As the year is drawing to an end I thought it appropriate to look back and reflect on what has been before focusing in on all the great things that lie ahead. The Telcom of today is very different from the Telcom we started out with at the beginning of 2015, and will be a very different entity again in 2016.
I believe 2015 was the year we grew a tremendous amount as company and stopped identifying ourselves with being a startup.
I believe 2015 was the year we found what’s known as product-market-fit and although we have a ways to go, our recent surge in demand is a testament to this.
I believe 2015 was the year that all of us at Telcom started to believe:
- in our unique ability to deliver a great experience
- that a small yet fast growing ISP in Manchester can have a large impact.
- that we can compete with (and beat) Goliath.
I can’t imagine there being many more challenging startup endeavors to embark upon than founding an internet service provider. It is essentially akin to starting a new utilities company and all that involves in terms of physical infrastructure. We chose the hard path early on in deciding to build our own network as opposed to reselling others, and although this presents a huge amount of challenge it also affords us the opportunity to do things differently and in our opinion better.
The biggest initial challenge with our approach was the building of a new core network from scratch, whilst simultaneously serving customers reliant on this infrastructure as and when it was built. We didn’t have the luxury of spending months and millions building out a network before giving customers access. I can only equate this experience to that of laying tracks in front of a train as it gathers speed, requiring track to be laid at an ever quickening pace.
Customers quite understandably are a lot less forgiving of bugs and glitches when it comes to a service provider than that of a traditional software based startup. Our equivalent of a bug often meant a business being unable to do business, so the tolerance level for mistakes is a lot lower.
On this point I wish to send out my heartfelt thanks and gratitude to all of our early beta customers who stuck with us and have shown incredible patience whilst we grew out of our teething phase.
A common definition for a startup is that of a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. I no longer think that definition applies to the organisation we have grown into; Telcom is now a strong, steadily growing company who has found its model and is now working towards being the best in its field.
I have personally learnt so much from Telcom since it’s inception. When I think about the experience it brings to mind a quote from Goethe:
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
So much goes into building a functional company let alone one aspiring for greatness. The first step is just getting started, and as long as you get the founding DNA right the rest can and will be figured out over time.
So as we end 2015 it is with a sense of immense pride in the team's accomplishment that I say farewell to our startup phase...
We look forward to sharing our story as it continues to unfold in 2016 and beyond.
