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It is a familiar problem for many companies: moving along with contemporary digital innovations. Many of them want to make the transition to online, but do not know how. The startup Dutch Coding Company helps these companies to take a step in the right direction, as they are a development studio that realizes useful solutions and digital systems.

Several areas of expertise

Bas Schleijpen, Head of Design at Dutch Coding Company, founded the company together with colleague Joris van Rijn. That was during their study in Innovation Sciences at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Both were already working as freelance web developers at that time.

”What struck us most was that we saw many large ICT projects fail,” Schleijpen explains. ”We didn’t have the illusion that we could solve that immediately. But we did see that combining different expertise leads to very good projects. That is the approach of our entire company. We don’t just put programmers in place to solve a problem, we try to involve multiple expertises in a project.”

Keeping the company up to date

These expertise areas help companies to respond to various social innovations, such as making an app or designing a digital database. Dutch Coding Company has therefore started software development for a number of customers. It’s not an easy process, because it innovates almost every day and the number of projects continues to increase, despite a shortage of manpower and time.

According to Schleijpen, keeping their company young plays an important role in the success of Dutch Coding Company. It is a simple solution to keep the knowledge within your sector and within your company up to date. Using software from five years ago would make customer service a lot slower and less secure. At the time, security was not so much of an issue as it was less known about. Now it’s placed first. ”When we design systems now, they are much safer and we also have them tested by competent people. Keeping up to date with every new development is a real challenge, but it is a requirement.”

Complete your study or work full-time?

The financial challenge was not so big for the startup. The founders of Dutch Coding Company needed little starting capital to set up the company and could immediately pick up projects. The company has grown so strong that they have expanded their team to keep up with the large range of projects on offer. Freelancers, designers as well as Business Developers are attracted to ensure the success of their projects. A year ago, we came to the point that the number of assignments was overflowing and we all had to make a choice. The work went so well that we could no longer combine it with our study. The choice between canceling a number of large customers and graduating, or working full-time for our own company, was not easy”, explains Schleijpen. In the end, together with his partner Van Rijn, he chose to work for the company: a decision they do not regret for a moment. Projects such as OMS, a digital system for orders and invoices, the Quality Register, about the quality of eye operations and the app for the introduction week of the TU/e are displayed on their site. The website and app for ‘24 hours in operation‘ (24U) have also been created by Dutch Coding Company.

Larger office

The growth in their company made it possible for the team of Dutch Coding Company to move into their current office and further expand their business here. In the Eindhoven-based co-working space Microlab they have now been renting an office for less than a year, because they had outgrown the Innovation Lab at the TU/e. The TU/e encouraged us to start up our own business, for example by offering this workplace. The fact that we now have our own office promises a lot of good for the future”, Schleijpen concludes content.

Photo’s: Dutch Coding Company