Start-Ups

Why we like to exchange ideas with start-ups

10 years ago, the development of a new software was a major project. Years had already passed from the idea to the concept. And during programming, many programmers had to be coordinated, some of them distributed worldwide. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code were produced, tested and deployed. In today’s times of apps and widgets, this effort has been significantly reduced. Time to market, the period from an idea to the first prototypes, has been reduced to 6 months or less. And so even very specific use cases can be quickly optimized in a program today. Furthermore, by making the software available in the cloud, installation costs are eliminated and the inhibition threshold to use it is significantly lower. Who doesn’t know this from their private environment, a new app is quickly tested.

Our motivation

And so, every month new ideas are born in the environment of value creation management, implemented in a software or disappear again. At Adconia, we dealt with the topic of performance recording for service providers 5 years ago, and the idea of an evaluation portal analogous to an online store for companies was born. Via an app, employees of a company should have the possibility to rate service providers, e.g. cleaning companies, regularly and easily. At the time, we were looking for programmers for this, developed a concept and the high costs for a comparatively small application kept us from implementing it. In retrospect, this was the right decision. Today, such functionality is available for little money as a widget and can be integrated into any other software or workflow.

In our projects, however, we repeatedly encounter very customer-specific or general challenges that can be significantly optimized through automation or digitization. And that’s where it’s even more important for us to know solutions, to understand approaches and the technology for digitization. The exchange with start-ups in the value chain environment is therefore a mutual gain situation for us. We can critically evaluate ideas, provide advice on optimization, and identify opportunities for use. On the other hand, we learn about new solutions early on and can offer them exclusively to our customers.

Start-up success story

Furthermore, as an „old“ consulting company, we get to know the entrepreneurial spirit of start-ups and their will to succeed. We made our first contact with a start-up for the digitization of forms four years ago. At the time, it was intended as a solution for a specific industry and a specific challenge. Four years later: the start-up has a new name and new investors for the third time and today has a financing round of several million euros. No longer specifically for one industry and for completely different challenges, but with the same technical idea. These transformations alone were exciting and interesting for us to accompany. And yes, at times we believed the idea was dead. But through the transformations new approaches emerged again and again, and today the time and also the technology is ready for it.

We can only advise anyone interested to always watch or attend startup pitches. Even if out of 10 ideas there might be only one, which, if you reflect it with your own environment, can really be a gamechanger, it is worth attending. And you’ll learn a new language, which is interesting enough in itself.

 

Oliver Kreienbrink

Managing Director. ADCONIA GmbH