Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
MetaLamp is a custom software development agency that specializes in the blockchain industry. Our clients are entrepreneurs and companies that want to build decentralized apps and implement blockchain solutions into contemporary business processes.
I'm the CEO and my responsibilities are coordinating and managing strategic departments, mostly marketing, sales, and finances.
What is the story behind starting this company?
Our company started as a club of passionate developers who wanted to build web products that would change people's everyday life. Our first projects were small freelancers' jobs, but after years we started to build huge high-loaded systems from fintech startups to analytical services for enterprises.
Time changed us, and the small club of enthusiasts became a strong and confident company. But the main value is still there - people and their relationships.
What are your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
We have 80+ developers, designers, and managers in-house. All projects we take are mostly under our control. But we have partners who are ready to support us if projects need more specialists.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Our main strength is narrow ranged specialization. We do only one thing - blockchain solutions. That allows us to do the best quality in that area without being distracted by other directions.
Among blockchain developers, we stand out with a strict attitude to technical standards. We have our own roadmap for developers which helps us to improve the skills of teammates and sustain a level of expertise. Such an approach lets us work with hard engineering tasks instead of ordinary forks and stereotyped NFT marketplaces.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
More than 70% of our customers return to us for new solutions and scaling their projects.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most for?
MVP development, smart-contract development, frontend, and backend development.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
To say the sooth, we've just started to measure our client's satisfaction with different aspects of our work, that's why I don't have a right to declare some figures there.
But the most common principle our customer's note is transparency. We try to make the process of building projects open at every stage. Beginning with the first call and finishing with project delivery we provide all the information about workflow, methods of estimation, and even problems and blockers during the development phase. We are sure that total mutual understanding is the best way of effective cooperation.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
Almost every project is coordinated by our project manager. All questions and requests are answered as soon as possible. It helps us to control our principle of transparency for every customer.
In technical terms, we spend a lot of time building maintainable and scalable architecture. It costs more, but it gives its payoff.
We can admit our professional weaknesses. If we can't do some things - we will not take it on or warn that we put such risks in the final estimation. It protects our clients from unexpected extras and allows them to manage their risks accurately. This approach is not for everyone but it matches our ideology.
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.)
For projects, we totally understand we can suggest a fixed budget.
In projects with a portion of uncertainty, we suggest work by Time and Material.
Most of our projects are developed in a hybrid regime when ordinary parts are estimated with fixed costs, but complex non-obvious scopes of work are completed on an hourly basis.
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 don't consider projects in budget preferences. We are ready to take even simple tasks if it suits our specialist's interests and expertise level.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2021?
Our minimum hourly rate is 40$, maximum is 110$. Hourly rate depends on the expertise level of specialists we engage in working with projects. Some tasks require junior's knowledge, some require seniors.
The minimum budget for our fixed projects in 2021 was 5 000$. Maximum budgets exceeded 150 000$.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
We understand that blockchain technology is on the first steps of its own way. Now we see only enthusiasts who are inspired by the idea of changing the world, but in the nearest future, we will find huge companies implementing blockchain solutions and adopting decentralization for their business processes. The traditional approaches to information storing and financial management will be changing.
Even principles of ruling corporations may be removed by new decentralized methods of making decisions.
We want to be experts who build this stage of business technology evolution.
