I founded intcube GmbH (int3) two years ago and set myself the goal of building a good company with creative approaches – both internally and externally. On the one hand, two years in the life of a company is not particularly long, but on the other hand, development is rapid, especially in the initial phase (how long does that actually take?).
The hard facts are quickly told
- August - December 2022: Start months, Dror still alone (you can imagine this as a combination of "freelancer" and "company founder").
- January 2023: David Fuhr joins as co-founder and Tobias Hellmann becomes our first employee.
- November 2023: We move into our "office-as-a-service" at Unicorn in Französische Straße, Berlin.
- December 2023: We are 6 people in the company and have generated approx. €600,000 in sales in 2023 – we are satisfied and proud. For 2024, we are aiming to almost double (headcount and sales).
- Spring 2024: We are 8 people in the company and we are experiencing our first economic crisis. As a result, we are trimming our growth plans a little. Nevertheless, the mood in the company is very good.
- Summer 2024: We publish our second (self-built) website and the Unconsultancy Manifesto.
- Late summer 2024: All the signs indicate that we are emerging from the crisis. The mood is still very good, maybe even better. We initiate our first reorganization and look for a new (larger) office.
However, these hard facts do not convey a lot of the essential things.
1. The freedom and responsibility of entrepreneurship are fantastic and weighty. The freedom to make and implement decisions. The freedom to shape things extensively. The freedom to develop fundamental principles of cooperation both internally and externally. The freedom to set the priorities for the company (these are our entrepreneurial priorities: 1. survival of the company, 2. fun work, 3. doing good, 4. making a profit). With freedom comes responsibility – for the company, for the employees, for the customers, for the results of our work and, unfortunately, also – albeit to a lesser extent – for free society.
2. The pleasure of working with the team and enjoying our culture. I enjoy working with every single person in the company. And I look forward to interacting with them every single day. The pleasure of seeing how people grow, develop, demand and take on more responsibility. Seeing how well things are going, even when I'm not there. Seeing how people in the company take the initiative, initiate developments, ask constructive questions. The joy of seeing that companies can function differently. From the very beginning, we have made "transparency until it hurts" our motto, which is intended to describe how we act in all situations. In our economic crisis, we have consistently adhered to this motto internally: in weekly updates on the situation, we have disclosed, categorized, explained and discussed all figures. And we have done this for several months. And everything was documented for everyone to read on the internal knowledge platform. I remain firmly convinced that the maxim of transparency is a foundation for us as a company. I am curious to see when we will find ourselves in a situation (and which it will be) in which we can no longer adhere to it because the consequences would be too "expensive".
3. The trust of our customers. It may sound trite, but without customers who trust us as a "new kid on the block" and are willing to give us a chance, we would not be able to survive. Our first customers were "old acquaintances" who gave us a leap of faith. Over the two years, new customers have also been added through recommendations. And we have worked with the vast majority of our customers on several occasions or for a long time (more than 9 months). Both the recommendations and the repeat and long-term contracts encourage us to believe that we are doing a lot of things right in front of our customers. Of course, we will never please everyone. That is not our aim. On the contrary: we will not bend, but always stand by our approach, our results and our responsibility. And sometimes we lose a customer as a result. We enjoy working with our customers. That too is not a matter of course, but for us it is essential (it is also one of our priorities).
But what are the biggest challenges we face?
We have neither a large marketing budget nor a sales team. But our approach is: impact at scale. We therefore need many (small and medium-sized) customers so that the methods can have their full effect. In our current setup, we could help around 150 companies a year in the long term if they were willing to get involved with our methodology (which we have described on our website). We are confident that we can expand our team and our platform in a very short time so that we can also serve 300, 500 or 1000 organizations a year. So the challenges are clear:
Marketing. Nobody knows us ;-) We have developed approaches that can scale to meet the existing consulting needs of medium-sized companies. Unfortunately, too few companies and decision-makers know us. When we post on LinkedIn or present our ideas in one-on-one conversations in our network, we get overwhelmingly positive feedback. But this is just "in our bubble" - and this bubble is not our target audience. The big challenge for us is to break out of our bubble with our communication and get to where our target customers are. And to do so in a way that is appealing, underscores our expertise and makes people want to get involved with our approach.
Distribution. We distribute our new approaches via multipliers who give us direct access to a group of interested companies. The most successful multiplier we have is an investor who has a strategic interest in developing and securing his portfolio. In addition to investors, there are other types of multipliers. We have identified and classified a large number of multipliers that we would like to "approach in terms of distribution". This means that we have identified the multipliers as key accounts that we would like to approach. But how do you go about cold calling in a market that is saturated? In a market that is now referred to as the "market for lemons". By using such marketing and sales power to influence potential customers that they are overwhelmed by exaggerated advertising messages and no longer perceive quiet tones?
Unsales. We call our approach "Unconsulting" and ourselves "Unconsultancy". A key feature is that a need for advice is served in groups, the so-called cohorts, instead of in established individual projects. Individual projects are sold by classic sales – with tenders, key account managers and rainmaker sales. This is just as unscalable as the individual projects sold, even if tenders are becoming increasingly large in volume. So how do we build a sales process that scales just as well as our cohort consulting product?
If you have any ideas about our challenges, please feel free to contact me or the team,
On that note: Happy Birthday, intcube and dear T3am! Happy Birthday & Thank you, dear customers & partners!
Yours, Dror
p.s. If you work for lead generation agencies and think "ah, I'll write to Dror now because he obviously needs leads": Save yourself the trouble. I get a few such offers every day. None of them has ever sparked my interest. They were all more of the same and aimed primarily at selling their own services. And if the selling of one's own services is already so uninspired, how unconventional or disruptive will the approach be for the cold-acquired customer, with whom you have not even spent 15 minutes?