It is almost unimaginable that it is a whole year since we sat down to launch Recursyv. At the time we had an idea – make enterprise software more readily accessible – and a name. We knew we wanted to build a software business and we were lucky enough to have a pair of (prospective) customers willing to be patient while we built product.
In our first few months we canvassed our prospective customers and focused on building software to address their specific needs. In truth, this was also a significant learning curve as we spread our technology stack into areas which required learning for the both of us.
We also had the intimidating privilege of a blank page. We needed to set everything up from scratch. Here are a few highlights…
Our first tweet was posted on the day of our first meeting, 30/08
Day one! We’re underway at @campuslondon planning and plotting to grease the wheels of your MS Dynamics implementation
— recursyv (@recursyv) August 30, 2016
Over the following weeks we put our website live, launched on LinkedIn, ordered business cards, published our first blog post, worked our way up the Google rankings, and – after much unnecessary rigmarole – managed to get a bank account open. We also learnt about working with each other and how to play to our respective strengths and weaknesses.
today I learned that my ability to make sandwiches does not match @jon_littlechild‘s desire for perfect spreading of butter to the corners
— David Reinhardt (@davereinhardt) September 29, 2016
there’s been a big debate amongst the team the past few days, we’re going public to try and bring some finality to it … #nomnomnom
— recursyv (@recursyv) October 11, 2016
We worked to refine our software and we even stumbled upon our chocolate chip cookie tradition. By September our Seamless service was sync’ing messages and a few weeks later we had demos scheduled for both Seamless (at the time, still imaginatively called the Azure Service Bus Integration tool) and Sales In-a-Box.
Then this happened.
SOUND THE BELLS our first signed order form has come through the door 🎉🎈🎉🎈🎉🎈
— recursyv (@recursyv) December 6, 2016
And we were in business! By the end of 2016 we had another order on the books and in January we began rolling software out.
Over the year I’ve tried to engage with as many entrepreneurs as possible and one key theme that often comes up is “the first few customers are easy, it’s the next 20 that are difficult – but they are the ones who will make or break your business.” This is proving to be true, exciting and intimidating. We’re working on it.
While preparing this post, we created a Twitter moment to share a more extended highlights package of our first year. We hope you enjoy it.
