IPD NOW in action: flexible IT for start-up koawach

How do you take your cocoa? How about with guarana in chili, cin­na­mon or plain flavours? Grün­der Daniel Duarte and Heiko Butz have just what you crave. They sell organic, fair-​trade hot choco­lates under the koawach label. Founded in 2014, their busi­ness was an imme­di­ate hit. In the first year-​and-​a-​half, the start-​up grew from zero to 600,000 euros in rev­enue. Today, koawach can be pur­chased at over 7,000 retail­ers, in more than 40 cafés and from the company’s own online shop. Any­one who grows this fast needs flex­i­ble and pow­er­ful IT.

Sim­plify your life

koakult GmbH – that’s the name of the com­pany behind koawach – went with IPD NOW. “We loved the fact that we didn’t have to worry about soft­ware, updates and the whole she­bang. After all, what we wanted to do was sell cocoa,” recalled Heiko Butz. Butz and Duarte had their hands full man­ag­ing their busi­ness day-​to-​day. Ingre­di­ents needed to be ordered, stored, mixed, pack­aged and shipped; rela­tion­ships with sup­pli­ers, retail­ers and cus­tomers had to be estab­lished. At the same time, the two cocoa pio­neers were launch­ing a direct dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nel of their own: an online shop .

Only buy what you really need

“That’s why we were so happy to learn about IP Dynam­ics from a busi­ness con­tact,” remem­bered Daniel Duarte. “They had just launched IPD NOW, essen­tially an IT con­fig­u­ra­torwhere I can put together exactly the IT that I cur­rently need. It comes with 24×7 sup­port and is afford­able, even for small com­pa­nies like ours. IPD NOW was a start-​up like us. It couldn’t have been a bet­ter match.” Butz and Duarte first ordered soft­ware licenses through IPD NOW. “Soft­ware was a real chal­lenge for us. We knew that we needed pro­fes­sional tools. But we also knew that soft­ware would eat up a lot of time: research­ing, com­par­ing prices, pur­chas­ing, installing, updat­ing. And you have to repeat the whole process for each pro­gram,” said Butz.

Your IT grows with you at a key­stroke

Now, koakult GmbH is think­ing about pro­fes­sion­al­is­ing its tele­phony solu­tion. “We get more and more calls every day – far more than one per­son can han­dle alone,” said the two entre­pre­neurs. “It’s com­fort­ing to know that, with IPD NOW, we can eas­ily add new com­po­nents with just a few clicks. Every­thing is up and run­ning quickly, and our staff can start using the new IT right away.”

IPD NOW is avail­able from only EUR 16 per month, includ­ing 24×7 sup­port. Find out­more.

More on this topic: Five traits of mod­ern IT – for every­one from start-​ups to cor­po­ra­tions