you started Platform.sh?
We didn’t get funding at the time, because the traditional VCs do not fund R&D projects.
We were very lucky to find the Horizon 2020 Program and get funding from the European Commission. This program is highly competitive (success rate is below 2%), so we filed the request and then forgot about it.
Six months later, we were very surprised to receive a phone call saying we’d be getting the grant! Two million euros in non-dilutive research and development funding. Unbelievable! We would not have made it without the European Commission. So today, I can say thank you to the EU for trusting us at that time.
What is your focus? Is it on small companies or larger businesses?
We’ve got all sorts of projects running on Platform.sh. We have very large customers like Nestle or Johnson and Johnson as well as freelancers who really don’t have a team and are just on their own.
The range is very wide. The price point for a single app is from $50 a month. Prices change depending on how many apps you need to run and how much traffic they’re getting.
Our strategy is that we target developers. Basically it’s like fishing with a big net – you cast it out and when you bring it up you will have some massive companies and some one-man bands – and everything in-between.
We found that bottom-up is a much more efficient approach than the traditional Enterprise sales approach with big companies, which is a very slow and expensive process for limited results. The inbound and bottom-up sales method is much more efficient and is the new way for Enterprise selling.
How do you decide the level of support you apply to customers?
We have one product, and different tiers for our customers differentiated on SLA, compliance and support level.
The first Tier is what we call ‘best effort’ which means we are going to respond to your questions as quickly as we can but we are not committing on how fast we are going to respond to your questions; the second one has certified response time – one hour for urgent tickets – and the third comes with a dedicated person in the organisation that is your ‘go-to’ person who will follow up every week or month and some Enterprise features.
The companies decide which Tier works best for them.
Is there are an area where you feel you punch above your weight – where you think you do something better than other companies?
We are very much about quality. I think that’s probably one of the things that we do well, especially in the product side of things and engineering, we build for the long run.
A startup is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. If you’re taking shortcuts on your product development at some point you will become stuck and you can’t move anymore.
Do you think the VC funding model encourages people to take those shortcuts? Is it growth at any cost?
Of course, it does. Whether you’re a public company and you have quarterly reports, or you’re a private VC finance company and you have private boards, you always have deadlines so it’s always tempting to take shortcuts.
I think it should be quality first. Customers want their app to be up and running and fast. If we don’t provide that then nothing matters.
Stability is first – and stability and shortcuts just don’t work together.
How do you keep an eye on quality as your company grows?
Quality is one of our five core values and it’s something we talk about all the time: we say “we never sacrifice quality”. People know it matters and it’s not something I or my co-founders are willing to compromise on. It’s part of the recruiting and onboarding process. We are setting the bar quite high and you’re going to be asked to do your work again if it’s not up to standard.
Across the board, we have chosen managers in the team who are very demanding and often detail-orientated. We do not hesitate to rewrite or refactor code when we think that quality is subpar. It takes more time, it costs more money but I think it’s the right approach because it’s sending a consistent message.
Having an impact is not necessarily down to your volume it’s really dependent on the quality you’re going to deliver.
What are your other four values?
So, “we never sacrifice quality” is the first.
The second is “we shoot for the moon but we go there step by step”. That means we are ambitious but we are not going to burn the house down. We love change, we understand that change is really necessary but at the same time, we are running mission-critical applications for customers that could be transacting more than a billion dollars a year. So, five minutes of downtime and maybe millions are gone. Stability is critical.
The third is “we care for each other” – it’s critical to have empathy with each other.
The fourth is “we are nothing without our customer success”.
And finally “we are diverse, curious, passionate and courageous”.
Is there one bit of advice that someone has given you that has really stuck in your mind?
It was given to me in French: “Hâte-toi lentement” and it translates to English roughly as “more haste, less speed”. So in today’s environment, you feel the pressure of having to deliver really fast, but at the same time you know focusing everything on speed is the biggest mistake you can make. You need to have the time to reflect and make sure you are doing what is right. You can sometimes move faster by starting slowly.
Most startups get somewhere after 10 years. When you’re running a start-up and especially when it is your first one you think nothing can wait another two weeks. Well, that’s not necessarily the case.
Thank you for your time.
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You can see Fred’s talk, Enterprise Apps: Build, run and scale apps. Anytime, anywhere, on the 29th January at Velocity²!
Tickets are available here.