Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Lean Apps is an app and web development company based in Berlin with offices in India, Russia, and Croatia. We are working with large, mid-segment enterprises and startups in Healthcare, Music, and retail and e-commerce domain helping them building digital products at lightning speed. Our core expertise is building MVPs and launching products in 12 weeks. We work closely with Product Managers, Product Leaders, Product Owners & Product Designers to solve their business problems.
We are the right fit for:
Companies/Startups trying to build a new product or service
Companies trying to improve their existing product or service
Corporate Innovation Teams lead by Head of Innovation looking to build an innovation culture in the company.
As an entrepreneur, my passion is sales and marketing and helping people. I spend two days of my week with project delivery teams, HR, finance, admin team to make sure everyone is working towards one common goal “Delivering a wow experience to everyone”. I am also responsible for the company's future growth and spend the remaining time connecting with business leaders in different domains and understanding the new trends in the market.
What was the idea behind starting this organisation?
While we were in our corporate jobs, we realized that there is a huge problem in the outsourcing model and customers are not getting the real value of outsourcing. We interviewed multiple stakeholders in different companies and realized that they have issues with communication, collaboration, and quality while working with Indian companies. We saw this as an opportunity and left our corporate jobs and started Lean Apps. It was a hard time for us initially to convince the customers to choose us as a development partner. However, our past contacts, relationships trusted us and we started our entrepreneurship journey.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We have internal employees and we also work with 3rd party vendors for specialized services based on the customer wants.
How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
We believe in providing value to all our customers and deliver a wow customer experience. This is always our top priority and this is one of the reasons customers love working with us. We help them not only on the technology part but also on the product management. We sometimes challenge them as well if we feel that they are going in the wrong direction. We work with them as partners and not vendors.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
We cater to Healthcare, Music, and Retail, and the e-commerce industries. In the last 2 years, we have done close to 20+ projects in digital healthcare and we are really passionate about healthcare.
Mention the parameters which are most important for you in developing an app design.
User experience is the most important aspect when it comes to designing an app. Any product that you build is solving a user problem. Design is an outcome (solution to the problem). It's important for any designer to know the problem of the users before designing any app.
What key aspects do you keep in mind while developing an app design in order to enhance its usability?
The app designs should be simple with minimum click to achieve the desired goal. The designs should be simple and very easy for the user to navigate. We follow design principles from apps like User, Airbnb, Tinder, Zara, etc.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right framework for an app design?
We use a design sprint framework for all our app designs. We deliver a design prototype to our customer in 4 days before we start the app development. This process covers everything you need to start designing the app. We use tools like Invision, Figma, Sketch, Adobe tools for designing both web and mobile apps.
Which framework do you suggest your clients to go for when they approach you with an idea? Why?
We follow the PCNS framework (Problem, Consequence, Need, Solution). We always start our sales process by identifying the problem, what is the problem, why the problem exists, what will be the consequence if the problem is not solved, identifying the client's needs, and proposing a solution. This approach also helps us in qualifying a customer if he is making the right investment. We work as partners for our customers and not as vendors.
Android or iOS— which framework is best to use to build your app design? What are your recommendations?
Today, users want the same experience on both android and iOS devices. When it comes to mobile apps, we are focussing on 100% React native apps and they are easily portable on both operating systems. Unless it’s an app that includes extensive interaction with Hardware, we prefer delivering React Native App. It also depends on the user personas, the target market where the customer will launch the app.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile app design?
We have created a cost calculator for the customers to calculate an approximate cost for the app.
The cost depends on:
UI/UX
DevOps
Technology Stack
Security & Performance
Unit Testing and Automation
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 have made the pricing model which is very simple and lean. We follow sprint-based pricing. Sprint is 2 weeks and we offer a Full Stack Development. Sprints, Design Sprint. Our pricing is available on the website.
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 any project is 15,000 - 20,000 Euros.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2018?
We have catered to projects starting from 20,000 Euros to 500,000 Euros.
Kindly share your feedback on how Goodfirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
After signing up with Good Firms, our inbound leads have gone up by 40%. The leads are qualified and relevant to our business model. The combination of leads is from startups to large enterprises looking for app development to building a design prototype.
