Starting a business: The Pilot Episode

The first entry in a series about building SLK Projects from Johannesburg — written as it happened rather than reconstructed afterwards, which means some of it aged well and some of it did not.

What we set out to build

A studio that could take something from the idea to the running system without handing it between three companies. The observation behind it was ordinary: most South African businesses were not short of software options, they were short of somebody who would own the whole outcome. Design agencies handed off to developers, developers handed off to whoever was left, and the client absorbed every gap.

The early bets that paid off

• Learning the business before the brief. Slower to start, dramatically fewer rebuilds.
• Saying no to work we would have done badly. Painful at the time, and the single highest-return decision of the first year.
• Building our own tools. Everything we run internally started as a problem we had first, which meant we shipped it knowing whether it worked.

The ones that did not

• Underpricing to win the first few. It does not build a reference base, it builds an expectation.
• Treating marketing as something to do once there was spare time. There is never spare time, and the compounding starts only when you start.
• Assuming good work markets itself. It does, eventually, and much more slowly than the invoices arrive.

What we would tell someone starting now

Pick the narrowest thing you can be genuinely excellent at and be known for that first. Breadth is something you earn afterwards. And write things down as you go — the reasoning behind a decision is far more useful a year later than the decision itself, and it is the first thing memory loses.

More on how we work: about SLK Projects and consulting and advisory.