Please introduce your company and your role within the company.
We are a young company, established at the end of 2015 – beginning of 2016, though before that we have worked a lot with different clients separately. Several of us, developers, suggested that together we will be stronger than each one being on their own and that is how fructustemporum was born. Fructustemporum translates to “fruit of labour”, “fruit that ripens in time” from latinic. That is what our company is – with time we get stronger.
I am Pavel Andreev, CTO of fructustemporum company. Our company is based in the heart of Moscow; we have currently 12 developers that work on projects of different type and scale. We develop applications, servers, video games and some special stuff like chat bots, NFC, ibeacons and other such products. My role is to oversee the quality of development work our company provides to every client and partner.
What was the idea behind starting the company?
The idea was to establish a company that works with the clients from all over the world. We set our goal to be a very strong development team, to grow constantly in skills acquired and thus we want to compete with the best companies now as we already have good experience in development.
Also, we noticed that most problems with development projects came from miscommunication – so we decided to provide constant 24/7 availability to our clients to mitigate any differences in the beginning.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a mobile application.
The following parameters help us in deciding the time frame of developing an application -
1. Number of platforms
2. Feature list
3. New/rare technologies used
4. Clients budget
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a mobile application?
Firstly, we discuss the whole idea behind the app with the client; go through all the features needed. Then we create UI/UX mockups and a mockup prototype to better understand the user flow. Then goes the design stage, and lastly, when design is ready and features list is created, our developers begin their work.
We work agile with weekly sprints - it helps us keep track of where we are in development of the project.
What is your company’s business model– in-house team or third party vendors / outsourcing?
We are a full-scale outsource company with full time in-house staff.
How is your business model beneficial, from a value addition perspective, to your clients as compared to other companies' models?
Our main target is establishing long-term relationships with clients and partners. We do not only do our job as discussed but provide some interesting insights in business models of the apps, their promotion and details concerning the success of the app.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a mobile application?
There are certain parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for an application - Budget, scale and intent. And experience of your team members of course.
Which platform do you suggest your clients to begin with when they approach you with an idea and why?
For complex apps or the ones intended to be updated in future, we prefer building on the native platform. For quick and multi platform turnaround applications, we prefer to have a multi platform framework.
Android or iOS, Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?
We like complex and long projects so we propose only building the application only on the native platform. Quick and little projects rarely make it, and projects that grow over time and constantly on the market are more trustworthy to clients and have success more often.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile application?
If app contains rarely used but interesting technologies (ibeacons, voice recognition etc.) we are more interested in developing them and can lower the budget. If the project is multi platform and big, we too can make a discount. In other cases we do as any other developers do – (hours*rate) = total budget.
What kind of payment structure do you follow to bill your clients?
Mostly it works as we bill the clients 20% upfront, 40% in the first half of the project and 40% at the end of the project. For bigger projects (3+ months) it will be monthly based with equal payments.
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 are flexible on minimum budgets because there are cases when we receive ready project that needs to be developed further. We estimate each pool of work and bill clients accordingly.
Which business model do you suggest your clients use to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?
Mostly clients already have a good idea of how to monetize their app and our task is only to tweak a few bolts. We do not change their approach but tweak it, because any approach is correct if it is executed flawlessly.
