StartUs Presents: Portadi

Describe Portadi in 50 words or less.

Portadi is a cloud access panel for apps and online accounts we use in the workplace every day. As a user I have single sign-on to my accounts. As a manager I know what apps we use and how much these cloud subscriptions cost us.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dreams rather than someone else’s?

Portadi is not my first company so I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into. The idea behind Portadi came through my own experience — in my prior job I encountered the very issue we are trying to solve. It was really hard for me to say with certainty who got access to what — my team had accounts in well over a hundred different cloud apps.

When someone left the team, I couldn’t tell if I disconnected them from all services, canceled every single subscription they had, transferred the accounts they originated or owned to someone else and changed passwords in all of the shared web apps and websites (like Getty Images or conference accounts). These things went into the first MVP. We showed it to a few people and they loved it. You can’t say no to that.

7 years from now: How did your startup change the world?

Seven years from now, Portadi is the go-to platform for cloud apps. It’s the first thing someone thinks of when they say, OK, we are forming a team, we’ll have all of these apps that we will be using, I’ll use Portadi for that.

But seven years is a very long time in the technology world. Just look at Slack – who would have thought you could resurrect the IRC concept and build a product that challenged not only all of the existing chat services but also all of the team collaboration tools.

In what ways do you measure your success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

Our customers use Portadi because it solves a huge pain point for them. They appreciate the incredible simplicity we are bringing. A key objective is growing our customer base. Some of our new customers came through referrals from existing customers. To me that’s a sign that we are on the right track.

Describe your typical working day from coming to the office to leaving it.

The day starts with follow ups with all new customers — yes, we try to talk to every single one of our customers, it’s very integral to our brand. Second, we review that the platform works as expected and users can sign into their apps without a hitch. We have several KPIs we track — daily signups, weekly active customers, platform usage etc. which we review daily. Then there’s time to do some real, actual work. I like to do creative work and especially writing later in the evening, simply because there are fewer interruptions.

Already pivoted? Did customers use the cloud access panel like you imagined it in the beginning?

The basic premise has not changed since we started — to make it easy for anybody on the team to sign into company apps and online accounts. That has stayed the same and our customers love the fact that you can have all accounts in one place, basically like a bookmark list with built-in cloud SSO. In the process of building Portadi we discovered that problems with cloud apps run much deeper: invoicing, procurement, audits… you name it.

Bootstrapped or financed: What fuels your startup now and what will in the future?

We have bootstrapped Portadi up until now. It’s a very interesting exercise in being resourceful with super limited funds. Our infrastructure runs completely in the cloud all the way to accounting. It’s an awesome time to launch an SaaS company because so many of the products we use offer a free plan of some sort which gave us the runway to build something and not get charged for it until we grew a larger customer base. We launched earlier this year. We are able to cover most of our operating costs.

With ferocious competition and a booming trend to build new companies: How do you make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle?

We are still in the early days of cloud app management. Sure, smaller companies may be a bit more adventurous to embrace the cloud fully. When you look at the many areas that have been disrupted by cloud offerings like CRM, it took years before they got wildly popular. Being early also means that you have to be really close to your customers, they are pioneers willing to take risks. Ultimately, that insight will be your competitive advantage. In this regard, I’m very happy to see that traffic on our platform is growing by almost 30% month over month.

What do you look for in team members?

Passion is the number one thing. It’s passion because it is what ultimately gets you through tough times — and there are many in the early days. Everything else can be learned. We’re a small team so every single person is highly visible. We want everyone to fit in and be a good team player. We are a fully distributed team with people working on different continents and in different countries, so being able to work remotely is key. Remote work is not for everybody.

Why would a talent join your team?

There are two classes of people — those who are really good at starting a company and those who are really good at running a company. We are at the stage where only the first group would enjoy being with us. When someone looks at us, they see that we offer three things: working with a very talented team, working on a very hard and interesting technical challenge, and being in the market that has not been fully discovered.

What was your most memorable moment so far?

Actually, it happens every time I get an email from a customer saying something great about Portadi. The fact that we changed someone’s work life for the better, that’s what really keeps me going.

A single moment that definitely stands out was the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator. We graduated in June this year and met a group of really awesome people — other alumni, mentors, advisors. I wrote a whole series of blog posts about our experience, it’s at blog.portadi.com.

What advice would you give fellow founders for their startup?

Don’t do it until you are ready to give up everything. Gil Penchina, one of the most reputable angel investors in Silicon Valley, has a saying “f@cking ship already”. If you are a founder, your life pretty much turns into a relentless pursuit of “f@cking ship already”. You won’t have time for anything else.

This advice obviously is more suitable for software startups where it’s easier to ship early with an unfinished product and iterate. A hardware startups is a very different beast. You can’t spell hardware without “hard”. The costs of prototyping, manufacturing and distribution effectively prohibit you from shipping anything but an almost perfect product.

Founder Dusan Vitek

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