Warrigal recently joined the Silicon Luxembourg Business Club. Get to know the startup.
Could you give us an idea of what your startup does?
Warrigal is startup machine. In other words, we create startups for internal development reasons and for our clients. We take charge of startups’ technical and business development after the ideation stage, and then we initiate a structural consolidation into the Lean Startup model, including the MVP development, continual development, training the future development team, and the growth hacking/marketing phase.
How did you come up with the idea?
After considerable reflection on our respective experiences, the founders noticed several problems (and their roots) that startups face during the development of their MVPs and newly developed functionalities.
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The subcontracting of the heart of an application in a team working on an emerging country can often provoke deceiving results. In the same vein, the lack of proximity and constructive discussions can accelerate these failures.
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Current methods in traditional web agencies do not correspond to the specific needs that startups deal with, either in terms of speed, agility and/or mentoring.
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The growing complexity of MVPs demands, more and more often, external competencies in addition to those of the founders.
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The notion of the MVP is not always well known, and a lot of startups launch while their solutions are much too advanced and not agile enough. Modifications take thus more time, and the rhythm of development slows down—often to the detriment of the small companies.
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After these periods of intense subcontracting, startups really need an internal IT team, but transferring knowledge can prove long and costly, and sometimes result in failure.
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Marketing and growth strategies that we currently see in young startups are often put in place too quickly and focus on false presuppositions.
Over time, and dealing with these different constants, we realized that we would be more than capable of intervening on these different points and bring true value to startups with which we help by giving them the means to save time, and thus, money.
“Following best practices set by the largest startup studios, we dedicate part of our time to developing new projects. That is, we bring to life each step of the stages listed here in order to create an MVP.”
Cédric Bousmanne
What are your products/services?
We have several. To make it more comprehensible, here’s a list.
Lean Startup Coaching: By using the lean startup methodology, we help our clients define their priorities in their development and strategic choices.
Defining the MVP: With the help of Lean Startup training, the key functions in any MVP become clearer and thus see rapid development, which ends up meaning that each updated cycle is shorter and in agreement with users’ wants and needs.
Continual improvement: Once the MVP is finished and the startup enters a growth phase, development does not stop. We enter into a new phase. By remaining focused on KPIs measured directly in developed solutions, we advance hand in hand with the startup and we help it grow to its own rhythm and according to its needs.
Transferring knowledge: We do not want to help startups get going and then leave them to figure out the resulting technical problems on their own. We take to our responsibilities by putting in place a technical transition phase. During this period, we continue to track the technical needs for several months by training the future technical team on our clients’ side. That is, we take care of recruiting future specialists. We transfer them accumulated knowledge about the startup so that they can integrate into the client’s team easily and in an efficient way.
Growth hacking/digital marketing: We put in place several strategies based on educated hypotheses, ideas and regular testing. We aim to accord our clients a way to save time in their marketing-attacking phase and by speeding up their growth.
Workshops: One of our unique skills is transferring knowledge. We feel very close to the open-source community, and it is very important for us to share our knowledge with a maximum number of people. As soon as a subject seems interesting enough to share, we make a workshop out of it.
Our personal startups: Following best practices set by the largest startup studios, we dedicate part of our time to developing new projects. That is, we bring to life each step of the stages listed above in order to create an MVP. Once this MVP is defined, we take charge of the project until it attains a rate of growth that allows us to give up a part of the startup that will be created with a CEO, the latter of which will take care of developing it in the best possible way.
What is your business model?
We have a hybrid business model. First, we have consultant and subcontracting fees. In addition, we hold equity in our startups.
Who are your clients?
Our clients are startups based in Belgium, France, and in the United States. They are all in the stages of startup development, from early stage to scaling. Among these startups, there are EASYPharm, AppTweak, and Ring Twice, who are developing in Belgium and internationally. We also look out for institutions and incubators in their coaching phases.
What are the next steps in your development?
We would like to continue developing our team in 2019, augment the number of our listed skills as well as continue to provide irreproachable service to our clients.