It’s now a few years since I started working with the Altai team as a co-founder, and as I’m now transitioning into more of an advisory role, it’s a chance to reflect on the experience.

It’s certainly true what they say about the start-up space - it isn’t for the faint-hearted! There’s an interesting contrast with the larger organisations I’ve worked at, where easy access to expertise is built right in. People - for the most part - stay in their lane. At start-ups in general, you’ve got to roll your sleeves up and figure things out for yourself, get them done, and you rarely get a chance to catch your breath before you have to move onto the next challenge. It exemplifies the notion of perfect being the enemy of good. It can be pretty daunting, but when you’re surrounded by a team pushing hard in the same direction, you figure it out together at speed.

Together we’ve got a lot of achievements we can be proud of:

• Launched a fully featured B2B SAAS platform in our pilot market (Australia and New Zealand), and started generating meaningful revenue (proving product-market fit), all while heavily time- and cash-constrained. My role was leading all the design and planning work, pulling in a merry band of side hustlers where needed, working alongside a single excellent developer.
• Then launched in Mexico and then globally (big plans on that front, watch this space). The team started to grow…
• Won our first pitch night, which lit the blue touch paper for not one, not two, but three successful venture capital funding rounds. By my reckoning we’ve presented variations of this pitch over 100 times
• Now the core web app has over 1,000 distinct pages across every stage of the casting process for Casting Offices, their Clients, Agents and Artists - and maybe 10x that for page states. Casting is so much more complex and nuanced than you’d expect; organic processes that flex to accomodate humanity and creativity at pace.
• Built a MacOS Desktop app for managing live sessions
• Platform (or rather, platforms - we’ve got six of them) translated into Spanish and ready for more
• Full infrastructure reboot (terraforming, etc.) to evolve from startup to ready-for-growth. Lots of innovative stuff in this space that I can’t talk about yet…
• Secured SOC-2 compliance in readiness for the Enterprise market
• Implemented Posthog as a CDP and used data from here to build a segmented, dynamic marketing program on Customer.IO
• Coordinated 271 deployments to production and counting
• Created and completed 2903 tickets in Notion
• And much, much, much more….

Not bad for a small team!

So, where to from here? Altai is still a relatively young business, and I’ve got every confidence we’ll achieve our ambitious goals. It’s been one of the best experiences of my career, but as I transition into an advisory role I’m now breathing life back into the PragmaTech proposition - which partly explains why I’m writing this blog post. Open for business!

So if you (or someone you know) need support across any of the areas listed above, or more broadly when it comes to strategic planning, hit me up and we can grab a coffee or zoom to discuss.