Exclusive interview with POPX Founder & CTO, Andy Venables

Full, uncut and RAW...

We uncover what it’s like to be a founder in a tech startup with no external seed funding, selling digital transformation to one of the toughest vertical sectors and getting started just as a global pandemic hits. Andy Venables reveals what inspired him to create POPX, the importance of crafting a culture of innovation and how he’s developing a winning team.

In a rare interview, we are privileged to briefly put the spotlight on an entrepreneur whose career has taken him from the support desk at a service provider and software developer to implementing enterprise solutions for some of the largest organisations across Europe.

Venables has poured all his professional experience and learnings into a business venture with purpose, drive and ambition that reflects his passion for technology delivering value. With a highly tuned ability to problem solve and overcome the stickiest challenges, he has methodically built a talented team around him that is fast becoming a go-to brand for the Managed Service Provider (MSP) industry.

With my background in the tech service provider industry and after six years at ServiceNow, I’ve experienced first-hand the challenges faced by MSPs and how difficult it can be to get to value with enterprise software. It was evident to me very quickly in my time at ServiceNow that professional services often leave the customer short-changed in terms of business outcomes and budgets.

My vision for POPX was to take ServiceNow and develop an MSP Platform combined with a fully managed service for one of the most complex use cases – digital transformation for MSPs. Our focus is to deliver a service that immediately eradicates the problems of trying to deploy, enhance and maintain a complex platform in-house.

2. As a tech entrepreneur, you must have faced numerous challenges along the way. Can you share a significant obstacle you encountered and how you overcame it?

The nature of challenges in a startup environment is that they are constant, they just change in relation to what stage the business is at. As we overcome current challenges there will always be new and equally difficult ones waiting to reveal themselves. For me, it’s difficult to separate the business from my personal life experience, as the two have become intertwined. There is no better example of entangled business and personal challenges than what I experienced in my first 12 months running POPX.   

Starting a new business venture with all the excitement and expectations of creating a startup can be tricky enough. However, 2019 was a tough year for me that could have derailed the company before it had a chance to get up and running. I was having multiple operations on my knee and left a great job at ServiceNow to get POPX kicked off. Then Leo, my second child, was born and had to spend the first three weeks in hospital. 

As we were in the middle of onboarding our first major client, the pandemic hit and the lockdown started. We had to quickly adapt and learn new ways of working to ensure a successful implementation - which we did. In that first year, we proved to ourselves that we could overcome anything in our path to push the business forward. We built resilience and demonstrated just how badly we wanted this new endeavour to succeed.

3. How has your company's technology evolved since its inception, and what factors have driven these changes?

The version of ServiceNow we provide with our managed service wrap is uniquely developed by us for the MSP industry. It is constantly developing due to customer requirements shaping the features, functionality and delivery. This means we constantly evolve the platform and every process of engagement with our clients. One of the frustrations I experienced while working at ServiceNow is that most customers go through the same onboarding process and have similar requirements when they implement the solution, but new customers need to start from the ground up every single time. It always felt like we were reinventing the wheel, instead of getting a head start.

Such an approach is time-consuming, costly and, because everyone is learning on the job about the customer, can be very wasteful – all at the customer’s expense. Even the applications in the ServiceNow Store need that last mile of configuration from someone with industry knowledge. At POPX, we are focused on a vertical sector that we are intimate with. This means we can save time by anticipating much of what we know the customer will need, as well as how best to deliver many of the special requirements they may have.

We can typically onboard a new client in a third of the time it would take with professional services. More importantly than this, just as a consultant and all their knowledge would be saying goodbye and moving on shortly after the go-live milestone, for us this is just the start of the development phase and where much of the transformation work gets done.

4. Innovation is crucial in the tech industry. How do you encourage a culture of innovation within your company, and what role do you personally play in fostering new ideas?

Innovation is the lifeblood of POPX and was architected into our DNA from day one. We exist out of a new approach to making enterprise software work the way it should for our clients, and to stay on top of that core value we must constantly improve.

We have three main streams of innovation that we nurture with purpose, and all are subject to critical feedback loops from our employees and clients alike:

Platform Innovation

We constantly develop and improve the underlying technology with new and efficient enhancements. As we look after and run this platform for our customers, everyone benefits from the improvements we make. In addition, we have created a growing library of micro functions and bigger applications we call POPX Smarts, that are available to all clients. We constantly review the library and add new Smarts to it, driven by specific requirements from customers and suggestions from within our team.

Service Innovation

As a service provider ourselves, we constantly review how we deliver our managed service to customers in a model of true partnership. We make regular improvements to ensure we communicate, collaborate and work as efficiently as possible. To do this we adopt the goals of our clients to help them achieve their desired business outcomes. All of them have helped shape and improve our service and, as we have grown, we have improved important functions such as Customer Success, Product Management, Quality Assurance and Customer Support.

Customer Innovation

Working closely with our customers has many benefits, including the potential for new and exciting ideas that can only be conceived by merging our thinking through collaboration. Those ideas can be anything from new ways of working, new processes we can develop for our customers to make them more efficient and new product offerings we can develop for markets we can service by joining together. It is because we partner closely with clients, having regular meetings to review and align our teams, that we can innovate in this special and unique way.

My role in all of this is to ensure everyone understands the importance of innovation and has everything they need to contribute as part of our internal and customer-facing teams. In addition to setting the culture and conditions for success, I am heavily involved in the direction and roadmap of our product, taking input, advice and opinion from our growing and talented team, as well as external sources. Ultimately, it’s my job to make sure everyone has a voice and direct influence on all three of our innovation streams.

5. The tech industry is highly competitive. What unique value does your company offer to stand out from the competition?

POPX is a unique offering in the market. Interestingly, as we become better known in the industry, we are seeing more and more managed services being offered by the traditional professional services community. However, they appear to be nothing like what we would call a ‘fully managed service’ and most of it is just a bundle of professional services hours in a retainer model.

Our clients come to us because they want to work with people that have a deep understanding of the MSP industry and benefit from a service that includes everything they need at a fixed price. They value the fact there are never any financial surprises or budgetary holdups. Our vision is to establish POPX as the de-facto platform for Smart MSPs and we have made great progress in a short period, showing high demand for our innovative approach.

6. How have your background and experiences influenced the direction and success of your tech company?

I started my career on the support desk for a service provider, where I met and had the privilege of working for Martin Ford, POPX co-founder and CEO. We had the idea to create something like the POPX MSP Platform back then, but ServiceNow wasn’t yet an established market leader, so we had to develop our own in-house version. This was the inspiration for the idea behind POPX and after almost seven years at ServiceNow, I decided to join back with Martin and fix the problem of service management, automation and customer portal for MSPs once and for all. 

7. Many startups struggle with funding. Could you share your experience in securing funding for your company and any tips for other entrepreneurs seeking investment?

So far, we are self-funded and have re-invested in the business to grow it in a determined and steady way. If I had any advice for other startups it would be to avoid taking external funding too early, but I appreciate some may have no option. We were in the fortunate position not to require seed funding and instead focussed on creating a successful startup before we invite investors to join us. The time will come soon when external funding is necessary to help accelerate our scale-up effort. We look forward to welcoming new partners in the ownership of the business when that time comes.

8. Looking ahead, what are your company’s future goals and how do you plan to continue innovating and growing in the tech industry?

We intend to continue to grow our client base both within the MSP sector and in other key verticals to broaden our appeal and addressable market with new products and services. Currently, all our clients are UK&I-based service providers, but we are now receiving interest from MSPs in other countries. As we develop, we will start to proactively target international markets and grow our business in new territories. For now, we are super busy meeting local demand and there is still much work to do in the vibrant UK MSP sector.

Recruitment is also very important to us, and we are always looking to bring in new and talented people. We have a diverse and growing team across the UK and have established development centres in Serbia and India. Our UK team is very hands-on and customer-facing but leans heavily on our very capable international operations to deliver high-quality results at speed for clients. 

Building a highly regarded team includes the importance of rewarding those that help us to build POPX. This starts with all employees being shareholders, so they can benefit from our success and this continues through our benefits package, which is tailored to ensure we look after our employees and their families. I believe we can only take the very best care of our customer’s needs if we ensure we take care of our employees first.

The combination of all these components working together is what gives us our competitive edge and will help drive innovation for years to come.

9. Is being a tech entrepreneur everything it’s cracked up to be?

Yes, I love it! It definitely has its challenges, but then that is part of the fun. At the hardest of times, it's the team coming together and pulling through these challenges that I relish now. We have achieved a scale where I can’t fix or be involved in everything, so one of my proudest moments is seeing the team thrive, and then I get to do the really fun bit which is to reward them for their efforts.

I’m focused on setting the conditions for success, so I can get out of the way and trust our smart people to do at least as good a job, if not better than I could. This, in turn, gives me the time to focus on recruitment and finding more rock stars to bring in, so they can make a big contribution and realise their career goals.

Sometimes work can be all-consuming, and I’m certainly lucky that I have an understanding wife, who is also busy with her own business. Together we make sure we both balance hard work with family time. Having young kids is a wonderful blessing in so many ways and spending time with them helps me decompress, so I can return to work re-energised and inspired. I also enjoy nothing more than getting out for a run or a cycle to clear my head and think through our plans.

10. Do you have any helpful advice for any young budding entrepreneurs?

Go for it! I had the privilege of working with many great people at ServiceNow, and many entrepreneurs in the partner ecosystem, and I made sure I learned as much as possible from all of them. Analysing the market for a gap or opportunity to disrupt the status quo is what allowed us to offer a new model that wasn’t available before, and that has been a big part of our success. 

Also, make sure the timing is right. If I had tried to do something like POPX back when we first had the idea it may not have worked out. What made POPX feasible is the underlying ServiceNow technology, which is the leader in service management and benefits from huge ongoing investments in R&D. 

Leveraging this key technology is what allowed us to realise the POPX dream, and we are only at the very beginning, as I believe there is so much more to come. Once you are confident the timing is right, I would say do it and never look back, no matter what life may throw at you.

The POPX MSP Platform is powered by ServiceNow