Software development and consulting company

Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?

Code Inspiration is a full-cycle software development partner capable of serving our clients’ needs. We have performed a lot of projects in different spheres such as education, entertainment, social media, business automation, betting, trading, food, and delivery.

Being a Chief Business Development Officer, I am part of the global strategy team. My knowledge of 5 languages gives me an edge and enables me to establish and maintain relationships with clients from all over the world with no language barriers. I’m involved directly in the communications with our customers and also building and maintaining trustful relations between our businesses.

What was the idea behind starting this organization?

In 2012 our CEO Yaroslav managed to unite people and founded a mobile development company. Step by step, the company noticed higher market demand in full-cycle development. Seeing these trends, Yaroslav gathered a stronger designer team, hired experienced project managers and business analysts, formed a core development team and transformed Code Inspiration into a turn-key agency.

What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?

Currently, the company works with prominent market participants from all over the world, such as American companies involved in fintech sphere or a UK franchise heading the most extensive cleaning services. We work with start-ups as well. Being beginners, they rely on us completely to get a good start and investment. In both cases, we just cannot afford to hire third-party teams, because such risks are completely undesirable for our business reputation.

How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies’ models?

Applying in general Agile methodology, as most IT companies do, we approach each customers’ business individually. That’s why we are flexible enough to offer them various types of cooperation models, including dedicated team or outstaffing model. And if currently, the company does not require a full-time team, we offer them Time and Material option, which will help them save the budget. Having spent enough years in the development space, we also provide Fix Price model, if the project has precise specifications and the scope of work is not going to be changed during the development process.

As for Time and Material, we do our best to provide the client with the pricing interval within a PERT estimation in advance, giving a clear view on how long a given task and the product development will take.

What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?

Our focus includes fintech, food and delivery services, business automation, social media, education, and entertainment industry. Most of our customers are repetitive because they are either large companies that are always in need of software development or start-ups whose ideas need a good start. So they also turn to us regularly. Taking into account these facts, we have set up a comprehensive maintenance and support offer. We’re continually improving to make our service client-oriented. And we are also pleased with the practice that our customers recommend us to their friends and acquaintances.

Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a mobile app.

The most important thing is whether the customer has a clear understanding of what he/she is eager to develop, or some advice is required from our end to help them figure out which tasks are needed to be carried out for their project. One more critical thing to look into is the scope of the project, also, the model of work. These points may sound banal; nevertheless, they are critically important to have a great- structured working plan.

How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a mobile app?

It depends on a given project. So the terms are determined by the stage of project preparation, features needed to be implemented and the complexity of the application in general. On average, the development of a mobile app takes around 2-3 months. However, I must underline, the question is very broad, as some projects may take 3 months, and some of them may be enterprise-level, which means they will require much more time.

What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a mobile application?

The very first thing to be considered is the target audience. It is necessary to analyze what’s the target location and what is the market share of the platform on which the app is being planned to develop. The niche of the future product is also essential.

Which platform do you suggest your clients to begin with when they approach you with an idea (Android or iOS) and why?

This question deals with the same aspect as discussed in the previous question. Depending on the market share and target audience of the product, we would recommend a particular platform. Having a vast experience both in iOS and Android development, what we can do for our clients is to offer our consulting services in the first place; not to mention underlining the fact that we’re a full-cycle development agency. And if the customer’s request, we can develop on 2 platforms parallelly if the customer possesses the budget for it and looks for a product launch on 2 platforms simultaneously. In this way, we can achieve tangible time-to-market speeding-up. But the final decision is undoubtedly made by the client.

Android or iOS, Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?

If we see from the very beginning that the project will be significant, and complex features like animation are required to be implemented, native apps are a better fit. In case it is needed to develop an MVP within a short period, and fit a somewhat restricted budget, Hybrid would become a good way-out.

What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile application?

To cut a long story short, I’d name 2 key factors: the timeline of the project and detailed specification guide which outlines the project scope.

What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, Pay per Milestone (could be in phases, months, versions etc.)

Actually, we’re flexible and offer our clients various paying model types. The most widely used model of work with our customers is Time and Material because it is easy to make changes and additions to each subsequent sprint. The working hours are tracked and updated automatically to keep the development process maximum clear and convenient for the customer. At the end of each sprint, we provide an invoice to our customer according to the amount of hours tracked via the system.

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?

Being a full-cycle development agency, we usually work with the projects starting from $10,000 budget. However, if a company is looking to change the software development partner and turns to us for maintenance or some development tasks, we can take up the project even if a starting budget is not yet set.

Which business model do you suggest to your clients enabling them to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?

To start with, most of our customers have their strategy in place as to how to generate revenue. Those who turn to us for expert advice, we share with them different ways of achieving these goals. I cannot go into details as this information is commercially sensitive.

Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.

GoodFirms is the very platform for a software development company to showcase its capabilities, demonstrate its achievements and improve brand visibility. As for our cooperation in 2019, we’re very much looking forward to extend our cooperation with the platform and achieve more tangible results.