At the closing of a year, I write a short article of what we at Serendip learned. It serves as a reminder to me and is an extension of my journaling. We all know how quickly the days and weeks roll into each other and become a blur. This process forces me to think about those days/weeks/months and the little ways in which we learned and grew as a company.

Serendip is now 4 years and 9 months old, with an internal team of 5 and thriving partnerships with 4 other development firms. We continue to practice our communication philosophy based on kindness, gratitude and bravery everyday.

• Our revenue grew by 4% compared to 258% last year. We were not able to scale at the same speed.
• 20% of our revenue was directed towards minority hires which is 3% more than last year.
• 0 new clients in 2023.
• 40% increase in expenses as we adjusted pay rates and tested add on services free of cost.

Learnings

1. Proactive QA Process : Early in the year, we had our product quality team run in tandem with the development team with every sprint. This meant, when the product team signs off on scope, the dev team picks up the cards for development and the qa team picks up the same cards to prepare regressions. This provided an extra set of eyes for both the development and product teams, catching issues earlier in the sprint.
2. Introducing test automation : As you may know, Serendip aims to maintain affordable development costs for early-stage innovators. When creating an MVP with a limited budget and uncertain business model assumptions, we skip test-driven development. As clients progress, we explored model-driven programming tools for easy adoption by early-stage test automation engineers. We landed on which made it super easy for us to get up and running quickly. However, when it came to scaling and performance, we started seeing major problems. Components could not be reused nor could it be deployed to our own cloud servers which meant the code would be very difficult to maintain. We switched to native tools such as Selenium, JUnit and Maven.
3. Documentation : Some products we developed had complex features tied to multiple factors. Accessing detailed requirements during the sprint was challenging, so we incorporated documentation as the final step for a feature. After release, we integrate the requirements into our documentation space using . Guru is handsdown the best tool we have seen so far for documentation. That is all they do and they do it well.
4. Email Marketing Faux Pas: Serendip allocated 8% of our 2023 profits to outsource sales to an email marketing firm, which proved to be a complete failure. Despite expecting 15 referrals in four months, we discovered that email marketing is ineffective in conveying our boutique innovation approach. With just one success out of 4,000 emails, it was brutal acknowledgement of how saturated an email inbox is these days with the same kind of messaging…. and we just added to that noise. I am grateful for having learned this lesson and we will not be repeating this.
5. Entrepreneurial Therapy : Mid last year, for the first time, I felt alone as an entrepreneur. There are so many unknowns and twice as many actions one can take, it was overwhelming. It didn’t help that my mother’s dementia was getting worse 9000 miles away. When sent me in an invite to join the , I thought of checking it out. Since August, I have been part of their and that has been the best decision I made. The intimate accountability forum I am part of has provided me guidance and peace of mind. The fact that you have a safe space to talk freely and seek others’ experiences is something I am so grateful for.
6. Better On-boarding : The new documentation process and qa techniques (that were also documented), helped the on-boarding process for new employees at Serendip and our clients. That felt super useful – I had this sense of relief as we saw more people function with more autonomy.
7. Traction : Around the same time that I was introduced to EO, I began to read the book . The book recommends reading the chapters with your leadership team so the Serendip team has been reading through the chapters. This helped us discover our niche, align on our core values, and build on our purpose. As a team we realized the following … We are catalysts for innovation. That’s it! More than anything, we want people to realize their full potential and unleash themselves. Thanks !
8. A life of SIM: To think that I might have become a realtor in 2019 instead of choosing this path … I owe it to my family for seeing something I didn’t. Every year there are opportunities that present themselves where I have to pinch myself to remind me that this is not a dream. Building Serendip has put me next to people who are building more impactful businesses, brought investment opportunities, allowed us to have a positive impact on non-profits and given us the freedom to manage our time.

Every time we help someone realize their dream, the universe seems to reward us a hundred fold. That is one of the reasons I want to share these experiences with you … If you are considering entrepreneurship, I hope you find these articles inspiring and useful. There are lots of resources in Michigan to help you with whatever you might need. Reach out to me (jeeva@goserendip.com) if you are on this journey.