How the founders of Algolia think about scale (and how you can too)
When fueled by an exceptional idea, Software as a Service (SaaS) companies can grow exceptionally fast. As you start to execute and see growth, it’s important to think about scaling from the very beginning. Indeed, scalability is key for SaaS companies. In this article, we’ll provide tips and best practices based on our learnings of growing our business from just a few customers to the thousands we have now at Algolia.
To get the scoop, I interviewed our co-founders Nicolas Dessaigne and Julien Lemoine, our VP of Engineering Sylvain Utard and Product Manager Lucas Cerdan.
There are numerous aspects to consider when scaling your operations including infrastructure, team diversity or culture. Join us as we explore ways to get ready for your company’s future.
Values are Key
Values are the foundation of everything when building a company, and culture has a huge impact on everything we do at Algolia. Startups should define their culture as soon as possible — write down the core values and use them as a benchmark as you grow. If you wait until you start growing quickly to define your company culture, it will be too late as it will have defined itself in the meantime. By being loyal to your values, you’ll be able to keep your culture no matter how big your company becomes.
Before hiring employee #1, Nicolas and Julien sat down and took time to discuss the company’s values — Care, Grit, Candor, Humility and Trust. The latter value, for example, has defined our ownership culture and limited the number of processes we put in place. We don’t react to problems by creating barriers so that the problem doesn’t reproduce itself — we treat it as an outlier and move on. Every time we set processes up, we ask ourselves questions such as: “Does it align with Algolia’s culture?” and “Is the process here to help people?”.
Think global first
One of the big advantages of SaaS is that the cloud isn’t confined within regional borders. In order to have customers in different countries, you have to think with a global perspective. Don’t stop with your local ecosystem — you’ll find rich diversity if you hire people from other countries and open offices abroad. Also, consider bringing on investors from outside countries to open up unseen doors and broaden perspectives to other ecosystems.
Algolia has offices in San Francisco, Paris, New York and Atlanta. We started in Paris but soon realized we needed to move our headquarter to the US to become the company we wanted to be. We encourage employees to travel once a year and this helps to create a global team. And it’s not just a question of location. Our CEO and co-founder Nicolas says “The working language has always been English for us, even if none of us were native speakers in the beginning. It might sound trivial but if we needed to switch to English today, it would be very tough!”.
Today, we have customers in more than 100 countries and it wouldn’t have been possible without thinking globally from our company’s inception.
Forecast your infrastructure
It’s important to have infrastructure growth in mind from the minute you start. Our CTO and co-founder Julien affirms “Even if you don’t implement your infrastructure right now, you can design it without developing everything at the moment”. Always have the future in mind, always know you will be bigger in a few months. A good way to prepare for the future is to always anticipate and see the future times 10.
For example, at Algolia, everything is ready to support 10x more queries, 10x more searches. We still have a long way to go, but we’re prepared to scale our infra when the time comes. Achieving such a high availability has not been an easy road, it took us time and effort to be where we are today. But as we always kept the future in a corner of our head, we managed to be there and are following the same path for the next years.
Simplify
There’s a common acronym in the software world called “KISS”, meaning keep it simple, stupid. This saying is easily laughed at but its importance should not be forgotten. For example, leveraging existing APIs instead of developing them in house is a way to prepare for the future. If a process, algorithm or method already works, don’t waste resources creating it again. Who would host their emails by themselves today? Some companies are out there already & ready to help you: Stripe for online payments, Twilio for programmable SMS or Algolia for a faster & more relevant search.
At Algolia, we came close to creating our own DNS because we couldn’t find what matched our needs. In the end, we are using NS1. We almost created our monitoring tool before finding Wavefront. We don’t regret these choices: they made us earn more time to take other impactful actions and keep our eyes focused on delivering our best solutions based on our core competencies. We love SaaS companies and Julien even wrote a checklist to select a SaaS service.
Plan ahead on product
On the product side, it’s important to think two, three or even five iterations ahead. To do so, think about your product, your competition and even your peers and focus on two or three big differentiators to have in your pipeline. It’s not only about trying to defend your position versus the competitors: staying one step ahead involves constant innovation. The big ideas don’t come at the snap of the fingers, you need to talk with your clients to find them. For Lucas Cerdan, Product Manager at Algolia: “The product manager has to make sure the company has the right product for the right person at the right price”. Encourage your team to speak with their clients about their pain points to be sure they are on the right path. Speaking with the customers drives the time-to-market, the pricing and is the only way to be customer-centric.
Algolia’s team is already working on our next differentiators to stay ahead of our customer’s needs and our competitors. An example of a differentiator is Algolia Offline. Algolia’s co-founders thought about the feature in the very beginning of the company but left the idea to focus on online search. But this idea came back on the table by discussing with clients that needed an offline option. Thanks to this critical customer feedback, we launched Algolia Offline a month ago.
Clarify your engineering organization
When your team is small, it’s easier for everybody to be impactful. Each individual in the team can take ownership and immediately drive change, but as the team grows, it can become difficult to help everybody maintain this level of ownership. What efforts can you take to prevent ownership dissipation?
At Algolia, we became inspired by Spotify to create squads. Our engineering team has been split into different squads over the last months. Squads are fully autonomous and they take responsibility for their projects from A to Z, from committing to deploying. For Sylvain Utard, our VP of Engineering: “Squads didn’t change our day-to-day way of working. It clarified it”. Everybody in the squad knows what’s missing in a project and what needs to be done. As we always question our organization, squads can be flexible and evolve along time.
Get hiring right
As an early-stage startup, the temptation is big to only hire the people in roles you’ll directly see an ROI on — such as engineering and sales. Yet, thinking in a scaling mindset means you should not neglect the other roles that will be fundamental for your growth. Don’t be afraid to hire more senior candidates just in an effort to save money. Even if senior people cost more initially in salary/benefits, having critically needed knowledge from experience is super valuable.
Hiring rapidly? Consider bringing a dedicated recruiter on staff. Using internal resources for hiring will preserve culture as opposed to using external head hunters. When you hire fast, having enough recruiters to help you is mandatory. You cannot keep up with your growth without recruiters! Nicolas Dessaigne says “As soon as you want to hire more than 10 people during the year, having a recruiter in the team can help tremendously!”. This thinking also applies to operations, marketing or legal positions.
Each company, no matter the size or phase of growth you are in will find your path to exceptional growth. What have been your company’s growing pains and what tip(s) would you have for new founders or early-stage customers?
