Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
We at iTreeni Technolabs, are thrived to deliver innovative yet cost-effective, quality-driven, high-performance, and eye-catching solutions to our global clientele. Our prolonged portfolio consists of web development, mobility, and search engine optimization.
Currently, I handle critical areas like:
- Strategic Partner Relations
- Defining business development strategies
- Evaluate the company's performance quarterly
- Take corrective steps to enhance the growth of the organization.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
We have started this organization with one mission that is to provide innovative yet cost-effective one-stop web/mobile development solutions to simplify and automate the client's business needs.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We have an in-house team of experienced web/mobile developers as well as marketing personnel capable of handling and delivering success to large-scale projects. The company has also established an ecosystem to shout for when we are full internally. It goes without saying that we maintain full transparency with the client while outsourcing their projects and take full responsibility for quality even in cases where we could not execute projects on the floor.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
We value our professional relationships with clients, and thus we believe in complete honesty and transparency. We provide a one-stop design, development, and marketing solutions, all-under-one-roof. This gives our clients ease of dealing with a single vendor for all their development and marketing needs. This business approach has done wonders for us and gives us an edge over our competitors in the market.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?
We have served mainly ecommerce, sports, and manufacturing industries. We were also privileged to develop CRMs and SaaS (Software as a Service) products for our global clientele.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing software.
One cannot aim for moving targets; hence the first and foremost part for accurate estimation is finalizing requirements. After requirement finalization, the second immediate step would be choosing the right framework or language to build an application. One can leverage the framework's in-built functionalities and third-party plugins to reduce development load. The third parameter is determining the right number of resources, including Project Manager, Designer, Developer, and Tester required to work on the project based on task complexity and resources' technical capabilities and experience.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of software?
Well, there is no perfect mathematical formula for deciding how much % of the total development time should be allocated to develop the frontend and how much for the backend. I personally think development time should be in proportion to features required to be developed and the complexity of features. This, I think, is the right way to estimate and justify development time for backend and frontend.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right framework for developing software?
In my knowledge, below are the parameters that should be considered before selecting a framework for the software.
- How much workload will the framework reduce? - After finalizing requirements, we check and analyze how many features we can leverage from the framework's built-in library or by installing supported plugins. Many times, especially with ecommerce sites, I have experienced that installing the right plugins and purchasing paid themes proved cheaper and time-saver rather than developing features from scratch.
- Security - In my opinion, the developer must not compromise the security of the system at any cost. Either we have to choose the most secure framework, or we should improve the system's security by implementing stand-out features if it is not provided by default.
- Durability - The framework we choose for a project should be durable and easy to maintain and upgrade with the framework's updates.
- Community Support - The framework or CMS we choose for a project must be supported by a huge development community. This is very handy while developing complex features. We can always ask the community for help in tricky situations to resolve the problem quickly to maintain development pace and deliver the project on time.
Which languages & frameworks do you prefer to use in development of software?
My preference changes with time as I like to stay updated with technological evolutions. I currently prefer the following:
- JS Frameworks like Angular.js, Vue.js, Node.js, React.js, MEAN Stack, MERN Stack, etc.
- Open-source Frameworks like Laravel, Phalcon, Symfony and CodeIgniter, etc.
- CMSs like Drupal and WordPress.
- ecommerce solutions like WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify.
- Mobile technologies like Native iOS, Android, and Hybrid app development technologies like React Native, Flutter, Xamarin, and PhoneGap.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of software?
I usually determine project costs based on the below points.
- Framework or language we use: We charge a bit extra than usual if the framework or programming language we choose for the project is the latest in the market, and very few like us possess expertise in it. It justifies our resource training cost for the technology.
- Resource experience: How much experienced resource a project/client demands?
- Project Execution Model: Whether the client wants to execute a project on a fixed-cost basis or in dedicated mode. I personally prefer a dedicated resource option because it gives freedom to the client not to be bound with project scope and can change requirements and mold projects as he/she wishes to at any point in time.
- Project commitment: The client gets benefited if he/she assures longer project commitment.
- Long-term relation: We believe in a long-term relationship and would give discounts to our customers who believed in the same and provide free maintenance support up to some extent.
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 try to keep things as simple as possible and follow practices of fewer milestones, which implies less paperwork. If the project is of fixed-cost type and is of less than two months, we divide the payment into two terms; 50% advance and 50% after setting-up a project on the client's production server.
For dedicated projects, we log hours and generate invoices bi-weekly for the first three months. We ease payment terms after that if business demands for that.
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 treat all projects equally regardless of their size. I think this has worked for us very well and won many big-sized projects from the same clients whom we had helped with a smaller one earlier. In a nutshell, I would say we always aim for bigger projects but would be happy to help with any project client offers to us.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2018?
2018 has been kind to us and has offered us USD 2000 - USD 25000 price range projects.
