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 +150 customers all over the world. 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?
Enjoy our new episode of Becoming Crono!
Ep. 12 - Crono 2.0: growing, changing, pushing forward
Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome back! If you missed the previous chapter of this story, I suggest you catch up here: Crono Through the Eyes of the CTO (Part 11) before moving on.
Let’s go!
It’s been a while since the last chapter. I broke my every-three-month rhythm of publishing an update. Pretty sure the world didn’t suffer from it, but personally, the idea of being “late” to this self-imposed appointment really bugged me.
I needed time. A lot happened since last April, and I had to process it, find a stable point that would allow me to close the circle and gain a clearer view of Crono’s evolution. But let’s take it step by step. I’ll start from the event that sparked a small revolution, though I need a brief premise first.
We’re a startup, and it’s quite normal to have a dynamic team, with people coming and going. In the U.S., the rule of thumb is “hire fast and fire faster”, though it doesn’t translate 1:1 to Europe.
Even less so when the founders are Italian, still attached to that romantic idea of the company as “one big family.” While I’ve never fully believed in that metaphor, it’s true that at Crono we’ve always cared deeply about everyone who joined us, especially the younger team members we worked closely with every day.
On April 28th, I had my usual monthly check-in with Bob, our very first hire in April 2023. A brilliant young developer who had been my right hand from the start, taking ownership of the frontend. And out of nowhere, he told me he was resigning.
Okay, maybe not entirely out of nowhere. He’d been showing some signs of frustration in the previous months, but caught up in the daily grind, and probably unprepared to proactively manage employee relationships—we failed to catch those signals in time.
Still, I didn’t see it coming. Bob was my right hand. I just assumed he’d stay, no matter what. I thought we’d keep pushing through this journey together, from our first release for 15 users all the way to celebrating the millionth one.
So, yeah, I took his decision hard. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him either, Bob believed deeply in Crono.
This experience taught me a lot. Mainly, that you should never take anyone on your team for granted, and that constant dialogue is key to preventing small issues from turning into final decisions.
At the same time, it made us proud to see people who grew with us move on to world-class international companies. It proves that Crono is full of talent, and that whoever passes through here is ready to shine even beyond our borders.
From a practical standpoint, though, this opened up a huge challenge. After me, Bob was the person with the deepest technical knowledge of the platform, and as the main frontend developer for the past two years, he knew most of the details by heart.
In short, we urgently needed to find a replacement, without losing momentum in the dev team.
As anyone who’s ever hired a developer knows, that’s no easy task. You’re not just looking for skills, you’re looking for attitude, someone you enjoy collaborating with, someone who gets how a startup works. That last part might be the most important one.
Despite searching actively, even with external partners, we struggled to find the right person. Then, part luck, part LinkedIn magic, a message arrived in Alex’s inbox (he’s basically the King of LinkedIn) from a guy named Alen.
It didn’t take long to realize Alen was exactly who we needed. After a quick evaluation process, we made him an offer. By early June, he was already onboard, before Bob’s last day at Crono.
During this transition, Oleh played a key role. With far more responsibility than his age might suggest, he handled the entire knowledge transfer, absorbing everything Bob could pass on, documenting it, and helping Alen get up to speed fast.
The hardest part is managing situations like this while you’re still going full throttle on product development.
It’s a bit like changing a tire while the car’s racing in a Formula One Grand Prix.
By now, three years in, we knew building a startup wasn’t easy. But the further we go, the more we realize how the surface area of challenges keeps expanding. And that’s exactly what makes the journey so exciting.
Meanwhile, on the sales front, our numbers kept climbing. We were maintaining steady month-over-month growth between 10% and 15%, a clear sign we were moving in the right direction.
A big part of that was thanks to Luca joining the sales team in Barcelona, full of energy and quickly taking the lead under Lorenzo’s guidance, racking up clients in no time.
The arrival of Alen and Luca showed us how the right additions, people with more experience, could deliver better results than those they replaced. Sometimes, especially in dev teams, you get too comfortable with things that shouldn’t be acceptable.
Sure, in the early startup stages, with limited resources, you can let things slide, like messy code or lack of structure. But at some point, those things must become a priority. That’s where long-term sustainability starts.
Alen’s arrival helped me realize that and raised the bar for what I expect from the dev team—and for the level of maturity we need to reach.
Since summer, that mindset has spread to the rest of the company. We’ve reflected on every role that showed friction or underperformed compared to expectations. In recent months, we’ve restructured a few positions to find people more aligned with our goals—people who can keep up with a startup that wants to become the best sales software in the world.
This summer was also a major turning point for me personally: I became dad.
Of course, being a founder, I had to manage it all amid the usual startup chaos and relentless pace. But it was a great stress test and taught me a lot about resilience.
I won’t dive deep into that here, I already wrote a separate article about it: Reflections on a Summer of Software Development #3.
In early September, we welcomed a new young backend developer, Lorenzo (aka “Magic”), who immediately clicked with the team. Maybe it was his mix of boldness and brilliance, but it was clear from day one he was something special.
Lorenzo: Ciao Marco, se prometti di non scrivermi allo stesso orario in cui hai accettato la richiesta di collegamento mi piacerebbe che considerassi questo messaggio come candidatura spontanea riguardante il post che hai scritto ieri. Faccio cose C#/PostgreSQL/Cloud/Al. Fatti un giro sul mio profilo linkedin:) Se sei vecchio stampo (che noia), rispondimi “CV” e ti dovrebbe arrivare in automatico. A presto
Marco: Più che vecchio stampo sono curioso di sapere se l automation funziona scrivendo CV.
Lorenzo: Apparentemente anche pagando per uptime non posso fare quello che mi pare con il servizio che pago, mi tocca mandartelo a mano, arriva
A season of change and growth
Magic immediately showed a strong desire to jump in, get his hands dirty, and, most importantly, the attitude of wanting to deeply understand everything he touches, improving it whenever needed.
In the product team, we also welcomed Iampona (aka Lampo), who joined as Scrum Master, acting as the bridge between business and developers, dedicating time to those small product details that make a big difference in improving the user experience.
September, however, brought two more “surprises” for the team: Sofia and Tom told us they would be leaving Crono.
For two years, Sofia had been Alex’s right hand—much like Bob had been mine, while Tom had been part of the sales team for about a year, a true team player who always knew how to lift everyone’s spirits.
Both were in their first professional experience. It’s easy to understand how difficult their decision was, for them and for us, especially knowing how much they both cared about Crono.
Their decision helped us realize that it’s not always about work. Sometimes, choices simply need to align with the personal phase people are living through. A company can’t always demand or offer exactly what an employee can give or expects at that particular moment.
We understood that we had to normalize these moments and not make them bigger than they are. That’s how the professional world works. You need to be aware that it’s always possible to find someone who can replace a departing teammate effectively. The machine has to keep running.
By the end of September, it was time for everyone’s favorite moment of the year, the company retreat.
This year, we decided to gather as many people as possible in Barcelona, where our sales team is based, and which had recently welcomed a few new energetic and talented salespeople: Valerio, Alejandro, and Alvaro.
The goal was simple: spend a few days together, work, connect, and have some fun.
Fourteen Croners proved just how much can be achieved when we’re all in the same room. Those were truly fantastic days. Working side by side with every other team member makes you realize how much talent we have and how much commitment everyone is putting into reaching our goals.
It was especially heartwarming to welcome our colleagues Vlada and Oleh from Ukraine, who, despite the challenges of traveling, were determined to join us. The dedication and constant effort of these young professionals are truly admirable.
Realigning the vision: the future of Crono
During the retreat, we founders decided to take a few moments for ourselves, to realign our goals and direction, but also to give the team some time to connect, have fun, and strengthen their bonds.
During those days, we shared with everyone the direction and objectives for the future: we want to become the best sales tool in the world.
To get there, we need full alignment on our vision, from product to marketing, from sales to customer success, and we all have to give our very best every day to keep improving, step by step.
Most importantly, we revealed what had been brewing within the product team: we had decided to transform Crono into an AI go-to-market Platform, completely revolutionizing the user experience, just like the most advanced tools in the industry are doing right now.
Take a look:
Moving in this direction was a radical choice. After three years of development, always ready to respond to customer needs and match the level of functionality offered by other tools on the market, we knew it was time to raise the bar and make Crono empower its users through AI.
ChatGPT opened the door to a new way of interacting with computers, and we’re convinced that within the next three years, every piece of software will move in this direction.
We were the first in our sector to make such a disruptive change.
Getting there ahead of others gives us a competitive and technological advantage that could position us as the definitive sales tool in the era of generative AI.
Sharing this project with the entire team created an incredible wave of hype. Everyone was super pumped (as our legendary Alvaro would say), even though we didn’t yet realize that intense weeks of hard work lay ahead to complete the project on time and coordinate efforts across the marketing and sales teams.
We had marked November 12 on the calendar as launch day. To make sure the development team was ready, we had to organize everything efficiently and quickly, and we brought in an external partner, Polarity, one of the best AWS Partners in Italy. Thanks to the great experience of Giovanni (co-founder) and his team, they provided us with top-notch support in bringing this initiative to life.
Internally, the work was just as intense, starting with the massive effort of Vlada, who completely redesigned Crono’s interface, to the frontend team, who worked tirelessly to visually shape the idea, and the backend team, who silently orchestrated the interaction between the new AI module and the existing platform features.
In short, since this summer, we’ve been going through an intense phase of design and development that has filled us with incredible energy, especially now that we can finally see and feel the results of our hard work, realizing how much AI has propelled our platform forward.
October Highlights: From Coding Marathons to Global Stages
October went by doing what we love most: developing software to innovate our industry. It almost felt like reliving Crono’s early days, when we were about to launch our MVP and were ready to revolutionize outbound sales once again!
October was also a month full of events for us co-founders, including:
Italian Tech Week in Turin: it was amazing to meet so many fellow Italian founders and see how Crono is now recognized and established as a brand. One evening, it almost felt like everyone there was either already a customer or about to become one, though I’m not sure all of them were being completely honest. Maybe it was just FOMO.
Arrtist in Berlin: a top-level event where you can shake hands and chat with some of the most important founders in Europe. It was incredibly inspiring to exchange ideas with those who’ve reached the highest levels and to see how founders with an unshakable passion for their product always find a way to achieve their goals.
(Side note: I also noticed that successful people in Berlin are way more humble than their Italian counterparts).
SaaStock: we made it to the final of the pitch competition to win $1 million. Unfortunately, we finished second.
As you’ve probably gathered from this article, the past few months have been a period of immense growth, for Crono, for us as founders, and for me personally, as both a person and a CTO.
What makes me most proud is that, for this new project, I wrote very few lines of code. Of course, I was always there to guide, suggest, support, and make decisions, but the real achievement lies in the incredible teamwork and synergy that allowed us to reach such a milestone together.
To wrap up, I want to share the biggest lesson I’ve learned over these months: what it takes for a startup to go from 0 to 1 isn’t necessarily what it takes to go from 1 to 100.
At certain stages, change is necessary, whether that means people, direction, priorities, or choices.
Looking back, I realize that every change, even the hardest ones, was a necessary step to get us where we are today. Without all these experiences, and without every single person who contributed to the project, including those who are no longer part of the team, we wouldn’t have come this far.
If you want to keep growing your startup, you have to be ready to embrace change.
Only by accepting it can you continue to innovate. On this, Marco had the right intuition to push us toward the direction we’ve now decided to pursue together.
And now, we can finally say it:
Welcome, Crono 2.0!
Keep pushing.