Visioncraft CEO Gunnar Obolenski and Head of Technology Ahti Nurme talk about how even the smallest teams can create innovative products and do big things.

Visioncraft was spawned from a company called Levercode and has been offering software development services since 2019. In the space of just a year, it has grown from a 14-strong team to one of almost 30. The team is international in nature, with six different nationalities represented among its members. The company’s turnover in Q4 2021 was more than 600,000 euros, while its profit for 2020 was almost 80,000 euros.

How, in your view, is Visioncraft doing?
Gunnar: Its development at the moment is based on internal synergy. Within our team, we’re able to cover a range of business processes, from product development to user support. We’ve been growing all the time, and life’s shown that there’s demand on the market for what we’re doing. That’s what led to us bringing the work we’d been partially outsourcing entirely in-house and taking on everything that was being developed outside of the company. That’s what gave us our big push forward in terms of our development. When we first started, we didn’t have a single in-house developer. Ahti was the first one who joined us. Now we’ve got more than 10 working for us day to day who need managing. That’s where our development’s sprung from.

What’s having the biggest impact on you at the moment in the broader economic environment?
Gunnar: What our competitors are doing, as well as recruitment and salary pressure. Since development’s linked to products – and we have a lot of financial products – then legislation affects us as well of course, especially when it comes to virtual currencies, which are only just finding their place in the grand scheme of things. Some are for them, some are against them, and at the state level, they’ve yet to decide where they stand in regard to how transactions should be carried out on platforms. And given what’s going on at the moment, what complicates things if you’re an international business is having partners on both sides of the dividing line in the war. That’s impacting on us as it is almost everyone else, and we’re having to rethink things as we go along. So that’s the economic environment we’re operating in at the moment.

Could you give us some specific examples of how you’ve had to adapt?
Gunnar: We’re only just starting to adapt, really. But the first thing we had to learn to live with was the pandemic – everyone had to adapt to that. There were companies that weren’t used to working remotely every day and didn’t do online meetings, so just reorganizing the way they worked was a big thing for them. Your relationships with your clients can suffer if you can’t speak to them in person. If everyone’s just a face on a screen, the warmth you once enjoyed with them tends to cool off sooner or later. There’s less chit-chat and more specifics, which is great in a way since it saves time. But if you try and put yourself in your client’s shoes, think their thoughts, it’s incredibly hard to focus through a screen. You come up with a lot more innovative ideas when you’re talking or brainstorming in the same room than when you do it online. All that’s part of adapting. And then of course, as I mentioned, there’s salary pressure. There’s a huge demand in the IT sector, and you have to keep up with it.
Ahti: Where the conflict in Ukraine’s concerned, I think the problem we’re facing is the same one as every other company – the uncertainty it’s led to. People’s confidence has taken a knock, and like it or not, that’s affecting their work. Since people spend most of their day at work, then inevitably that’s an issue we have to deal with as well, offering people help where we can. Luckily our parent company was pretty far-sighted on that front. Everyone was offered those options before things kicked off in Ukraine.
Gunnar: The whole ‘soft values’ thing is much more under the microscope in the IT sector than it is in others – particularly how to create, and guarantee, a good working environment. How motivating a workspace is doesn’t depend on who offers free snacks and drinks or how many ping-pong tables there are in the office. Those sorts of things are run of the mill these days. Supporting mental health also means, for example, looking out for people’s physical health. We offer our team extra health insurance, and they can choose for themselves what they use it for – whether it’s just a massage or something more serious like the sort of psychological support the company or the head of the team isn’t qualified to provide. Of course, we talk every day, but we have to look ahead and be ready to face other complicated situations so that it becomes a logical part of the work process. Just about every company offers sports bonuses, but in order to get your team using them, you yourself have to do everything you can to get them moving. Keeping an eye on people’s physical and mental health is something that needs to be enabled and promoted, and the team needs to be given the chance to make those choices themselves. No one knows better than you do what you want or need.

What’s the niche you fill that sets you apart from other software companies?
Ahti: Visioncraft isn’t your classic software development company. We started down that path from the other end, if you like, from product development. The know-how we needed for software development came later. The software projects we’ve worked on so far have all stemmed from an idea, which has then evolved into a business model and only then does the product itself take shape. I’d call Visioncraft more of a digital product development company myself.

Do you only get approached with new ideas, or do companies come to you looking to update or improve existing things as well?
Gunnar: Both, and both are equally important. If you look at the start-up scene, where ideas are built from the ground up, then naturally starting with a vision and not knowing where it’ll take you is part and parcel of working in the industry. But these days it’s more common for companies to look to improve, say, user-friendliness through digitalization, to find better ways of producing results from within their business model, to increase speed or convenience or profit, and save time on the functioning of processes. Optimization, expanding something, adding functions to a product – all boost user convenience. Pushing forward with existing ideas is more common than starting from nothing. That said, developing things from scratch is a challenge we tend to relish more. You see the developers’ eyes light up every time they have to build something from nothing. That way they’re involved in every phase. No one’s done any market research, nothing’s been mapped, you don’t have to jump ship halfway through when you’ve painted yourself into a corner in your excitement and need a technological workaround. We want to be there working alongside the client from the get-go.
Ahti: The majority of our team are product leads, and they’ve developed all of the products in our portfolio as if each and every one of them were its own start-up. This means they’re very independent, and that their skills and experience even cover the areas that don’t really fall under the banner of product development. They can see the bigger picture.

Do the digital products that get developed in cooperation with your clients remain part of your portfolio or become the clients’ own?
Ahti: Normally what we do is set up a separate company for each product, which we then carry on managing. At the moment our developments can basically be divided into two groups: short-term projects, where existing products are taken further; and longer-term products, to which functions are added over time depending on how many users the product has or how many products are added to it. Some of our products have already started forming their own little ecosystems of sorts since they all work together.

Do you have any clients who’ve been with you since you set up the company and who’ll be sticking with you for the foreseeable future?
Ahti: Yes, and even some who’ve been with us since before we started up, who came with us from Levercode.

So who are your clients, your target group?
Ahti: We focus on financial products, virtual currency in particular, including cryptocurrency.
Gunnar: Virtual currency is forward-looking digital money, basically. The word ‘crypto’ is often a red flag to a lot of people since they associate it with Bitcoin. But we’re talking about virtual currencies more broadly, like blockchain and other services based on the tech that underlies them. The world’s started making more of a beeline towards virtual currencies. Everyone’s looking for alternatives, especially countries whose official money is losing value. They’re looking for new ways to trade. It’s just a matter of time until people realize there’s no point trying to hold back the tide of virtual currency. They’ll have to accept that the fundamental control that’s currently in the hands of banks and states is transferring into people’s hands and that all of the products and services we consume are under users’ control. The question is when people start to trust it and view it as secure. If banks or states give some sort of guarantee, then who guarantees these sorts of products? If we start replacing one form of currency with another, what’s there to guarantee it? The task of software firms in that context is to enable traders and companies to become part of that new world and to offer their clients a variety of means of payment. And one of those means is a virtual currency. You can still go about things the old way if you want to, but now you have more choices.

What sort of digital products have you been able to create for virtual currency?
Ahti: One side of things is maintaining virtual currencies, so for example digital wallets, payment solutions – which is to say how to transfer money from one person to another – and payment cards. We’ve even come up with an ATM solution. But since we’re still dealing with money, then it comes with a KYC verification solution as well. Everything depends on what services we need so that transactions with virtual currencies are possible in the first place.

More and more blockchain systems are appearing on the scene. Does that mean a never-ending supply of clients for you?
Gunnar: Touch wood! Our role is to create an overall picture where all the pieces of the puzzle fit together and work together. And if we’re talking about financial products, then there’s no getting around or away from identification. That’s our solution – not selling stuff a bit at a time, but as a fully integrated concept.

How do you stand out when competing internationally?
Gunnar: That starts, at least in one respect, from how competent you are at what you do. We know Estonia’s already got a bit of a head-start on a lot of other countries when it comes to digital development. Because we didn’t have any special systems in place before, we started from a clean slate and were able to build everything up based on the latest technology. That’s given us loads of competence most other countries can’t offer. We’ve been lucky enough to be right at the heart of that, which is why we’ve been able to trade on our reputation as a digital state. That’s where the relationships of trust we enjoy have stemmed from.
Ahti: To come back to creating innovative products with a small team for a second, because I had the honor of being there at the birth of Visioncraft I can tell you that what we were doing three years ago was very homespun. To me, it seems that because Estonia’s so small and everyone wants to come up with world-changing ideas, then in a sense that’s a really big advantage for us. We’ve gotten used to doing big things with very little. That gives us a competitive edge – we don’t need a huge team in order to develop products. We try to work out, using as few resources as possible, whether everything works and then act accordingly.
Gunnar: The formula for success lies in having the right people, not lots of people. If you put together a team who brings all sorts of skills to the table, and can deal with anything, then you’ll make progress a lot sooner. We’re used to making snap changes based on our clients’ wishes, and our development process isn’t the lumbering kind that drags its feet, that stops us from doing things, and has us asking whether we can do this or that or when we’ll even get a decision on something. Decisions are made pronto, which gives us an advantage and the sort of flexibility that helps save the client both time and money. Less talking, more doing.

You’re aiming to become the number-one company in your sector. How will you go about it?
Gunnar: Our aim is to offer our clients as much value as possible. The work you do has to be high-quality in order for your development to be consistent and sustainable.

What’s the next big thing on your bucket list as a company?
Ahti: We’ve just spoken to everyone in the company about the fact that everything we’ve done so far has been about other people’s wishes and that we’ve reached a point now where we can start making our own products. It turns out a lot of our team are interested in the NFT field, which is really popular at the moment. If someone came up to us today and said, “Look, I’ve got this cool NFT solution that isn’t just about making money but will actually make a change in the world”, our team’s eyes would light up. I think there’s good reason to assume NFTs will follow the same sort of trajectory as cryptocurrency. The world just has to get used to the fact that NFTs aren’t about cheating people out of money, but have long-term value.
Gunnar: With cryptocurrency, it took more than 10 years to shake off the speculative stigma that was attached to it and reach a stage where we could use it to consume actual services. My guess is that it’ll be the same with NFTs. Everyone’s still caught up on the whole monkey art thing, but come back in a couple of years’ time and we’ll be talking about other things related to it.

What have been the biggest obstacles you’ve faced in the projects you’ve taken on so far? How did you overcome them?
Ahti: One of the biggest hurdles generally is how to put a bunch of different products together when we have several development teams both in-house and outside the company, plus a number of project managers. Like, how do you get four product leads and three project teams all singing from the same song sheet so that the functioning solution you need is ready a month later? Take Escrow, one of our products, with which you can put virtual currency in a deposit so that you have the buyer on one side, the seller on the other, and a person or institution in between them who says whether the seller should get their money and whether they’ve handed over their goods to the buyer. Like a sort of arbitrator.
Gunnar: You need that to boost people’s sense of security. Say the question comes up as to whether a product was dispatched and received. Person A says they sent it on its way, and Person B has already paid for it, but it never arrives. That’s when you need to create a security product, a ‘central bank’ if you like, where both confirm that Person B got the goods. The money’s only released to Person A when Person B confirms they got what they paid for and it met their expectations. With ordinary payments, the law states very clearly what both parties have to do. But with virtual currencies, a lot has to be divined from non-existent regulations, as it were. How do you ensure that the environment is safe for both the buyer and the seller? Providing a technological product that works is one thing, but the legislative role in the whole process is quite another.

What else have you come up with that’s gone out into the world and found use?
Gunnar: It’s financial products that have world-changing potential. There are countries that haven’t managed to create a reliable trading environment with their own ordinary money. Our job is to establish those sorts of environments in countries where innovative new solutions that will help resolve the issue are welcomed. There aren’t trustworthy trading environments in all countries yet, especially outside of Europe. By taking our knowledge and products to them, we can change the world.
We’re always open to new ideas and projects in start-up format as well. If you’ve got an idea but don’t quite have the skills or knowledge to implement it, come to us! We can work on it together. The tiniest spark of an idea can lead to big, amazing products and services.

Are you planning to expand your team further?
Gunnar: There’s definitely room for more development and design people on the team. Boosting user convenience is what we need more resources for at the moment. If an idea has good prospects, we’ll hire more people in order to get it done.
Ahti: We’re not really on the lookout for specific skills, because you can always learn them. We tend to look for certain types of people who’ll work well as part of the team. That said, they need to be really independent because our entire company operates along start-up lines. Our people are divided up into a number of teams. Other key qualities are dedication and a real interest in the field we work in. And since chaos sometimes reigns in our company, then the people who work for us have to be capable of making decisions for themselves that are most important at the time.