Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
GoodFirms is a great platform to expose our expertise, increase our brand awareness, and showcase our projects to potential clients. The traffic our website receives from GoodFirms has high quality and has grown over 300% in the past year. Our goal is to increase our exposure, share more projects, and generate more happy customer reviews to reach even more prospective customers to visit our website and profiles on independent platforms like GoodFirms. We aim to keep our profile up-to-date and have it contain the most relevant information about the company.
Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the organization.
I am the CEO and founder of Scopic. In 2006, after working in the software industry for over 20 years, I was enthusiastic about starting my own company. The idea was to have a software development company that relied fully on a remote team of experts. Scopic is now one of the biggest fully remote companies in the world, with 280+ employees from over 45 countries and counting. We strive to provide a personal approach to each of our clients, and become an extension to their business, providing a full range of digital services.
What is the story behind starting this company?
Scopic started small, but the remote-first approach allowed us to scale without experiencing the classic issues of growing fast. We believed that a fully remote software development process could be more efficient, flexible, and enjoyable for our employees and clients, and we were right.
In the first year, we only had 5 employees, and by 2012 we reached 100 employees over the globe. Scopic didn’t need to expand a physical office to make room for more people, so we easily brought in talented professionals in operations, sales, finance, HR, marketing, and others to optimize our processes. Our chosen model worked because we built an effective company structure, implemented the right processes, and successfully managed our business to grow in 15 years. We are now a well-established service provider with a loyal customer base and many returning clients. We are starting new and exciting projects that we are proud of every day.
What is your company’s business model–in-house team or third-party vendors/ outsourcing?
Scopic’s entire team is in-house. We do so to maintain full control of the projects, the resources working on those, and ultimately, the quality of the solutions that we provide. We believe in recruiting the best talent and continuously investing in their professional development. This process allows us to deliver great expertise to our clients and keeps us confident about the outcome of any project.
How does your company differentiate itself from the competition?
Our core philosophy is to make Scopic a one-stop shop for our clients. They don’t have to search for multiple providers for software development, design, or marketing services or take care of transitioning from one stage to another and changing teams. All their projects are completed under one roof, thoughtfully being taken care of. Scopic doesn’t just build apps. We help our clients plan and efficiently create products that will be relevant, modern, and in demand, and we further support them in marketing them to the right audience.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
Since the beginning, we have built software solutions for medical entities, with the healthcare industry being a core focus. We have created a wide array of custom software solutions for hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, physicians, and medical professionals across the world. Another area of expertise is custom trading software development, including technologies like blockchain, followed by fintech, education, manufacturing, wellness and fitness, and cannabis. In 2021, recurring clients accounted for 70% of our revenue. We are still working with clients who started with us from the first year since the company was founded.
Please share some of the services that you offer for which clients approach you the most?
Scopic’s core focus revolves around a few types of services: IT, DevOps, web, mobile, and desktop development, UI and UX design, and marketing. Yes, we are a software development company, but we offer much more than just that. Scopic helps businesses from the idea to the design, development, launch, and promotion of their digital product or service.
What is your customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
Scopic has a high level of customer satisfaction, and the easiest way to check this is by taking a look at our client reviews on GoodFirms and other platforms. We take steps to cater to our customers’ needs and requirements to go beyond having a dedicated project manager and team. We take pride in our transparent business processes, ensuring that our clients are regularly informed and kept up-to-date with the projects’ progress via regular reports. Scopic’s sales process includes estimates, and once a project starts, we launch a highly detailed discovery phase, and the outcome is very accurate specifications. The discovery document ensures the clients and the teams are aware of the workload, timelines, and overall expectations.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
Scopic’s operations team keeps a close relationship with all clients, continuously mitigating risks, managing issues, and ensuring their satisfaction. Our account management processes focus on checking the client’s satisfaction along the way and implementing any needed changes.
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.)
Scopic considers both pay-per-hour and fixed-cost projects. We always start our projects after providing a detailed set of estimates for the tasks to be done. This way, the client knows up front how much their project will cost and can adjust the budget and timeline according to their possibilities. All our work is documented in our time-tracking system, and all our employees report each new hour worked. Our project managers and team leaders always ensure that the clients approve any additional hours not included in the estimates.
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?
Scopic focuses on medium to larger projects. We have a minimum 150-hour workload project requirement or fixed pricing of $5,000.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2021?
For new projects, the minimum price is $5,000. The range of the projects we work with would be anywhere between $5,000 and $1M because of the diversity of our client base.
Where do you see your company in the next 10 years?
As Scopic continues to grow and change, our teams create phenomenal work, and our clients continue to be pleased. We know that the competition is fierce in the software services industry, so Scopic is focused on further expanding our expertise in some strategic areas, such as healthcare and blockchain while keeping up to date with rising technologies. Our goal is to continue to grow the business from all perspectives without sacrificing quality for quantity. This goal includes increasing our loyal customer base, having our previous clients return for additional services, and continuing with innovation to offer cutting-edge technology to them. I believe that Scopic has laid the groundwork for a successful company, which strives to be around for decades to come.