Innovate and scale up.

Results

of basic platform

without fuss

to industry leader

with optimized ease of use

Tech stack

Used tools & technologies

In 2013, an initiative started by three roommates: a student, a marine and a lead developer. Their idea was to sell Bitcoins, because at the time there was only one Bitcoin company in the Netherlands that charged a 30 percent margin.

“We figured that if we were good to the customer, we would get good reviews,” Julian said. And that turned out to be a good strategy. “On the first day we sold a thousand Bitcoins already and then thirty to forty thousand a day. Then we had to decide quickly: would we go full steam ahead or stop?”

Challenge

Professionalization through rapid growth

Anycoindirect grew from three to 50 people in a short time, including IT Rockstars.“With us, Rockstars are just as much Anycoiners; they also have heart for the business,” Julian says.

This growth called for a professionalization effort. “Bitcoin is one of the fastest growing, volatile industries. Competitors are constantly updating themselves. In addition, there are many new companies and thus many hijackers on the coast. If you do nothing, your value falls away.” Thus Julian underscores the importance of innovating.

Anycoin’s old platform was not modular. That made it difficult to test and developers were in each other’s way when working on code at the same time. In addition, with over half a million customers, they needed to increase scalability and wanted to further optimize the ease of use. With a new platform, they got this done.

Solution

Monolithic system

In the form of event sourcing, Anycoindirect stores data by event. “If someone changes his or her name, this is logged,” Julian explains. “This allows us to see the changes well by week, for example. We can also detect bugs better.”

In doing so, all events are encrypted. “Data modification is not possible. That’s good for a fair, reliable, auditable system.”

The company expanded on the ease of use with more information in the roadmap. “At each step there are questions that most people wonder about with the answers. The customer benefits from not having to google.”

Anycoindirect also switched to a monolithic system: “Now we can update only the pricing API without affecting other parts of the site,” Julian explains. “In addition, it takes the developers less time, which in turn contributes to productivity and thus business.” Furthermore, this allows scalability to be adjusted per site component as needed.

result

New platform

Julian has been able to make this new platform a reality thanks to his team of developers, including several IT Rockstars with more specific knowledge of RockSOLID software. “This is how we buy in knowledge that makes our own team richer: they learn a lot from Rockstars,” says Julian. “This contributes to the quality of our regular people. They gain new information, knowledge and insights this way.”

Julian sees that many project leaders struggle with innovation choices. “Many you hear say, ‘we need to go to the Cloud,’ but don’t think beyond the fancy term. They don’t consult with programmers, even though they are the ones who know about it.”

Making decisions together with your people is Julian’s advice. “In doing so, stay close to who you are and what you need.” But also, “Dare to take risks and dare to go along with new technology”.