Venture building

Are you and your business ready to grow beyond expectations and get a boost by spotting new opportunities, reinventing a product, optimizing your growth model or finding ways to fund your venture? At Harborn we love the energy venture building gives us, while working together with entrepreneurs like you. It’s all about a continuous mindset of adapting, disrupting and innovating.

Our way of working
When it comes to challenges, running a business is in a league of its own, which means that sometimes it might feel like you are the only one putting in the unstoppable effort and coming up with future proof ideas, right? At Harborn we get that, and that’s why we believe that venture building can only work if we operate like we are your co-founders. Because as a co-founder we not only think about the product, but also about the business and growth model, and the funding of your venture.

As finding the right (and best!) talent is one of the toughest tasks for entrepreneurs we operate as your own in-house digital team, which you can easily scale up and down depending on the capacity you need. Just like a special force really. They have all the capacities you need: from design skills to expertise on cloud native solutions, full stack development and engineering. And with their entrepreneurial mindset they have a shared focus, and follow a clear battle plan in venture building:

• Step one: together we determine the mission in a number of short focus sessions. In this stage we are fearless. Decisions are made with a real entrepreneurial mindset: no bureaucratic rules to follow, and individual interests are subordinate to the group interest. We do this for our own ventures but also for the ventures we participate in.
• Step two: we set out our battle plan for the first launch, within a period of 12-16 weeks. If needed, we schedule a roadmap sprint to get aligned. Collaboration and team spirit, that’s the key during this step.
• Step three: now it’s time for action as we start to develop the platform, mobile app, portal or any other digital tool needed. During the process we focus on building high quality software that is maximally scalable and future proof.

For the realization of the venture we start with our own development team. If preferred, it can eventually grow to a hybrid situation in which the venture also has its own developers in-house. The result? A venture building growth model that is future proof and stable.

Seeing is believing when it comes to venture building

At Harborn our belief in the power of entrepreneurial thinking isn’t just ‘a nice story’. This means we don’t just ‘talk the talk’, but ‘walk the walk’ as well. Our team members therefore always have room to innovate and optimize ideas and products, as they ‘only’ work on fixed projects for 80% of their time. This way we can constantly implement new developments and innovations in the field. Curious how we keep track of these (new) techniques and how we determine when they are ready for implementation when it comes to venture building? Check our Tech Radar!

One of the venture building projects we are very proud of is ‘PicYourMoment’. This app allows you to take one picture a day, of an unexpected moment, in order to create a spontaneous and honest diary of your daily life. After a year a user can get their photos printed and turned into a small booklet. When Thomas Boswinkel, a Dutch publisher, came to us with this idea our entrepreneurial minds started running. The concept was clear but to make such an app work, 90% is about the technique and way of developing. With Harborn’s expert team (the special force, remember?) we developed a serverless product based on AWS to handle the daily data peaks, offer future proof scalability and to make sure we don’t pay too much as AWS works according to a ‘pay per use’ principle. Next to that we focused on a smart data architecture and handled the entire data security aspect. Right now we are already busy with implementing new ideas and techniques to make the app even better, because as shareholder and true entrepreneur we never stop finding new opportunities to boost business.

Besides being a shareholder in your venture, like we are for ‘PicYourMoment’, we also operate as a preferred digital partner. Please ask M is a great example of that, as we work together as though we are one company. On top of that, we also start our own ventures through ‘intrapreneurship’, such as productowner.nl and The Next Lab.