In times when businesses are finding it hard to expand their customer base, Stellic has been incredibly fortunate to experience the opposite. We’ve doubled our institution base just in the last year and are nearing our reach to 1,000,000 students! This has led to an all-important question: How is Stellic going to handle all this growth? This letter outlines my response to this question. It is addressed to our employees, investors, advisors, and prospective partners, but most importantly, to our current valued partners who remain the key drivers of our growth.

I am aware higher ed is filled with stories where a “promising software company couldn’t deliver on the promises”. Institutions frequently use the phrase “burnt by past experiences”. So I spoke to founders of those referenced companies and learnt from their experiences. I also spoke with leaders of some of the most successfully scaled companies in the world. Those insights led us to build our scaling strategy with four key components: Principles, Team, Product and Operations.

Principles

It all starts with clarity in priorities: Delivery over Growth. I shared that principle explicitly in our Partner Summit last Fall. I emphasized it in our board meetings which include our impact-focused investors who are 100% onboard. I now repeatedly mention it in our team meetings every week and have started to hear other team members reference this principle in discussions too. The principle is applied across the org, but here are just a couple of examples where this is influencing our actions:

1. All 3 founders are spending near-100% of our time on delivery: talking to current partners and building the engine, teams and product to support delivery. Usually, one founder is focused on sales. At Stellic, that hasn’t been the case lately.
2. Marketing resources are channeled towards customers too. We are helping them build launch kits, welcome videos, elevate student & advisor voices, etc. This is also unusual for a company of our size.‍

The beauty of principles is that a founder doesn’t have to be in a room to make a call. So I expect many decisions made independently across Stellic that follows this simple guide: Delivery over Growth.

Team

Our goal has always been to match the team growth to the stage to the company. This has resulted in a few key developments in recent months:‍

Our goal has always been to match the team growth to the stage to the company. This has resulted in a few key developments in recent months:

Let’s start with delivery team. Despite us having 3x more active implementations right now, we have expanded our implementations team proportionately. In fact, today we have fewer onboardings per project manager than we did a year ago. We intend to keep this ratio intact. More implementations = More project managers.

We are also reshaping our entire Partner Success org by moving from generalist roles to a little more specialists roles. Instead of one role doing everything (project management, managing live accounts, support, invoicing, etc.), we are introducing 4 dedicated arms of partner success: Onboarding (i.e. Project Managers), Content Builders (i.e. curriculum and pathway coders), Success (i.e. Account Management for Live Accounts) and Experience (i.e. Support and Ops). We are expecting this to bring focus to each of these areas.

The trend of specialized teams has expanded to technical teams as well. We have a Site Reliability team dedicated for uptime management. We are building an SIS-focused team too so we have in-house experts for each major SIS.

We have also intentionally introduced diversity in the team. We now have folks from higher education, top consulting firms, edtech, startups, OPMs, etc. We hope this will bring different, valuable perspectives in solving scaling challenges as we grow.

The three of us, being first time founders, we're learning on the job and believed the growth was outpacing our learning speed. So we have hired incredible leaders in the past few months who have seen growth much faster than ours at companies absolutely loved by users. Vishwa, our Product leader, came from Epic where he was an early employee and grew the platform fast to enable 10M kids read books every month. Casey, our Operations leader, came from Calm where he joined as 15th employee and grew the app to 100M downloads. These leaders are helping Stellic build growth engines that are world-class. At least a third of my time this year will be spent on hiring and onboarding additional leaders fit for our stage.

Product

As a product-first leader, I naturally incline towards solving problems using modern technology. Just in the past few months, we have introduced new products and features to match our growth. Here are 3 examples:

• We were receiving requests for too many system changes so we developed an Admin Panel that will allow super-admins to make these changes directly. Just in the last couple months, this new product has enabled 225+ config changes. In the past, these would have been 225+ tickets that would have consumed our engineering resources.
• We were receiving requests for all kinds of custom data reports that institutions were asking for. We revamped our data reporting framework so users (admins, advisors, or anyone else with the right permissions) could run those reports directly.
• We saw consistent patterns in user trainings around the Requirement builder. So we are now redesigning the editor to minimize need for training. We expect more admins to independently build program requirements as the experience gets more friendly and reassuring - reducing dependency on us.

In hindsight, these enhancements would always be there but as I say: we are constantly learning. And I am told curiosity > maturity 🙂

It is worthwhile mentioning that our focus will continue to be on working on these “non-cool” things: admin features, platform stability, design improvements, etc. This means that we would slow down (but not completely stop) new features for a short while - excluding new features needed for delivery (i.e. launch blockers). It is a hard call but we believe it’s the right one.

Thankfully, the modern infrastructure of the platform works for 100,000+ students campus so that hasn’t been a significant focus for us in our growth plans.

Operations

Finally, we looked at our partner onboarding journey and improved the operations to adhere to our principles and support the growth:

• Deal Review: We are now reviewing each deal very closely before signing a contract. In the early days, we would say yes to a lot more things than we do now. Can we actually do things the campus is asking us to do? Is the campus ready for a project like Stellic? These are the questions we are deliberately evaluating and helping the campus evaluate too. In case you are wondering: Yes, we have said no to schools who we thought weren’t a fit at the time they reached out. Yes, we lost that revenue but I truly believe that those schools appreciated that candor and may one day come to us when we+they are ready.
• On-sites: Most of our foundation was set during COVID and we didn’t know how amazing on-sites are. Decisions required so much back and forth in an async environment. We have recently introduced on-sites during implementations and they have been game changers. Recently, we did all of integration with a partner within 3 days - a process that sometimes takes several weeks. Resources on both ends can now be used for other projects.
• Support (Post Go-Live): We are significantly investing in improving our support arm to keep up with our growing number of Live Partners: hiring dedicated team members, adopting support tools, improving documentation, etc. We will also continue to meet key stakeholders on campus at regular cadence after going live. Regardless, we will keep measuring partner satisfaction to ensure that partners get the same support experience as they once did when we were small. If there is dip in these numbers, we’re committed to act fast and respond.

Conclusion

There you have it: our plans and actions to respond to our fast growth. I know this is a critical point in the long-term trajectory of a company. How we perform here will define Stellic and its impact across higher ed. Therefore, we are taking this very seriously. I am sure we will make mistakes as we go through this phase but I request you all to keep the feedback loop open (like you always have done) and hold us accountable. I have learnt most of what I know from you all and I am looking forward to continuing to do so.

I will wrap up by sharing a sweet fact: Back when we were students, our goal with Stellic was just to make a difference at Carnegie Mellon (7,500 undergrads). Today, our reach is nearing 1M students. That is a humbling experience. Now, the next dream is to serve 10 million students across the world. If we keep learning, if we keep our priorities right, if we keep building the team correctly, if we keep innovating our product and services, and if we keeping getting the love from higher ed - we might just get there.