Interview with Yulia Koroleva, Chief business development officer - Code Inspiration

Yulia Koroleva  

Chief business development officer, Code Inspiration

Give us a quick overview on Code Inspiration. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

Code Inspiration is a custom software development company. It was established in 2012 as a native mobile application development team. Step by step, following market demand, the company has been converted into full-cycle software development agency.

I joined Code Inspiration 4 years ago. During this period, we have been building complex custom software development services, including mobile apps development using both native and cross technologies.

What is your role in the management and development of Code Inspiration?

Being a Chief business development officer, I elaborate the overall business strategy of the company with other stakeholders and communicate actively with clients. Before COVID pandemic and lockdown we met clients here in our Minsk office, performing business meetings and spending time together. Surely, nowadays all the communication with clients is limited to online mode.

I take part in defining general development goals of the company as well as communicate and manage the team, carry out daily operations.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry.

Recently Code Inspiration has developed several unique custom software projects in the niches of online banking and options trading. We are also proud of our social applications and, for example, right now we are redeveloping a mobile application aimed at people with disabilities. Real estate mobile application development is also among Code Inspiration’s deep expertise.

Code Inspiration team members also take part in global knowledge exchange. We take part in webinars hosted by IAOP, Yahoo Business as well as publish articles with insights about software development outsourcing on various platforms.

How do you schedule the development phases of the apps to promise the timeline to your clients?

Flexible Agile software development is popular as never before. To ensure the project’s success and its delivery on time, we divide the project into development sprints that usually take 3 weeks. After completion of the sprint, we deliver the results to the customer, discuss the results and plan the next sprint, making sure everything goes right.

Actually, the situation is that many businesses avoid long-term planning nowadays. That’s why we revise development priorities with clients, delivering monthly updates according to the strategy and scope of work.

How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for app development?

Consultancy before development stage is Code Inspiration’s strong point. We spend a certain amount of time to study not only the current needs of the clients, but also their long-term development plans. Our task is to understand how the software will be used, what is the market and target audience, devices and other important aspects. After conducting such a research, we provide the client with the options and he/she will have an outlining on the pros and cons of each approach.

Which would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, Native or hybrid apps? How do you define the factors that influenced you to make this choice?

Choosing between native and hybrid apps, there is a basic rule: if a mobile app is planned to maintain a big number of users with various devices, needs multiple third-party APIs integrations, contains complex animations, native app development is highly recommended here. For instance, planning a social network mobile application, which is expected to be used on multiple devices with various firmware, have various feeds, animations, native app development is a must. Native technologies ensure stable and high-quality mobile application upon completion of works.

We recommend hybrid mobile app development when the application’s interface is simple and there is no need to develop animated UI, or a client needs an MVP version for both iOS and Android platforms to be developed as soon as possible, or an application is planned for use within a single company on a limited number of devices, for instance iPad 10.2 only. 

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?

Here we act according to the widely used models of work. In case a client has a defined scope of work, we proceed with a fixed price. If a client needs flexibility in development process, we establish a Time & Material project and a client can define tasks for the upcoming sprint. Additionally, for long-term cooperation Code Inspiration offers a dedicated development team and out-staffing options when we agree on a monthly price for each developer or for the entire team.

How helpful are the mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your clients’ business?

We are proud of the fact that we have developed many mobile apps in various niches and a certain number of them became popular and got investments. We would like to underline that startups continue working with us even after they got client base and investments. We are sure this is a direct evidence of Code Inspiration’s high quality of services, communication, and management.

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction? 

Working with clients from all over the world it is important to understand what is important for this given client before starting with the works. And, responding to the question, the best practice to attain customer satisfaction is personal approach. One client considers perfect UI&UX as the most important aspect. For the other client, term and deadline are important. Some clients consider budget as a key aspect but timeline is not so important. Thus, my main goal when working with clients is addressing exact needs that are of the greatest value to the given client.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

Before COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown we took part in both local offline and global online conferences for developers, nowadays all these activities are carried out online only. We do our best to track new emerging development technologies. What’s more, we set aside time for developers to learn new useful technologies and support them in self-learning, developing their skill.

What is your motto for Business Development that has helped Code Inspiration achieve success?

“Nothing is impossible. - Maybe we simply need more time to develop it and to deliver.” – This is a motto we follow developing software for our clients. Actually, this motto is the first thing a visitor sees on our websites. With this statement we try to say that Code Inspiration is a software development partner that is capable of realizing even the most challenging tasks and clients can achieve their business goals, no matter how ambitious they are.

What are your thoughts about AR, VR and Internet of Things (IoT)?

Definitely, these are software and hardware development directions both large and small companies try to force nowadays. Surely, these technologies are used, developed, implemented, and promoted by such large companies as, for instance, Apple for AR; Facebook, Valve for VR; IBM for IoT. Anyway, being a software development company, we keep an eye on the development of these technologies.

What do you think will be the future of Mobile technology? 

We suppose that new cross-platform development technologies will appear, aiming at speeding up development timeline of applications and reducing budgets. Most likely, these new cross-platform technologies will be supported by industry leading corporations. Together with this, native app development will not lose its popularity because it is supported by major corporations – namely Google and Apple – and already in-demand service.