Symph
Love. Change. Hack.
We build web apps, mobile apps, and custom software to give you and your customers a better digital experience with your business.
Great Product = Right Team + Right Process + Right Technology
Right Team
Our team works with client to design systems and software with users in mind.
Right Process
We develop software in an agile approach, this enables us to quickly iterate on the application, with user testing and validation to analyze the usage and functionality.
Right Technology
We are adept with tools that we use to provide up-to-date and reliable system in this fast-pacing industry.
Philippines
350T V. Urgello Street, Sambag II, Cebu City, 6000 Cebu,
Cebu City,
Cebu
6000
63 (032) 234 6967
$50 - $99/hr
10 - 49
2010
Industry Focus
- Financial & Payments - 20%
- Real Estate - 20%
- Government - 10%
- Information Technology - 10%
- Advertising & Marketing - 5%
- Art, Entertainment & Music - 5%
- Business Services - 5%
- Consumer Products - 5%
- Education - 5%
- Media - 5%
- Transportation & Logistics - 5%
- Retail - 5%
Client Focus
100% Small Business
Detailed Reviews of Symph
Executive Interview of Symph
Dave Overton
Founder & CEO
Please provide your feedback on how GoodFirms has contributed to increasing your visibility among potential clients.
GoodFirms has been a great help in increasing our visibility. Over the past few months, we've had leads come through the platform. It's a valuable tool for reaching businesses that align with what we offer.
Please introduce your company and describe your role within the organization.
Symph is a software design and development company that we started in 2010, and since then we've been building mobile, web app, and website solutions for clients around the world. I am the Chief Executive Officer of Symph, and we are looking to expand our base of talent and provide solutions that really deal with real-world problems.
What inspired the founding of your company, and what is the story behind its inception?
At the heart of Symph, we really wanted to see how technology can shape the future and how technology can empower lives. We're based in the Philippines and so a lot of that is a developing country and the developing economy. How can technology both improve the lives of the stakeholders as well as the general population in a place like the Philippines? And how will technology build a better future?
So a lot of the ideas that we have and what we're inspired by are building products around education, building products around finance and financial accessibility, as well as solutions both for the government and the non-government organization sector. So looking at initiatives like freedom of information or open data and how we as a technology provider can bridge that gap and enable people around the world to have better lives.
What are the core values and principles that drive your company's culture, and how do you ensure alignment with these values across your team?
Number one, we like to get things done. I think that this really sums up the experience of working with us because we usually start by trying to understand the problem, trying to understand why this needs to be built, and how we can enable you to build it.
In that sense, we've leveraged our experience and our skills from a product management perspective by asking what our customers' problems are and how technology will enable them and transform them. That's led to a lot of great experiences for our customers and getting things done. And it's not always the typical way like, okay, we need to build this huge solution. A lot of times it's because we ask these questions that we're able to help the customer discover an easier path. Then we can build something simpler or something, honestly, affordable that solves their problem and helps them get things done.
The second is we really like to work on problems that are worth solving. So for example, one of the values that I would say we have as a company is we look for problems that interest us and that excite us. Education is a great example. We want to enable a better education because a lot of us are parents or we look at our own educational experience and we dream of something better. We dream of something like that, with technology, that could be realized.
The last one, it might sound silly from a work perspective, but it's very important. We like to be fun to work with. We like to enjoy collaborating with our clients and we like to feel that they're part of our team. We're taking on this mission or this project together and we hope to accomplish something and be able to do something and realize something great together. And so I think part of that is we like to be fun to work with. We like to be approachable. We don't like to be too formal in that sense and we like to be very friendly but to be also very real and very candid.
Can you highlight some of the key achievements or milestones your company has accomplished since its inception?
One is we worked with a financial services company here in the Philippines, and we were able to transform their entire technology stack. Basically, they had an older system that was running on some legacy hardware. They came to us and they said, we want you to build out our entire platform, to take what we have and make it better, so we embarked on that. It took us about 18 months to really build this entire platform. This platform services tens of millions of users and hundreds of millions of transactions. It's a very high-volume, well-known brand here in the Philippines.
Alongside that, we played for the long game. We were empowering their technology team to understand what we were building, how we were building, and why we were building. So we were actually actively collaborating with their team as they would hire more, we would give them consultations, and we would just come alongside them, and they would shadow our developers so that they could learn from the experience. Because for us, the long-term success of our clients is of the utmost importance.
Another project that I would say highlights some of the work that we did is really the work that we did for Open Data and the Freedom of Information here in the Philippines. These were projects that were supported by the World Bank, and we were able to collaborate with the government departments and entities that were involved in this. We had launched the Open Data platform for the Philippines, and it included a robust API. We were pulling all of the purchasing information from the Philippine purchasing systems. So, we were able to really open up and give developers and other businesses open data or access to the data within the Philippine government. And that was very, very exciting.
Freedom of information came at the end of that sort of project window. It was about 120 days from the announcement of the law and the enactment of freedom of information in the Philippines in 2016 when they came to us and they said, we need to launch this. And we were able to build a robust freedom of information system that we continued to support for about three years after its launch.
Could you explain your company's business model? Do you primarily operate with an in-house team or utilize third-party vendors/outsourcing?
At this time, Symph is really an in-house team and we've grown over the years. We have around 88 people working within the company and so we're a fully functional in-house team. If there are projects that do come in that have requirements we can't fill in-house, we look to either source those and bring those people in or to work with them on a project-based model.
How does your company differentiate itself from competitors in the industry?
There's this mindset in Silicon Valley, where they talk about teams of missionaries or teams of mercenaries. Mercenaries and missionaries are all usually very good, very talented, but the way that they approach problems is very different.
Mercenaries are typically motivated by just getting the job done and then getting the bounty or the pay for that job. Missionaries, on the other hand, come in with this idea that they want to transform something. They really want to see it through, create an impact, and believe in something deeper.
I would definitely say our values and ethos as a company have been formed because we think like a team of missionaries. We genuinely like to understand our clients' situation, problems, and opportunities and put ourselves in their shoes. This allows us to build solutions that solve real problems—not just building for technology's sake, not just building things that are beautiful because this is the trend in UI or UX, but really building things that have a meaningful impact and leverage technology as well as design to achieve those goals.
How would you describe the dynamics within your team, and how do you foster collaboration and teamwork to achieve common goals?
We're a cross-functional team at Symph. When we take on projects, we're assigning the whole project team. Now, there are often projects that don't need that. They just require a dev or a designer or something like that, and that's fine—we can also do that.
But where I would say our strength comes in is when a client or a project comes to us, and they really need a holistic way of thinking about it. They need someone who understands the product and the business value and can ask those questions about why we are doing this and what's most important. They need a technology team who can say, "Okay, this is the easiest pathway for this technology," or, "Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?" Likewise, we have our design and UI/UX team who are really thinking through what the user experience is and how we would design this in a way that will meet the business goals as well as the user's perspective. Of course, last and certainly not least, there are project managers.
This cohesive unit, this cross-functional team, enables us to come into any situation, opportunity, or problem and really look at it from a multifaceted vantage point, allowing us to build solutions that truly have an impact.
What measures do you take to support the professional development and growth of your employees? Do you offer training programs or opportunities for skill enhancement?
We definitely do invest in this. We enable our team members to take training that they feel is valuable. We actually incentivize them to get certifications in areas like on Google Cloud or other technology providers so that we can also have more experienced developers.
We also firmly believe that being a self-taught developer is essential, especially in the rapidly changing world of technology. What I learned 20 years ago is no longer really relevant. Yes, there are some principles, but the specific technologies have changed so quickly over that period of and even the last 18 months, look at how rapidly even AI and machine learning and these different technologies that frankly have been around for a while, but have really picked up the pace in learning.
We definitely empower our team and we identify individuals who are driven to continue learning, because if you're not driven to continue learning, then that's a challenging road to really be at the best and at the forefront of technology. We invest in individuals who are doing that, and we look and identify for team members who really are hungry to learn.
Could you share a notable success story or case study that exemplifies the impact your company has had on a client's business?
One of our oldest clients is actually in a very traditional business. They run brick-and-mortar restaurants, and they have a group of restaurants here in the Philippines. And so when the pandemic hit, the Philippines was under a very strict and tight lockdown. And literally, people could not go out of their houses, dining establishments were closed for an incredibly long period of time. This was obviously very challenging for our client. Literally, they went from having around 30 to 40 locations with employees and full-service restaurants to being able to operate none. They were in a dire situation. They basically had to reinvent their business because the idea of reopening was very, very far away when it came to the pandemic and the lockdown in the Philippines.
So we collaborated with them to build an online ordering platform where there are multiple restaurants that could all be accessible in one online platform and people could order and then deliveries can happen to their house, et cetera. We enabled them to sort of survive the pandemic, but not only that, to have something where they could thrive and that they could continue to grow. Until this day, this continues to operate, people are still able to order online. Thankfully, they were able to restart their restaurant operations and they've continued to grow.
We've been happy to just step in and enable them to continue succeeding, to continue operating, to continue generating revenue, even in the most challenging of times.
What industries do you primarily cater to, and do you have a significant percentage of repeat clients? If so, what is the ratio of repeat clients?
Hospitality is one, the real estate sector, all the way to restaurants and establishments. This has been a strong industry that we've helped a lot of clients in. Another one is financial services, building out different technology stacks from very traditional brick-and-mortar financial services in the Philippines to more enabled, like crypto or Web3-based technologies, and enabling both of those fronts. Education is a sector that we care a lot about, and we've done a number of projects.
Lastly, this is not really a sector, but I would say a technology area that is affecting all sectors is AI, really looking at how AI will change this operation, this activity of this business, and thinking through that has been a question that we've been working with our clients with very, very deeply.
We do have a significant percentage of repeat clients. About two out of three of our clients when we started back in 2010 are still clients to this day, and they've been with us for 14 years. I don't have a ratio right now, but I would say we are very much in the game of playing long-term games with long-term-minded people or businesses. We like to collaborate. And that doesn't necessarily mean that we want clients to stay with us forever. One of those clients that's been with us since 2010, we've actually done training programs to help them grow their technology team. They have a team of about 100 in-house developers now, and we collaborate with them openly. We try to enable them. We try to help them learn new technology faster. We want them to be able to maintain and operate their platforms and continue to trust us to lead in innovation or new ideas and new experiences. And so we can establish long-term working relationships with a lot of our clients and therefore we have a lot of repeat business.
What initiatives does your company undertake to foster innovation and stay at the forefront of industry trends? Do you invest in research and development projects?
We're more of a startup builder in terms of what we do internally and how we think about things. Like research and development, I would say we don't necessarily call it that. But what we do lead on is really a lot of innovations. We try to come up with ideas, like startup ideas that we can build out relatively quickly. Over the years, we have invested a ton in these areas.
For example, 2023, we committed a lot of time and energy within our company and put a significant investment into understanding what the AI landscape was looking like, how it is changing, and what we could do with it. So we challenged ourselves to build 30 AI apps in 30 days. We ended up with far more because it became so easy for us to generate AI product generators and to build the underlying technology to do some very interesting things.
We invest heavily in startup ideas, or what you might call research and development projects, probably disproportionately to more conservative design and development studios, because we know that the future will be upon us before we know it.
Please share some of the most sought-after services that clients approach your company for.
If I tried to generalize it and classify it, I would say it's the service of idea-to-reality. A lot of our clients come to us with this idea of what they want to build, and they just walk in and they say, hey, I have this vision for this. And we collaborate with them through that whole process of ideation and understanding what needs to be done and who can do it and how we can go about doing it. I think that in that area, we have just so much opportunity and we're so excited about what we can do for clients.
If it comes to some specific technical level projects, most of what we have are web application development and mobile application development. But what they often don't realize is there's so much in the UX and the UI and the discovery and the business delivery that this whole list approach that we have built ourselves upon is so, so important.
How do you build and maintain strong relationships with your clients, and what mechanisms do you have in place for gathering and acting upon client feedback?
We definitely have leaned into our client relationships. I think anytime you look at a company and they've had a few of the same clients for 14 years, clearly there is a good working relationship. And that doesn't always mean it's perfect.
Those clients and I, we have had confrontations. We have had difficult situations. However, that being said, if you can continue to work with someone for 14 years, you really show that you have a capacity to handle long-term relationships and you realize that there's always give and take, and we tend to view ourselves and our relationships as what is the long-term success of the client.
You face a lot of challenges when clients are trying to get something done, and you're also trying to get something done, and you're trying to run a company. These are very challenging situations, but I think one principle that has guided us over the years is alignment, to really understand what is the goal and the objective of the client. Do we have alignment? We ask ourselves that constantly. And if we don't have alignment, then we are radically candid. We talk to the client, and we've had those relationships where we had to break up with the client, and that might be unbelievable in our industry, that we would say no to an existing client. But what we realized is for us to continue on, we're actually going to do lower quality work. We're going to disappoint the client and we're going to be disappointing ourselves in the end. And so we say no.
Likewise, when projects come to us, we actually say no quite a lot. If we don't think it's a good fit for what we know and what we do and how we do it, we will say no. And the main reason for that, walking away from business or leaving money on the table, is because these principles don't align with our values. One thing that we've been true and candid over the 14 years that we've been here is that we really believe in alignment of principles and values in what we're going to do and saying no if we don't think we can do that.
That's sort of a lot of the deeper theory on this. How do we actually make that work? We tend to follow an agile approach in our software development and that includes sprints and sprint planning and sprint retrospectives and presentations. So basically we are time-blocking say, one week of effort, and you start at the beginning of the week with planning out what's going to be done, then the team work and they collaborate. We have daily stand-ups with the team, including the client, to just do check-ins. If we get blocked by anything, we're going to communicate. We probably err on the side of over-communication, but we have found that when we get blocked or when we need something, we would rather err it out than the client be disappointed. Now, the week goes on and progresses, and then we have a demo at the end of the week where we sort of showcase the work that's been done. We talk about any challenges and we do a retrospective, so basically we look at what was done, what was planned, how did we do, what could we do better, what would make us move faster, how can we, you know, meet the goals quicker, how can we do things more effectively, how can we do better quality work, we'll reflect on that with the client. It's a very collaborative process.
And you might be saying, Dave, I don't really buy into all of that, I don't want to be involved, I don't have time for that, then I would probably say, you might not be the best client for Symph. What we've learned over the years is that we do our best work when we are very collaborative with clients who are fully bought in to this process of building software and building things quickly and well, and using some of the principles of agile software development, using the principles of the way that startups work and just building, measuring, and learning, and continuing through that cycle.
How has your company adapted to changes and challenges in the business landscape, and what strategies have you employed to ensure resilience and sustainability?
We've been around a while and in my experience and my theory of business, things run in cycles, and there are some good cycles and then there are cycles where the tide ebbs and flows.
Basically, there are great cycles where there's a lot of client work. There's high demand. And then it tends to die down. The recent one is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, and during the pandemic, there was a huge tech build up. Then after the pandemic, it slowed down a lot. Some call it a tech winter. The demand for software development and design services did go down, and that affected our business. It affected our bottom line.
Basically, there are great cycles where there's a lot of client work. There's high demand. And then it tends to die down. The recent one is the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, and during the pandemic, there was a huge tech build up. Then after the pandemic, it slowed down a lot. Some call it a tech winter. The demand for software development and design services did go down, and that affected our business. It affected our bottom line.
What we do for resilience, we set aside savings, we set aside money. When this tech slowdown started to happen, we had to tap into that and we had to sort of think, okay, we want to survive as a company. We don't want to make a lot of hard choices of laying people off. We want to continue with the team that we have. We also want to push for excellence. And so we continue to just really say, okay, we're going to invest, we're going to ride this wave or this season out, and it will pick up again. I would say it took longer than we expected, as we did with the pandemic too. We thought it would be over in a few months, but it wasn't. We had to learn how to adapt and to deal with it.
That meant a lot of changes internally of really focusing on: where do we find good clients? How do we build an impact? How are the relationships that we have? How do we also ensure that we're delivering value?
A lot of what happened through this last tech slowdown was building up the team internally to have a structure that would have better sustainability. So it wasn't always reliant on just one person or one of the founders of the company really doing things, but we began to open up the leadership model and to really empower people to begin leading certain areas, divisions, responsibilities. And likewise, really trying to now rebuild that savings. So we do have that buffer, we have that safety net that we can fall back on.
I think at the end of the day, what it has always come down to for our company is just really alignment. Alignment with the team, that we care deeply about the work that we're doing, and we are committed to this journey. And that journey is not always easy. There are a lot of bumps along the way. There are a lot of rough patches. But we have a great, great team and a great ethos. And each of those team members has a deep commitment to making themselves better.
What payment structure do you typically follow when billing clients? Is it Pay per Feature, Fixed Cost, or Pay per Milestone (phases, months, versions, etc.)?
I would say, we're pretty adaptable to the way that we bill. Our general practice is what we call “time and material”. So we usually look at everything as a quantity of resources that are assigned to the project and what capabilities of output they will have. How does the client check that? There are milestones that they're looking at that we're aiming to achieve.
But in the Sprint model and the Agile model, we also realize that there are things that will change. The whole point of Agile is to be responsive to ongoing changes. In my view of the world, that is reality. Like what we started to build at the very beginning will never be what we built in the end because changes will come along the way. And honestly, if you're responding to changes from customers, that's a good thing because then you're able to build something that people love and something that people really, really want. So we tend to build that way.
Now, when we estimate the work from the beginning, we talk about it in terms of features. We talk about it in terms of, say, the scope of work. But fundamentally, it comes down to time and material. So what we typically do in terms of those milestones is we would have like a monthly cycle of the effort that was done within the month. And then that would be invoiced to the client.
Do you accept projects that meet your basic budget requirements? If yes, what is the minimum budget requirement? If no, what is the minimum budget you have worked with in the past?
In a general sense, projects come in all shapes and sizes, so we're open to having conversations about those. But generally, if it's a new project, or a new idea, I would say the minimum budget for us is usually around $20,000. That's a good starting point. That's a good chunk where you can say, okay, what can I get done with this?
Now, obviously, there are sometimes when a project budget might not be that big. For example, an existing project that just needs augmentation of developers or additional resources to work on it. And so, maybe their monthly budget is closer to like $5,000 or $10,000, but it's going to be recurring. Those are projects that we're also open to. But I would say for new projects, a good frame of reference is probably $20,000 to $50,000 for the range of what I would say a good project should be ready to start with us.
Can you provide an overview of the price range (minimum and maximum) of the projects your company worked on in 2023?
We definitely have a very big project range. From 2023 to 2024, in summary, some of our smaller projects were in the neighborhood of maybe $70,000 as the minimum. But with context, these are clients that have been with us for a little while, and we're doing a build-out that's maybe six months, something in that range. So a little bit over our minimum spend for project engagement, but I would say that is probably realistic for startups and people who are trying to get things done.
Then for the bigger size projects, definitely some of our key accounts and our corporate accounts that we've been working with for multiple years, those can run up to a million dollars per annum. So basically we're doing probably close to a million dollars for a few clients. So if you split that in half, $500,000 per client for the max per year.
Things can go very big or things can be relatively small. It depends on the engagement and the structure.
What technological capabilities does your company possess, and are there any ongoing or planned investments in technology infrastructure or tools to enhance your services?
If we go technical, these are the technologies we mostly use:
● Frontend Frameworks: React, Vue.js, Angular
● Backend Frameworks: Node.js, Django, Ruby on Rails
● Mobile Frameworks: React Native, Flutter
● Cloud Technologies: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure
● Database Management: MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL
● DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins
● AI and Machine Learning: TensorFlow, PyTorch
Cloud hosting technologies Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure are the underlying frameworks that we use for technology and hosting and launching things. But we're very open to whatever the client wants.
In terms of programming, I would say our specialization is really in the JavaScript realm of the world, as well as Python. So typically for JavaScript, we're using something like React Native on the front end, something like Node.js, Next.js, those types of things in the back, and then connecting those things to a database, if that's a requirement. So that can be in the Postgres range. It could be in the NoSQL type of database structure. It really depends on the client's requirements.
In terms of our expertise, I would say we're very good at solutions, engineering, architecture, and what is needed from the project, as well as understanding the requirements of the product. Thinking about the UX and going through customer journeys, and user stories, going through the mapping of those things so that we can really identify what type of technology needs to be built. The designers are very good at thinking through the UX process and then designing UIs that support that user journey and that customer flow.
In terms of what we possess, I would say it's pretty wide. It's a pretty good spectrum all the way from the inception of idea, design, thinking through prototypes, MVPs, building out core technology, building deep systems, integration, as well as API integration, payments, et cetera, all of that, building out backend in front end, and then really having the QA and the testing done prior to launch. So I would say we're pretty robust from my perspective in just building out software solutions that work.
Now, in terms of planned investments and technology infrastructure or tools to enhance our services, absolutely. This goes back to the training and the ongoing enhancement. So number one, I would say we're always developing a team mindset that is enhancing our skills. We're looking for what new technologies we can use. AI, we're investing heavily in that area. We're looking at how AI can be leveraged both in the building of the product, as well as the products themselves for our clients. We're also looking at what technology stacks, whether it's the different languages and interpretations or the actual technology like database, infrastructure, et cetera, that we can use to optimize solutions. We're constantly iterating and evolving that process.
Where do you envision your company in the next 10 years? What are your long-term goals and aspirations for growth and development?
We've been around a while, we would be close to 25 years old in 10 years. I think that's pretty amazing because a lot of times, in the current time, you don't really see long-lasting companies, especially in technology. There are not a lot of technology companies that last this long. They're few and far between.
So number one, I'm just excited that we will continue to succeed. What does success look like and what specifics would I envision over the next 10 years? That we would be the trusted source and the go-to provider in Southeast Asia for software development and design. Specifically, we are building a reputation and expertise around AI technology, and we want to be at the forefront of that. That's really developing and deploying solutions around AI for clients, as well as ourselves and our own ideas.
In terms of impact and where we want to be, we really, really, really want to be responsible for enabling software development for good and really thinking about the problems we can solve as software developers. I would love to really say that by our 25 year mark, we would have built some amazing products in education, in healthcare, that would really be transforming the way that people live. A lot of that just comes down to building good technology, and building products that solve people's problems.