Brocoders

My name is Andrey Konoplenko, and I am the CEO and Founder of Brocoders. I have a Co-founder, Rodion Salnik. We have been managing the company since its inception, in 2014. While Rodion is responsible for the development and project delivery, I am in charge of the business development and customer relationships.
My role is to ensure the efficient work of the sales and marketing departments and provide the development crew with enough projects. The more prospects we find, the more work we have. It is my key area of responsibility.

At the same time, I take care of the service quality. I want to make sure that our flow is transparent to our clients at the first point. Transparency leads to trust and helps build communication. So, one of my duties is keeping up a customer-oriented experience. It is the most interesting part of my job, I would say.

Brocoders is based in Sumy, Ukraine. Besides in-house, we have remote developers working with us from other cities. Overall, our team counts over 80 people. At the moment, we deliver the service to more than 20 clients, including the new and ongoing projects. We work pretty intensively, as you see.

Before establishing Brocoders, my co-founder Rodion and I were focused on creating side projects. We constructed them and monetized their services. I want to mention only a few projects that we developed: the culinary network, enriched with an extensive collection of recipes, the online consultancy for those who need legal advisory, and Hintarea, our SaaS product tailored for digital marketers’ needs. The latter had opened the door to the startup community, with many opportunities, like meetings with angel investors and mentors, visiting big events, and communicating with famous CEOs. It was a fantastic time as we learned much about doing technological business.

At the beginning of 2014, our team grew large. We had project managers, designers and software engineers onboard. Then I told my counterpart: "Hey! We gained valuable expertise in developing big products. Why not do it for other startup companies?". That was our real beginning. We were eager to find customers looking to develop networking services or marketplaces and benefit from our commitment.

When we entered the IT outsourcing market, it was already overheating. It took us almost three years before finding a partner of expected size and capacity. Until then, we had to develop MVPs for early-stage companies. They were approaching the startup business and just studied how to monetize their services.

Unfortunately, most of them were closed after a while. Nevertheless, our cooperation was beneficial, because some recommended us to big enterprises.

Brocoders is providing its services on the basis of a third-party vendor. We have been focusing on this model since the early days. Meanwhile, this service includes various packages. For example, prior to the web or mobile development phase, we could carry out the discovery phase. It consists of requirements elicitation and their overview. The main methods we use to handle it are customer interviews, prototyping, user flow diagrams, etc. To start this work, we sign an agreement indicating our responsibilities, development timeline  and deadline.

We differentiate from other companies with our development life cycle. At the first point, we focus on the key priorities of the client's project. Secondly, we iterate the process. We envision the whole work through the smaller paces or milestones.

Each of them targets the development of core features. After finishing it, we show the client a working demo of the product functions. Based on outcomes, they may decide on the new requirements. We consider it a usual thing and prepare ourselves for that change.

Our service product is best aligned with the specifics of B2B SaaS companies. When evaluating their scope, we allocate the software engineers with the relevant experience. They work on the feature list needed to be developed and specify the risks that may appear during the build process. After hiring us, this team will work on the client's project. The described offering is called the dedicated team. It matches with the B2B SaaS companies that want to scale their product and accelerate the development speed.

We target the SaaS industry. To be more precious, we focus on constructing MarTech digital services and products. These companies are dynamic and require the vendor to follow the Agile strategy. We learned how to fit with this flow and managed to work with them at various stages. They are repetitive customers since they get back to whether they validated their MVP or received new investments to scale their product.

To add to that, we constantly receive inquiries for building real-time platforms, which are mainly SaaS and cloud-based solutions. I would outline the main spheres that they belong to:

We also differentiate our clients by technology. In these terms they are divided into the following categories:

We provide our services under three categories:

Our team consists of those specialists:

I will lie to you by saying that 100% of our clients have always been happy. Having constructed over 120 projects in 7 years, we faced various situations. Wrong expectations were the reasons for most problems. I want to share some examples with you.

After sending us an inquiry on project development, a client looks forward to getting the cost estimate. I set a meeting hoping to discuss the scope details. During the conversation, I notice that the client expects me to know the project requirements better than they do. It leads to a curious situation. Instead of writing a code, I am supposed to write a specification. But since I don't want to lose this client, I work on the requirements outline even though it goes beyond my responsibility.

Finding a compromise is the best way of successful collaboration. Indeed, we do not create the product business instead of our client. But we facilitate them at those points where they lack experience. At the initial stage, we suggest our client perform the business analyses. We offer a quote for this stage. Once agreed, we undertake the research and prepare the full specification.

Next, we provide our clients with a UI/UX design quote. It is easy to complete now: we can estimate the design work by knowing the feature requirements. After finishing the graphic layout work, we show the client a software development estimate. This information is based on the features outlined during the previous stages.

The more certainty we input into the working process, the easier it will be to cooperate. I am glad that we make such efforts in our company. To finish it up, you could visit our profiles on Clutch and Upwork to check on the latest customer satisfaction rate.

Our clients could reach out to their project managers and receive a quick response. The communications are running through instant messengers like Slack, Google Hangouts, and Skype. The urgent queries have the highest priority and are fixed in a short period of time. Once the issue is resolved, project managers report to their clients. The task progress could be also tracked in Jira.

We bill our clients based on the Pay per Milestone principle. In most cases, the duration of the milestone lasts one month. Our invoices mention the completed features and hours spent for their delivery. The following payment structure comes from our development process. We pursue the Time and Material approach, so it is more natural to bill this way.

Yes, we have some preferences regarding the budget. We could take on the projects with a minimum of 80.000 USD.

Between $80.000 and $250.000.