EN#6 Brotherhood as a key element of SH success, Painful exit from a niche – Callstack example, How SOFTIQ grew with GenAI, What the OSS Engine is in Callstack and Rigby

Grow Your Software House newsletter are methods, GPT tools, analyses, and recordings that help software houses discover their growth engine.

Hi! My name is Maciej Greń, and for 17 years I’ve been helping Software House companies grow. Grow Your Software House is a newsletter with a free section on LinkedIn, expanded here on Substack with paid analyses, knowledge, tools, and videos showing how to stop wandering and start systematically developing your Software House.

In today’s issue:

• (free) Brotherhood as a key element of SH success

• (paid) Exiting the niche where your growth engine operates can be painful – Callstack example

• (paid) GenAI Growth Engine – how SOFTIQ built scalable AI-driven sales in the Public sector

• (paid) What is the Open Source Growth Engine – Callstack and Rigby example

The knowledge shared in this newsletter should be used with caution and at your own responsibility. I frequently borrow phrases from English—please forgive me; I do it intentionally because we use them constantly in our daily work.

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Brotherhood as a Key Element of SH Success

Paul Graham, one of the founders of Y Combinator, emphasized that one of the main reasons for rejecting applications is the fact that a startup has only one founder, though this is not an absolute rule — solo-founders are sometimes accepted, but rarely. Tomek Karwatka recently said something similar in an interview. It’s no coincidence that many of the companies they incubated began in Wrocław. It’s not the beauty of the city, but the proximity of founders that is key. Why is physical proximity so important? Because when things get tough, when intense conversations happen, they need to be built on personal relationships.

Your co-founder can be your wife, a friend, family, or an acquaintance. On the “family photo,” family usually looks best, which is why many people wrongly assume that a co-founder should be a stranger. We often avoid building close, friendly relationships, yet it’s one of the superpowers that matters immensely. A friend is someone who, above all, loves us. Yes, love is a rather dangerous word in business, but those who truly have such a friend in their company know what I mean. This is someone who cares less about money and more about their relationship with you. Someone who will support you through hardships and tell you the honest truth when they see you heading in the wrong direction.

The degree to which such a co-founder is underestimated is, unfortunately, lethal. First, I often see companies entering equity relationships and calling someone a co-founder when there is no real bond with that person. After all, business doesn’t have to go hand-in-hand with “love,” right? At the end of the day, we all want to make money, and that should be enough to keep us together?

Well… the problem is that when the money is less than you expected, or a better opportunity appears for your co-founder to build a better business with someone else — what will keep them with you?

If you have no bond, you don’t enjoy spending time together outside work, and you lack a shared conviction to move in the same direction, then unfortunately situations like this often lead to:

• Negotiations over equity: “or I’ll leave.”

• Pressure to pivot “into something more profitable right now.”

• Expectations for a high salary: “I have other offers, I could leave.”

Sadly, it turns out that what you’re building together depends on an illusory transaction in your co-founder’s mind, an expiry date that is inevitably approaching, and you have no way to “pay,” while carrying a ton of stress.

And what will motivate you to keep working when a cold sweat wakes you up at night and you fight paralyzing thoughts until morning?

These are truly hard moments, almost impossible to go through alone. A co-founder who walks with you through the dark valley and restores your faith is priceless.

Of course, sometimes your co-founder must leave for objective reasons. In my life, I had one co-founder who is still my friend today, though we had to part ways in very difficult circumstances when we both had burned through our savings and naturally couldn’t move forward together. What’s beautiful is that we’re still in touch, and no matter how long we go without speaking, whenever we reconnect there’s always that sense of “brotherhood.”

Having a co-founder with whom you share a deep bond is crucial at every stage of building a company.

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A Co-founder Doesn’t Have to Hold Equity

People who support you and have been “on the bus with you from day one” don’t necessarily have to be shareholders. One of the huge mistakes founders make is assuming that key employees without equity will never be as committed as shareholders, so to fully engage them you need to give them shares. This is a fatal assumption leading to poor decisions:

• Offering equity to key employees who don’t care about shares but value the shared vision, respect, and friendship kills a perfectly functioning relationship and turns it into your constant expectations and complaints: “now you’re a shareholder, so you should do this or that.”

• Brotherhood in a relationship is more important to many people than equity. Undervaluing the potential of brotherhood in working with key employees and inserting managers between you weakens your collaboration.

• Replacing brotherly relationships with purely business ones — “showering” key employees with money, hoping it will motivate them more. What motivates them is working together, not money, which comes and goes.

• Introducing OKRs and other operational systems implemented by external consultants who destroy your partnership by “measuring performance,” ignoring the complex aspects of your prior agreements and a long-standing effective collaboration model built on a deep understanding of your mutual needs.

Key employees need appreciation and a deep connection with the founder. It doesn’t have to be friendship; sometimes admiration, alignment of ideas, and values are enough. This is the case with Elon Musk, who, due to Asperger’s, doesn’t build relationships the same way more relational people do. Through his attitude, dedication, ambition, and charisma, he creates a sense of elitism, mission, and deeper meaning. Many companies lack this, which is why people long to work for Elon’s companies.

A support team for whom being together matters more than the fastest ride in one direction is key. The fact that you’re on the bus together is enough for them, even if the well-equipped bus temporarily becomes an old model. You’ll still be in it together and can’t imagine riding with anyone else.

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When Brotherhood Breaks — 5 Deadly Sins

There are a few situations where a seemingly strong brotherly bond can be quickly severed. Below are things I’ve personally witnessed in my work with companies — the five deadly sins that permanently, sometimes irreversibly, destroy a brotherly bond with a co-founder:

1. Ignoring heartfelt requests — When your co-founder sincerely asks you for something important and you ignore or dismiss it. If they’re asking, they’ve hit a wall. Rational arguments don’t work; they’re appealing to your relationship, hoping you’ll come to your senses. Often it’s a silent cry that gets ignored. In aggressive growth or survival mode, it’s easy to miss such signals, but this systematically kills the relationship.

2. Ordering instead of asking — “I’m the boss here.” Instead of a request, you use the argument of power, authority, or title, forcing your co-founder to do something against their will while ignoring their concerns. This destroys the bond and reduces your co-founder to a task executor.

3. Publicly undermining them — Attacking your co-founder publicly, taking away their sense of self-worth. Public arguments and questioning their competence hurt deeply. I’m not talking about having different opinions on a topic — I mean attacks that wound them.

4. Breaking agreements out of greed — Not fulfilling arrangements with your co-founder despite being able to, acting from a position of strength. Greed can lead you to betray your co-founder. Using your power against them kills the relationship.

5. Going behind their back — Doing things that undermine the very foundation of trust. Your co-founder trusts you and assumes you trust them. If you sabotage their work behind their back to avoid conflict, act inconsistently, or break trust in other ways, they cannot comprehend it. This disappointment and frustration, combined with a lack of understanding of your actions, quickly destroys the relationship.

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Of course, the problem isn’t always you. Your co-founder might be influenced by various voices, thoughts, or fears, leading to emotional imbalance or a drop in professionalism. That may tempt you to take shortcuts — do things behind their back, avoid confrontation or discussion. Remember: in a brotherly, loving relationship with your co-founder, you can simply invite them for bowling, billiards, jogging, PlayStation — whatever you did together when you were close — to evoke those memories and use the bond as a platform to open up. Listening to your co-founder allows you to return to the depth of the relationship and clear the air.

One brutal truth, however, is that this cleansing of the relationship is very hard to achieve when you’re far apart. Physical presence, being together in daily life, is a powerful platform. Founders severely underestimate this, hoping that everything will be fine and that remote co-founding sometimes works. But if you look at the history of companies, you’ll see that co-founders and key employees spend time together daily and have a strong bond. Not because online work is impossible, but because they know their bond builds trust and the sense of “being on the same bus.” That sense gives meaning, strengthens the bond, and adds energy for the daily boring, tedious, sometimes disappointing work.

GenAI Growth Engine – How SOFTIQ Built Scalable AI-Driven Sales in the Public Sector

GenAI is on the lips of practically every business. Everyone looks at their tasks and processes and wonders: “Is this a good candidate for using GenAI?”…