Kindly share your feedback on how Goodfirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
We started to use Goodfirms only a few months ago. We haven’t really received too much traction from it. But we’re actively adding more reviews and hoping to get more attention through this platform too.
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
We’re a software development company originally from Hungary, but now we operate in 7 countries. We highly focus on technical deliveries, the majority of our team are developers. In the last 3 years, we had great opportunities to grow and now we have more than 50 people working with us. My role in the team is to keep everything together, make strategic decisions, and try to balance sales, HR, and delivery somehow to have enough projects, people, and know-how in the company.
What is the story behind starting this company?
We started as a product startup lab in 2013 in Budapest. With a team of around five people, we founded and developed 10+ products in 5 years. Some of them were successful, and some of them were a complete bust. Fortunately, we had two flagship projects that were fairly successful. Back then, we learned the hard way how to deal with 100,000+ clients, bigger infrastructures, enterprise clients, and so on.
After a while, we didn’t feel we should continue together, and because I was always responsible for the technical part of the projects it seemed natural to start a business around that. This was in 2019 when we founded this company. We tried a lot of things, but over the years we shifted our focus to technical deliveries because we had to realize that our main passion is development. Usually, we work with our clients end-to-end, specifically focusing on long-term cooperation.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
For the key areas, we only work with our in-house team members. Sometimes when there is a bigger project where we miss a specific technology stack or know-how, we involve external consultants as well.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
We have three key values: freedom, diversity, and quality. Every decision we make, everything we do is alongside those values. We like to be free and we give our clients this flexibility as well. We are a very diverse team that appreciates and celebrates differences in others and creates an equal environment with our team members and partners. This environment is filled with opportunities for everyone to reach their potential. Third, we never give away our quality. Everything we do has to be no less than 110%. We always go the extra mile.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
We have a pretty varied client base, but mainly they come from the world of finance or startups. (or combining these two as fintech companies) 90% of our clients are long-term partners who we’ve been working with for more than 1-2 years.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
Usually, we provide end-to-end services to our clients, including consulting, development, QA, and project management. The most typical services are longer-term web and mobile product developments where we usually take care of the front-end and the back-end as well.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
I’d say we have this above 90%. The reason why we excel in this is that we used to have our own products. We know exactly what founders are struggling with and usually, we already solved those problems for ourselves or another client before. Also, we are well aware that if our customers are successful and growing, we can grow with them together. Without successful clients, we’d need to chase projects too frequently which is just not a viable business model for us.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
It depends on the size of the customers we work with. For smaller clients and early-stage startups, we usually work in the same project management tool where they can see our tasks and tickets and they can submit support requests too.
For enterprise customers, we usually offer ITSM in Jira, as a support system, where they can submit, track and follow up on their requests.
Finally, for DevOps-related issues (outages, server problems, critical alerts, etc.), we have a 24/7 support form that can trigger the on-call team to pick up any problem immediately.
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.)
For fixed-price projects, we usually bill our clients after reaching a milestone in the development process. It can be a specific feature set or a specific time frame.
For team augmentation projects where we integrate into our client’s teams, we almost always send our invoices after every month, based on a timesheet of the resources working on the project.
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?
Yes, our minimum budget requirement starts at 30,000 EUR. Although we love to work with small clients and early-stage companies, our company and our processes are just is just too robust to handle very small projects. But we do one project for free (pro bono) for a charity every year!
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2022?
The projects were in the range of 50,000 EUR to 1,000,000 EUR in 2022. This year we’d really love to grow into projects up to 2M EUR.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
We’d to be the biggest remote-first software development company in Europe. We believe that it’s possible to build a 500+ member company where everybody works remotely, and has their freedom and fun during working with us.
