Scaling LastBasic, where to go from here

Outside the office of LastBasic, sitting on a terrace on Santa Engracia Street in Madrid, two partners discuss the future of the company. “Are we a traditional engineering consultancy?” or “Are we a platform?” asks the COO to the CEO.

Photo by Kushagra Kevat on Unsplash

“Do we want to be able to scale this idea in a meaningful way, or will we fall into the trap of chasing sales to just gain more users before we are ready for primetime?”. This is the question the partners ask everyday as LastBasic grows as a company and as a service. Everyday is a challenge of balancing new sales leads with the development of a robust and optimised platform to handle more users and more projects. Like most disruptive tech startups, the founders struggle to keep up with limited resources, but they realize their traction is growing and they feel the sense that they are providing significant value to their customers and are beginning to see the vision of democratising hardware becoming a reality.

Company Vision:

To become the global meeting point for technology interaction and creation. Where we will be a marketplace of tech trends, an exchange point of concepts and ideas, and a technical support ecosystem for entrepreneurs, SME’s, and corporations.

Company Mission:

We are on a mission to transform our industry through a combination of our design-to-delivery platform and increasing access to innovation and talent for our clients and experts; who come to LastBasic from around the world to collaborate and create.

What is LastBasic?

LastBasic was founded in 2017 with the vision to make product development and physical prototyping more accessible and affordable to the general masses. Through the optimisation and standardisation of traditional development processes, LastBasic is disrupting the hardware and product development industry through aggressive pricing options for customers and opening up the industry to a wider net of an addressable market. LastBasic utilises an agile global workforce to build interdisciplinary product teams quickly and provide their customers with world class designs and prototypes at a fraction of the cost to its competitors. The business model works through the utilisation of the sharing economy, the creation of a robust digital platform that easily connects inventors with designers, engineers, and suppliers, and a digital coaching service that allows any inventor with a good idea to make something ready for market or launch.

LastBasic’s primary operating goal is to provide the necessary tools to scale up the company with a targeted number of active projects on the platform and a targeted number of active experts contributing to the community. The pricing packages are straightforward and easy to understand, and the platform consolidates many traditionally messy process steps into a more modern and streamlined approach to product development decision making. The final deliverable to the customer is a physical prototype, which most customers use to sell their idea to potential investors or grow their brand. LastBasic delivers not only a physical prototype to its users, but also an education in product development and a connection to the broader industry community.

LastBasic has identified their product market fit, acquired some initial seed investment, and has successfully coached a dozens of customers to achieve their hardware prototyping aspirations. They are ready to scale up and they are ready to take all their learnings from bootstrapping the experience with each client and turning a tailored customer service into a scalable automated one. This is a challenge. This is a challenge when it comes to product development but it is a clear line to scalability and reducing overhead costs to developing new products. Scaling up LastBasic will come with a successful roll out of the digital platform the LastBasic team is developing and preparing to show the world. The digital platform provides three major features that will help LastBasic achieve scale.

Qualifying Experts: As new projects come onto the platform qualified technical experts are matched quickly and effectively per project. The LastBasic platform identifies the technical risks of each project and proactively notifies an expert of an available project to join. As the expert user base grows with diverse backgrounds, in order for LastBasic to scale the system it needs to correctly identify these qualified experts to expedite the team building process and ensure successful projects.

Automating Product Development: The Platform is a tool for inventors and experts to collaborate digitally. The LastBasic Platform is also a service that educates the client how and when to make critical product decisions while facilitating development conversations between the experts and clients. All these conversations and decisions are consolidated into one spot and each step continues to build a story for how the idea came to life, and a clear reminder of how product decisions were made. In order to significantly reduce overhead costs, each step needs to follow a rigorous process to streamline typically messy decision moments into intuitive and easy ones. The below image shows the LastBasic process map as a reference. The LastBasic team continues to identify areas that can be automated now and which could be automated in the future with improved platform functionality. Currently the team is testing the automation of the feedback and decision making process for the client to shorten a typical 2 week process down to 1-2 days as an exampl

LastBasic contests phases

Platform Connectivity: LastBasic connects the dots of product development. The platform approach allows relationships between engineers, manufacturers, and inventors to happen at an accelerated pace. Scaling this part of the company is a significant challenge and requires robust partnerships. A healthy ratio of engaged suppliers and experts to active projects needs to be maintained in order for the business model to scale. Finding the right partners to scale with is a critical step to push LastBasic from a start-up to a scale-up.

Scaling LastBasic requires continued investment in the backend service and platform that allows the process to run. Success will come from the continuation of building the MVP while always giving their customers and experts value to bring them back on a daily basis. Controlling the number of sales in order to build scalable operations now will benefit the companies overall growth in the future. Step by Step, LastBasic will continue to connect the dots to make product development easier and more accessible to the world.

Interested in becoming a partner, investor, or are you in need of help making your tech product a reality? Come say hola, ¿qué tal? and join us at LastBasic.