The Acquisition of icanmakeitbetter

Our first story is one of acquisition. We tell this tale because acquisitions highlight the tensions between risk versus reward at the heart of every other adoption story. It starts with an entrepreneur, a few slices of pizza, and a dirty napkin. You see, icanmakeitbetter was a tech startup.

In 2011, Paul Janowitz was a young entrepreneur with a growing market research company and an idea. He came to understand that asking folks the best questions, even with excellent effort and world-class analysis, wouldn’t mean anything if you asked the wrong people. He met with Bruce Tate over pizza to talk about ways to automate the process of building research communities to find and engage the best customers. They brainstormed and sketched, and days later icanmakeitbetter was formed. Alas, that first napkin went into the trash because of irredeemable sauce stains.

The freshly merged company had just two programmers, and one worked his first full year from New Zealand. They stood up a product quickly and landed a few whales to feed the company as it grew. They knew the business model would be fluid so they chose a software stack that optimized the developer rapid-prototyping experience. Scalability could come later.

Growing the Business

Over the next few years, the young startup tweaked their platform to hone in on a business model that could better scale. They encountered several technical problems along the way. Their initial idea platform scaled easily because it was built primarily of pages that were easy to cache, and because the traffic moved to the platform organically, with a steady, equally distributed traffic load throughout the day.

As the company moved into new areas (including surveys), performance problems emerged. Complex survey platforms are tricky to scale with caching because the content and structure of each page depends on the answers to questions on previous pages.

Survey platforms also depend heavily on email and push notifications. When a researcher invites tens of thousands of people through an automated invitation, they tend to show up at the same time. Since it’s tough to determine which surveys will have high completion rates, the traffic can be unpredictable. The platform started to show signs of strain under the weight. The caching strategy wouldn’t work anymore, and Bruce started looking for potential solutions.

After attending dozens of conferences internationally over a two-year period, icanmakeitbetter landed on Elixir to solve these scalability problems and to offer more interactive experiences to their users. Elixir was a functional language with strong concurrency and fault tolerance, so it would scale. The fledgling language supported an advanced and readable syntax with excellent metaprogramming, so it would support their highly productive programming environment. The Erlang foundation underneath Elixir gave the team confidence in long-term stability and reliability.

Bruce began to get involved with José, the creator of the language, and other members of the community to help jump-start the libraries, conferences, and publishing that Elixir would need to emerge as a serious language. They hired Elixir’s second committer, Eric Meadows-Jönsson, to give the language some stability. Then, icanmakeitbetter first launched an Elixir chat application blending the concepts of quantitative and qualitative research. When that project proved successful, they then migrated their core survey platform to Elixir and the company started to see benefits trickling in.

The icanmakeitbetter team assumed their association with this new technology would make their company more attractive to potential suitors. Better technology meant better scalability and stability. You’ll soon see this assumption was not necessarily accurate.

The Acquisition

While the technical team worked on the long process of migrating to their new language, the business side of the company was enjoying newfound success with their research communities. At a time when traditional research firms were having trouble growing, icanmakeitbetter grew because they found ways to better engage their customers by providing research communities, leading to a sense of connection and better research.

Others noticed too. LRW is a family of market research companies in an industry going through substantial change. As part of a new growth strategy, they wanted to acquire icanmakeitbetter to compete in a fast-growing space called insight communities. Shaun Collett, their CTO, and his team were responsible for evaluating icanmakeitbetter’s technology stack for business risks.

Then the questions started coming, fast and furious. Initially, Shaun was quite concerned about adopting a new language, based on the difficulty of finding developers and tools to work with it. As a good businessman and experienced CTO, he understood what could happen when good developers adopted leading-edge technologies for the wrong reasons. Let’s hear what he had to say, in his own words:

Bruce:

Can you tell me a bit more about why LRW and ISA were interested in acquiring icanmakeitbetter?

Shaun:

The market research industry is undergoing rapid change. Today’s businesses need to make decisions faster and more iteratively to fuel growth. Community platforms have emerged in the past five to eight years to address this, offering tools and technologies to help clients make more meaningful business decisions in ways previously not possible or which were otherwise cost prohibitive. We knew we were late to the game and to catch up quickly, sought to acquire icanmakeitbetter. The platform was one of the most advanced community platforms in the industry and had great potential to grow even more, especially after looking under the hood.

Bruce:

Through the acquisition process, did you have any concerns with icanmakeitbetter’s strategy to move toward Elixir?

Shaun:

The short answer is “yes.” As a business leader and technologist, I’m always mindful to separate technologies that are simply “cool” with those that create real business value, or present meaningful business risk. I had never heard of Elixir before meeting Bruce and his team. After learning more about it, I thought it had potential to create real business value, but I also had significant concern about how new it was. While promising, new languages come with inherent risks, specifically surrounding people and development speed. I was worried through the acquisition process that if anyone left, we’d have a very hard time backfilling that position in a timely manner. Additionally, I worried about the speed of development, as immature languages don’t give you many packages or “plugs” to get started, which can slow development speed and increase cost. After seeing our Ruby engineers pick up Elixir and experiencing early success building an incredibly successful chat feature, we felt both were worthwhile risks to take on and decided to move forward with the acquisition.

Bruce:

Did the business face any challenges as we proceeded with this migration strategy?

Shaun:

After cutting our teeth with the chat feature, next we tackled a core business feature that was suffering from inherent performance and scalability limitations from our Ruby codebase: our data collection process, our surveys. Our scalability issues were more than just performance. The complexity of our codebase suffocated us. The reality of business is that it doesn’t stop changing, which in fact is a good thing. We knew we had to continue supporting critical business changes while we moved surveys to Elixir. This took longer than we expected, created some angst among business leaders as not as many features could be worked on, and created long weeks for the team, but we got through it, launching a totally new platform roughly six months after start. The most important thing was trust—we leaned on it significantly as we asked business leaders to be patient while we re-laid the tracks under a fast-moving train.

Bruce:

Since migrating the platform, what benefits have you seen?

Shaun:

Sure, we were able to scale, but that value was secondary. More importantly, we could quickly develop and release complex features across our survey platform that the business had been asking for. We couldn’t (or shouldn’t) have built these features on our old Ruby platform, as it wouldn’t have scaled well enough to serve the business, so we felt great that we could finally deliver this. Once the business saw the features and understood that it was the work of the previous six months that enabled this—as well as many other features on our roadmap—to be possible, it created a lot of positive momentum, trust, and support for our work. I’m delighted to say that we’re truly rocking and rolling!

Shaun’s comments show that adoption is more than a technology problem. He had some well-founded concerns about acquiring a company in the midst of transition.

Over the next year, progress slowed. icanmakeitbetter didn’t stop working on the Elixir migration, but the focus was divided across some features they needed to build to stay competitive and maintain growth. As their platform stabilized and gained critical mass, they started to deliver new features at an accelerated rate.

As this story unfolded, Bruce began to think of Elixir in a different light, through the eyes of other early adopters. He spent two years speaking about technology adoption, making it easier for developers who were struggling with older technologies to make a case for Elixir based on the needs of their businesses. In short, he was helping adopters to discover new questions to ask and where to go to find the answers.

Leadership Questions for Early Adopters

As the startup joined the acquirer, Bruce and Shaun began to work together more closely. Bruce invited Shaun to ElixirConf 2016 in Orlando and the two attended other events together. They began to work on the political side of technology adoption, asking themselves:

• How do you fully involve upper management stakeholders at the earliest stages of the decision process?

• Where can you find developers to work on new technologies?

• Where can programmers go to learn about how to write functional, concurrent code?

As you get deeper into this book, you’ll see new questions form about each of these topics. We’ll also interview others who dealt with some of those questions before you.

If this first story highlights the inherent risks of early adoption, the next highlights the rewards. It is the story of Elixir at Bleacher Report.