Five lessons from the first three years of our start-up journey

Deltabase has just turned three. What started as 3 co-founders huddled around whiteboards on camping chairs in a South London home in 2019 is now a rapidly growing business, providing specific and actionable company intelligence to some of the world’s best and biggest deals advisors and management consultancies across the UK, North America and Europe. It’s hard not to feel immensely proud of what we’ve achieved so far in our journey.

I’m writing this article to chart some of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last 3+ years of getting a start-up off the ground with my talented and tenacious co-founders David Rowe and Alastair Whiteley.

Hopefully some will find it interesting and possibly even helpful – especially those considering starting a business or in the early stages of their own start-up journey.

Humble beginnings, Camberwell, London 2019

1. It pays to be open-minded

When we launched Deltabase, our initial focus was on assessing and scoring the digital maturity of companies, without needing any access to the company’s management team or data by using data science and intelligence techniques.

The bringing-together of defence intelligence techniques (OSINT) and data science for this specific purpose remains revolutionary. However, we learned through collaborating with our customers on live due diligence engagements and business development pursuits that it would also be valuable to be able focus on specific areas of interest rather than always looking for opportunities across a company’s entire operating model.

We were quick to spot this as a pattern in customer feedback and soon developed a flexible menu of intelligence products that our customers could select from to create a tailor-made intelligence brief best-suited to each specific M&A deal or sales pursuit.

We still provide our comprehensive digital maturity assessment product today but, since making this relatively subtle pivot in the way we provide our intelligence, we have seen dramatic growth in repeat demand from our due diligence and consulting customers.

2. Focus is key, but resiliency matters, too

Deltabase was 10 months old when the Covid-19 pandemic reached the shores of the UK with the associated wave of uncertainty bringing an abrupt halt to the majority of M&A deals almost overnight.

Fortunately, we were at a stage of our business where we were experimenting with several intelligence products with a wide range of customers that spanned multiple sectors. This made it easy for us to redirect our efforts temporarily away from M&A due diligence, leveraging our specific and actionable company intelligence to help our consulting customers win more client work.

If we had been singularly focused on the M&A due diligence use case, it is highly likely that our business would have been another victim of the pandemic. Instead, having resiliency in our product suite and in our customer base allowed us to emerge stronger from the pandemic; with proven product-market-fit in two discrete customer use cases, rather than just one.

I’d like to sincerely thank Ex-Accenture Managing Director Jonathan Every who was pivotal in helping us to see the value that our intelligence could bring to the consulting sales cycle.

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3. Never underestimate the power of your network

Sometimes the old adages absolutely bear out in reality. “People buy from people they trust.” “Every business is a people business.”

When I was a Management Consultant at The Berkeley Partnership, one of the founding partners, Michael Mahony, gave me a practical masterclass in the power of one’s own professional network. This was imparted as a way of leveraging a genuine and innate desire to be helpful to others whilst deriving pleasure and energy from meeting other people, learning about their worlds, and finding common ground.

As a founding team, we have over 65 years of professional experience between us, so our combined networks are diverse, rich, and very relevant to our business.

As a natural consequence of this we have really benefited from the value of our networks. At last count, 86% of our company revenue can be traced back, directly or indirectly, to our network prior to setting up Deltabase.

I would urge any founder of a business to challenge themselves on whether they are making the most of this valuable asset, however large or small their own network is.

Whilst I’m on this topic, I’d like to use this as an opportunity to thank anyone reading this who has been a part of our journey so far, whether as a friend, sounding-board, customer or investor. You all know who you are!

4. Kindness can kill your business

Now this may be a cultural thing – perhaps truer in the United Kingdom than elsewhere – but people are generally encouraging when providing feedback on new ideas. In our early days of concept testing and product development with customers, we received an overwhelmingly positive reaction to our ideas, proposition, product prototypes and early engagements.

At the time, it was all too easy to mis-interpret this as signals of the hallowed product-market-fit. Real product-market-fit is proven, of course, when customers are buying your products or services time and time again. Failure to spot actual product-market-fit can cause start-ups to make fatally bad decisions (like the 35% of start-ups which fail due to ‘no market need’ according to research by CB Insights).

New founders would be well-advised to read ‘The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You’ by Rob Fitzpatrick (thanks to Jasel Mehta of Forward Partners for the original recommendation).

5. The value of young talent

The talent that we’ve sought and have been fortunate to attract to Deltabase has brought with them knowledge and experience of tools and techniques that are capable of solving complex intelligence challenges. From Python coding to OSINT techniques, many of these are not commonly found in consulting or due diligence scenarios.

If we had attempted to build our products upon a more traditional toolset then this would severely compromise the pace, quality, and rigour of our intelligence and we would not have enjoyed such significant growth.

When considering the optimum staffing mix of a start-up, it’s worth ensuring a decent blend of experienced people who can set strategy and make solid judgement calls plus younger team members who bring fresh ideas, tools and techniques.

In closing…

David, Alastair and I started the business with a goal of helping people harness the power of data to find opportunities to create value and, whilst our products have evolved and pivoted considerably over the last 3 years, our core purpose remains intact.

The journey so far has been a rollercoaster ride, at times, but one that puts a smile on my face when I recount the challenges, pivots, setbacks, and successes.

The next stage of our growth will include a fundraise to unlock the capital needed to take our business to the next level. Once we’re through that process, I will gladly share my next set of experiences and lessons from that – I’m sure there will be many.

As they say: “every day is a school day”.