Scale Ups

Starting a business is hard. Building a product is harder still.

Doing both at the same time is one of the toughest challenges of your career. We know, because we've been where you are, we know how you feel, the challenges you face, and we want to help.

We want to offer an alternative to external funding: use endjin's Intellectual Property to bootstrap your product development.

A little bit about us.

Endjin was incorporated in 2010 by two founders wanting to create a sustainable long-term business with organic growth and no external investment. They started out with no plans for an "exit"; they simply wanted to create a profitable company that would enable them to employ great, like-minded people, and help organizations to work smarter. Along the way they figured out how to deliver extra value by turning ideas into reusable IP, architectural blueprints, and a number of products. Their longer term aim was to try and achieve the dream of "making money while you sleep" and annuity-based revenue streams.

10 years ago, we were in your shoes. Watch our story.

Learn about endjin's 10 year journey from start-up to Microsoft Gold Partner from one of its Founders and Director of Engineering. See how we used Microsoft's BizSpark programme to bootstrap our product development activities and grow our business.

Helping start-ups.

In 2011, endjin began working with PaySuite, a start-up funded by Employer Services Limited (who have since been acquired by Baker Tilly). Endjin helped re-architect PaySuite from a desktop-based MVP into an Real Time Information (RTI) capable Cloud-based payroll platform; the first to gain HMRC RTI accreditation. In 2014, PaySuite was acquired by Intuit and integrated into the QuickBooks Online ecosystem.

When we needed a new payroll system built, we enlisted the best in the field. Endjin's work led to our exit to Intuit.

With an interest in start-ups sparked, later that year endjin became involved with Microsoft for Startups London and mentored two cohorts; the first included AppyWay, a smart city start-up focusing on delivering realtime parking data. The second was FitWell Inc, a health and fitness company developing a state of the art mobile platform to improve lives and help people achieve their health and fitness goals.

In 2016, Dan Hubert, Founder & CEO of AppyWay appeared on Dragons Den and turned down offers from two of the dragons!

Endjin helped us focus at a crucial stage. As a result, AppyWell is built on solid foundations to allow us to become a truly scalable kerbside management, mobility & parking solution.

The Founder's dilemma.

Creating a business and growing it is hard. Creating a product and successfully taking it to market is even harder. So little of creating a successful product is about the software. Yet far too often it's the starting point; too many founders don't understand that software is just the means to scale the proposition (and hopefully offer economies of scale that increase profit margins), which means they start their business with seed funding based debt, building a product with very little idea about who their customer base is, what problems the product solves, and how to monetize it.

This puts the seed funding at risk, and this money often comes from friends & family – people you don't want to let down. By starting as you mean to go on with a dependency on funding, rather than a profitable business model based mindset could account for the fact that the median level of founder ownership at exit is only 11%.

Prove your proposition.

We want to help founders to work smarter; if you're trying to prove a concept, use endjin's New Proposition Development process to focus your time on answering the questions that will allow you to use your limited resources in the most effective manner. The process is a proven approach for rapid, fail-fast innovation; rather than focusing on building working software, it's about proving you have solution to a problem that actual potential customer have. The process has 33 steps and the first point at which code should be written is step 29:

GitHub is full of repositories of great products, open sourced after the company failed because they couldn't find a market to create a viable business from. Don't be like them. Fail fast & pivot until your find success.

Compared with our previous approach, we estimate the New Proposition Development process saved us over £500,000 in design & build costs for a go-to-market MVP.

Accelerate development.

If you've got a provenly credible proposition, but think you need seed-funding to build out core elements of your architecture or infrastructure for your MVP, why not talk to us about whether our Modern Data Platform, API Economy Blueprint, Identity as a Service API, Content Management Platform, or any of our Core Intellectual Property will accelerate your development, without the distraction and stress of trying to obtain seed-funding, or having to grow your development team to hit that milestone.

If you've raised funding to scale your start-up your proposition, talk to us about whether any of our products, solutions or intellectual property can help deliver the features, performance or scale that you need for your next stage of growth.

Interested? Apply Now.

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