Kindly share your feedback on how Goodfirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
We have been partnering with Goodfirms for quite a long time and this shows how much we trust this platform. Over the years we have been seeing how the visibility of our company is increasing among our target audience. And we would like to thank GoodFirm a big time for helping us to improve our engagement with our clients as well. We are looking forward to our partnership with Goodfirms in the future as well.
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Arka Softwares is a leading software and app development company. At Arka Softwares, we meticulously study both global and local market trends, and customer behaviors to develop and design software and mobile apps that are not only practical but give advantage on so many levels. With our collective efforts, we have developed over 600 apps and websites for our clients from almost all over the globe.
At Arka, my role is to set strategic goals and lead my teams towards achieving them. I also collab with my managers to work on new approaches in our work. In addition, I strive to maintain a great business relationship with our clients.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
I worked in several IT companies before laying the foundation stone of Arka Softwares. Working in other IT companies made me realize that there are industry-wide fundamental issues and I was not happy with that. Some of them were the lack of imagination, and fear of going the extra mile, trying new approaches, working on new things, and lack of professionalism, etc. I have always been dedicated to my love of technology and I could not let it get wasted in such environments.
So, I build my own space where there was no loophole for such issues. I make sure, at Arka, imagination, and creativity take the highest flights. And the rest is history.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third-party vendors/ outsourcing?
At Arka, we love to take control of our work. This is how we deliver the optimum level of quality to our clients. Therefore, our business model is dependent on the In-house team only.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
Let me be clear first, I am not implying that we don’t want to earn money. Everyone wants to earn money, even our clients, that is why they trust us to build them something that can earn them money. But the difference is, we want to earn money the right way.
Over half of the time, our clients have a pretty vague idea of what they are putting their leg into. It’s our responsibility to educate them about all the ins and outs of their idea. We try to maintain seamless communication with our clients and educate them about their plan whether it can be even better or it has some potential loopholes.
Hence, we are literally on board with their plans. And maybe this is why our work helps them to grow their business more than their expectation.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
From small businesses, start-ups to enterprise, we cater to almost every industry, some of these are, e-commerce, fintech apps, medical, real estate, travel and hospitality, and fantasy sports as well.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a mobile app.
Once we finalize our plans and strategies for app development, we get a clear picture of the scale of the development of the mobile app. This gives just parameters like resource availability, features, 3rd party integrations, the overall app design – graphics and UX/UI, and complexity of the development, etc. that help in determining the time frame of developing a mobile app.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a mobile app?
Generally speaking, for a normal mobile app it may take up to 6 to 8 weeks to develop each, front end, and back end of a mobile app.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a mobile application?
Well, there are several important parameters like, target audience, features of the app, revenue model, and scalability demand, and even sometimes the budget of development as well.
Which platform do you suggest your clients, to begin with when they approach you with an idea (Android or iOS) and why?
This completely depends on the purpose and the target audience of a mobile app. If it is only for internal operation in an organization then it is by default the platform the organization already using. If it is for the public then we check the preference of their target audience in terms of platform.
However, we always encourage our clients to go for both platforms, Android, and iOS for maximum market penetration.
Android or iOS, Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?
First of all, for deeper market penetration, it is great to develop an app for both Android and iOS platforms. But when it comes to deciding between Native and Hybrid, the only way is to check the budge for the development. Native apps interact with the mobile OS better than the Hybrid ones. Hence, it is expensive to develop Native apps than Hybrid apps.
But as technology is evolving, Hybrid apps do not compromise much in terms of quality and performance.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile application?
To be honest, there are a lot of factors we have to consider before the cost of a mobile app development service. This is how we are able to deliver the best quality of apps at the best prices. To name a few, these factors are, technology stack, mobile app platform, resources required for the API integration, complexity, security compliances, and many more.
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.)
We like to divide our development journey into small milestones, this makes the development more organized and trackable. So, we follow the Pay per milestone payment structure.
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, we do take projects which meet our basic budget requirements, this helps us to justify the resources and efforts we are putting into our work. And our minimum requirement is, $5,000.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2019?
Well, 2019 was a pretty great year for us. In that we catered to projects ranging in the price range of, $5,000 to $85,000.
Which business model do you suggest to your clients enabling them to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?
We believe that each mobile application should be in an experience in itself. And as long as revenue generation is concerned, it shouldn’t come between the users and their experience. To execute it successfully, we suggest they apply business models that are in progressive stages, and at each stage a user must feel justification.
In other words, we suggest our clients adopt the freemium business model. This way, users can unlock the type of experience they want from the app. If they want the app for free, they may have to see some in-app ads. If they want them to remove, they can buy it. In addition, if they want premium features, they can as well pay to unlock them. Hence, at every stage the user is in charge.
Apart from this, depending on the service, we also recommend the subscription-based business model.
