Learning from Odoo’s Journey

Familiar with Odoo? It’s an impressive empire of business apps. A Belgian man, Fabien Pinckaers, has built Odoo within two decades with trials and errors. With his background as a developer, he innovated a simple solution with affordable prices for business operations.

His journey then sparks a thought, “Could they have amplified their growth even further in those early years by tapping into offshore talent?”. Let’s take a look at Odoo’s success and consider how an offshore strategy can be an effective solution.

Odoo’s Origin Story: A Startup Hustle

Fabien’s core business from the start was optimising service, not revenue, where professionals serve customers on hand directly. Building a company isn’t cheap, and Fabien has been open about navigating the funding landscape and his approach to keeping control by managing valuations. 

It’s a clever play, but it also means those early budgets can be tight. A reality many startups experienced well. When you get the great investors, any clever way to optimise costs without sacrificing quality is a massive win.

As a developer, Fabien found out what services were needed by users of digital products from giant tech. He then thought of starting to summarise those services into one platform named Odoo, which has an affordable and reasonable price.

A Startup Reality We Know Well

Odoo’s achievements, now worth hundreds of billions of dollars, show that innovating is still at the core of operations. He tried to position himself as a business and IT leader by being consistent in his work and focusing on fixing what needed to be fixed.

“Continue doing what we do today. Not defocusing, innovating year after year with the same pace, growing the company 50% per year while keeping the culture,” said Fabien in his talk with 20VC.

Perhaps it seems different to the typical days of startups. Odoo, at an early stage, was not just about innovation and finding new talent. There were times when Fabien struggled with finances and did everything from selling T-shirts to leading the marketing team. He survived, and Odoo HQ is currently placed in 10 countries with thousands of talents.

By bootstrapping the company to keep the cash flow on track, Fabien’s core business was optimising service, not revenue, where professionals serve customers on hand directly. This is challenging for a startup, but prioritising service to enhance user experience has proven to be a more effective investment of time than focusing on revenue initially.

Company Culture: Empowering Young Talents

A good product is not measured by how smart the talent is hired. Instead, whether the management practices have been carried out well. Most companies focus on KPIs, but are of average quality when delivering products to clients. This also became the concern of Odoo’s founder, who started a breakthrough in product delivery management and recruited more innovative young people.

“Things are very subjective if you put KPIs,” said Fabien.

“…This guy was the best, yet on the KPI it was the worst. It’s just that we gave him the worst project,” he continued.

Fabien cuts through the obstacles experienced when recruiting skilled talent, which is the assessment based on resumes. The role should be simple: a developer being asked to develop and a salesperson pitching the business. Not from an interview that only talks about resumes for two hours and then passes the candidate. At Odoo, he would rather see the numbers in results through IQ tests.

“Our process is extremely fast, it’s one meeting and we decide right away. So, usually we recruit within five days and everything is automated,” said Fabien.

It makes sense to recruit young talent in their 20s. Young talents are now more proactive and own the advanced literature about current technology. As they are closer to technology, they are quicker to adapt to work in the digital landscape.

Innovation from Within

Fabien made many breakthroughs when building Odoo. Starting from the ideas of feature products packaged as simply as possible in one application, to people management that does not limit young people from innovating.

Investing time and business in young talent is never wrong. Once again, they are the closest to the latest trends and experience how competition in the digital world occurs. Young talents have brilliant ideas and agile attitudes. And hiring young talent can be a mutual benefit when they are looking for a place to learn, and startups are about trials and errors.

Lessons from Odoo’s Success 

Odoo’s journey began with trial and error. Fabien chose to focus on optimising service delivery rather than revenue, as the quality of service is more important once clients receive it. In the landscape of growing innovative giant tech companies, Fabien chose not to compete. 

According to him, Odoo is a “sweet business app” as it offers whatever you need, such as accounting, CRM, or logistics. Odoo focuses on all-in-one apps that cover all operational needs. Microsoft does have one, but it is fairly expensive and less user-friendly. Compared to Slack, Asana, and MailChimp, which focus on only one function, Odoo offers all of those functions at an affordable price.

An Alternative: Leveraging Offshore Development Teams

Learning from Odoo’s journey, they can actually utilise offshore developers. With a limited budget, getting quality developers can be done by monitoring the talent list in countries with rapid startup development.

In line with Fabien’s thinking, building a team is not just about reading resumes but also looking for practical talents whose competence can be proven through numbers. And recruiting offshore developers has several advantages, such as:

Financial Benefits

At the early stage of building a startup, let’s focus on searching for qualified talent with cost-effective solutions. You can choose whether to hire developers based on projects or long-term. From here, your financial management gets crystal clear on goals and measurements.

Maintaining Quality with Global Talent

Many companies are still prioritising DEI values ​​in the company. This is to provide diverse input from local talent. By recruiting offshore developers, you are also getting the best quality for operations and keeping cash flow from plummeting in getting quality talent. For Australian businesses, strong tech talent pools can be found in South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe.

Flexibility and Scalability

Utilising offshore development services can be beneficial in measuring the scale of the project being worked on. You can more easily find the type of tech talent to fill the company’s needs. By utilising the best tools available, you can monitor the work of remote teams without bias since all measures are time tracking and numbers.

Without further ado, Upscalix here to provide solutions. Let’s scale up your business and boost efficiency with us.