Kristoffer Fürst, founder of Limna, explains how his 50-person team built investment-management software that outpaced a competitor 50 times larger. A modern codebase without legacy baggage, a stable engineering team, and non-linear productivity gains let Limna ship features twice as fast.
Chapters
How did Limna manage to build a product that was able to replace the second largest provider of investment management software in the world? It's a question I've never been asked, but I'm going to answer it anyways. The provider we replaced has one directly competitive product and they have 50 times the staff that we do 5.0x our team. It shouldn't be possible for us to replace them. We should not have a chance. On paper, investment management software is usually the most expensive software an investment manager has and it's used through investment workflows in front office, through operations. So the bar, the quality lowest quality bar is actually really high for a system like this. It can't have functional gaps in that case it to all asset classes and all workflows, we pass that gap. Secondly, this client described moving to Limna as an upgrade. So not only were we able to meet the lowest bar, but we also had differentiated value in this case in terms of exception based workflows. So how did we build a product with 2% of the resources that could be described as an upgrade versus the second largest investment management system provider in the world? There are three main reasons why. The first reason is that productivity doesn't scale linearly with team size. In engineering teams, about a 5x team size produces about 2x of the output. So already from there there is a 4 to 5x difference, not 50x difference between us and this competitor. The second reason is legacy. Our code base is built on modern best practices. We have made no acquisitions. It's a pure that's the ice cream truck. Anyways, for this reason I would estimate that we can actually move about 5x faster. The third reason is that we only have top engineers on our team. We have close to zero attrition in the team and the quality bar to become part of it is really really high. That also means that the team members, they lift each other and this is hard to quantify. My best guess would be this is about the 2x. I think that's conservative but about the 2x difference. So all in all, adding up these three reasons, I think we're actually able to move twice as fast as this competitor that is 50 times our size.
