Railwaymen

My name is Łukasz and I’m a CEO and Co-Founder of a Cracow, Poland-based software house Railwaymen. During 11 years of our existence, we’ve developed +125 web & mobile applications, for clients mostly from the USA, Western Europe, and GCC region. Our areas of expertise are construction, social, marketing, education, food tech, and fintech industries.

What’s special about us, is that we do everything in-house - we can develop your app from A to Z, starting on the idea only and ending with fully functional software within just a few months. Our most important value is quality - having mostly Senior Developers on board, you can be sure that if you choose us - your app idea will land in very experienced hands!

Our whole founding team (which includes me and two of my colleagues, Grzegorz and Marcin) has got a strong programming background. We all worked together for a while in a software development company, and as we gained enough experience and knowledge we decided, we want to start something on our own. This is how Railwaymen came to life.

The idea behind the company name is pretty unusual - disclaimer: we have nothing in common with trains or tracks ;) As our core programming language is Ruby on Rails, we called ourselves Railwaymen - as people, who are real experts, when it comes to that Ruby framework. Back then, it wasn’t such a popular technology language so we decided that this will be our path to distinguish ourselves among other software houses.

Almost 100% in-house. We do not cooperate with any third-party vendors or software outsourcing teams. The risk of failure is too high. Although sometimes we do receive that kind of offer, we do not plan to do that, ever. I am afraid that it would downsize the code quality and negatively impact our company image. When working with clients, who are hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away (and most of our projects come from the USA), smooth communication is a very important thing - outsourcing our work further could damage that, and I don’t want to take that risk.

The only occasions when we cooperate with external providers is when the project requires very specialistic knowledge. For example: from the fields like blockchain or AI. We know that someone who is 100 % focused on one topic will find the best possible solution, so we are open to those kinds of cooperation. But it’s more like consulting, than third-party outsourcing - we never do that.

At Railwaymen, during the recruitment process, we precisely check candidates' skills. I take an active part in recruitment interviews. We build the right teams around projects. Each developed app has at least one Senior Developer in the team. It gives me confidence that the software will be produced in line with the budget and timeline.

I think that our culture and agile approach to app development attracts people to us. In 2020 we launched a new free service called Design Thinking Workshops. The goal of that meeting is to understand the digital product and everyone’s perspective. After the workshops, collaboration goes smoothly. Our clients appreciate this method of work very much.

For the last 2 years, we pay strong attention to content marketing by sharing our knowledge and experience through articles regularly published on our company blog. Right now, we have over 50 talented people on board. Many of them willingly write texts so that you can find topics written by Developers, Projects and Business Managers, QA Specialists, Designers on our blog. It allows us to build an image of an expert in the industry efficiently. We also constantly explore new technologies (for example last year, we investigated React Native and Vue.js more) and share our knowledge within company structures, and on our YouTube channel.

Another factor is the experience - we have people on board, who are working on our clients' projects non-stop for over 10 years, constantly developing and supporting them. Most of our projects are long-term partnerships, where we constantly adapt to the clients' business needs. So if you need a reliable partner, who will guide you through the whole process and stays with you to collect the results - we are the one.

When it comes to industries we find ourselves the most confident at, these are:

Speaking about customer repetitiveness - a very big part of them comes back to us. Whether it is with another project (like Tim from Launchmatic) or with the app that we made some years ago and the client wants to add new functionalities to it (like Christine from It’s short). Overall - we never shut down for picking up the cooperation again, even after years of break. And lots of our clients recommend us further which has to be a good sign, that we do our work well.

Railwaymen is the most known for Ruby on Rails development. It is our leading technology. I am proud to say that we're excellent at it. Our portfolio is full of advanced RoR apps. So yes, most queries refer to RoR web development. Of course, as we have talented iOS and Android developers in the team, mobile development is no problem for us. We are 100% ready to create mobile and web applications from scratch by ensuring UX/UI design, development, Quality Assurance, maintenance, and support. We also explore hybrid mobile app development with React Native.

As I mentioned above, free Design Thinking Workshops generate quite nice interest, and potential customers are excited to participate in them. We also offer a more extended service called Discovery Phase. In short, it's written documentation, a complete guide about the application. It includes the scope of the project, features, technologies, competitors, target audience definition, user personas, monetization strategy, pricing, timeline, and more. Everything you need to know about your projects. More and more people are asking about this service.

If you look at our Clutch. co profile, you will notice that our rating is 5.0 from 32 reviews. And those numbers do not lie. The recent opinion says: Railwaymen goes above and beyond to provide high-quality results at reasonable rates. The team is hard-working and organized, establishing a smooth workflow. We do our best to meet the clients' satisfaction.

How do we do that? First of all, we listen to our clients carefully. Product owners know their vision best. Secondly, we respect their money. We recommend building MVP at first, instead of the whole app. Thanks to that, the budget is not wasted on not-necessary features. So we implement modules that are needed, test the users' reaction and develop software in the right direction.

We are constantly in touch with our clients using tools as follow:

Each project gets a dedicated Project Manager who is the main point of contact for our clients. So if you have any questions at all - feel free to approach your PM without hesitations! On special occasions, we also allow our clients to contact our developers directly, if the person is technical enough, to explain the issue to a programmer.

Depending on the project methodology (SCRUM or Kanban), we recommend payments by sprint or milestone. This gives our customers the possibility to have better control over the budget and pay for already done features. We are always open and flexible when it comes to adapting the best solution for our customers, that’s why in some specific cases we can do fixed bids.

Yes, we accept projects within our basic budget requirements. And how high it is - it depends on the project. When it comes to our Discovery Phase service - you can have it for around 6k$.

In case of building an application from scratch - we can make an MVP for you starting from 20$k in total if you don’t have anything but the app idea. Of course, the prize can change up to or down, depending on what functionalities or integrations you want or you, for example, have your wireframes already done.

In 2020 (but bear in mind, that it was not a typical year because of the COVID-19 pandemic) our price range was from 20k$ (min) to 400k$ (max).

It’s hard to predict what the future will look like, last year, and COVID-19 has shown that things can change significantly. Although, our mission is unchanged: to digitize businesses as well as optimize and automate their processes. As long as we are efficient and helpful in these areas, we are satisfied with a job done well. Even though the tools and approach might change (big role of ML/AI), our goals stay the same.