Flowcase was started late 2012 by Erling Wegger Linde and Nicolai Rønneberg Nielsen in Oslo, Norway. Both Erling and Nicolai had experience developing and designing SaaS tools, having worked for both consulting and engineering firms prior to starting Flowcase. The Flowcase founders wanted to create a lean, developer driven product and company where the developers had lots of freedom and flexibility. We are proud to say that this is still one of the main values of Flowcase.
The journey started with interviewing professional services firms
Before a single line of code was written, the team took the time to interview bid managers and consulting managers in the professional services industry learning about their challenges and needs. Based on this and feedback from a dozen of early adopter enterprise customers, the core features of the product that is used by thousands of users every day was developed by the founding team over a two year period. Since then, the core features has evolved and new features has been added, but the core has stood its test of time very well.
A company by and for developers and designers
One of Flowcases guiding principles is to create a «developer first» company where the developers decide what tools to use, and at what speed we should develop the company and tool. The idea is that if you give talented senior developers both time, flexibility and freedom, you can create a culture that fosters innovation and agility. Also, this will ensure both safe and high quality code. That culture would again lead to a good product, happy customers and healthy growth as a company.
A programmer who gets to use the tools and methodology they prefer, is also a productive programmer. We have plenty of challenging technical tasks both today and in the future.
As a result of this strategy we try to plan ahead and avoid those last minute features or requests that require the company to drop everything and work late hours to complete the feature. That said, we do respond to client requests every day, and provide solutions often within minutes, but we guide the development of new features to meet our current plans for a safe and sustainable development.
Helped Flowcase set a direction
Being a developer first company also helped us set the direction early on. We made decisions on what technologies to develop on, which features to create (and more importantly what features NOT to create) and how to build and finance the company together with the developers. Also, we decided not to look for external or VC financing, and we decided not to create all the features and products the market or clients wanted in a lean and bootstrapped manner. We decided to be extremely narrow and focused on one task, namely CVs and Case Studies. It would be easy to branch out to HR or CRM features but we have been true to the strategy from day one. Having this focus has allowed us to be the best CV and Case Study management tool out there, but also a great place to work.
Who is developing the Flowcase SaaS tool today?
We have not revoked GIT access from the technical founder/CEO yet. To date, we have only senior developers at Flowcase, but in the coming years we will add more junior or mid-level developers. We have to start with senior developers in order to be ready to mentor and develop junior and mid-level developers. We will always do our best to keep our technology stack up to date, which will require new skills and more developers. We have plenty of cool new features and tools on our roadmap which can be a great challenge to any aspiring programmer.
Learn more on our careers page
As you can read in the intro on our Careers Page you can see for yourself what the CTO thinks about how the company is set up and how we work together. You can also learn about the benefits we offer, our office locations, how to contact us and much more.
