Easy Does It: Building a Tech Start Up from the Ground-Up.

The month of October 2020 marks Duple’s 2nd birthday. Two years down the line and Duple is still going strong, eager to learn and passionate about what we do, but the journey has been anything but smooth sailing and certainly not without challenges.

In her blogpost, “32 Valuable Start up Lessons From Successful Entrepreneurs” , Eshan Pancholi said “Building a successful name for a start-up is not a function of ‘by chance’. It takes a lot of discomforts, uneasiness, and creativity to start with an idea and then build on that idea every day”. 8 out of 10 start-ups fail within their first year of existence, meaning Duple must be doing something right.

Innovation drives everything we do at Duple, it is what generates our competitive advantage. To maintain this, we must ensure that our company culture, processes and mindset supports this new way of thinking. The following principles have become the laws we live by and is ingrained into every aspect of our organisation:

Streamline internal communication

Internal communication can make or break your business. Not only do employees need to stay on top of the latest news and developments in the company, but they also need to be continuously reminded of the company’s vision, brand, values and goals. Ensuring that your employees are well informed will create confidence and unity amongst them.

Slack is one of the main communication tools that we use at Duple, it combines an intuitive UI with both group and person-to-person messaging, with the added feature of creating channels for all the different project and departments within your organisation. By using workplace communication tools such as Slack, you can streamline your communication and have it all in one place ensuring your employees knows what’s up all the time. We have also integrated other business apps with Slack to create a truly central communication tool.

Use Automation as a power tool

Automation has the ability to change the way we work, the way we manage our teams, and the way we conduct daily business activities. As business automation processes have started to improve, more businesses are looking for ways in which they can leverage automation in order to help them reach their goals or at the very least save time and money.

Duple COO, Andre Minnie designed our very own automated workflow software, called Rapid Planner. RP is allowing our employees to be up to 40% more productive in a single work day empowering our team to focus more on the quality of their work.

“We run a well oiled machine here and we cannot have people doing admin and repetitive tasks which take away valuable time to innovate and earn revenue. RapidPlanner was built to solve this and ensure that we have total transparency across the business, simplifying commercial decision making and trusting in the software to generate and track sales proposals, calculate resource availability and help staff manage projects and tasks. We also integrated RapidPlanner with our CRM to manage Client accounts centrally and Xero, a 3rd-Party accounting platform, to automate invoicing and statements. So the team is left to just focus on building awesome web and mobile apps!”

Duple COO - Andre Minnie

Creating a (safe) innovative environment

Innovation happens from the inside out. Business owners must create a culture of innovation by leading with example. Nothing is impossible, live by it and believe it, soon enough your employees will believe it as well. As a leader, all you can do is provide your team with the tools necessary to be successful and allow them to dream, to bring ideas to the table no matter how absurd they might be. Employees must feel empowered to innovate.

When you create an environment in which your team feels safe to fail, they are more likely to reach higher and think bigger which can result on them stumbling onto the next big thing.

Ensure an aligned mindset

By aligning mindsets, you create a kind of symmetry between mental and emotional energy. Alignment eliminates distractions and will help you create synergy across your organization. When your employees have a thorough understanding of what is expected from them and the standard to which they must measure themselves, they are much more likely to make a success of their career and help take your business to a higher level.

If you want to clearly pave the path towards a common goal the best way is to align the minds of those who are helping build your business.

Treat your customers like family

We focus on keeping up with our customers, not our competitors. Around 97% of customers will tell others about a good customer service experience. If you treat them well, they will always come back and if they don’t, they will send a new customer your way. It is no secret that a good reputation can open doors to new partnerships, attracts top talent and lengthens the lifecycle of your business.

Maintaining a good reputation amongst your clientele requires hard work with a lot of attention to detail, as well as passion, consistency in intent and quality at all times. Warren Buffett once said, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

Treating your customers well not only puts you in good light with the outside world but with your employees as well. It encourages them to become advocates of your business, boosting morale and making them more willing to stick with the company through tough times.

We have learned plenty within these last two years of which one thing stood out the most, there is no right way. There is only the way that works for your organisation, a unique recipe that can only be discovered by multiple failures and lessons learned. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon summed it up the best, “I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.”

We are not perfect but we will never stop trying to be. Happy Birthday Duple!

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