Crono

Category: Becoming Crono

Becoming Crono is the story of our startup told by our CTO and Co-Founder Marco Maddiona. In each episode, he walks us through Crono’s challenges and milestones.

  • The Story Behind Crono 2.0: Growing Through Change

    The Story Behind Crono 2.0: Growing Through Change

    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.

    image (3)

    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.

  • Life as a Startup CTO: Scaling Code, Teams, and Myself

    Life as a Startup CTO: Scaling Code, Teams, and Myself

    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. 11 – Scaling business and life

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome back! In case you have missed the previous episodes head here to read the very start of our adventure. Now, let’s dive right into our story!

    In the last episode, we left off after a Summer of Growth. Let’s go on: it’s September 2024.

    Coming back from a week of vacation, especially from a wonderful place like Puglia, is never easy.

    Especially if you’re the CTO of a startup.

    I’ve come up with a law, still unnamed (suggestions are welcome): the amount of things to handle and their ability to pile up during the CTO’s absence grows exponentially and tends to +∞.

    Although the team did a great job handling any issues that arose, I still manage several technical issues directly. Maybe a quick digression is needed to provide context and avoid the impression of disorganisation.

    Developing fast and tech debt

    Many of the processes or modules I still handle could actually be managed by the rest of the team, but the fast-paced nature of a startup and a product that aims to grow quickly doesn’t always leave time to transfer all the knowledge, especially about the more consolidated parts of the software.

    Moreover, we try to invest most of our resources into developing innovations and new features — in other words, everything that helps us “sell more.”

    The decision we made was to allocate resources toward developing new modules and features, and continue transferring knowledge when necessary, as existing modules get touched by the development of new ones, which also supports refactoring efforts.

    Given this decision, if a problem arises or if a modification is needed on existing modules, I often have to step in personally. As we grow as a team, shared knowledge increases and the software becomes more cohesive.

    And so September begins, and it’s back to focus, into the vortex. The roadmap to year-end is ambitious, and we dive back in to keep improving the product and driving sales.

    Oh, I also needed to update you on the client I mentioned in the previous chapter.

    Our bet paid off.

    The custom development we delivered allowed their employees to try out the platform, and they were impressed and excited. Since then, their user count keeps rising (28 at the time of writing)!

    This was a huge win for us because the company in question is Alibaba (Europe). Having big names in a startup’s portfolio is a major credibility boost and helps us gain leverage with other companies.

    When bets like these pay off on a startup journey, it’s incredibly rewarding. But it’s important to remember that these results are the outcome of all the previous work, not because we randomly pulled a joker from the deck.

    Sure, sometimes pulling a joker can help (both for business and morale), but keeping this in mind makes it easier to understand that even when things go wrong, you’re still going through a growth phase. It’s the sum of continuous small efforts that brings results.

    The Italian Tech Week

    As September draws to a close, we manage to gather part of our Italian team in Turin for Italian Tech Week. It was our first time attending with so many team members, and it was valuable for several reasons:

    • So many inspiring talks and interesting people we met helped grow our awareness and understanding of the tech and startup world.

    • It’s great to see your team “moving” within a major event. From someone trying to sell Crono in the food truck line, to pitching to investors while waiting to hear Sam Altman speak, to fixing a bug over the phone while standing up, and the desperate hunt for power outlets and Wi-Fi—it’s clear we can’t sit still even at an event. That means we’re all focused on the same goal.

    “Oh, you’re the folks from Crono—I know you!”

    Hearing this more and more often (especially from people we’ve never met) shows that we’re doing a great job (huge kudos to the Marketing team led by Sof and Alex). Once we were back from our Turin adventure, we got our heads back down and kept developing.

    Our focus for the end of the year has been continuously improving our users’ workflows—boosting automations across different stages, delivering more useful data for decision-making, and backing everything with AI.

    The AI Bet

    Nowadays, it’s easy to say AI has changed how we work, but not all the software we use daily has truly transformed the user experience (have you tried writing a formula in Excel recently? What’s really changed in 25 years?).

    Finding the right way to implement AI isn’t simple, and even though we introduced generative AI in Crono from day one, it still took us time to figure out the most effective way to bring it to our users.

    Product development is iterative, and it’s essential to learn from users what to build and how.

    After several tests, research, and user interviews, we identified a few core features that allowed us to take Crono to the next level with AI:

    • Sequence generation optimized for each target

       

    • Personalization of each message flow using contextual info from the prospect

       

    • Data enrichment and classification to provide deeper insights

       

    It sounds like a lot of work in a short amount of time for such a small team (five developers, including me), but AI not only helps improve the product, it helps build it.

    Beers, wins and scaling a backend

    That said, startups aren’t all serious business: in October, we took part in one of the top sports events organised by our coworking space (WAO)—the prestigious Beer Pong tournament.

    I have to confess: I hate Beer Pong.

    I hate when the ball bounces off the plastic cup and flies out, or circles the rim three times before falling out. It seriously drives me nuts.

    That’s why I usually avoid playing.

    But that night was different: we were playing for Crono.

    The team (me, Dante, and Alex) was super in sync, and we really brought our A-game. That night, I had the same confidence Michael Jordan had when he made a free throw with his eyes closed.

    And we won. Against seasoned teams that had trained for this for years. It was one of Crono’s proudest moments (up to that point, anyway).

    After that moment of joy, we didn’t waste any time and kept pushing the accelerator. September and October turned out to be excellent months in terms of sales. The ongoing improvements to the product were drawing the attention of new customers and increasing the satisfaction of existing ones.

    When the number of users grows, there are always technical aspects to consider: the backend must scale.

    A (good) CTO needs to be aware of the capacity and limits of their infrastructure but what do you do when resources are limited and you’re heavily investing in features and user experience?

    In short, we tried to push Crono to its limits, fully aware we couldn’t keep doing it for long given our growth pace.

    Scalability issues were starting to become noticeable even to users, so we knew we had to do something in the short term, even though we didn’t have enough internal skills and resources to properly optimize our cloud architecture.

    Let me put it differently: with more time and patience, we could’ve studied the best solution and implemented it ourselves. But when you’re working in such a fast-paced environment, you often don’t have the time you want, let alone the patience. So this remained an unresolved issue for us.

    Time flies when you’re focused on something, and before you know it, it’s mid-November: Web Summit time in Lisbon.

    Like every year, we couldn’t miss it but unlike previous editions, we decided, for various reasons, to make a smaller trip. Fewer days and fewer people, especially since Lorenzo was in the middle of a move.

    Websummit, two years later

    Following the (unnamed) law I mentioned at the beginning of this article, going to Lisbon wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for me.

    Partly because I decided to deploy some delicate changes to production just before leaving (lesson learned), and partly because of the architecture issues I mentioned earlier, I ended up spending most of the event trying to support the team in solving problems.

    Sure, I could’ve avoided the release. But when you have a roadmap to follow, you accept the risk of breaking something in exchange for the advantage of releasing new features quickly and gathering user feedback to iterate and continue development.
    In short, given the context, sometimes you have to take a bit of a risk.

    Anyway, the Web Summit turned out, as always, to be an amazing event.

    For me, being there and discovering as many startups as possible helps me spot tech trends and find potential new services or partners that could improve our product.

    And that’s exactly what happened. Luckily, I met an Italian startup that spun out of a software company specialized in AWS: Polarity.dev. It was a totally random encounter after a morning spent trying to manage and solve our infrastructure problems.

    When there’s a technical problem, my computer engineering instincts push me to find a solution myself. But when you don’t have enough time or resources, I’ve learned that asking for help from an external partner, specialized in that exact field, is far less expensive.

    So after that chat, we decided to reconnect right after the event and, thanks to the deep expertise of their founder, Valerio Versace and his team, we quickly found a way to fix the most urgent issues and planned a series of infrastructure improvements over the following months.

    These allowed us to optimize our cloud architecture and make it more robust, secure, and scalable (and gave the CTO some peace of mind).

    The Web Summit flew by, of course, not without side parties and big dinners in Lisbon’s lively nightlife. “When Crono’s around, there’s always a party,” quote.

    Once the scalability issues were resolved and we started releasing the new AI features, the product began to reach a new level of maturity. This was also reflected in the numbers: users kept growing, and so did licenses sold.
    We were heading into the end of the year riding this positive trend (with +15% month-over-month growth). When the numbers grow, so does the awareness of your value—and the team’s morale.

    We knew we were crushing it, but we also knew that in this industry, you always have to do more to stand out from the competition, which means never stopping to study how to improve and innovate the product.

    Around that time, I was also hit with personal news: my partner found out she’s pregnant, we’re going to be parents in June 2025. It was an immense joy for me.
    Maybe someday I’ll share more about how I felt in an article, for now, I’ll just say that Having Kids by Paul Graham helped me a lot.

    I’m sure this will have an impact on my life and my work:
    now I have one more reason to keep going.

  • A summer of growth in Crono

    A summer of growth in Crono

    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? 

    Enjoy our new episode of Becoming Crono!

    Ep. 10 – Summer growth

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome back! In case you have missed the previous episodes head here to read the very start of our adventure. Now, let’s dive right into our story!

    In the last article, we left off in the summer of 2024, to be precise, June.

    As I had shared before, in the months leading up to this point, we had been studying intensively to improve our value proposition, both in terms of product and commercial strategy. It was essential to keep working on the software to bring this vision to life and to enhance both the user workflow and the overall quality of our platform and its features.

    June and July turned out to be two months of very intense work. In addition to focusing on execution, we invested a lot of resources at the team level to support the onboarding of two new team members: Dima (backend) and Nicu (frontend).

    Managing the onboarding process, especially in a small team, is never easy. Many procedures and work methodologies often only exist in team members’ minds, and it requires a double effort to transmit knowledge and ensure the new members are up and running from day one.

    Onboarding in Startups vs. Larger Teams

    However, when someone new joins, they bring their own knowledge and methodologies into the team.

    In our case, after discussing with the new members, we found the best way to facilitate their integration by transforming the knowledge transfer into documentation and sharing our working methodologies through the creation of procedures and conventions to be adopted at the team level.

    For those who have worked in structured teams and environments, these things are often taken for granted.

    However, they cannot be assumed in a startup, especially in the early stages, when all available resources are typically invested in development, and everything else is handled more haphazardly. As the company grows, improvements in team management, documentation, and the sharing of procedures and conventions become essential to simplify work, help new members integrate smoothly, and make everyone more aware and productive

    I was satisfied with the teamwork we achieved, and every individual was incredibly supportive in welcoming the new arrivals, just as a true team should be.

    Commercial Growth and Client Recognition

    Meanwhile, on the commercial side, many opportunities were beginning to open up: clients were now recognizing Crono as a competitor on par with the industry leaders we had been chasing for almost two years.

    Despite our younger age, we were managing to convert many clients, even pulling them away from bigger companies.

    Every time this happened, it was a small but significant satisfaction, serving as proof of the progress we were making.

    Those two months, in terms of results, proved to be the best yet in the first two years of Crono’s existence.

    Attentive readers will recall seeing this phrase multiple times in my blog. It’s a common expression we often use within our team, but seeing it written down now makes me reflect on how normal it becomes when a startup is going through a growth phase.

    Monitoring month-over-month growth is an excellent KPI to track the progress of a startup. Of course, for a SaaS business, it’s difficult to improve every single month, especially since sales are often tied to external factors or work periods. For example, in August, many companies close, meaning that sales teams—our users—have less work to do.

    The key is to look at the overall yearly or quarterly trend. This is a positive sign for any startup.

    Celebrating Crono’s 2nd anniversary

    July is a particularly meaningful month for us, as our anniversary falls on the 28th. This year, we managed to bring part of the team working abroad together in Italy.

    For a few days, 10 Croners worked side by side in the same room at the C30 offices in Milan, and it was a fantastic experience for a team that usually works remotely.

    The speed at which information flows, the ability to have discussions without needing to go through a screen or headphones, and observing the operations of other teams was a snapshot that perfectly described how much work we’re putting in daily and how much commitment and dedication everyone is contributing to our shared goal.

    When we started two years ago, alongside Lorenzo, Marco, and Alex, I couldn’t have imagined what it would mean to have such a united team collaborating for a single cause. All the efforts that we, the founders, have made—and continue to make—would have been in vain if we hadn’t found people just as motivated and excited to join our project.

    We are all growing alongside Crono, and I am infinitely grateful for their hard work.

    Celebrations & renovation

    On Friday, the 26th, we relocated to Lake Garda and took the opportunity to spend a weekend of fun and relaxation together.

    Between swimming, giant pizzas, tastings, and lakeside walks, we had the chance to get to know each other better and form connections that will last even when everyone returns to their everyday lives in their respective cities.

    After celebrating Crono’s second birthday, we returned to normal life, more energized than ever.

    August is traditionally a month of vacation. The pace tends to slow down for everyone, especially clients, and there’s more time to focus on product development.

    For our team, it’s the perfect month to continue working on new features, without distractions from external sources or client-specific requests.

    In fact, we received a request from a potential client, a major international player, who was interested in trying Crono and then deciding whether to implement it across their European team.

    A technical challenge for a potential client

    There was one technical and administrative challenge we weren’t fully prepared for: this potential client wanted to use a single subscription and allow each user to pay separately for their individual subscription (a non-standard practice in the SaaS world and not natively supported by Stripe).

    As had happened before, we needed to decide whether to take the risk of implementing a technical solution to overcome this obstacle (along with other necessary integrations) for a potential client we weren’t sure would actually purchase our licenses.

    As you know, here at Crono, we love challenges like these, and our past experience has taught us that every time we’ve attempted to close a large client, we’ve had to implement technical solutions that ultimately benefited other clients in the long run.

     

    Keep reading the blog to discover how this challenge turned out!

  • Re-thinking the roadmap: planning the future of a product

    Re-thinking the roadmap: planning the future of a product

    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 new episode of Becoming Crono!

    Ep. 9 – Planning the future of a product

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome back! In case you have missed the previous episodes head here to read the very start of our adventure. Now, let’s dive right into our story!

    New emerging challenges

    In March 2024, and after an exciting start to the year, difficulties had emerged that still needed resolution. As mentioned in the previous chapter, some team members, hired early on, decided to change jobs due to a mismatch between the realities of startup life and their expectations.
    This led us to search for replacements and expand the team to cover strategic roles. Another issue was customer management, especially larger clients who required more dedication to ensure successful adoption of our application.

    In fact, the second important problem that emerged during the beginning of the year was linked to the management of customers, especially the larger ones, who required greater dedication to ensure that the adoption of our application was supported in the best possible way.

    Crono is software for the outbound sales process. Though sales might seem uniform, there are vast differences based on company type, size, sector, and people’s experience. Choosing Crono means adopting a new work setup, which could integrate well with existing processes or require some adjustment.

    The Crucial Role of Customer Success

    The Customer Success department handled this, requiring a dedicated full-time role to speed up the onboarding of large customers and manage diverse requests from smaller ones. Paul Graham’s article “Startup in 13 Sentences” highlighted the importance of this role for startups.

    Finding the right Customer Success manager who could quickly grasp outbound sales logic, understand Crono, and exhibit patience, availability, and proactivity towards customers was challenging. After some unsuccessful hires, we were cautious but needed to move fast to find motivated people willing to learn and get involved.

    Moreover, after our previous unsuccessful experiences with some employees, we were a bit burned by the search for new figures (developers, sales and customer success). We knew we needed to move fast, but we didn’t want to just fill in the missing boxes, we wanted to find people who were as motivated as all the other team members and, even if young, who were willing to learn and get involved.

    New trends: the AI SDRs wave

    Startup life demanded high work rates, but with a lean structure and well-distributed responsibilities, the rewards were much higher than in other work environments. We conducted interviews for weeks while focusing intensely on product development and marketing, bolstered by a new addition to the sales team.

    Meanwhile, competitors were active, and two new trends emerged:

      • AI SDRs, aiming to replace human salespeople with virtual agents sending messages at scale.

     

      • Data enrichment platforms, aggregating data sources to provide info on potential leads.

     

    Software hype was common, especially around promising innovations. AI accelerated the introduction of innovative features, now readily accessible to developers as off-the-shelf services.

    robot on a earthy surface

    We took time to observe these trends. Were they just hype, or truly effective? What benefits did they bring users? We knew Crono was also innovating outbound sales software and had already introduced many of these trending features to some extent.

    The Need for a Well-Defined Identity

    Unlike other emerging software, however, in terms of communication and consequently user experience, Crono did not claim to belong to a well-defined category, causing confusion for potential customers who approached us for the first time.

    “Ah, you also do automation, so you are an AI SDR?”

    “Uhm… no, we believed in the importance of the human salesperson.” “

    I see that with your tool I could also create contact lists, were you a Data Enrichment platform?”

    “Yes, but we didn’t just do that.”

    “What were you then?”

    “We were Crono!”

    At that time, we realized that this type of conversation no longer had much effectiveness and that we necessarily had to find something that would allow us to give ourselves a well-defined identity that was easily understandable to the end user.

    In short, there was an urgent need for a brainstorming period among co-founders to share our analyses of what we were finding and to define the next steps needed to improve our proposition. To do this, what could be better than a week-long retreat in one of the most beautiful regions of Italy?

    Refreshing our identity in Cagliari

    We decided to take a flight to Cagliari, to be able to work together side by side and foster reciprocal influence in order to share a common development direction.

    Working remotely in different cities could give you many advantages, but it was undeniable that communication, alignment and the flourishing of new ideas improved drastically when everyone was in the same room.

    Moreover, we discovered that Cagliari was a very active city in the digital field: we had the opportunity to work in two different co-working spaces (The Net Value and Opificio Innova) and to meet many people and high-level realities. Above all, we had fallen in love with the hospitality of the Sardinians who had invited us and welcomed us into their offices and taken us to learn about so many beautiful things in this city.

    Crono founders eating at a table

    Even if it wasn’t easy to believe, we didn’t just eat during those days.

    We had the opportunity to better understand the difficulties and feelings that each of us was encountering daily in our own area of expertise. What did investors think of our value proposition? What did potential customers perceive? What were we finding from user usage and what difficulties did they have?

    New trends in the market

    As I mentioned earlier, when everyone works in the same room, a different connection is created compared to working remotely. By analyzing the new emerging trends, but trying to maintain the idea of software that we had always wanted to achieve, we managed to outline which direction to take both in terms of communication and development for the Q2 and Q3 period (second and third quarters of 2024).

    These were the key points that emerged following that week:

    • Favouring a faster and richer approach to generating contact list information (winking a bit at data enrichment tools). To achieve this, we would necessarily have to work much more on integration with external providers and on the quality of the data we obtained from them.

    • Increasing automation, both on operational and decision-making aspects, provides these features as an extension of the individual user’s capabilities, not as a replacement. We made this choice because we understood the advantages of AI SDR tools, but we were convinced that the salesperson should be supported in their process by artificial intelligence but not replaced.

    • Improving personalization features thanks to generative AI and data availability. We had always been convinced that a precision approach to outbound sales, even on a small scale, was much more effective than a massive and generalized approach. Crono had to support the sales department in this process and make it as effective as possible.

    At the end of those brainstorming sessions (and an intense week of work), we felt we had the right recipe in hand and had begun to outline the operational plan to put it in place over the next few months.

    We enjoyed the last weekend of spring in Sardinia, trying to recuperate some energy for the next rush that awaited us.

    crono founders in sardinia

    Changes are for the brave

    Returning to base, we continued to work head down while resuming the active search for new Croners to fill the missing roles.

    As initial feedback, we realized that the new value proposition was starting to attract more interest from investors and potential customers.

    For a startup, it’s important to keep evolving from all perspectives. To connect the dots with the initial part of this post, why is the Customer Success role so important?

    Because it allows for direct feedback from users and, by trying to interpret their level of satisfaction, one can understand what’s missing and how the proposed service should solve their problems.

    It’s therefore important to have a clear idea of where you want to end up as a final result, but it’s essential to be ready to analyze new trends, understand customer needs, and be quick to iterate on communication, especially on the product.

    Changing at the communication level is obviously faster than changing the product. New features take time to be designed and implemented, and as much as a startup tries to work in a lean way, dividing the work into sprints, it takes a few weeks to start seeing the first results of these new developments.

    This leads to a disconnection between the sales/marketing department and the product, especially in terms of results. After making the decision on the new value proposition, customers don’t immediately find the feedback of these changes within the software, implying an inevitable slowdown in sales.

    It’s difficult to explain to a potential customer the concept of “we’re working on this thing”. Or rather, the customer understands it very well, but if they have a need to solve at that moment, their answer will be: “Okay, I’ll come back in 2 months”.

    During this period, doubts may emerge about having chosen the right direction, which can push one to change the value proposition again, even before having put it in place.

    How to drive change as a CTO

    At that moment, however, it’s necessary to firmly hold the direction taken. As CTO, I insisted on giving the development team time to put the established changes in place before thinking about any new changes.

    The reason is simple: the chosen direction was the result of an objective analysis of technological trends and user feedback, but to understand if it’s the right path, it first needs to be put in place, in the shortest possible time, and the user feedback needs to be analyzed (“Build, measure, learn” from The Lean Startup – Eric Ries).

    In short, one has to suffer a little, try to work quickly, leave aside non-priority things, and focus all the resources of the development team to bring these new features into production as soon as possible.

    Consequently, April and May turned out to be months below expectations in terms of results, but we were finally ready for the beginning of June. The new features were immediately well appreciated, and the new workflow drastically improved user performance and the perception of new customers.

    This made us realize that we had taken the right path, on which we had to continue to build.

    In June, we also managed to complete the team with two new developers (welcome Dima and Nicu) and a customer success manager (welcome Lollo) who immediately integrated greatly into the team and demonstrated that they had the DNA of true Croners.

    To conclude, June 2024 ended as the new best month (so far) in terms of turnover, confirming the excellent work we were doing and the continuous improvement of our solution.

    Keep reading our blog for more exciting stories!

  • Crono’s Journey: Breaking Records and Looking Ahead

    Crono’s Journey: Breaking Records and Looking Ahead

    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 new episode of Becoming Crono!

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome back! In case you have missed the previous episodes head here to read the very start of our adventure. Now, let’s dive right into our story!

    Tracing the roadmap for 2024

    Embracing enthusiasm, November became Crono’s highest turnover month, up to that time, propelling the company forward. This achievement not only fueled motivation but also validated the hard work invested in the product.

    Efforts began to pay off, and the company even attracted clients from larger competitors. However, staying complacent was not an option in the industry.

    The end of the year was used to outline the development roadmap for 2024.

    December, typically a slow business month, saw us maintaining November’s momentum. The Christmas period allowed us to recharge, reflect, and plan for the future. This time allowed us to step back from the daily grind and evaluate our progress as a team.

    We analyzed our achievements and challenges, refining our strategies and setting goals for the upcoming year. It was a moment to celebrate milestones and acknowledge the hard work and dedication that got us there.

    We celebrated the year’s end together, cherishing the progress since our MVP launched the previous year. In the fast-paced start-up world, each year felt like an era, and our broad, integrative product reflected that. Our journey from concept to a market-recognized product was remarkable.

    Reflecting on our journey, we saw how far we had come. From the early days of our MVP to gaining market traction, our progress was substantial. Our product’s evolution mirrored our growth as a team, adapting to market demands and client needs with agility and resilience.

    Balancing Multiple Market Needs

    Our platform’s comprehensive coverage of the prospecting process required high standards and numerous functionalities, unlike single-function tools in the commercial sector. This approach demanded significant resources and effort, which we had anticipated.

    Gaining industry media coverage and interest from leading start-ups and software companies, including a major fintech company, was a testament to our progress. We were driven by the goal of enhancing our product to meet the needs of such significant clients.

    We spent another winter driven by enthusiasm, designing Crono’s future. Despite facing stiff competition, our flexible and configurable software began attracting small to medium-sized companies.

    Balancing the needs of different company sizes required diverse go-to-market and sales strategies. While it might have seemed logical to focus on one market, opportunities from larger companies were hard to pass up.

    We decided to keep building a product that could fit medium and large-size companies, thanks to a certain degree of flexibility in the product and its maturity in terms of development.

    This decision allowed us to solve one of the existential questions while making a product and deciding which target of clients to follow: keeping our vision broad helped us get the attention of both types of companies.

    Team Dynamics and Challenges

    It’s late January and the year has kicked off incredibly well with 4 new clients who had just raised a Series A round.

    So, as usual, I set my 1-1 with the team to align on new goals and understand what’s working and what needs improvement. And that’s when I got important news that also became a challenge.

    One of the most experienced members of the team told me that he had found another job and would resign, with two months’ notice.

    He had been doing important work since he came to Chrono 6 months earlier, and although he was an already trained developer, I had invested quite a bit of time in imparting to him my knowledge about the project and trying to make him an active and involved part of the team.

    I started to think about why he wanted to leave the team and I finally realized a couple of things:

    • The technology we were using in Crono was not his favourite, nor was the approach given to the project: the fact that he knew the language was not enough to think he was the right person for the team’s needs.

    • His willingness to do a refactoring of the code before continuing on the development of new features:  as a developer, I understand this aspect, but when you work in a startup you don’t have the same amount of time as you do in a consulting firm or a large company.

    • Working in a loosely structured environment with high dynamism goes poorly with figures who have more experience and an already defined mindset: it is difficult to train someone who already has a lot of experience just as it is difficult to get them to change their habits.

       

    Team lessons

    When you build your team, letting someone go is a bit painful but it’s a chance to learn some lessons:

    • When building a startup you have to realize early on whether or not a person is a good fit for the environment and type of role. That is what the probationary period is.

    • Not all employees share the same dream as you. Some do, but not all. Sure, they may admire you for what you are doing and may be committed to you achieving it but whether the startup succeeds or not is not their life’s goal.

    • Over the long term, it is more cost-effective to invest in young people who have not yet developed a defined mindset and work habits and who are more willing to learn and get involved. Experienced people are very important in a team, especially a development team, but it is much harder to get them to adapt in an unstructured and dynamic environment such as a startup.

    In the meantime, the team didn’t stop, in fact, it expanded.

    We brought in a new young member, Oleh (a computer engineering student in Ukraine) who in a very short time, even before he starts working is documenting himself to align with everything about Crono (not only from a technical point of view).

    February is progressing and we understand how important it is to focus on management and strategy as well as day-to-day operations. Building startups teaches many things all the time.

    New product features

    The roadmap we had built at the beginning of the year was tailored to attract a potentially big customer. So in the early months of 2024, we focus on building new features that could fit that kind of company.

    Unfortunately, though, the potential customer didn’t buy our solution – in fact, they didn’t buy any – but we discovered something really pleasant.

    The features developed to fit larger businesses had impressive success among our clients and led us to get new ones.

    We understood that raising the bar of quality to try to convert big customers gives very good spin-offs to small- to medium-sized customers as well, and we continue to navigate in this direction.

    Building a startup is like sailing in the ocean. Sometimes the sea is calm and sometimes there is a storm with waves trying to turn the ship upside down.

    One must try to keep the bow always straight toward the set direction and keep looking fixedly toward the goal.

    Read episode 9
  • A Milestone in the Making: Launching Crono’s New Platform

    A Milestone in the Making: Launching Crono’s New Platform

    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 new episode of Becoming Crono!

    Episode 7 – Launching Crono’s New Platform

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome to the seventh 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!

    A new software release

    In early September, after several months of dedicated work on the new platform version, we were nearly ready to release the software into the production environment. While some modules were still missing according to our initial roadmap, and the new browser extension was not yet complete, we decided to move forward.

    As a startup embracing a lean approach, we chose to release the new version to our clients despite these gaps. Our goal was to start receiving user feedback while we completed the remaining development.

    The new version immediately received positive feedback, but naturally, we also began to encounter bug reports and feature requests. Managing these client requests while still completing the planned features was challenging.

    The enthusiasm of our users, the increase in their requests, and the rise in usage metrics fueled our determination to continue pushing forward. September was intense, but we felt we were on the right track. We worked tirelessly on the new product version and, before October, successfully released all planned features, including the Chrome extension.

    Active users June 2023- October 2023 (powered by june.so)

    Reflecting on that period as the CTO, I can now see it as a significant achievement for Crono in various aspects:

    • Team: We built a highly functional team from scratch, with clearly defined roles and excellent team chemistry. We took some risks, such as assigning Bob, a student intern, the task of redesigning the platform’s front-end. With support from Manuel, he delivered outstanding results.
    • Product: The product is attractive, fresh, and functional (despite a few bugs). The new UX-UI is modern and intuitive, standing out from our competitors. Credit goes to the Marco-Vlada duo. Betting on a young, talented, and eager individual like Vlada was a risk that paid off.
    • Scalability: A significant part of our summer efforts focused on ensuring the platform could handle an increasing number of users. Synchronisation with CRMs is a feature users take for granted but requires substantial work to function seamlessly. It’s one of those features that users only notice when it doesn’t work, so we’ve dedicated considerable attention to it from day one.

    As a CTO and developer, I invested substantial resources to ensure the software development process was highly efficient, and supported by the entire team. This process is complex to build and improves iteratively, much like the software itself. It’s crucial to focus on both planning and execution, acting as a facilitator for all team members and earning their trust through hard work and organisation. Most importantly, it’s about guiding the team, making daily adjustments to stay on track, and leading from the front, ready to navigate uncharted waters when necessary.

    Marketing and Sales Expansion

    Developing software is just one part of the equation to build a successful startup. We also needed to promote and sell it. After the intense focus on product development, we needed to catch up on marketing and sales. We decided to expand our team in these areas, investing heavily in young talent:

    • Sofia: A university student from Brescia, passionate about advertising and copywriting with some experience in digital marketing.

    • Loris: Originally from Veneto but now in London, he has a passion for sales and a strong work ethic.

    • Dante: From Florence, an economics student born to sell anything, even to the unwilling.

    We focused on enhancing communication through our LinkedIn page and website. With Alex’s experience and networking and Sofia’s passion and ideas, we created a fresh, engaging identity, establishing ourselves as one of Italy’s coolest emerging startups. Our Crono Blog is an excellent resource for those interested in B2B sales, filled with articles written in collaboration with numerous industry experts.

    Simultaneously, Alex and Lorenzo started structuring the sales team and process following the new product version’s launch. Although interest from potential clients increased, converting leads and closing deals was challenging due to our limited high-profile clients. We targeted other advanced startups with structured sales departments and a propensity for risk, willing to trust a young, rapidly evolving software.

    The joint efforts of the marketing and sales teams began to bear fruit. Between October and November, we started acquiring new mid-sized clients aligned with our buyer persona.

    As the number of clients grew, so did the startup’s enthusiasm. Increasing sales was necessary to sustain our momentum and essential for securing the next investment round. The pre-seed round closed in spring 2023 helped us build the team and develop the product, but achieving the next round required meeting high expectations.

    WebSummit 2023: A Game-Changing Event

    By November, it was time for the WebSummit in Lisbon. As in the previous year, all four founders attended to fully experience the event and align our objectives and strategy. The WebSummit is a fantastic opportunity to connect, learn about new trends and technologies, and seek clients and investors. This year, our primary goal was to find as many clients as possible.

    Although we were interested in potential investors, we knew our current numbers were not sufficient to start fundraising for the seed round. We focused most of our resources on generating leads and showcasing our solution. The Italian delegation included several other startups, providing a chance to connect, share opinions, and exchange feedback.

    Founders Crono @ WebSummit 2023

    We received numerous compliments on our product from peers, especially regarding the quality and quantity of work accomplished in such a short time. Returning to the WebSummit after a year highlighted our evolution from an MVP with a rough interface to a young product with numerous features and tremendous potential. This achievement allowed us to reach our primary goal of the week: attracting many companies interested in trying our software and significantly boosting our brand and network.

    We used this period to analyse customer feedback and continuously improve our solution. Additionally, during the WebSummit week, we discussed Crono’s next goals in terms of product development, vision, and strategy.

    As a CTO, the greatest satisfaction was knowing that while the founders focused on maximising the event’s potential, the rest of the team continued progressing smoothly, supporting Crono’s growth. This too, is a significant achievement.

    That’s all for now, stay tuned because this column will be back in a few weeks with more updates!

    Read episode 8
  • Becoming Crono: First-year challenges and growth

    Becoming Crono: First-year challenges and growth

    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 sixth 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. 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.

    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. 

    Read episode 7
  • Becoming Crono: Startup accelerators and team relationships

    Becoming Crono: Startup accelerators and team relationships

    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 5 – Startup accelerators and team relationships

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome to the fourth 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!

    After collecting the pre-seed round, we started a revolutionary phase of our product. Users perceived the value of the technology we were developing but struggled to adopt it the way we were trying to convey.

    So, we decided to survey a sample of selected customers and realised that our main problem was related to the user experience. Users could not easily identify Crono’s functionalities and adopt the workflow we had in mind for them.

    This is a typical situation when building a software product with only technical and domain expertise but not UX/UI expertise.

    Trying to hold on to our strengths, i.e. the ability to create value for the user through the use of data generated by their prospecting activity, we decided to entirely redesign the platform and workflow for our customers, starting from their needs.

    To do this, we needed a UX-UI designer to help Marco in the process. After evaluating about ten people, we identified the one who was right for us, thanks to the advice of a friend of Crono.

    We started collaborating with Vlada, a Ukrainian girl who, despite her very young age, already had strong UX/UI skills in her technical background. The collaboration initially involved 3 hours per week, while she continued her full-time job at a major international web development agency.

    The design and implementation work on the new version of the platform involved the entire product team, which then began to take on a shape of its own.

    Carrying out this process while there were still users on the platform was not an easy job. 

    New landscapes with Startup accelerators

    While we were doing this work, we were simultaneously going through the incubation paths of Startup Wise Guys and Magic Mind, both of which, in different ways, contributed strongly to shaping Crono’s identity.

    The Startup Wise Guys route included in-person periods in Bilbao with workshops and mentor meetings. For Crono, it was a key moment to get in touch with other international start-ups and allowed us to consolidate our European identity.

    Spoiler: unfortunately, if you are the CTO of a pre-seeded start-up, you will find that you hardly have time to participate in these moments. The work to be done is always too much and so you have to sacrifice certain activities that, although important, are not directly related to product development.

    Fortunately, being four co-founders proved to be one of our greatest strengths from the start. This allowed us to divide up our roles and be present in different places at the same time. Our CEO Lorenzo was able to participate in all the activities of the acceleration process, both physical and online, while the rest of the team only participated in those directly related to their area of expertise.

    After intense weeks of work, we always found a way to organise moments of sharing between us founders, which were useful in amalgamating the knowledge learnt during the week, getting everyone back on the same page, and increasing Crono’s overall knowledge.

    The knowledge acquired from the Startup Wise Guys coaches and mentors was paramount in bringing out Crono’s identity and structuring our internal processes. Although each of us already had a strong background related to the startup world, we were able to revisit many aspects ranging from market validation to marketing, from pitch writing/exposure to go-to-market strategy, from team organisation to the relationship between founders.

    Simply put, the ability to access the knowledge of those who have already been successful in the start-up world is invaluable capital that has allowed us to accelerate many aspects of business, hard and soft skills, and more generally the complex process of creating a start-up from scratch.

    One of the most intense and enjoyable moments of the Startup Wise Guys acceleration journey was undoubtedly Sprint Week. Following the methodology invented at Google by Jake Knapp (and described in The Sprint Book), we followed a week-long path that led us, methodically, from the identification of the problem most felt by our customers to the realisation of a useful prototype to validate a possible solution to it.

    This initiative involved all 4 founders for a week (almost) full-time and allowed us to test on some users, quickly and effectively, some ideas that we had been kept untested and which finally proved to be fundamental in the process of redesigning the platform that was already underway.

    Working together to build something great

    Magic Mind‘s acceleration path provided us with a lot of value on several aspects of building a network, a fundamental step for the growth of a start-up.

    First and foremost, the opportunity to get to know many other Italian startuppers, with whom relationships of collaboration and friendship have developed, has been a key factor in fuelling the spread of Crono and the growth in the number of customers. The simplicity and efficiency of the application we are developing is a plus point for us with startups/scaleups, who appreciate a lean and dynamic tool that fully embodies their nature.

    Secondly, we were able to get in touch with major innovation players in Italy who provided us with support on certain strategic technological choices for our platform.

    The highlight of our journey with Magic Mind was undoubtedly the Demo Day held in Milan at the IBM Studios. Seeing the Crono logo projected on the maxi screen in the conference room of one of the most important and beautiful technology venues in Italy made us realise that we were building something important.

    Parallel to the acceleration paths, the development team proceeded at a fast pace to migrate the first users to the new version of the platform before the end of the summer.

    Finding a common language

    Considering the amount of work to be done, I had already guessed that I would not have too much time over the summer holidays. We planned a week of work together between us 4 founders in Barcelona at Lorenzo’s.

    As always, the times when you can work side by side are those in which the best ideas emerge and, in addition to managing the day-to-day, you can also do a lot of work on planning and future strategy. So, for a week, we spent the days in our Spanish offices and the evenings between sangrias and paellas, grinding kilometres up and down por las calles de Barcelona.

    Carrying out a huge amount of work with limited resources is inevitably a great source of stress. In addition, as CTO, I was trying to take on most of the complex issues related to the development of the new platform with the idea of allowing the rest of the team to concentrate on their assigned tasks and make rapid progress on their parts.

    As you can imagine, working under stress can lead to disagreements between colleagues and the emergence of tensions. It becomes easy to reply badly to the demands of others because you’re feeling overwhelmed.

    This has also happened to us, probably because while building something, there could be the feeling of having too much to handle. And this results in being too focused on the long term to notice the small progress one achieves daily.

    Specifically, it happened to me with Marco to have some moments of complication due more to the way we were relating to each other during work interactions. I believe that in the phase in which Crono was in, the Product Owner / CTO axis is the centre of the whole start-up and it is fundamental that the two figures manage to collaborate in the best possible way, finding a way to speak the same language.

    Basically, they are both very complex roles, and even more so in a start-up company, since on the one hand it rains reports and requests from customers while on the other hand, one tries to solve bugs and proceed with the development of new features.

    A great deal of support in the co-founder relationship was given to us by Niklaus Frey, a coach from the Startup Wise Guys route, who taught us not to underestimate the psychological aspects of creating a start-up, explaining how to relate to each other and how to handle stressful situations.

    Tips for healthy team relationships

    I will try to highlight those that were the most important learnings for me:

    • Giving feedback is crucial. The most important thing is the way it is given.
    • We do not all communicate in the same way, especially when you have different professional backgrounds, you have to find a “common language” when talking to another person.
    • Talking to each other is important and must be done constructively to help both sides grow and improve.
    • Maintaining regular 1-1 conversations with other people in the team is helpful to bring out and heal any points of friction.

    There would be so many other things to say about this and related aspects, these are the ones that helped us to manage the relationship between co-founders and to nip some misunderstandings in the bud.

    Concluding on this topic, after learning to relate to each other on work issues, the relationship with Marco took off. We can now say that we understand each other and have laid a solid foundation to continue pushing even harder than before on product development.

    That’s all for now, but I’ll come back soon with a new episode covering more about our product and team journey!

    Read episode 6
  • Building a Startup: How to get fundings and build a team

    Building a Startup: How to get fundings and build a team

    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 4 – Funding & Building a Team

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome to the fourth 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!

    The beginning of 2023 has been a whirlwind for Crono. We carried on and developed so many activities at the same time, that I had to stop for a moment to be able to isolate and focus on them. But, as usual, let’s proceed step by step.

    Fundraising from business angels continued well and we managed to get close to the quota we had planned to set aside for them in the round. I believe that finding business angels who are experts in the field is paramount for an early-stage start-up as, thanks to their experience and network, many opportunities can be reached.

    Moreover, this allowed us to raise some money to continue investing in the project while looking for an investor to lead the round.

    As far as product development was concerned, we were still iterating on the feedback we received from customers, trying to introduce both improvements to the existing software and new features to make Crono the best tool in the outbound sales process.

    How to develop a product as a CTO

    Managing the development part alone, in the early stages of a start-up, is a fairly common situation that requires a lot of skills, flexibility, time and above all patience. It might happen that you have to fix the size of a text in your web application, while you are completing a database synchronisation, after you have just developed a new API and fixed a bug.

    All in the space of 15 minutes.

    Moreover, a developer wearing the role of a CTO always has to fight between their nature of writing clean, well-structured code and the need to implement functionality that may no longer be needed after 15 days.

    For this topic, I can only recommend one of the articles that has most enlightened me during this journey:  ‘Do Things that Don’t Scale‘ by Paul Graham (Y Combinator).

    If you don’t have the time to read it I can (humbly) summarise it very quickly: in the beginning for a startup it is necessary to do things that don’t scale. It would be much more problematic to invest too much time in making the software totally clean, automated and scalable only to realise later that the product made is not actually what the user needs.

    How long does it take to find the product the user needs? This is the question every founder would like to have answered. Finding the product-market fit is a very complex process where so many factors come into play. Even when you have precisely identified the customer’s needs, it is difficult to create the product that adheres to them as closely as possible, especially in the way the user expects.

    So you find yourself immersed in a cyclic process where you try to get closer and closer to the best solution.

    It is also a question of time, resources and different and necessary skills that are hardly ever fully present within the team at an early stage.

    Although it is not possible to know in advance how long this process may take, everyone in the literature is quite convinced about how you realise you have reached product-market fit. When it feels like the business is bursting at the seams and that the whole machine can no longer cope with the flood of new customers.

    That is the real panic moment for the CTO, because that is when you really have to worry about doing things that scale to make the software and infrastructure ready to support business growth.

    Finding the right team-mates

    At the beginning fo 2023, while searching for product-market fit, we realised that we needed support in software development. 

    Finding developers is notoriously a very difficult process. The main reason for this is that demand far outstrips supply. Moreover, the funnel gets narrower and narrower if you add the desire to find bright, proactive people, willing to change jobs and with the right amount of risk-taking and passion for innovation.

    We juggled various channels (job post + direct contacts on LinkedIn, network of founders and colleagues, former professors) and thanks also to the precious suggestions of super smart HR friends we manage to get several interviews with developers intrigued by our project.

    During the interviews, our enthusiasm for our ambitious project easily transpired, but it was not always obvious to find corresponding feedback from the other side. After all, how can a young start-up compete against the benefits of large multinational companies or the ordinariness of a small software house?

    Even the first employees must share the same dream as the founders and have that spark in their eyes that entices them to revolutionise a specific sector, with the knowledge that the growth of the start-up will be directly proportional to what they can take and learn from it.

    After several weeks of research and interviews, we were proud and happy to have found the perfect match for our project: Roberto Cornacchiari in front-end development and Leonardo Falco in back-end development.

    Finally, funding

    While tackling the issue of the composition of the tech team (developing the product, selling it and working on growing the brand) our focus was always on raising investment. Managing so many aspects all at once is not easy: they are all time-consuming activities, especially if you approach them for the first time.

    Being four co-founders allowed us to divide our roles well and, with excellent internal coordination, we managed to carry out all the work that needed to be done. Fundraising was on our CEO Lorenzo, who for 6-7 months carried on full-time, brilliantly and tirelessly.

    In early 2023, after a period of discussion, things got unblocked. We were at an advanced stage with three funds (two British and one Italian) that offered to lead the round as lead investors. At that moment we realised that there was concrete interest in investing. After having carefully chosen the lead investor, we needed to identify other 3-4 funds ready to come in with smaller tickets.

    Fortunately, over the course of the previous months, we had met many players who were enthusiastic about Crono. Among them, we were able to choose super partners ready to participate in the round and support us in our growth.

    After a few weeks, the final list was as follows:  SFC Capital, Magic Mind, Startup Wise Guys, Aticco Ventures and Starseed Investments Pvt. Ltd.

    (More details about our pre-seed funding here)

    That’s the four of us, smiling and truly happy after funding

    The beginning of prospecting revolution

    Yes, six months after the release of our service on the market, we managed to raise our first investment round (pre-seed). There would be so many things to say about this as it was a real whirlwind of emotions for us, in a very hectic period, which we did not even have time to process.

    Raising an investment round is first and foremost an important first validation moment for a start-up. This gave us an incredible charge and pushed us to do better and better and to want to prove the value we know we can achieve.

    Of course, that was a testing ground for us. That is, we had found the necessary resources to continue to invest in the project, optimise the product and grow the number of customers, but we knew that we had to work even harder.

    We celebrated the news in front of our computers without diverting too much attention from all the various ongoing activities. Aware that for us that was the first small milestone of a much longer journey still to come.

    Summer was coming and more surprises and achievements with it: funding and building a team were just the beginning.

    Thank you for reading so far. I hope that my memories and words have inspired you and given you the sense of what building a start-up from scratch feels like. If you liked this episode, feel free to share it with people who may appreciate it.

    Crono’s story isn’t finished yet, the most exciting parts are yet to come, stay tuned!

  • Building a Startup from the point of view of the CTO

    Building a Startup from the point of view of the CTO

    The birth and launch of a brand new business is similar to a ride on a roller coaster and that’s one of the many truths uncovered in the startup narrative.

    Exciting moments, visiting new places and meeting incredible people but also hard work and constantly improving the product: the adventure told in this column is our story through the eyes of Marco Maddiona, Co-Founder and CTO.

    If you’ve already read the previous episodes of Becoming Crono, by now you surely understand the paramount importance of his point of view in a sales and tech start-up environment.

    Get ready to discover in this new episode how we managed funding in the middle of a crisis while dealing with our first customers. We’ll cover the very first goal for Crono’s team, showing the importance of rethinking.

    Enjoy reading our third episode of Becoming Crono!

    Episode 3 – Things we didn’t know we needed (until they became problems)

    Hi Croners, I’m Marco Maddiona, CTO & Co-Founder of Crono, welcome to the third episode! In case you have missed the previous ones, head here to read the very start of our adventure. Let’s get back to where we left.

    As soon as we returned from WebSummit in Lisbon, we were so enthusiastic that we continued working non-stop: the goal printed in our heads was to close the first investment round (pre-seed) by December 2022.

    We were quite confident about the potential of Crono. We would present ourselves to investors proposing our vision and telling them what we had managed to achieve after only two months from the product launch.

    However, we soon realised that no matter how positively impressed they were with the team and the maturity of the product, no one was initially eager to invest in us. They were all asking for a little more substantial sales numbers and, above all, they were hinting that we were overvalued.

    It was starting to get quite frustrating for us: in our plans, it was not yet time to scale up sales, as we were in the process of requesting funds to accelerate product development, structure the company and then try to conquer the market.

    After all, this would be the benefit that investors should bring to a start-up seeking a pre-seed round: unfortunately, not everyone seemed to understand this and preferred instead to wait to invest until they felt more secure.

    Comparing ourselves with other start-ups, we realised that we were not the only ones in this limbo and understood that the ensuing crisis was the cause of a strong cooling in start-up investments right from September 2022.

    Valuations that one year earlier were normal for startups without MVP became absurd for those who already had a product and even customers.

    The timing was not on our side but, once again, we did not lose hope. We realised that we had to adopt a different strategy and, while trying to figure it out, we went back to focusing on our product and sales.

    In the meantime, we continued with the acquisition of new customers and, after a two-month rush, we went back to the existing ones to get the first feedback on the use of the platform. We realised that we had been a bit presumptuous: not everyone was fully operating the functionalities and adopting the process for which the software was designed.

    When funding your first start-up, you realise how many things you didn’t know you needed. In an established company, everyone already has their own function and, even for those who run the firm, it is enough to fulfil their role and take care of their responsibilities to keep the business going.

    A good-looking product

    In a startup, you have to build every business function from scratch and you can only realise you forgot something when you find out that there is a problem. At Crono, no one was yet dealing with customer success. We thought our customers were happy and content just because we didn’t hear them complaining. But we were wrong.

    We first realised that our user-use analytics system was not user-friendly at all, so we decided to implement june.so, a platform developed by a French-Italian super team we met at WebSummit. From that moment on, we were able to easily keep track of how our application was being used, which was crucial information to be able to iterate on the product and understand behaviours that users do not always make explicit.

    We realised that not all the functionalities we had developed, although considered very useful and requested by the users, were actually understood or even identified. Users needed guided onboarding to explain the logic and processes behind Crono, and we needed to involve them as much as possible in the initial phase to make them fall in love with the tool and start getting benefits from it.

    The problems that led to this situation were:

    • There was no UX/UI designer in our team and at an early stage we worked according to our gut feeling rather than best-practices;
    • We had developed too many functionalities trying to satisfy the most varied customer needs by making the interface, which was initially very simple and clean, a little too heavy;
    • The many things we had to do in the early months didn’t allow us to devote time to do customer support and the development of platform-driven onboarding.

    Once we saw the problem, we stepped in to solve it or, at first, at least to repair the damage. We decided to set up sessions to support new customers in the initial phase of adopting the solution and also created facilitated direct channels for them to ask us directly for clarification or to communicate any problem. We also started to write a regular newsletter to inform our users about the new features released, with videos and explanations.

    We were fully aware that the main problem was due to the UX/UI of our platform, but the time had not yet come to address that issue: we had to work first to identify exactly what our users’ needs were and what kind of solution could solve them.

    Looking for investors

    Although the approach we adopted at first was not scalable, it allowed us to see first-hand how users interpreted the solution we proposed to them, helping us to take in information that had not yet emerged until then.

    We didn’t have to ask the users what they wanted, we needed to see them at work and understand their needs.

    In doing so, we started the customer success section of Crono and have since formalised an established process to optimise the start-up of subsequent customers and get them ready as soon as possible.

    In the meantime, we had not stopped with sales and the number of customers continued to grow steadily, but the closer it got to the end of the year, the more we realised that we were still a long way from closing the round. There had been a few expressions of interest, but no fund had convinced us, so we continued to explore potential investors.

    At a certain point, we decided to play the game in reverse: instead of starting with the search for the lead investor, we looked among our first circle of contacts for potential angel investors willing to believe in us and invest in our project. We had already established that in the first round, there would be a percentage dedicated to business angels. We realised that starting with them could have been a good move given the fewer decision-making steps and simpler formalisation of the procedure.

    Moreover, thanks to our network, we managed to involve many people from the industry and several founders of other start-ups who were ready to introduce us to other potential customers or give us advice on experiences they had already had.

    So, towards the last days of December, we sent out the first contracts and started to receive the first endorsements from our business angels. Those first funds were crucial for us to enable us to fuel our initiatives and have more resources to invest in the start-up. They also boosted our mood because they gave us proof that we were not the only ones who believed in Crono. This meant we just had to be patient, put in the effort, iterate and persevere.

    In the end, we could not close our first investment round by the end of 2022.

    But, as one usually does at that time, I took some time to conclude how that year had gone. I remember very well the various company panettoni of my years as an employee, and I remember how in December 2020, looking at myself in the mirror in the lift before heading to the Christmas holidays, I promised myself that it would have been the last one.

    At the end of December 2022, I was working for my startup, together with 4 guys I had met the same year, and 5 months after the official launch we had managed to create a product that was spreading to many other startups and was receiving more and more acclaim. We were aware that we hadn’t built anything really solid yet and that it could all have been over within 6 months if something went wrong, but we were ready to minimise the chances of that happening.

    That winter, none of us went on holiday: we took advantage of the Christmas break to get ourselves even more ready for the start of the new year while seeing photos and videos of people on the ski slopes on Instagram. 

    But we were happy and determined.

    That’s all for now: Becoming Crono will be back next month and you’ll get to read what happened right before we got our first round pre-seed. 

    Read episode 4