Ikius is 5 years old.

By Max Ikaheimo

August 15th, 2024

I rarely write anything personal on our blog, LinkedIn, or other social media. Today, I'll make an exception.

Ikius was officially founded in early July 2019 - about 5 years ago. However, as a solopreneur this is a huge a huge milestone for me. And not just for me, but for Ikius as a company. Ikius was the first company I founded and being an entrepreneur has been nothing like I could've ever imagined in a good and a bad way.

Now, Ikius is turning 5 and I wanted to share my journey - more specifically, I want to share the story of how and why I founded Ikius, what my vision was in 2019, where we are now and where we're heading.

Emerging technologies
and emerging opportunities

In 2019 and still to this day, WordPress is the most widely used system for building websites (statistically speaking). 5 years ago, in my previous job, I built websites with WordPress. Around 2018, alternative and better ways to build websites started to emerge. This new way of building the web was called Jamstack (Javascript APIs and Markup), nowadays Composable Web might be the more applicable term to use.

But I digress...

Now I'm not gonna talk about the technical side of things that much in this post, but let's say that I saw this new Jamstack architecture as the future of web development. WordPress was largely outdated, a nightmare to work with technically, full of security flaws, and badly optimized for any serious websites.

This new and improved way of building the web was still an emerging technology, and not a lot of companies or developers were using it for commercial purposes. This is where I saw opportunity to build websites that are faster, more secure, more scalable and generally better than the so called "legacy" systems.

Beyond technology

As this "Jamstack" way of building websites was still kind of obscure, there were no companies specializing in this specific niche. Software and web development is a highly competitive and saturated market, more so internationally.

This is what gave me the idea to found Ikius - maybe, by focusing on this obscure niche Ikius could get a foothold in the industry. Founding a generic, bootstrapped software or web dev company with $0 funding would've been nearly impossible. However by focusing on this specific niche, I was sure I could make it work.

Starting Ikius

In 2019, I was fortunate enough to know a few people that needed websites - and I was able to land Ikius' first clients through personal connections. As a new company with no "legacy" baggage, Ikius had a clean slate to start working on web projects with these new and emerging technologies.

During the same time, the demand for modern web development was indeed surging and I started maintaining the Ikius blog to write about modern web development. These blog posts started picking up wind in Google's organic search results, which resulted in Ikius receivingmore contact requests for building the web with these modern technologies.

COVID-19 and
employee number 1

In late 2019, COVID-19 happened - which accelerated technology innovation and such investments globally. As it happens, modern web development was in high demand during the pandemic as most services were now only accessible through the web.

Thanks to Ikius' SEO efforts and our first client references with modern web technologies there was suddenly more work than I could handle by myself. In 2020, we hired our employee number 1 to help us deliver more projects due to the increasing demand.

Expanding further

In 2020, COVID-19 was still raging on and the demand for modern web development was not slowing down. In fact, spending in digital services was hugely accelerating due to COVID related pressure to invest and innovation in web services.

Being (mostly) an online and remote company since our foundation enabled us to hire and manage our operations despite COVID. At this point, we had clients in the UK, USA and Finland - Ikius had become a global company.

While most of our revenue was coming from service exports, we kept our staff here in Finland. Keeping our operations local was a decision made mainly for the following reasons:

• As we were growing, we wanted to develop a strong local culture and keep compliant with various HR and payroll related regulation and compliance. Having everyone in Finland just makes more sense in the long term.

• Finland is generally known for its high technology culture, which enables us to source and find highly talented people to deliver increasingly complex web projects.

• We've always had a "boutique" approach to our work. Having a local, tightly-knight team enables us to keep our service level exceptionally high and personalized.

Our team at a company retreat.

Ikius 2.0

Since Ikius was founded in 2019, there's been a fundamental change in the way web is developed. Post COVID, the previously obscure and emerging "Jamstack" was now the new de-facto standard for building websites. Frameworks and technologies such as Next.js and Headless CMSs had permanently secured their place as the new standard for building the web.

While my predictions related to the modern web had been mostly right, Ikius was now more than just a "tech agency". Although we've a strong background in technology, we've always been about people and genuine human-to-human connections. At this point we did not feel like our current brand reflected these values and in a sense, we had coincidentally evolved to a new version of Ikius. We wanted to expand.

A new brand

In 2023, we did a full brand renewal as we now had the resources to commission a brand project at a scale that we were happy with. While we hired an external agency to help us get on track with our branding, but later we noticed we were actually quite good with design and branding related things.

Perhaps due to the fact that since our foundation we have always worked closely with designers when working with our clients. Within the last year or so, we've continuously developed our brand to offer design services as a part of our core service offering, which complements what we do quite well.

Hello design

It's always a challenge to stay ahead of the curve in tech. We knew that we needed to take things further to grow as a company and being able to work with even greater projects.

In the recent years, we realized we need to take the big leap and incorporate all-encompassing design as a part of our core services. It was the natural step for us to take in our operations.

In 2024, we hired our first designer. More specifically, Head of Design. We made a decision to expand into design services after our brand renewal. This expansion complements our service roster in addition to the tech related services we had previously focused on. I think this was a instinctive progression as we've evolved from a pure tech agency to more.

While Ikius is still a tech first company, expansion to design complements our core services as most often, design is required when developing anything related to the web.

Where to next?

Starting and growing a company has not been an easy journey. It has also not been an easy time to be an entrepreneur - during Ikius' existence we've witnessed a global pandemic, war in Europe, massive economic turbulence and inflation. Generative AI seems also to make an impact on web development and design. Despite all this we've been able to grow and nurture a global company that I'm truly proud of.

In this industry, I think it's important to remain patient, as the ecosystem can change quickly. On the other hand, being able to adapt to changes quickly in a rapidly evolving market is crucial. Technology trends won't wait for any company lacking behind. Technologies and trends emerge and fade away, being in a constant state of flux. A new trendy technology can become outdated quickly, and be replaced by something new. It's the way it usually goes, so it's crucial to stay ahead of the curve.

Now, we'll continue to concentrate on being an all-encompassing tech agency, that develops and designs modern websites, apps, eCommerce services and custom software. We're definitely gonna aim for growth in the design sector in the coming years, as we really believe we have a lot to offer for that part.

Thank you!

Building a company from the ground up has been nothing I could've ever imagined. I've certainly experienced my highs and lows during during my entrepreneurial journey as you usually do in this line of work.

However, I would not change a day - building something new and contributing to our society is something I would not trade for anything. I'm eagerly looking forward to what the next 5 years will bring - and lastly, I want to thank EVERYONE who have been a part of Ikius' journey, one way or another.