datarockets
We careOverview
$50 - $99/hr
10 - 49
2014
datarockets is a product development company consisting of 35 in-house developers working remotely from Canada and Eastern Europe. Founded in 2014, datarockets have developed 40+ high-quality and scalable custom applications and software for startups and medium-sized businesses.
datarockets builds long term relationships with clients based on trust and honesty, which transitions product development into a fast, easy, and fun process.
The primary tech stack in
datarockets is a product development company consisting of 35 in-house developers working remotely from Canada and Eastern Europe. Founded in 2014, datarockets have developed 40+ high-quality and scalable custom applications and software for startups and medium-sized businesses.
datarockets builds long term relationships with clients based on trust and honesty, which transitions product development into a fast, easy, and fun process.
The primary tech stack includes Ruby on Rails, React, Node.js, React Native, Java, Kotlin, Swift. Read about our Capabilities.
datarockets works in different areas no matter if it’s a ridesharing service or a tool for personal growth. The main condition for us is to believe in the products we are working on. datarockets is passionate about working closely with clients and growing their businesses together.
Check out our Instagram profile where we share our life moments and our blog containing business and technical posts.
Contact us if you are looking to build a startup from scratch or expand an existing team.
Company Approach
- Agile Development
We communicate every day to adapt to all changes quickly, so you don’t need to write long project specifications. - Transparency
With real-time task boards and public communication channels, you will be able to keep track of any updates and changes. We are a transparent development team - Automation
We automate routine work to deliver completed features immediately that saves your time and budget. - Quality
We take responsibility for code quality, to ensure flexibility to changes and scalability in the future.
Focus Area
Service Focus
- Software Development
- Mobile App Development
- IT Services
- IoT Development
Client Focus
- Medium Business($10M - $1B)
- Large Business(> $1B)
- Small Business(< $10M)
Industries Focus
- Productivity
- Startups
- Advertising & Marketing
- Business Services
- Healthcare & Medical
- Information Technology
- Retail
- Transportation & Logistics
Customer Reviews
5.0
(7 Reviews)
An absolute pleasure
Ed Wong
Associate Attorney at at Hillis Clark Martin & Peterson P.S.
posted on 7/7/20
I've been working in Product Management for a while in Toronto and the PM circle is quite small here. I was first recommended DataRockets by a fellow Product Manager that I was chatting with. She had glowing reviews for them so I decided to try them out for a project that I was working on - a platform to connect the brightest minds in Canada and provide easier access to expertise.
Working with DataRockets was an absolute pleasure. It was incredibly enjoyable - I most appreciated their responsiveness, their quality of work, and most importantly -- collaboratively problem solving with them.
They had tried-and-true processes that kept communication open. Tools and organization that made it easy for us to track work and discuss tasks. It was so effective that I adopted some of those processes in my day-to-day PM role. They are truly entrepreneurial-minded, so it was nice to be able to bounce ideas and have other bright minds thinking ahead on potential challenges or opportunities.
I would highly recommend and would not hesitate to work with them again.
Working with DataRockets was an absolute pleasure. It was incredibly enjoyable - I most appreciated their responsiveness, their quality of work, and most importantly -- collaboratively problem solving with them.
They had tried-and-true processes that kept communication open. Tools and organization that made it easy for us to track work and discuss tasks. It was so effective that I adopted some of those processes in my day-to-day PM role. They are truly entrepreneurial-minded, so it was nice to be able to bounce ideas and have other bright minds thinking ahead on potential challenges or opportunities.
I would highly recommend and would not hesitate to work with them again.
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
The people
What was it about the company that you didn't like which they should do better?
The expertise are so vast, I wish I could get access to more of their team, but alas, it's always a question of time and money.
Project Details
Mobile App Development
$10001 to $50000
Speedy, communicative, and brilliant!
Lannie Le
TitlePartner, Executive Creative Director at Pixel Dreams
posted on 13/8/20
datarockets team is our go-to partner firm for any technical projects that require a fine blend of technology and business acumen. After having worked with more than a handful of different dev shops, we've finally found our THE ONE. datarockets is unlike other dev shops we had worked with. They only build products they truly believe in, and with that belief comes commitment, dedication, ownership (it's refreshing how much the team treats a client's project as their own), and innovation. My personal favourite part of collaborating with datarockets team is their radical transparency, holacracy, and intensive communication. We love datarockets so much we constantly refer them to our clients who need product development.
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Halacracy. Radical transparency. Communication. Collaboration. Capabilities. Business acumen.
What was it about the company that you didn't like which they should do better?
Scale up so you can take on more clients and projects!
Project Details
Mobile App Development
$50001 to $200000
Great supportive team!
Nivida Manicks
posted on 30/10/20
Project Details
IT Services
Solid service with great results
Alejandro Pérez
CEO at Komet Sales
posted on 1/10/19
We've done a couple of projects with the team at Data Rockets and our experience has been very positive. Communication is great which makes a big difference when running projects with a distributed team in various countries (from our end). Pavel and his team have been always available and reply to emails / requests promptly. When we've had problems they've reacted swiftly and thoroughly.
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Deep technical knowledge in Salesforce.
Project Details
Software Development
$10001 to $50000
Working with DataRockets has been excellent
A
Anonymous
Chief Executive Officer at Advertising platform
posted on 23/8/19
We have been working with data rockets for 3 months and are very happy with their service. Their communication has been very impressive thus far. I was hesitant to work with an international group given a bad previous experience with another company, but DataRockets has been nothing but exceptional. They have taken over a complex software platform and have even assisted with technical support.
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Communication Management Dev team structure
What was it about the company that you didn't like which they should do better?
Costs are high compared to competitors.
Project Details
Software Development
$200000+
Great Firm
Gabriel Ferrin
Head of Product & Engineering at American Estate & Trust
posted on 27/9/19
We've worked with Datarockets for about 4 years now continuously and have been very happy with our collaboration. We've used them for both frontend and mobile development and they've produced high quality code and satisfied our project needs. They are a strong team and have helped enahce our own developer culture over the years.
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
Development Culture
Project Details
Mobile App Development
$50001 to $200000
Reliable and enthusiastic engineers
Robert Osborne
Director Of Engineering at Freckle IoT
posted on 27/2/19
We have two datarockets' developers working with our mobile team and we are always impressed with their dedication to the project, willingness to go the extra mile and desire to learn and improve.
What is it about the company that you appreciate the most?
I like that the developers feel as if they part of my team and behave like they want the project to succeed as much as I do.
What was it about the company that you didn't like which they should do better?
So far there has not been one concern I've raised or change I've requested that has not been rapidly addressed.
Project Details
Mobile App Development
$10001 to $50000
COMPANY RESPONSE
datarockets
Feb 28, 2019
Thanks, Robert! It's a pleasure working with you!
Executive Interview
Pavel Demeshchik
Owner & CEO, datarockets
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
datarockets is an experienced team of product developers with offices in Toronto, Canada and Minsk, Belarus.
We know how to build successful web & mobile applications and do our best to share that experience with our clients. I believe we have a very special approach, when building relationships with our customers which results in productive partnerships that last for years.
At datarockets, we use Holacracy to distribute roles between people, so my roles are constantly evolving. In short, I have the pleasure to:
- Define the future of the company by researching new business opportunities
- Give product strategy advice to our customers
- Try to share our knowledge writing articles about startups and product development
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
The idea behind starting datarockets was to create an intellectual hub where engineers come to learn product development skills from one hand, and clients come to create products for their businesses and startups from another hand.
Together with Dmitry Zhlobo (the CTO and co-founder at datarockets), we had been working for leading outsourcing companies in the industry and seen their processes from the inside. We didn’t like many things, such as:
- the lack of transparency. Typical outsourcing companies were trying to “build a fence” between their developers and clients with the help of project managers.
- indifferent attitude towards the success of their projects. Our managers were more concerned about clients paying their bills rather than our ideas on how to improve things around.
- unwillingness to invest in the personal growth of their engineering teams. We were working in a typical corporate culture embracing overtimes and trying to squeeze as much as possible from their employees.
We couldn’t find a place for ourselves, and that’s why we started datarockets. We were lucky to find 20 more like-minded individuals who joined our team and now:
- We integrate closely with our clients and work with them as a single team using extremely transparent development process
- We communicate a lot and share our ideas on how to make things faster/better.
- Our company organizes tech conferences across Europe, and our engineers perform there as speakers.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
Our business model is called “Dedicated Team”. We don’t outsource and prefer to rely on our own resources.
Working as dedicated teams means a close integration into our clients’ businesses and their teams. We bring our communication and development processes, automate routine work, and exchange best practices. This way, we create a productive environment where we grow together with our customers.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
Apart from actual coding, we bring our own ideas to the table. Writing high-quality code is what we do by default, but there are many good engineers out there, and we go the extra mile to stand out. We contribute to our projects by sharing our culture, bringing our processes, and providing our ideas on how to make things faster/better.
Our major strength is transparency and simplicity. datarockets’ clients don’t worry about the technical part of their products anymore - we handle that. We set up clear work and communication processes, so our clients can see what we discuss, how we make decisions, and what issues we experience in real time. We let our customers focus on what really matters to them: overall product strategy, finances, and marketing.
We try to automate as much routine work as possible. Our engineers don’t really enjoy the work that can be done by robots/scripts, and that always turns out to be very beneficial for our customers.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?
We don’t stick to a specific industry. Our team consists of people who are fond of complex architectures, like to resolve complex problems and create something really useful. We never stop learning. The best way to use all this knowledge and learn more is to take different kinds of projects.
For the last 6 years, we have been building products for the following industries:
- FinTech
- Ride Sharing
- Entertainment
- Social Media
- Social Network
- Real Estate
- Human Resources
- SaaS
- Marketing
- IoT
Almost all of our clients come back to us with new projects and refer their business partners/friends to us.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing web and mobile apps.
To provide an accurate estimate, we need to know as much as possible. Usually, before we give an estimate, we try to determine:
- Functional business requirements. What kind of features we need to build and how they actually help the users.
- Technical business requirements. For example, if we need Internet Explorer browser support, it can add some extra work.
- Product strategy. Before taking on a project, we need to believe in the idea behind it as well as its strategy. We need to know why exactly we build a certain feature to share our insights and suggest improvements.
- Marketing strategy. Nowadays, marketing matters even more than development, and we need to ensure that our prospective clients are aware of that. We need to know their marketing strategy to suggest our own ideas and share relevant experience.
- Budget. Depending on the budget, we can offer alternative technology stack or suggest our vision on the scope of work/priorities.
- Legacy Code. If a project is not from scratch, we need to perform an initial code review to assess its current state and provide estimates based on what has been done already.
Our estimation process is collaborative and transparent. Our prospect clients see how much time we plan to spend on each feature/change and free to share their questions/concerns during the process.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a web application?
It really depends. In our portfolio, we have some API-only projects that didn’t involve any frontend and at the same time, some frontend-only projects without any backend.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right framework for developing software?
- Common use cases. Every framework/technology is aimed to resolve a particular class of tasks, and you need to be aware of that. For example, it’s possible to develop a simple website & blog with C++, but with Wordpress, it’s gonna be 1000 times faster.
- Technical limitations. Each framework has its own limits and they need to match your technical business requirements. Otherwise, at some point, you will need to switch to another framework, which can be extremely expensive.
- Flexibility. At some point, you may need to make a strategic pivot and be sure your current framework can handle that.
- Ecosystem. When using a popular framework with a highly developed ecosystem, you almost always can find an open source library that does exactly what you need. For example, the Ruby ecosystem has thousands of open-source libraries that you can plug & play. That significantly cuts down the total cost and timeline.
- License. Not every framework is free, and some of them are authorized to be used in certain conditions.
- Community. Your development team should be able to find the necessary information fairly easy. Moreover, there should be a community behind the framework which is able to answer questions, fix bugs, and patch security breaches as they get discovered.
Which languages & frameworks do you prefer to use in development of web and mobile applications?
For the backend we prefer to use:
- Ruby / Rails
- Javascript / Node.js
For the frontend, it’s usually JavaScript:
- React.js
- Vue.js.
Talking about mobile apps, we use:
- React Native
- Kotlin
- Swift
There are 2 reasons why we use these technologies:
- They fit our needs the best. The technologies listed above give enough flexibility and at the same time, speed up web/mobile app development.
- Our team has the most experience with them and enjoy using those languages/frameworks.
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 bill for our time only. When a project needs to be done in a certain budget and time, we usually apply the FFF approach (Fixed Price, Fixed Time, Flexible Scope). What we actually do in this case:
- We break down the scope of work into User Stories and sort them based on their priorities
- We work on the User Stories iteratively based on their priority.
- We release new functionality as soon as it’s ready, sometimes we make multiple releases per week.
This way, at any time, we have a working version of the product. When we get closer to the deadline, we can just stop and skip some minor features, but deliver the most crucial functionality under the budget.
We don’t like fixing the overall project/milestone cost for the following reasons:
- Providing estimates on fixed price projects development teams have to lie. If they provide positive estimates - their companies inevitably lose money. If negative - they kinda lie to their clients.
- After a fixed price project is signed, the client has no flexibility as the scope of work is fixed for that price. Requesting even a minor feature turns into the bureaucracy hell when project managers need to re-assess the scope of work, get updated estimates from the team, and re-sign the budget agreement. We strongly believe that it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
- There is not enough freedom for teams working on fixed price projects. Engineers don’t have time to suggest their ideas, improve processes and automate routine work. Such atmosphere embraces poor productivity, low-quality code, and reluctant attitude to the project in general.
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?
In practice, the minimum budget we can work with is $20k. The reason is that we don’t build simple websites that can be done with CMS like Wordpress, we take on the projects that require custom solutions. Having a budget less than $20k is pretty challenging to kick off something like that, even an MVP.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2018?
$30k - $220k
I have to note here that we always build long-term relationships with our clients. The medium project duration with us is approximately 12 months. Our clients work with us for years; for some of them, we become their exclusive software development partners.
Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
Since our company created a profile on GoodFirms, datarockets visibility has grown significantly. Goodfirms helped us to meet motivated clients. At the same time, with the help of such platforms, businesses can find the right team for their applications and software development needs.
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Team Members
Yulia Garanok
Business Analyst & Marketer at Software Development Company
Pavel Demeshchik
CEO, datarockets | Advisor | Entrepreneur