Wow, What a Year…! What we Achieved (so far) & Getting Ready to Tackle the Scaleup Challenges of 2023.
I am a builder. And at the core is the team. At Rocsole, we have created a pandemic child, as most of the team has joined during the past two-three years. And we have learned at a very high pace, learning from mistakes, building extremely good internal work processes, collecting data, and with a dedicated and motivated team continuously improving and pushing our level of training upwards. This year has been filled with ups and downs for us, like any other startup/scaleup. That is part of the game, and I enjoy what we are building and doing together.
This is not a full retrospective; I am always looking ahead and excited about the coming year. But some highlights can be mentioned:
We have proven our technology and business model — having done our first ever true product launches and introduced the subscription model successfully. Our unique critical data and insights matter. We create customer value. It has also resulted in that our sales cycle has been reduced from 300+ days to about 60 days: we work in traditional, conservative industries. Even though several of us have a track record and experience from this business, it still amazes how slowly customers are able to adapt and incorporate innovation to drive operational excellence, improve financial performance and reduce emissions. Over the past 2 years we have grown our customer base from 2–3 customers to more than 30. And our customers are international bluechip companies. We end the year with several new orders from major companies. The change and impact is coming!
We turned 10 years young! We are building a strong reputation in the industry and with peers, which gets noted. We got our team into one modernized location in Kuopio. We have had customer visits, with testing and trials resulting in further approvals and new customers won; we are also in an exciting phase with a customer product development project for a new product where our AI & deeptech know-how is fully deployed…
So what about 2023:
Funding for Growth: Our building is not ready yet — we will secure additional funding to finalize our industrialized product versions, which are scalable and simplified: Good for us, good for the customers and our stakeholders. Investment decisions and funding are tougher to get than a year ago in the venture capital market: our solution will be existing shareholders and some new strategic investors, with whom we have built our business relationship over the past two years.
Strategic Partnering: We cannot build this alone. And it is not just about money: We need to add partners to support our growth strategy — additional hardware product improvements to simplify and reduce costs, get manufacturing partners and establish a strong supply chain. When experiencing growth pains and attempting to cross the chasm, you must focus on the core and develop good strategic partnerships. We are on a good track, but further strengthening is required. Remove any dead weight, and get rid of the chains!
What about the market outlook: process control and operational excellence are critical to secure output and production with good cost control. This benefits not just the industrial customers but also the users, as humans, to have a secure, reliable, and affordable supply of energy, goods, and food.
We have a long list of customer projects to finalize, get operational, and many more to continue to serve — in countries such as Canada, the United States, Brazil, Norway, Qatar, Saudi-Arabia, Germany, Malaysia, and Finland as some examples.
Most important — I am so excited about the team development; we will reach new heights with our small team in 2023; with all the ongoing activities there is a plethora of possibilities to learn and excel.
Without the TEAM, this journey would be impossible to realize — thank you for all the fantastic efforts, work, dedication, and energy to drive the change!
Between a busy year-end, I can enjoy nature and the winter landscape: hiking and skiing. With a wish to also go lake ice skating…
Wish you all a Happy New Year!
/Mika
