Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Innovify is a digital product studio for enterprises & start-ups, demanding the very best in new product development and business transformation by harnessing the power of disruptive technologies. With a lean and agile mindset, we go beyond traditional enterprise application development to provide a full range of digital services to not only build user-centered products, but we also disrupt markets for our clients to grow and transform; an ideal intersection of the user, technology and commerce.
With a diverse team of highly competent talent, we have become a trusted partner of our clients to manage the entire product development life-cycle across the full spectrum of internet-enabled smart devices, including web and mobile.
Maulik is the founder and CEO of the company.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
Maulik worked as a Product manager for many large-sized multinational companies before founding Innovify. Through his experience, he found that many companies are slow to innovate and are not as lean and agile as they would want to be. Additionally, many start-ups, although successful, don’t manage their products well. Such startups may have started with the founder being the product manager, but then often struggle to scale the team and hand over the responsibilities. Hence, Maulik spotted a gap in the market where smaller companies need well-organized product delivery teams, which are not only lean & agile but can also scale fast.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third-party vendors/ outsourcing?
We have multiple business models:
1. Product Lifecycle Management: We deliver products from idea to market. We work with our clients to ensure the views are worth pursuing and if they are, then we design and develop them as a product. We also support Growth-hacking and finding product-market fit. We define success KPIs for the product and base our pricing based on such KPIs.
2. Fixed Price Project: We provide fixed price delivery models to clients who have obvious defined needs and needs on time - on budget deliveries.
3. Time & Material projects: We provide flexible product developments on T&M basis for clients who need agile based delivery models with variable scope and timelines.
How is your business model beneficial from a value-added perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
We are very different from our competitors. We work with our clients as their delivery partner, responsible for executing the entire product strategy. Often our clients are at a very early stage and need a lot of hand-holding to ensure they properly develop the right idea. For this, you need to get the concept itself right, identify the right users, define the right problem and solution, develop the right UX, identify suitable technologies, design proper infrastructures, define the product backlog & roadmap to deliver the most value at minimal efforts. Software development is only a tiny part of the overall engagement we have with our clients. We provide them with a unified team that can help them navigate through this entire process with ease, enabling them to make the right business decisions.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
1. FinTech
2. PropTech
3. Retail, eCommerce & Marketplaces
4. Media & Publishing
Yes, our customer does come back to us due to the value addition that we provide. Interesting statistic, our clients stay with us on average for 30 months.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a mobile app.
The time required to develop a mobile app depends on 2 main factors: 1) Team Size and 2) Scope of work and then the level of UI/UX, levels of complexities involved. You can increase the size of the team (which increases the cost) to deliver a given scope faster. Alternatively, you can reduce/expand the range of the work to achieve the apps at the required time and budget. I would consider quality and non-functional requirements for the App as part of the scope.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a mobile app?
It depends on what kind of mobile app you are developing. E.g., an app like Uber has very simple front-end with only a few screens. So, the time to create front-end would be minimal, whereas the back-end would take a long time to develop, especially if you also looking for all kind of AI, ML, and other features.
Alternatively, if you are developing a mobile app with mainly front-end functionality with very little backend functionalities then naturally front-end would take more time for example, offline mobile games with purely on-device gameplay.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a mobile application?
There are many platforms in the market to develop mobile applications. The key parameters to select one are as follows:
1. The kind of functionalities to be developed.
2. The on-device interaction required
3. The commonality of features between iOS and Android
4. The cost of maintaining two code-bases
5. The cost of employing teams
6. The support available for a given platform
7. The longevity of the App
Which platform do you suggest your clients begin with when they approach you with an idea (Android or iOS) and why?
It depends on what kind of idea they want to develop. If the concept is well designed with a need to have in-app purchases, then we recommend iOS as its users are more like to pay than Android. However, we would support Android, when the idea is not well articulated and needs some experimentation mainly because it's easy and quicker to release the apps on Android than on iOS. Otherwise, both the platforms are matured and offer like for like features. TG geography also plays a part in deciding the platform, e.g., if it’s the US focused then iOS and if Asia, then Android. However, this again is a thing of the past as there are so many users for both platforms and businesses should go for both platforms.
Android or iOS, Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?
As I said above, it all depends on the kind of app you want to build and the factors listed in question 8. As a rule of thumb:
1. iOS: Well developed ideas, needing a lot of native interactions and in-app purchases
2. Android: When you want to experiment more
3. Xamarin: When you want to maintain a single code-base and especially you back-end is in .NET stack.
4. ReactNative: When you want to develop a hybrid app, with not many native interactions
5. Angular: Similar to ReactNative, but we would select Angular if the libraries required for developing the apps are better in Angular than ReactNative.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile application?
1. Number of features
2. The quality of work
3. The non-functional requirements
4. Native VS Hybrid
5. Speed of delivery
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 follow Agile based delivery models with either Scrum or Kanban methodologies. If we follow Scrum, then we will invoice per Sprint delivered. If we follow Kanban, then we will use feature-based pricing, which could be in phases.
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?
Our minimum budget for development is £25,000. If the UX is required, then £40,000.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2018?
£25,000 - £250,000 is the price range we catered in 2018.
Which business model do you suggest to your clients enabling them to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?
This is not an easy answer and needs us to know a lot about the client business before we can recommend one. As a general rule of thumb – identify the core value created by the App for its user, determine how this value is consumed, define a parameter to measure the consumption of this value and monetize this value based on this parameter. I know this is very abstract, but we have an open framework to define this.
