Please introduce your company and give a brief about your role within the company?
Zignuts Technolab is established in 2012 by three friends having 6-8 years of experience in serving large firm of IT services and products industry. In the year of 2016, we expanded our business globally and established our presence in Germany and Singapore.
At Zignuts, we are focusing on helping Start-ups and Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to develop their Web & Mobile based “Ideas into Reality”, mainly along with Strategy & Consultancy, UI/UX Design, Web and Mobile Applications, WebShop & eCommerce Solutions, Cloud Architecture and Consulting, and Business Intelligence (BI) Apps.
I am the Co-founder & CTO of Zignuts and leading technical team, also working closely with business development team and project managers to analyze clients business requirements, technical researchers and preparing the best project plan to develop client's idea in cost-effective and timely manner.
What was the idea behind starting this organization?
The idea behind starting this organization is to help dynamic & growing Start-ups and Small to Medium Enterprises to build their ideas in a high-quality and cost-effective way. Since the beginning, our team is focused on one thing: creating a world-class cutting-edge solution that blows the doors off expectations and establishes brands as category leaders.
We are a one-stop destination for start-ups and business owners to deliver web applications, solutions and mobile apps which would help them maximize their reach and attain more customers. We fundamentally believe in developing long-term strategic partnerships with our clients by exceeding expectations and providing a great level of transparency.
What is your company’s business model–in house team or third party vendors/ outsourcing?
When it comes to creating an incredible digital user experience, we prefer to keep the quality of work at the highest possible level, and hence we develop every bit of the software within the team. We have a complete in-house team who takes care of the various phases of our client’s projects from prototyping, wireframing, UX designing, project management, web & mobile application development, testing, and maintenance. We also work as sub contract partner for some of our partner companies. We support three main partnership models Fixed Price, Time & Material, and Dedicated Team.
How is your business model beneficial from a value added perspective to the clients compared to other companies' models?
Every company and competitor are best in their own business model, however, when it comes to value addition, we have proven expertise in powerful technical leadership, good domain knowledge required to develop business solution, quality products, flexible payment structure and our availability in Germany, Singapore, and Africa.
What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what ratio of clients has been repetitive to you?
We are not limited to any industry as such. Our client ranges from innovative start-ups to retailers & shop owners, manufacturing industry, trading and finance, restaurant, cafe & hotel businesses, and distributors/CNF to mini-ERP solutions. We also provide annual maintenance contracts and support to our systems which helps us build a long term relationship with clients. We are having more than 80% of our clients, repetitive.
Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing a mobile app.
Most of our clients or partners wanted to develop apps in the shortest possible time. In this case we first develop the MVP (the very basic version of an app) in a time span of 2-3 months. Based on the MVP, clients decide to develop their business ideas further, the new features and functionalities to be added, and the time and budget that they need to dedicate for this. The time for mobile app development is primarily affected by several factors as functionalities involved, their complexities, user interfaces, customization, resource availability and third party integrations.
How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of a mobile app?
Basically, we have different teams for frontend and the backend development, so depending upon the project requirement, the strength of both teams is decided. Usually, the backend has to process information in a complex way, so the time required would be quite high as 70%. In most of the scenarios, developing the backend always consumes with more effort and time than building the front end. If it is a simple app then it takes 50-50 % of the time in developing both front-end & the back-end.
What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right platform for a mobile application?
There are several parameters to consider before selecting the platform such as the target users who are going to use the app with their country, age group and business domain of the app, the type of devices they are using; we can collect this statistics from clients or through various reports available on the internet, if any specific feature is required which is dependent on any platform, if the client requires something quick, we suggest developing Hybrid Apps as it significantly reduces the development cost and efforts.
Which platform do you suggest your clients, to begin with when they approach you with an idea (Android or iOS) and why?
Over the time, clients have become smarter in terms of technical knowledge these days, they usually know what exactly they want. Only fewer are not more aware of technology. So the clients who already researched about their needs are known on which technology they have to work upon. Where the second one asks for company preference: in this case we simply ask them about 4p: about his PRODUCT, about his PRICE, about his targeted PEOPLE, about targeted PLACE and suggest accordingly.
Android or iOS, Native or Hybrid — which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?
As mentioned before, beginning with Android or iOS is totally depending on client's targeted audience and accordingly, we suggest them. Regarding the decision between Native and Hybrid, I can say that if client wants something Quick or MVP with very limited budget, we recommend starting with Hybrid App, but if client has enough budget and performance of the App is crucial part of the business than we strongly recommend to go for Native Apps. With Hybrid apps, it becomes very cost-effective for clients since they can have both iOS and Android app at same code base, so less time and work to build it. We prefer working on the native platform as well because of certain advantages – user experience is good, high performance and easy to scale advanced functionalities are more and looking at it from a technical point of view it is beneficial.
What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of a mobile application?
A thorough analysis and continuous client communication help us in deciding the right cost of the project. We decide the project cost based on the UX/UI designing of screens, development complexity & time, testing efforts and other actions required for developing the application. We follow agile scrum methodology as it is the key to rapid and flexible software development. We share the detailed proposal with the client after doing a technical research and cost analysis.
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.)
As mention earlier in our business model, we support three main models Fixed Price, Time & Material, and Dedicated Team. The Time & Material is suitable for complex projects that are inclined towards specification and design changes. We recommend a Fixed Price solution for projects which have well-defined requirement specifications, have defined expected deliverables and timelines. This model is best suited for small and medium projects. Overall, we are flexible with the payment structure so that we can meet the client requirements and expectations.
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?
Our targeted audience are start-ups, dynamic growing agency, and well-established companies, so we do not have any such criteria. We started working on projects where the budget was a few hundred dollars but now the same client has been working with us continuously for a few years now and we have done some of the most priced requirements for the same client. We have done small projects with a lower budget of US$ 500 with some quick fixes to large projects for complex system development with budget US$ 30000 as well. A small project with new Startup helps us lot in our repeated revenue and long term client relationship building.
What is the price range (min and max) of the projects that you catered to in 2016?
It has been varied between $10k - $100k, most of them are from repetitive clients.
Which business model do you suggest to your clients enabling them to generate revenue from mobile applications? Why?
We do a lot of research and ask 4p question we mentioned earlier, before moving to any model, which in turn, results in coming up with perfectly tailored solutions to our client’s business requirements. We often suggest the traditional methods like pay per download, freemium, in-app purchases, transaction charges, subscriptions and mobile advertising. Mobile adverting is one of the most popular and most widely used, among app monetization models nowadays.
