Simon De Baene has no problem deleting years of work.
At TechTO’s Toronto event this month at MaRS Discovery District, the Workleap co-founder and CEO described how his team spent two years in the late 2000s building a software product, only to scrap it entirely.
“We just built features, features after features after features,” he said. “There were so many buttons in the product, but most of them were half-baked.”
“Before you’re creating something, there’s going to be some sort of destruction happening.”
Simon De Baene
Workleap began as a service company called GSoft in 2006, building IT solutions for clients. They decided that developing their own product was the next logical step. Instead of selling hours, they would build something scalable.
“The problem with running a service company is that you get used to being paid,” De Baene said.
By 2008, the startup had fully committed to product development and started building ShareGate, a tool to help companies migrate to the cloud through Microsoft SharePoint. For two years, the team kept adding features, refining the platform, and waiting for traction that never came.
The product was too complicated. Customers struggled to use it, and instead of fixing that core issue, the team kept layering on more functionality.
So, they started over.
Burn it down
Instead of salvaging parts of ShareGate, the team erased it completely.
There was one rule during the rebuild, De Baene said: “no copy-paste.” Developers could retype the old code, but they could not port it.
It forced a fresh approach and ensured the teams didn’t recreate the same problems. The new version focused on solving one problem well; it took three months to build. Within a month of relaunching, the startup sold more licences than in the previous two years combined.
DeBaene focused his efforts on marketing, sales, and support: “everything not dev.”
It worked. Instead of waiting for customers to come to them, the team reached out directly, sold the product, and refined it based on real feedback.
Old habits die hard
In 2013, the team launched another product: Officevibe, an HR tool for employee engagement. But the lessons from ShareGate had not stuck.
“We repeated the exact mistake,” De Baene said. “Again, too many features. Customers were too tired using the product. It’s the same pattern that is happening all the time, and I see it in so many software companies out there.”
De Baene admitted that the instinct to keep adding never goes away. There’s always a feeling that the product isn’t quite enough, that another feature or enhancement will make it stronger. But over time, he’s learned that restraint is often the better approach.
“Sometimes you’ve got to build something simple, cut it in half and cut it in half again, and it’s probably not simple enough,” he added.
Scrapping as a strategy
Workleap now operates HR software for workplace management and employee engagement. The startup has destroyed and rebuilt products multiple times and now De Baene now sees it as core to how the startup approaches product development.
He said the human resistance to change is often what holds other teams back. People get attached to what they’ve built, even when it’s not working, which is why he pushes his team to challenge that instinct.
“Before you’re creating something, there’s going to be some sort of destruction happening,” De Baene said. “It’s always that cycle happening all the time, and it’s been like that since 2006.”
Watch Simon De Baene’s full conversation at TechTO Together here.
Images courtesy Sean Pollock for TechTO. Check out the full calendar of TechTO events here.