Back in January 2019, I co-founded a web development agency called Arcanium, with a couple of friends that I had been free lancing with. I was relatively new to both startups and web development so I heavily relied on the experience, skills, and vision of our main co-founder, Nick Bryant. The concept and business strategy of Arcanium evolved over time and I learned quite a bit from the experience.

Prior to the actual founding of Arcanium, the first iteration was simply a collectively of software developers and other people from tech in a Slack workspace so that we could all have a tight-knit community centered around software development and tech. As time went on, people who had opportunities they didn’t have time for could share those opportunities with others in the community. Once we actually founded a company our goal was simply to band the four of us together to make decent money on sites like Upwork by working as an agency. This model was quite difficult at first without an reputation but we were able to slowly build momentum and gain repeat customers(our second largest client ever was gained and retained on Upwork).

We eventually realized that while there is decent value in running an agency on sites like Upwork, we really needed to get more reliable, better paying work. This is when we started hitting our networks and looking for long-term contracts. These contracts were crucial in that they allowed us to build a brand with a consistent set of engineers that became our core workforce. By doing this our brand and capabilities became much more consistent, which in turn made selling ourselves easier.

For a while we were trying to be a turnkey solution to software development, attempting to have project managers, designers, and other software development related roles in the community so that we could come in with a huge value proposition. The problem we ran into was that with our lack of reputation and the lower market that we were selling to, there wasn’t much demand for anything other than just software development. We tested trying to bill enough on our developers to be able to afford to provide a turnkey solution, but this just made it impossible to compete when bidding on projects. The solution to this was to turn our selves from turnkey software development into a staff augmentation service. We just worked to have competent, reliable developers on our staff that could work long-term contracts that would be the keystone of our business.

This actually worked really well and for a while we had 10-15 developers working at a time with our largest contract being 7 developers. One thing that really slowed us down(other than the COVID pandemic), was our inability to sell our services outside of our own professional networks, which is finite, and Upwork, which has thinner margins. We tried multiple times to get our cold-calling and inbound sales pipeline to grow, but ultimately that was not a competency of any of the management team at Arcanium.

Overall, I am very proud of the work we did at Arcanium and I walked away with a huge amount of experience and multiple close friends that I didn’t have before.

Arcanium Office 1

Arcanium Office 2 The Arcanium office in Clearwater, FL!