Why and how we created Convex Works

Convex Works is the result of multiple years of trial, error, and experience in the world of tech and business.

Following a shared passion for tech, startups, and business, we (Nikitas and Filippos) got busy working together for the first time in 2019. We built an app that crossed 20K users (Fready), we worked for Viral Loops through its fastest-growing years and helped during its acquisition, and eventually picked up gigs for various million-euro/dollar companies as freelancers.

Individually, we clocked in 1000s of hours gaining expertise in our respective fields. Filippos developed as a senior full-stack developer, and Nikitas in growth marketing and data science. As a team, we bonded over being multidisciplinary. During our freelance years, clients liked how we cared about design in our work and how we could connect our individual work to the bigger picture of the business: a developer who understood his work’s business impact, and a business guy who understood the code behind initiatives.

So, we joined forces to create a partnership and officially work together. We bought the domain convex.works and tried things out. For a year or so, we were the tech guys for everything we could help with. We developed websites, built complete apps, managed ad campaigns, ran content marketing, developed data tracking systems, and everything in between.

Being multidisciplinary was useful. Selling an open-ended list of services was difficult. Saying yes to anything created opportunity costs and made it difficult to pitch and sell to prospective clients, as we were not building a portfolio of anything specific as a company. So, we went to the drawing board to think of what service we repeatedly offered, what we liked doing, what solved a bigger customer pain, etc.

POV: You try to enumerate what business service to focus on. (All columns except project count were merely educated guesses)

Through research and discussion, we saw the biggest opportunity in helping with data infrastructure. It was the biggest client pain, what we liked doing, what we excelled at, and it aligned with the global adoption of AI.

We saw that data could do much more than feed dashboards. An SME could already be doing well and still have no practical way to research an entire market, put years of customer knowledge to use, automate work, and handle data in a compliant manner.

The information existed, and the people understood its value (dashboards). But turning it into something the business could use to get a return was much harder. We wanted growing companies to have the kind of capabilities that large technology companies build entire teams around. We like putting it in the following mission statement:

To give growing companies the data systems of tech giants.

We wanted to take responsibility for collection, distribution, compliance, ownership and enrichment together. That is the approach we want to trademark as Data Systems™.

The most fitting framing to pitch this new service was ads. We wanted to stop managing ads for clients and focus on the infrastructure behind them. Paid advertising had always been very related to data. It combined dashboarding for metrics, feeding information back to the algorithms (CAPIs/pixels), and it was at the centre of global compliance laws that defined what data you could sell/share and how (GDPR/CCPA). On top of that, we had plenty of experience managing 6-figure/year campaigns.

The long-term bet is that each project makes the next one better. We can invest in our own technology and methods, test them in real businesses, and carry what we learn into the next engagement. So you can trust us without having to fund an entire team to recreate it.

We’re happy with what we’ve built so far. The companies on our homepage (always wanted a customer carousel), our case studies, and our published research show the work and the experience and know-how we’ve gained through it. Have a look. There is quite a bit there now.