Building a startup from an idea can be an exciting adventure that tests resilience, passion, and commitment. It’s about creating something entirely new and adopting the right mindset to turn it into a successful reality.
With “Becoming Crono” we’ll revisit our starting point through an honest and captivating memoir written by our CTO, Marco Maddiona.
Each month, you’ll have the opportunity to witness firsthand the steps that propelled Crono into a startup with a €500,000 pre-seed investment. This will encompass the obstacles we overcame and the choices we made. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to develop software while building a business?
If you are already on board then, enjoy our second episode of Becoming Crono!
Episode 6 – First-year challenges and growth
Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome to the sixth episode! In case you have missed the previous ones head here to read the very start of our adventure. Now, let’s dive right into our story!
Celebrating Crono's First Birthday
Towards the end of July, we had the opportunity to celebrate Crono’s first birthday with a 3-day company retreat together with the first two employees (Bob and Leo) in the beautiful Florence, precisely on the hills of Chianti.
On Friday, we all worked together in the same place for the first time, while over the weekend, we allowed ourselves a bit of relaxation and abundant lunches and local product tastings.
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At that moment, knowing that we had reached our first year and were beginning to structure the team for the growth phase filled us with pride. Starting a startup is a complex journey full of unknowns and threats around every corner.
Often, while on this path, one does not perceive the progress being made because you’re simply too caught up in the next problem to solve. But it is very important to find occasions to celebrate small milestones.
Speed vs. Sustainability
Anyway, those few days together served us to have fun, disconnect, and recharge our batteries for the last summer sprint that was projecting us to have the new platform ready by the end of the summer.
During an evening walk in Piazza della Signoria, we were discussing the need to accelerate to be ready as soon as possible with all the functionalities we wanted to develop.
We faced the dilemma that every startup encounters:
- Hiring more people to go faster: reduces the time needed to be market-ready but increases the risk of burning through the funds raised too quickly. Or
- Trying to grow without skipping steps: ensures that the startup can distribute the funds raised over a longer period but loses time advantage against competitors.
Spoiler: if you really want to do a startup, you must be ready to take risks and always prefer the first choice.
Boosting the Development Team
So, in early August, we decided to give another boost to the development team by adding two full-time members:
- Vlada: the young UX/UI designer who had started collaborating with us a few hours a week a few months ago and was already revolutionizing the interface of our platform, decided to accept our offer to join the Crono team full-time. The work to be done is substantial and continuous, and the benefits of this choice in the long term have proven to be fundamental.
- Manuel: a brilliant and precise Argentine frontend developer, always ready to learn new concepts. He joined the development team to accelerate the implementation of the new platform’s functionalities and to improve the graphical interface in great detail.
As you can imagine, it was a very intense August dedicated to the development and testing of new features, with a great teamwork effort from the product team that, although young and diverse, embraced Crono’s goal and is dedicating skill and passion to its achievement.
An Intense Year of Work
Summing up after more than an intense year of work and with a young team ready to support the machine that was set in motion, we realized that we had built and given a lot. When these periods happen, it’s normal to find oneself a bit short on physical and mental energy. So it happened to me.
At that moment, Marco’s words helped me, who, noticing the situation, told me: “Maddi, we are doing great work, but remember that we are running a marathon, not a 100-meter sprint.”
Riding the wave of enthusiasm from a year full of changes and positive news, I was working as if this project could have a short-term end. Probably used to the jobs I had in my past as a freelance developer.
Instead, when you start a project of this type (hopefully) there is no end, and one must be able to make a mental switch that leads to thinking about more long-term work sustainability. It is necessary to be able to alternate periods of intense work with moments of unloading to recover physical and mental energy and allow the brain to absorb new ideas between one sprint and another.
If one is not able to realize this on their own, someone must make you understand because, in the long term, it is more likely to succeed with this approach.
For now, that’s all guys: in the next chapter, I’ll tell you more about preparing for the Software Release and the importance of marketing & sales.
