How do you persuade large international clients to trust your product when you haven’t even launched it yet and you are still pretty much working from your bedroom at home?
For today’s crop of entrepreneurs, these are only minor deterrents. They use social media to take part in forums about IT problems, posting solutions which gain them grateful fans. These fans are more than willing to try them out.
‘They’ are two brothers, Andre, 22, and Stefan Gauci, 25, whose company Fusioo really captures the opportunities available for start-ups in today’s world.
Although they work mostly from home – they seem to work round the clock; 90-hour weeks are standard – they have free office space for three years at the Microsoft Incubation Centre, where they can plug in and work seamlessly.
They also benefit from numerous other benefits, like free hosting and servers which cut down considerably on their overheads while they are still in the development stage.
“We are digital nomads!” Andre joked.
They have also tapped into the PwC €1 Million Fund, one of the first start-ups to do so, getting pro-bono consultancy services on everything, from setting up a company to drawing up business plans.
It might seem almost irrelevant what Fusioo does but the reality is that these 20-somethings have come up with a cloud-based product which has tremendous potential.
“Well, what we do is provide different apps from one platform, so that businesses can buy what they need when they need it, and customise it easily – without having to buy expensive infrastructure. If they need to buy more, these will integrate easily with the others. The name of the company is meant to reflect the fusion of apps,” Andre explained.
He worked for a major IT company on a huge contract and is already a tutor at the Institute of Computer Education. He always knew that he wanted to have his own company and followed his instinct, ignoring what he described as the usual “naysayers”.
“Risk perception differs from person to person. After all, even large, established companies close down or lay off people,” Andre said.
“Now there is a lot more job mobility and companies don’t mind outsourcing. We have become real advocates for entrepreneurship and if we succeed, we will push others to try.”
Stefan also preferred to work on his own and spent some time as a freelance designer and developer for start-ups. He enjoyed the freedom this gave him and felt his own company was the logical, next step but readily admits that Andre was the driving force behind Fusioo.
The idea for the product is only six months old but when they spoke to clients about it, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
They spent summer developing the idea and it is now at the alpha testing phase, tapping into the dozens of people they had helped on social media. The beta testing phase, when they will rope in members of the public, is planned for the first quarter of the year.
The product is simplicity itself in concept: they have created a virtual marketplace of apps – around 20 to start with – to handle things like timesheets, customer relationship management, project management and so on.
“What is important is that all the architecture is on one platform. It is no use having different apps if they don’t talk to each other,” Andre explained.
“Companies can buy them as they need – and they can use them without having to refer to IT staff. And if companies have old applications that are now redundant, we can migrate the data to ours. The concept is that the data is separate to the app.”
They are now signing up more and more clients for the testing phase – 25 so far – although most of them are overseas.
“The Maltese are still comparatively wary about the cloud, even though it is so much more efficient!”
www.fusioo.com