Expert’s Active Contribution Assessment – How Web & Mobile Technology will Help Businesses for Enlarging their Foot-Print Globally

1. Tell us in brief about your company. How datarockets had begun this journey?

datarockets is an experienced team of product developers with a culture of remote work.

We know how to build successful and feature-rich web & mobile applications and do our best to share that experience with our clients. I believe we have a really very unique approach when it comes to building relations with our customers which results in productive partnerships that last for years.

The idea behind starting datarockets is to build an intellectual hub where engineers come to learn product development skills on the one hand, and clients come to create products for their businesses and startups on the other hand.

Together with Dmitry Zhlobo (the CTO and co-founder at datarockets), we were working for leading outsourcing companies in the industry and got to acknowledge their internal processes with many concerns, such as

• The lack of transparency: typical outsourcing companies tried to “build a fence” between their developers and clients with the help of project managers.
• Indifferent attitude towards the success of their projects: our managers were more concerned about clients paying their bills rather than our ideas on how to improve things around.
• The unwillingness to invest in the personal growth of their engineering teams. We were working in a typical corporate culture that was embracing overtimes and trying to squeeze the value as much as possible out of the employees.

We couldn’t find a place for ourselves, and that’s why we started datarockets. We were lucky to find 25 more like-minded individuals who joined our team and now:

• We integrate closely with our clients and work with them as a single team using extremely transparent development processes.
• We communicate intensively and share our ideas on how to make things faster/better.
• Our company organizes tech conferences across Europe where our engineers perform as speakers.

2. How do you provide direction in datarockets? What is your role in managerial activities?

At datarockets, we use Holacracy to distribute roles between people, so my roles are constantly evolving. In short, I have the pleasure to:

• Define the future of the company by researching new business opportunities
• Give product strategy advice to our customers
• Share our knowledge writing articles about startups and product development

3. What method do you follow for handling custom software and web development to reach up to a committed timeline for your clients?

We use Agile Development Methods and set up public communication channels, task management boards, planning calls, and daily standups to make all the progress visible for everybody. We provide single-minded dedicated teams that have been working together for years and can take on a project quickly to ensure on-time delivery.

Apart from actual coding, we bring our own ideas to the table. Writing high-quality code is what we do by default, but there are many good engineers out there. Therefore, we go the extra mile to stand out and differentiate ourselves from those engineers that just code. We contribute to our projects by sharing our culture, bringing our processes, and providing our ideas on how to make things faster/better.

4. Give us a brief about your enormous achievement so far in the industry.

We don’t disrupt the market. At datarockets, we just try to be as transparent and simple as possible. We share our expertise and knowledge with startups and do our best to build useful products for them. I believe that our achievement is that we manage to create a fully remote team with strong processes that make our clients happy. Almost every client of ours has referred us to their friends. This is the biggest achievement for us.

5. What are the key factors to be considered before selecting the right platform for web & mobile application development?

• Common use cases: every framework/technology is aimed to resolve a particular class of tasks, and you need to be aware of that. For example, it’s possible to develop a simple website & blog with C++, but with WordPress, it’s gonna be 1000 times faster.
• Technical limitations: each framework has its own limits and they need to match your technical business requirements. Otherwise, at some point, you will need to switch to another framework, which can be extremely expensive.
• Flexibility: at some point, you may need to make a strategic pivot and be sure your current framework can handle that.
• Ecosystem: when using a popular framework with a highly developed ecosystem, you almost always can find an open-source library that does exactly what you need. For example, the Ruby ecosystem has thousands of open-source libraries that you can plug & play. That significantly cuts down the total cost and timeline.
• License: not every framework is free, and some of them are authorized to be used in certain conditions.
• Community: your development team should be able to find necessary information easily. Moreover, there should be a community behind the framework which is able to answer questions, fix bugs, and patch security breaches as they get discovered.

6. How many optimum factors do you consider for attaining client satisfaction?

Focus on the result, collaborative approach, transparent communication, and work as a single team.

7. In terms of corporate strategy, what do you think are the main drivers that make your company stand out of the crowd?

• Honesty and trust: we embrace our clients to discuss issues they see through our retrospectives and by our own example. Our clients know what we discuss, how we make decisions, and what issues we experience.
• Professionalism: we never go below our quality standards, even if clients ask us to do that “quickly”. We have our own work style, tools, and rules that help us cooperate effectively.

8. What talent expertise do you employ in terms of new-age technologies like IoT, Blockchain, & Big Data?

Our team consists of people who are fond of complex architectures, like to resolve complex problems and create something really useful. We never stop learning. The best way to use all this knowledge and learn more is to take on different kinds of projects.

In our portfolio, you can find blockchain projects, SaaS, startups. Also, we have had experience in launching ICO and creating cryptocurrencies. At the moment we are working on two IoT projects.

We are happy when the clients come to us with non-trivial tasks and projects that include new-age technologies. In fact, we mostly work only with those kinds of projects 🙂

9. Do you take in projects which meet your basic budget requirement? If yes, what is the minimum requirement? If no, on what minimum budget you have worked for?

In practice, the minimum budget we can work with is $20k. The reason is that we don’t build simple websites that can be done with CMS like WordPress, we take on the projects that require custom solutions. Having a budget less than $20k is pretty challenging to kick off something like that, even an MVP.

I have to note here that we always build long-term relationships with our clients. The medium project duration with us is approximately 12 months. In the past 2 years, the price range was $30k – $300k. Our clients want to work with us for years; for some of them, we have become their exclusive software development partners.

10. You’ve been at this sphere for a long time, what is the one piece of advice you want entrepreneurs to take seriously?

We thought that we could build a small company with a remote team, transparent and stable processes, and great culture in a year, at the most. It was a mistake. It takes a lot of time to tune every process step by step. Everything takes time. And sometimes that’s really depressing.

But don’t get upset because of that. Be patient, take small steps, and remember that you cannot build the business of your dreams in just a little time. Delegate tasks that can be done by others. Don’t try to control everything, or you will end up with a bottleneck.

datarockets
http://datarockets.com/
p.demeshchik@datarockets.com