Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Evermore is a boutique software development agency and we help organisations transform by building custom, scalable and human-centred solutions. We believe in the power of creating products that matter and solving actual business problems.
My name is Dávid Reinhold and I am the CEO and a co-founder of the company. This role is very diverse and focuses not only on the company overall strategy and running smooth internal and business processes, but also meeting with clients and actively joining our client workshops.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
When we started the business in 2006 our idea was to develop a product, a competitive advantage for us, in the video streaming industry. At the time we recorded conferences for some of our clients within the EU bubble of Brussels, who then made these videos available online. This is when we made the decision to create a live streaming product tailor made for conferences, as a response to our clients’ and some of our own business problems at the time. This is how Livecasts emerged. Once we have resolved a problem for us, we decided to share our knowledge with more businesses struggling with the same issues we had and dedicate more time helping them. This is what led us to where we are today.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We develop all our projects and products in house and this is how we can guarantee the quality of what we deliver.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
We like to think of our clients as partners. Since we do all of our projects in house, our clients benefit from working with a well assembled, seasoned team. We never cut corners and always make the extra mile, something which differs us a lot from our competitors and what we wouldn’t have had if we involved external players in the process.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?
Although we cannot say that we have a specific industry focus, we could all agree that our specialisation is the international non-profit organisations and yes, most of our clients have either been with us since the beginning or for a few years now.
We are now looking at opportunities within other industries and although we are lacking experience in some of them, our team has embraced a learning culture, which allows us to bring in creative ideas, discuss the client problem from a different angle and developing a solution, which is unique, and not just a repetitive one.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a web app.
Estimating a project duration without having a specification in place is always a challenge. The main parameters we consider are the client brief, our experience with similar projects and the good understanding of client priorities. Before writing any code we make sure that we know all the motivations and needs of our client and we have a good understanding of their long-term vision. This helps us develop a realistic project timeline.
The best case scenario is to have the app’s layouts ready and that leads to less interpretation and a more precise timeline.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a web app?
This is project-specific. For most web applications we have developed, we could say that 60% of the development time is used for back end development and 40% is spent on front end tasks.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a web application?
The key parameters for us are: productivity, security, maturity and availability. Since our goal is to always develop long-lasting solutions, we select mature platforms with proven track record, documentation, easily accessible and with great community of contributors. With this approach we make sure that our clients can use their new product independently from us and at any point they can upgrade it with new modules/features.
Which platform and technologies do you prefer to use in development of your web apps?
As everything else, the choice of technology stack is highly dependent on the project itself. We prefer to use open source technologies and most of our solutions are based on Ruby on Rails or Elixir for the back end and Ember, React, Angular or Vue as front end technologies.
Do you offer website design templates or customised website design, and do you have a responsive website design?
All our designs are tailor-made for individual businesses and follow the best practices for responsiveness across all devices. Our creative process starts by identifying the end recipient of the service, what they like and dislike and then continue with a more in-depth questionnaire of the design style we are after.
Which Content Management System do you prefer to use (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal etc)?
Although ‘off the shelf’ content management systems such as WordPress and Drupal could be a great choice for some projects, we refrain from using them due to their questionable security when using third-party plugins and all maintainability challenges in the long term.
Instead we use administration frameworks, such as Active Admin, which are easily customisable and can be built in a way to serve the client’s specific needs. Our team has recently developed a block editor which empowers site managers to create beautiful and consistently styled content.
Do you provide website maintenance services?
Yes, we do for all our clients.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a web application?
The complexity, the scope and the aimed release date are the main factors we consider when estimating for a new project. Our price proposal is based on the time that all members of the team will spend throughout the project. If there is not a clear goal or specification in place, we often suggest our clients to first start with a ‘strategy workshop’ where we define all goals, the users of the new platform/application, and discuss all other relevant aspects that will determine the final price of the project.
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.)
Our usual practice is to provide a fix price for the initial phase of each project. Following that we work on a time and material basis or estimate every following feature/phase individually. We always consider what our client will feel comfortable with and we suggest an option that will work for both of us.
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?
We take projects where we believe we can bring more value to the table and where clients are open to discuss the use of custom solutions. Our minimum budget for a project is 15 000 EUR. We can compromise with that if the cause is good or the idea has a great potential.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in2018?
Last year we started some really exciting projects and the average cost per project varies between 15 000 EUR and 80 000 EUR.
Kindly share your feedback on how Goodfirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
We are glad that we are members of the platform and although we cannot track how many of the service inquiries we receive are because of our profile on Goodfirms, we are satisfied with the number of new users visiting our website as a referral from you every month.
