was founded in 2014 by Adam Broadway in San Francisco,
I’ve been fortunate enough to be surrounded by truly breathtaking tech talent living in San Francisco. This
place is a melting pot full of diverse, intelligent, and entrepreneurial innovators who continue to push how
we engage with the world we live in. The ideas, problem-solving, disruption and execution of these ideas into
real products, services and ecosystems has made Silicon Valley the tech hub of the modern world.
However, for every successful tech company out there, there are 9 failed start-ups.
I’ve seen my fair share of great ideas failing to gain sustainable traction and great people failing to bring
their ideas to market. The heartbreaking emotional, physical, and financial impact that these failures have
can’t be underestimated, not to mention the loss to society as a whole that just one of these failures might
have had, if they’d been able to ‘cross the chasm’ into “success” (however “success” might be measured).
A common problem I hear from many failed start-up founders and teams are issues with performance, reliability, and scalability of their product or service - which done
wrong had devastating impact on their Customer Experience (CX), causing their demise, when in all other
respects their business models and core business team were solid.
When it comes to the technical creation of an innovative or ground-breaking business solution, many
application developers just don’t possess the skills to deal with devops tooling and there was an enormous
learning curve to becoming proficient while it also removed their time and expertise from building their
application.
Start-ups that were able to secure seed capital went on to spend an enormous percentage of their funding
trying to get their devops and technical solution right and still had lackluster results, technical-debt,
shiny-object-syndrome by their developers, to the point of running out of capital before even getting to user
acquisition.
Similarly, Enterprise companies, who have wanted to innovate and begin working on horizon 2 and 3 of their
business longevities, would also burn through vast amounts of discretionary budgets, with little or no ROI on
those ‘long-term-growth’ bets.
Our goal was to build a flexible platform that didn’t limit the creativity of peoples’ ideas and had the
reliability, performance, security and scalability of an enterprise grade devops technology solution out of
the box.
To test the flexibility of the framework, we decided to focus first on some
of the most complex types of business models and so marketplaces became the first challenge platformOS would
solve. Not just due to the various technical challenges that a Many-to-Many business model introduces, the
technological requirements or the architecture of the technology, but most importantly the customer experience
overall.
We wanted to understand how you bought sellers together with buyers, multi-payment payouts, cancellation and
fees, complex shipping, who answers the phone, how do you follow up, how does insurance work, what about
digital products and services provided over video and taking on the entire end to end process of how to build
a marketplace business and not just the technology.
This led to the creation of desksnear.me, a premier marketplace for global
workspaces from New York to London, Istanbul to Shanghai, Sydney to San Francisco, and helping professionals
find workspaces that fit with their needs anywhere in the world.
DesksNear.Me enjoys top ranking in Google Organic Search results for every keyword combination that it aims
for. These learnings have also fed into the SEO superiority of the platformOS solution.