Where our story started
Cybersecurity company Phished, based in Belgium, is on a mission to eliminate human error as a cause of cyber incidents. As the threat of cyber attacks grows globally, the company protects organisations through employee training that combines phishing simulations, awareness insights, and an educational platform.
With their automated phishing simulation tools and through education on phishing attacks, the company works towards achieving zero incidents caused by human error. Having reached over 100 employees with a 20-person product and development team, Phished now faces the defining challenge of scaling beyond startup mode. The company is strategically evolving its structure and strategy for sustained growth as a mature organisation.
When you bring in madewithlove at the right moment, they deliver incredible value. They've helped us build a mature, reliable team and a scalable product — I notice the impact of that every single day.
Arnout Van de Meulebroucke, CTO @ Phished
The technical crossroads
Before madewithlove joined, the company was in a familiar dilemma: it was a side project which had evolved into a business, but the growth had brought with it growing pains.
The CTO was overstretched, juggling development with business demands. At the same time the existing PHP codebase, although functional could suffer under the pressures of performance and scalability.
An exploration to rewrite the platform in C# had failed and the team had been left at a technical crossroads. The CTO's goal was both simple and ambitious: build a solid technical foundation and development team that would allow him to "lay on a beach somewhere without being bothered", confident that the product and team could handle whatever challenges arose. He has since been on the beach twice.
Especially in the earlier days, Phished validated their ideas through rapid prototyping, they would then scale these with the development teams which is where the collaboration with madewithlove occurred. Over the partnership, madewithlove had provided three core services: software engineering, recruiting, and technical consulting.
Looking back at where we started, and at where we are now with the team at Phished, I can only conclude that the collaboration has been a massive success. Not just because the expertise that we could bring in at the right moment, but because our shared values that are rooted in quality and a continuous pragmatic approach have kept everyone involved on the same track.
Jonas Drieghe, Software Engineer @ madewithlove
Building the cornerstone team
One area in particular we helped a lot with was recruiting. We put the bar high, there was no team and we knew we had to find those cornerstone employees to form a team.
The company now has a very mature team they can rely on along with practices for hiring that they replicate in nearly every department.
Madewithlove typically enters engagements with clear exit plans, staying 6-12 months or at most 18, the collaboration with Phished has spanned over three years. As with what happens at times with other companies, as challenges evolve, longer periods of collaboration do occur.
We set the bar high for hiring from day one, even when it slowed us down. Looking at the strong, dependable team Phished has today, I'm proud we held that line — it's been key to their success.
Dimitri Roose, CTO in residence @ madewithlove
The right moment for collaboration
Our partnership with Phished demonstrates the importance of timing and preparation when working with external agencies.
As one team member noted: "We work with a couple of agencies at Phished. Each has their own sets of qualities and boundaries. But the thing that we note is that when they work best those agencies is when we fit them in at the right moment, when we've already done a bit of testing ourselves, when we have a sort of in, in terms of product market fit or an MVP or in terms of a website that we have an idea of where to start from or anything else. If you can do that, then usually it works out."
