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 to help set up processes. I used to be CEO, CPO, CXO, CTO, and even CFO, so I was able to help them sort out problems in all areas, complexly. 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.

Product changes

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.

Technical achievements

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.

Improvements in management and finance

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.