Interview with Nikhil B Patil, Chief Technical Officer - Infiny Webcom Pvt Ltd

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

In 2013, when myself and Krunal were working with different IT companies, we came across a family friend’s startup idea of holiday homes and got engaged with him in the entire process of building their technical platforms, both web and mobile. That experience led us to believe that there are so many upcoming startups across the globe that need much help in establishing their identities in the tech world. We believed we could consult them and actually develop their platforms and give them the kick start they need. That’s how and when, we founded Infiny Technologies (now Infiny Webcom Pvt. Ltd.) with one goal: using our technical expertise to make your business better.


What is your role in the management and development of Infiny Technologies?

As the CTO, my role is managing the operations of the organization, but that’s just giving you a very broad view of it. To be more precise, I handle the tech side of the business where I manage how we train and groom our technical team and constantly optimize the results we produce.


Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry

One thing we are very proud of is being able to satisfy more than 100 clients worldwide in 6 years. Most of these clients are from the United States and the fact is that they were aspiring to be entrepreneurs from places like Silicon Valley and New York. Through our consulting and technical expertise we helped them for their long term growth and this we treat as our biggest achievement in the industry.


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

After a couple of rounds of brainstorming sessions about the product requirements with the client, once we’ve locked down the SRS, we take it to our tech team and identify potential roadblocks. Then our research team comes into play, collaborating with our tech team and figuring out all the third party libraries that would need to be integrated in the process of developing the API. Meanwhile, we hand over the sketches of the screens to our front end team for them to plan the UI development. Both the front end and back end teams come up with a timeline to develop the milestones they have planned individually. We add 20% of buffer time for testing and client feedback to all milestones and have our front end and back end developers work simultaneously on them. The front end guys get the UI approved from the clients for both Android and iOS. The back end guys get the API approved from the team lead. And then the API integration begins. All these are meticulously put into different milestones and developed in a way to achieve the set timeline.


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

When we deal with our clients, we treat them as our potential partners. We don’t expect them to fail in any case, because that would be our failure too. This attitude helps us getting to know our clients the most. We ask them questions about their story, how they came up with the idea, what are their plans for the future, how they look at the market, who they will look at as competition or inspiration etc. We understand how many features they want to accommodate in their MVP and how are we going to scale the apps based on their needs. Based on this knowledge, we suggest them the most profitable tech stack and a strategy to scale it at a later stage.


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?

Usually, most of our clients are start up entrepreneurs who have ideas with potential to become the next big thing in the market. More often than not, our clients participate in different rounds of funding which means initially they will either need a working prototype, proof of concept or a minimum viable product. In this case, we suggest them to go with Hybrid first, with a reusable API code, and once they hit their targets with the MVP and decide to go all in, we suggest Native. Although if the MVP involves a lot of hardware interaction or needs to consume too much computing power like augmented reality, Hybrid would almost be impossible to give them a satisfying performance, so we suggest Native right away.


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

Like most companies out there, it all boils down to man hours. Once we figure out the number of resources and number of hours needed for the project, we simply multiply it with our hourly rates (that vary for different technologies). This is how we estimate the pricing for development of any app. We do not charge our customers for value added services like, technical consulting, in house testing and other resources like staging servers.

If the clients are not sure about how their requirements might evolve with time, we go with an hourly model where they are charged per hour. In some rare cases where the clients are 100% sure of what they want, we go with fixed priced model where we raise invoices for milestones, as and when they’re achieved.

We offer significant discounts for clients that want us to be their long term strategic or referral partners.


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

A lot, usually. When we have built apps for clients that needed them for their existing businesses, yes, they have enhanced them to a greater extent. But if the apps are made for clients’ startup ideas, a lot of their success also depends on how they market the app when it is a B2C and sell it when it is a B2B app. We have hardly had any complaints from the end users with regards to bugs and crash reports. For the rare cases when they have been reported, our support team has always been on their toes to do the needful.


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

What we have learned so far from our short experience in the industry is that some companies fail to attain client satisfaction because they lack the skills to deliver quality. While some fail to do so because there’s a huge communication gap to bridge between them and their clients. We have been fortunate that we have a pretty impressive core technical team and some really solid communicators at Infiny. We get to know the clients and their requirements like they are family. We never leave them blindfolded about anything that goes on with their project, neither are we unaware of anything they have been thinking about that has anything to do with the app development. The right blend of communication and technical abilities has helped us attain client satisfaction.


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

We have a really qualified technical and research team that is never a step behind the market. We’re aware all things trending, all the upcoming technologies out there and every updated versions of most used libraries in our projects (like stripe, twilio, FCM, etc.). Although, sometimes it takes time to incorporate some of the things because they involve high level training for our developers.


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

These are the technologies of the future. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. The way we have understood the IT industry by keeping up to date with everything that goes on, is that it doesn’t stop evolving ever. That’s the inherent nature of the IT industry. And there’s not much time from now to the point when if you want to buy a new house, you’ll visit your options sitting in your couch (via VR), turn on and off the lights and fans of your current house from your mobile app (iOT), and decorate your new empty house with furniture models through some mobile application (AR). Most of this is already in existence, by the way.


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

If you ask people about the first thing they do when they wake up, most of them will say - check our phones. If you look at the statistics about average time spent by people on mobile devices, it’s already more than television. You can in fact watch all your TV shows on your phone, you can shop on your phone, order food, stream a live event, you name it. There’s hardly anything left that’s not possible to do via mobile apps, things like visiting a doctor maybe. But then, I’m pretty sure even that will be made possible to a great extent pretty soon. So, long story short, Mobile technology is what future looks like.