8allocate

I am Vlad Potapenko, the CEO of 8allocate. I am passionate about staffing innovative tech companies with top Ukrainian software developers. Along with our 6 years of experience, we come in with extensive expertise in the FinTech field, quick start times, straightforward onboarding process, and excellent attrition rates.
A role of a CEO is not constant, it depends on an organisation’s life cycle. Every stage needs different roles, even different psychotypes, and those things change as a company grows. When I first started I was a one man show so I was a salesman, an accountant, a financial operationist, a project manager, a marketing specialist. There are 10-15 functions in any company, so when we started as a CEO I was figuratively speaking wearing 10 hats at the same time, and had 5 more in the closet. But as Elon Musk said in his interview with Joe Rogan what makes a growing company successful is access to capital and talent. So when I decided to hire the first employee I also had to take on the responsibilities of an HR manager and a recruiter, but ultimately that first person took ownership of several functions. And after that the other talented people joining the team started to take my hats off my head and wear them themselves. Now I only wear a couple – strategic growth, development, hiring the right people, maintaining the company culture, and last but not least I still take part in the sales process.

There were a few reasons I started 8allocate, some more idealistic than others. For one, I want to help develop the Ukrainian IT landscape, and unfortunately the ecosystem and culture of product companies is not quite there yet, and there aren’t many Ukrainian IT product companies that managed to successfully scale.

Being an outsource is currently the best match to the Ukrainian economic context. 
On the other hand there are many companies on the Ukrainian outsource market that constantly undercut each other's prices, steal each other's clients, overheat the market, and drain the supply of tech talent. That’s why we aren’t only building an outsource software house but are building it in conjunction with GoIT, our software development school. Right as of this moment the connection between 8allocate and GoIT is not as strong as we would like it to be but strategically in 10 years we are striving to build an ecosystem that doesn’t only drain the talent market but allows us to teach our own developers, and place them in great international projects.

We have 50 very strong in-house developers working on various projects, and a talented recruitment team that is dedicated to constantly growing our team. However after frequently encountering the urgent need for very specific skill sets that we might not have immediately within our ranks we have started to form a partner network that now includes 80 small specialised niche focussed Ukrainian software houses that share their uniquely skilled resources with us. So if we get a request for a very rare developer that is needed within a very short time frame we can augment our resources with the help of our partners.

Our main industries are FinTech, Transportation, and HealthTech. We have made a strategic decision to focus on these industries, so when a new project comes in we have 5 years of relevant experience to draw from. Don’t take our word for it though, our customers are open to give us references.

We make it a point to get to know our customers, their priorities, their constraints and concerns, and use this information to estimate the timeline of their project. For example, if a customer needs the project to be done in X amount of time and we don’t have enough developers on the bench we will go out and recruit the people we need in order to deliver what the client wants.

Depends on the project, always agreed upon with the client.

We have different clients, some come with 150 pages of project documentation, and some come with an idea on a napkin. Regardless, we do our best to make the customer happy, listen to what they want, and use our experience to expertly advise them.

We use plenty of technologies. So as a company that follows all trendy languages and frameworks, we prefer the following:

Moreover, we have several teams that use the latest programming languages such as Kotlin, Flutter, and Go – we are always very excited to start a cutting edge project.

Every project is estimated thoroughly based on our previous experience in the industry, and the expertise of our developers and consultants. We have been honing our skills in several key industries since the start so we like to think that gives us an advantage over the less focussed competition. The cost of software therefore is determined by technologies used on the project, the duration, the level of complexity, and many other factors. We don’t charge our prospective customers for estimates so anyone can come and talk with our Business Development team and find out how much it would cost to develop their project with us.

We are quite flexible, and always try to work with the customer to try and find the solution that will work best for both our companies. For nearshoring / outstaffing services we charge our customers monthly. For projects we prefer working on the Time & Material basis, however we can work for a Fixed price, Pay per Milestone, etc. Of course, if we agree on a Fixed price we put in a buffer in time estimations in order to ensure staying within the budget and time limits.

Our normal budget cut off is $10 000. At the same time we are open and entrepreneurial-minded so if a great project comes to us with a small budget and makes us believe in it – we take it on.

Last year we charged from $10 000 to about half a million dollars.