How do we evaluate a client’s strategy, identify key business goals and make final agreements

We are glad you found us! Because we are very active in many outbound marketing channels, our first question is: how have you spotted us? Have you seen our articles on Linkedin, footer info in one of our already completed projects or maybe someone recommended us to you?

Credibility and trust

First, let’s talk. We need to know each other. We can exchange a few e-mails or do a videomeeting on Skype, Teams, Webex or any other platform of your liking. If circumstances allow, we can also set up a meeting in our office or any other location where we can be present.

If you are looking for a new partner for a long-term cooperation how can we earn your trust? First of all, you can learn more about us by reading our history, meeting members of our team, familiarize yourself with our past project or even talk to our present customers.

We would also like to know as much as possible about your company. How long have you been on the market, what are your strong points, what on-line project have you worked on in the past?

Business goals

Before we even ask you how your web application should look like or work, there is a handful of even more important questions that need to be answered.

What is the main reason for starting a new web development project? What do you want do achieve and why? If we understand your goals and objectives, we may come up with a much better solution.

How do you know if a web application is good for users and has potential to conquer the market? It is not because it has all features possible, so users can do everything they need – that approach ended long time ago. Today, what makes a good website or web application is solving real problems of real people, fast and with minimal effort. More effort should be spent on things such as user experience, returning visitors rate or likeliness for recurrent transactions, which are more difficult to describe and later to assess.

We often discourage our customers to add all features possible in the first version of the application. It is a much better idea to focus on most important ones, that will still give full value to end users, but will allow to test our customer’s business ideas quicker and within a smaller budget.

sticky notes

If we know and understand your “why”, we can come with a better offer you, which will result in solutions better tailored for you. It is a win-win game.

Unlike most other software houses, we do not only work for external customers – we run a few successful online businesses ourselves. We know what it is like, you need to pay attention to sales, marketing, human resources, customer support, payment handling, accounting and finally on the technical side – your website, on-line store or web application.

Our experience will help design the best web application possible – not only from the technical point of view, but from the business side just as well.

Scope of the project

It’s finally time to talk about your project from the technical side. How well have you described your project? Do you only have a brief, with list of features you would like to be implemented? Or do you have a full technical documentation, including mockups, user stories, flow diagrams or even database architecture design?

At this stage it is very important for both you and us to know what precisely needs to be done in order to deliver a product that will meet your needs.

For example, If you need an e-commerce platform with a product configurator, we need to know:

  • what kind of products do you want to have in your configurator?
  • do you want to sell also standardized products?
  • how do you want your products visualized? via layers of photos or 3D models?
  • what configurable parameters will your products have? what are their marginal conditions and dependencies?
  • what will be the calculations for pricing?
  • how do you want to be able to manage the configurator? do you want to be able to add new materials for example?
  • do you need integration with your existing website or an online store?

Analytical process

If you are not a software house and need one to take good care of your project, chances are you need a team of people with a technical background and multi-year experience working on similar web projects. This is where we can help.

We will ask you a ton of questions. Their goal is not only to estimate the amount of work needed to be allocated for your project, but also to help you realize dependencies between modules in your project, as well as all possible use scenarios. Quite often during later stages of the analytical processes we hear from our customers “hey, I have not realized users can do it that way, we need to handle these new scenarios or maybe let’s do it differently”. That is normal and very desirable. We can design a better product altogether!

This is also the right time for intentional simplification of some business processed in order to make sure the project still fits into your budget. You can also decide that some features or use cases will not be handled by the application at the initial stage of development, if they are not critical for your business model.

The final outcome of the analytical process is a document that describes how the web application should work and what should be under the hood. The document then can be evaluated by any other software house and their response should be “this is a very well described project, based on that we can give a price estimate too”.

business meeting

Legal stuff

Nobody likes legal talk, except of course lawyers, that do that for a living, but we are unable to do business without it. They say agreements are written to be used during difficult times. It is true, but we still prefer to keep legal agreements compact and brief. Legal counsel costs should not dominate the project’s budget reducing testing or marketing expenses.

Payments

Our policy is simple and fair. After initial talks and your decision to work with us we do require upfront payment that will cover the work needed for a first stage of your project. Then successive payments are due once we reach a specific milestone as defined in our agreement.

Results

The final result is a deployed web application that your users regularly use and enjoy. You reach your business goals, earn more money and can fund further application evolution and support. If you are not happy with the final result, neither are we!