“I'm really not a salesperson”: vNEXT co-founder on development firm’s CRN Fast50 success

Software developers Has Altaiar and Chris Melinn are living proof that a background in sales isn't essential for business success.

In 2019 they started the Melbourne-based Microsoft software development house vNEXT, which grew its revenue by 155 per cent in the 2023 financial year to $5.1 million, claiming fifth place in this year’s CRN Fast50 - its second Fast50 appearance.

More than half of the firm's revenue came from enterprise and state government clients, and its top verticals were finance, utilities and mining and resources.

CRN Australia spoke to Altaiar about vNEXT's rapid growth. 

“vNext coming into this point has been really all organic,” Altaiar said.

“My background is as a developer, so I'm really not a salesperson. I don't have an MBA, we don't have a business plan, we don't have forecasts or KPIs or things like that.”

“I think we've been very lucky. We didn't set out to select particular market segments, it just so happened that we have had a lot of success in energy, in mining, in finance.”

“There is a huge amount of change that's happening in all of these domains. There is a lot of demand and very big challenges with a lot of investment [compared to] historical levels.”

“If we were relying on customers that are in retail, I think we might have a different outlook and different projects pipelines.”

Altaiar attributed vNEXT's growth to partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks and GitHub.

The company has advanced specialisation in app modernisation on Azure and in the 2023 financial year executed a new go-to-market motion with Microsoft that enabled it to close more deals.

“We've seen scenarios where Microsoft would bring us in front of other customers and they say, ‘look, you really need to talk to these guys, they have done a really good job helping a very similar organisation solve similar problems,’” Altaiar said.

“We have a number of credentials with Microsoft; so the more credentials you have, the more access you have into the different programs and investments and other programs within Microsoft.”

“All these things helped us, and working with the Microsoft specialists seeing us help certain organisations, that gave them enough confidence to put us in front of other organisations.”

Another reason for vNEXT's growth has been making "some of our solutions and our processes more repeatable, so we can help our customers more efficiently."

“We adapted our go-to-market, especially around services like AI, cyber security or secure coding practices, data analytics, and we have created our own frameworks to help customers bootstrap and get started quickly.”

“That was one of the changes that really helped us in having a great year.”

vNEXT has doubled its headcount every year over the last two financial years.

“Trying to grow at a disrupted size requires finding a lot of great people, and we are very selective about the people that we hire,” Altaiar said.

“We have a very unique hiring process, so that's been a little bit challenging, getting the right people at the right time.”

“But we've managed to overcome that in finding our own creative ways. We [created] some processes to streamline things, we've tried to have incentives that kick in early and incentivise people to continue the hiring pipeline with vNEXT.”

“Once we hire people, we tend to retain good talent, because we have a number of initiatives that keep people engaged and happy and productive.”

Altaiar said establishing formal HR processes for its team of 25 will be a key challenge for vNEXT as the company continues to grow.

“We do see the business growing by another really strong rate this year,” he said.

“I think that the challenge for us now is really trying to not only hire great people, but also trying to create that next level of leadership.”

“As the size of the team grows, we need to have more processes to support everybody in the business and make sure that everybody's coming on this journey and continuing to deliver the same level of quality to our customers.”