Choosing the data model for a project requires an extended conversation about the project itself. Its plans, goals and dreams. What does the project hope to be? It should not be a “choose your database and then fit your model”. You don’t buy a Ferrari and then see how much lumber you can fit on top: you choose the car for the purpose that you need it for.
Many of the founders we work with don’t have a technical background. In the crucial early days of creating their new digital products, they aren’t yet at a stage where hiring a team, namely a CTO, makes sense. Given our deep knowledge of the product (that in many cases we developed) and of their business (gained during the discovery stages), we work as their trusted technical partners and as an extension of their teams, as their CTO. This helps them gain confidence in tech decisions, clarify questions with partners and get the technical juice required to prove the technology is worth of customer trust or VC bet.
We’ve helped our clients leverage existing technology and SaaS products to build products or improve processes through low or minimal coding. We call it “Some code”. See a blog post here.
Although this is the business we seek out the least, we’ve been successful at lending some of our talent to companies of all sizes to augment their teams during peak needs. We like to think of those engagements as 3-12 months and feel that if you’re going to need the developer for longer, you might need to hire someone. We can give you a few tips on that as well.
We understand that at some point products will most likely need a rebuild but we never throw-away MVPs as we believe; that’s a waste of money. Instead, we like to think of these as building blocks. Although you can keep building you don’t need to trash everything done before.
We work with entrepreneurs to materialize their vision. Our typical entrepreneur works at one of the FAANG or Big 4 consulting firms and has solid business and industry experience but isn’t (in many cases) technical. We work as their partner to help materialize their vision and apply their business acumen into a solid, future-proof, digital product. We don’t like MVPs and like to think of them as SLCs instead. But we help entrepreneurs balance the needs of their product and their ambitions with the pragmatism of building and launching a product that can get market validation.
We understand that at some point products will most likely need a rebuild but we never throw-away MVPs as we believe; that’s a waste of money. Instead, we like to think of these as building blocks. Although you can keep building you don’t need to trash everything done before.
Similarly to the above, we’ve run many design sprints in the past helping people navigate through the needs of the product, the audience and what it would eventually look like.
We’ve helped countless entrepreneurs go from “rough sketch of an idea” to an “actual product”. Sometimes; we end up advising them against building something from scratch and suggest they leverage no-code (or some-code) to build these instead. We work as a trusted technical partner, a CTO of sorts and help them structure their needs and navigate sometimes-complex technical questions.
We can build native applications or hybrid (cross-platform) ones. This depends on your needs and we’re happy to advise on that as well. In either case we have the technical expertise in-house to build these applications, test them across different devices and connect them to backend services.
Our team of backend and frontend engineers (with solid backgrounds and experience in real-world applications) work together to build test-driven applications that either we designed or you brought to us. We’re able to support a variety of programming languages and frameworks and have built applications that have successfully processed hundreds of millions of processes every day. We’re able to offer competitive rates enclosed in a process designed for success.
Our experienced design team is able to help you think strategically through a given need and build a mobile or web product that satisfies the business and users needs from sketches to wireframes, designs and static prototypes. We don’t just “paint” an interface but we like to think through it (we all know a pig with fancy lipstick is still a pig). We follow some of the industries best practices (e.g. Norman Nielsen, Baymard Institute) but give room for experimentation and creativity: we call it data-backed creativity.
With mobile being “first” for many consumers, the need and appetite for mobile applications has grown tremendously. Sometimes it makes sense to develop native applications, in other cases it’s better to develop hybrid applications and for a lot of businesses, it doesn’t make sense to spend the resources building an installable mobile application, but rather a browser-based PWA that works and behaves just like a normal mobile app but with a myriad of advantages. You have a vision for your mobile application, you have a clear sense of what are the outcomes you want. We work with you, as your technical partner to understand what is the best solution and technology stack for your needs and then to build beautiful, delightful, smooth mobile experiences leveraging UX research and mobile’s best practices.
We help entrepreneurs — many with a non technical background — in building their first product. We don’t like the concept of MVPs — see here why — but rather prefer to think of these products as SLCs. We work with entrepreneurs as their technical partners (co-founders if you will). We challenge their ideas and learn on their expertise and industry know-how. We help define — through user feedback and research — what is the ideal set of functionality to bring the vision to life and prove the concept. We then build their SLC from the ground up. But rather than building a timed-MVP, we work to develop a solid foundation for a future project. You don’t create a SLC (or MVP) by making the tech poor and weak, you do it by deconstructing the number and complexity of the initial functionality set — it’s harder to explain this to entrepreneurs and so many default to patching things together. But a solid base is the only way you can leverage that SLC to continuously experiment and build — which you surely need as a startup.
We help entrepreneurs — many with a non technical background — in building web and mobile products from scratch. We have entrepreneurs that come to us with clarity and just want to execute… to be honest, we’re not the best at it. We help develop the concept further or just make it more clear for those technically executing it. We then understand how it can be brought to life — what are the steps, the technology, the form it will take. We strategise, wireframe and design the final product and then work to build a SLC version of it that serves as both a fast product to experiment with as well as a solid foundation from where additional features can be developed as needs evolve. These can be web as well as mobile applications.
Although most of our UI/UX work is done in the context of building a product end to end, we’ve also provided this service separately. There isn’t a perfect User Interface. Developing effective and delightful web and mobile experiences is synonymous with continuous experimentation. It is a mix of looking at data and drawing conclusions as well as of making assumptions and bets based on existing research and, yes, hunches. When we tackle a redesign project it is much more than just painting something or just about how it looks. It is how it functions, why it works or doesn’t. We work as a team: client, users, designers, project managers, strategists. We have exploratory conversations with users and internal stakeholders, define goals and then wireframe ideas to validate them. We’ll eventually make sure it looks as good as it functions too. In the end you get a homepage or an entire product redesign that won’t be perfect but will be functional, enjoyable to use and damn beautiful. They’ll convert more or simply decrease frustration and increase enjoyment.
These are great ways to get started, sometimes a simple pre-built e-commerce site doesn’t have the functionality to achieve the experience you want to create. You may need a far more complex order system for your product or to connect to additional back-end applications to do tasks like inventory syncing, creating custom prices based on account details or to create contracts as part of the automated sales process. You might have subscription needs that current platforms don’t cover. We have extensive experience with e-commerce development from small stores to complex e-commerce applications supporting millions in transactions, integrating with dozens of payment gateways and serving multiple audiences with highly localized offerings. One of the key things we’ve been helping customers with is building stores that focus on conversion through better technology and UX.
Data shows an increase in conversions when you provide users with payment methods that meet their needs. This is especially true as you expand abroad, having only Credit Card payment options won’t cut it and you’ll see an increase in abandoned carts. We’ve got extensive experience integrating different payment gateways and methods. Alipay? WePay? iDEAL? Boleto Bancário? Multibanco? Apple Pay? Amazon Pay? Google Pay? We’ve integrated custom online stores and checkout flows with all of these and more! And we’re not saying “integrating” as in “we configured a plugin” but rather we dealt with edge scenarios and complex business cases with specific needs. We can help with the integration as well as, leveraging our experience, in finding the right providers with the lowest rates.
Don’t you hate it when you can’t find a Zapier plug-in? Or when you’re doing that manual task 1000x times and just know it can be automated but can’t seem to articulate it or find the right tool to do what needs to get done? We come in at different stages of that process: either by hearing about an internal inefficiency or problem and working to design a solution that meets your needs or by executing a clear software integration you thought of and just need to get done. You have a list of reports you’d like to run, activities you’d like to automate and delays you’d like to take an axe to – let’s work on a fix. We’ve worked with dozens of software integration services – from POS systems, to payment gateways and CRMs all the way to proprietary bank systems.
Wondering how we got some of our big clients? We went to them with a fresh idea for a problem we knew they had and a clear plan on how to execute it in spite of the internal politics and friction. We have experience building applications for big enterprises. We’ve helped create entire applications from scratch and internal software (CRM, POS, ERP, HR Management) to meet very specific needs, customized sales leaderboards and much more. The people that buy from us at these companies look for a partner that can help them build sexy products that look like the latest consumer product but provide the functionality, expandability and soundness of what an internal tool needs. We’ve experience in highly regulated industries as well as with complex business cases and needs.
