The Idea - The Icarus and Phoenix moments of a tech founder

Wind back time to 5 years ago, I was living in Italy and just finishing another phase of a global transformation project. At this point the plan was to move to Copenhagen and settle down after having lived as a nomad for 13 years.

Part of this plan was to leave the world of contracting behind and start my own company delivering services for digital transformation, however I only wanted to do this with other experienced senior resources.

With that in mind I registered Digital Architect Group (DAG) as soon as I moved to Copenhagen, reflecting the ethos around collecting experienced resources in the company name.

Paper company

Sitting at home with a paper company, it was now time to make things happen which is an exciting process of exploring, learning, and failing. All of the sudden you come across all of the speedbumps that wasn’t thought about such as:

-          How do I get leads and turn them into clients.

-          Creation of a website, domain etc.

-          What kind of marketing material is needed.

-          How does DAG become a registered Microsoft partner.

-          And much more..

After addressing much of the technical setup needed, I simply started reaching out to every single person in my LinkedIn network to see if I could drum up business that way, so if you connected with me back then, then I’m sure you would have gotten one of my unsolicited messages.

Honestly this didn’t generate any business, other than awareness which is fine. People would buy into me, just not DAG at this point. This really taught me that selling the concept of DAG without any prior clients would be a tough journey even though my personal credentials where in place.

One of the next tactics I utilized was going through every published customer case story I could find, from the various Microsoft partners and noting down the client’s name. From this list of 200+ clients that I tried cold calling and mailing, only 1 in 10 would reply and in the end, I had 3-5 solid leads.

This approach hadn’t gone unnoticed with the other Microsoft partners, as I was (and had to be) very opportunistic in my approach.

Product of a pandemic

Things were starting to look better for DAG, now we had leads to work on and I just needed to convert one of them. But the world got hit by a global Covid pandemic so the leads I had to work with evaporated, no one had the appetite for change with the uncertainty this introduced.

It was around this time I connected with Jakob Bent Smed who I’m hosting the podcast with, we would meet up and use each other as sounding boards for the challenges we both where facing.

Anyway, with no leads, my lifesaving thrown at this venture and a global pandemic I had 2 choices.

Option 1: Pull the brakes on DAG and go back into contracting.

Option 2: Find another way to market, that wasn’t solely service based.

After some deep thought I went for option 2, as I had always been challenged by the fact partners redeveloped the same integrations again and again.

I was sure this could be standardised, to test out the thesis I reached out to an old colleague of mine Russel Fernandes who agreed to develop a prototype very cheap for what would later become our D365FO Connectors for external Expense and Time management systems.

In summary

I now had a product I believed in and could expand on, now it just needed to be brought to market, and we really needed to onboard a client fast at this point. You really learn that cashflow is king, when you’re responsible and funding for your own business.

But more on that in the next article, where I’ll take you through the journey of getting DAG established in the marketplace and highlight some of the things that worked and didn’t work in doing so.

All articles "The Icarus and Phoenix moments of a tech founder"

01 – Introduction

02 – The Idea

03 – Getting established

04 – Growth Pain

05 – Re-structuring

06 – Recovering

07 – The future