Setting up processes in Sponsr

Sponsr is a platform for subscription-based content sales, the "Russian Patreon". A startup from St. Petersburg launched in 2019 and has been showing stable growth for three years. The founders of the company invited me as a manager to set up processes. I've been combining the duties of CEO, CPO, and CXO for a long time. But this time I had to add the roles of CTO and CFO. Surprisingly, I did it. 2023 release

Goal

Turn a fun but chaotic startup into a product company. In one year.

Key challenges

In three years, the product has grown and accumulated serious technical debt. As a consequence, the stability was poor. E-mails did not go out, or a new version was not rolled out, or everything slowed down.
The development of the product was done at random, without a strategy.
The confused interface prevented authors from starting projects and users from paying for them.
The mass exodus of workers from the country created problems with payment.

What I have achieved as CPO

CJM visualization appeared. With its help, we identified and solved major user problems.
We introduced a full-fledged Product Backlog and strategy-based prioritization. Now we know where the product is going, why and in what order we do this or that feature.
Business Intelligence system implemented. Product statistics are counted correctly and visualized clearly.

What I have achieved as CTO

There is a new development team.
Stability and speed of the product have been significantly improved. Monitoring and notifications about problems have been set up.
CI/CD has been updated, instead of 1-2 deployments per month we switched to 1-2 deployments per day.
Auto-tests have appeared, which allowed us to eliminate inefficient manual checks.
Critical components (SSO, UserProfile, Checkout, Mailer) moved from monolith to microservices. A technical roadmap for further transformation has been compiled.

What I have achieved as CEO and CFO

New sources of income have appeared — video hosting, advertising and legal services for authors.
Financial planning was reorganized, and the cash reserve was significantly increased.
White pay schemes for employees based abroad were implemented.