Interview Edition: Oswald De Riemaecker

Who are you and what do you do?

Oswald De Riemaecker is CEO & co-founder. He likes shaping infrastructures as code so he can build scalable cloud infrastructure. He’s an Agile and DevOps Evangelist. By working for many years on various projects, Oswald has been experiencing diverse project management methodologies, Agile practices and principles have proven to be the most successful ones. He supports and coaches development teams so that they implement these principles and practices, including Agile development such as Unit Testing, BDD, Continuous Integration/Delivery and Deployment. Oswald has run his own company before he was a Technical Manager for large accounts.

Frédéric Dewinne is CTO & Co-founder. He worked for years as an entrepreneur. Continuous Delivery/Deployment addict in the PHP world. After many years of consultancy, Frederic met his partners and created continuousphp in order to help PHP developers to adopt industry standards. He’s also a senior consultant and IT trainer specialized in PHP apps testing (unit tests, behavior tests…), Zend Framework (also a contributing developer), Zend Server and JavaScript technologies. Particularly interested in industry best practices, Continuous Delivery, application and system architecture. Frédéric is also a frequent speaker at international conferences.

Pascal Paulis is continuousphp Core Developer & co-founder. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science and is a PHP & ZF Certified Engineer. He started to work as a SysAdmin and web developer. Thanks to his experience with end customers and as a consultant, he’s developed a strong expertise in Continuous Delivery, Behaviour Driven Development and API Design.

How did you get the idea for your startup?

Frédéric Dewinne and Oswald De Riemaecker came to the conclusion that all their customers needed a solid, scalable and easy to use solution for testing and deploying their web applications. They both noticed that their customers spent considerable amount of time and money to maintain and use their individual systems. It was clearly a problem for them.

“We met one night and started to design a solution for this specific problem over a beer pack. Then, we created a landing page to start getting the interest of potential early adopters and worked on a first business canvas model.”

“We tested concept and business model during the Start-up Weekend Luxembourg in May 2013 and won it. Thanks to the Start-up Weekend, we met different coaches (CEOs, Business Angels, Luxinnovation member and PhDs in computer science) who helped us to confirm project feasibility (Business Model and Strategy, estimation of the structure cost, revenue generation).”

“We attended the PHP Benelux Conference in January 2014 where we met some PHP community thought leaders and they all show a great interest in testing our solution as soon as it would be available and most importantly, were willing to resell it to their own customers.”

“End of June 2014, we opened the first Alpha version so that early adopters and key opinion leaders can test it. End of July, opening to open source users. In September, company and product presentation to the Technoport to potential Independent Software Vendor, developers and investors.”

“From June to November 2014, we validated our position by launching our Beta version and confirming customer interest and first sales opportunities.”

If you could only pick one thing to validate your reason for forming a startup, what would it be?

The entrepreneur experience to live. It’s a really exciting challenge that is already the best reason to form a startup.

What do you wish you’d have known 5 years ago that you know now?

Move to Luxembourg earlier.

To what do you most attribute your success?

The team!

What would say are the five key elements for starting and running a successful business?

A team, a vision, a minimum viable product, a customer validation, a customer acquisition

Have you been in a failed start-up before? Why did it fail? What would you do differently?

Yes, it failed but it turned into a really valuable experience. We should have taken a Lean Startup approach to minimize risks and adapt the business hypothesis before it failed.

How do you find people to bring into your organization that truly care about the organization the way you do?

We empower the team, so people working with us have a lot to share and receive. They are really involved into our organization.

What would you do with unlimited resources?

Definitely invest in and support a lot of startups!

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