Many fundamental questions answered by KindGeek COO Yura Gnatyuk in the interview for GoodFirms

KindGeek is a nearshore full-cycle software development company with business analysis expertise. I’m a co-founder and COO. My role within the organization is to stay in control of core business processes, manage our business development team, and customer relations. On top of that, I handle the strategy of company development.

What was the idea behind starting this organization?

From day one, we strive to help smart people implement their ideas into life. We want our company to be a platform for positive change for both our clients and employees. Also, our idea is to create digital products, which can make a global impact, while forming meaningful partnerships that are based on trust and transparency. One of our core pivots is social responsibility — we want to positively affect our community, city, country, and, as a consequence, the rest of the world. And, these values are not just words, they are reflected in actions. For example, we have our social project : http://lvivland.com/. LvivLand is meant to expand your mind’s horizons, break stereotypes, and open new perspectives. Lviv is one of the last hidden gems of Europe, and LvivLand is looking forward to showing you all of the great things that our city has to offer. We’ve got more than 1,000,000 total views, and received recognition from our city’s mayor. So, this is a pretty good result.

Which is your company’s business model — in-house team or third-party vendors/ outsourcing?

KindGeek provides software outsourcing services, which are based on different business models, such as fixed price, time & materials, and dedicated team. But all of our team members work in-house, in our offices.

How is your business model beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other companies’ models?

Besides simply developing software, we aim to contribute to the products we create with our vision and business expertise. We treat our customers as our partners: we want the product we create to actually succeed. We will use every bit of our sweet and bitter experience to make it happen. For instance, we’ve already helped some startups to rise to their feet and obtain significant investments.

What industries do you generally cater to? Are your customers repetitive?

Our top domains are fintech, healthcare, and education. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a ‘repetitive customer.’ Each partner is unique as well as his or her demands, vision, and approach to work. So, partnership with two different customers from the same industry and with similar ideas may be as different as day and night. Usually, we work equally well with nicely-funded startups, SMEs companies, and giants, such as Telefonica, big banks and Universities.

Mention the objectives or the parameters critical in determining the time frame of developing software.

The time of software development depends on the complexity of the project, technologies that should be used, and the size and experience of a team. So, we usually start with Discovery Phase. The main goal of the Discovery Phase is to define an optimal system with its architecture and UX design, which will satisfy stakeholders’ requirements, and accurately estimate costs of the Project’s development.

How much effort in terms of time goes into developing the front end and back end of software?

It depends on the project. Some software can have a complex back end structure and quite simple interfaces or vice versa. It is also possible that both front end and back end require significant time investments to develop. In any case, the best way of estimating time for development is conducting the discovery phase, during which all intricacies and features of the future project will be closely examined.

What are the key parameters to be considered before selecting the right framework for developing software?

The key parameters are the platform for which the product is created (desktop, mobile, web), and the project’s specifics. Also, scalability, security, and even a budget are really important in terms of framework selection.

Which languages & frameworks do you prefer to use in development of software?

Our preferred languages and frameworks are Java (Spring), PHP (Symphony, Laravel), JS (Vue, Angular, React), C# (.Net), Kotlin, Objective C, Swift.

If to go deep into details, for Web, we use:
IntelliJ, IDEA, Java Spring. Vaadin, JSF, Play, Grails, JavaScript, ReactJS, Redux, VueJS, Angular, Node.JS, Ionic, PHP, Yii, Laravel, Symfony, Zend, PHPunit
DataBase: SQLite, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, DocumentDB, DynamoDB. Postgresql
For mobile development, we prefer,
for Android:

● Kotlin
● Java (Android)
● Crashlytics,

for iOS:

● Swift
● Objective C

For DevOps, we use:

● ELKstack
● Grafana
● Prometheus
● Sonarqube
● OWASP proxy

IAAC

● Terraform
● Ansible
● CHEF
● puppet

Tools

● Kubernetes
● Jenkins
● git
● Docker
● Bitbucket Pipeline
● Nessus

Cloud Providers that we are working with:

● Microsoft Azure
● Google Cloud
● AWS
● Digital Ocean

For QA tools, we use:

● QMetry
● JMeter
● Postman
● SoapUI
● Appium
● Crashlytics
● Protractor
● Selenium
● TestRail

What are the key factors that you consider before deciding the cost of software?

Deciding the cost of software is a complex process during which we should consider the complexity of the product, the exact functionality that should be developed, technologies used, experience of the software developers involved, and whether business analysis expertise is required.

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.)

We follow three primary business models: fixed price, time & material, and dedicated team in terms of the billing process, we send invoices each month.

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?

Discovery phase that we propose on our website starts at $9800. We had cases when we engaged with this kind of budget initially, and then, the customers’ projects grew up to six- and seven-figure budgets.