Interview with Yashpal Singla, CEO - Iotasol

Yashpal Singla  

CEO, Iotasol

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

Iotasol is a custom web and mobile app development company that came into being in 2010. The birth of Iotasol was the result of my years of yearning to start my own entrepreneurial journey.

I had the dream of becoming an entrepreneur ever since the start of my career. I always knew that I wanted to become a business owner. To pursue this dream, I did my research in various sectors and even tried my luck in a few of those. But, finally decided to stick to what I knew best, software development.  This is how Iotasol came into being in May 2010 with me being the only person responsible for taking care of all its operations. The journey was nowhere close to easy.

The vision behind Iotasol was to emerge as an industry expert in solving the problems of businesses by creating scalable, cost-effective, and efficient software solutions. We achieve this aim by collaborating with entrepreneurs and converting their ideas into digital reality. We back our clients as their complete technical partners and participate in shaping their vision, reviewing their business, creating solutions that align with their vision, and supporting them at every step post-delivery for future growth and evolution of the product. Apart from this, we empower businesses by creating software solutions for them to streamline their internal business processes and make them more efficient and productive.

What is your role in the management and development of Iotasol?

I work in the capacity of the founder and chief executive officer of Iotasol. Iotasol has had a journey of 12 years so far and ever since the beginning, it was a one-man army where I solely was managing all the company operations be it HR, finance, documentation, planning, strategizing, interacting with clients, finding opportunities of expansion and growth and whatnot.

With a co-founder coming into the picture and more people joining in as employees, we have been able to delegate work.  If we talk about the present scenario, my major role or contributions revolve around balancing all the wheels by establishing a company culture while staying true to our values, building long-lasting relationships with our clients by making sure that we are living up to the quality standards, working on growth opportunities, and staying competitive on the technological front.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry.

Having started very small, we have been going strong ever since in terms of the number of employees as well as our financial growth. Apart from this, I see the ability to create a dream company culture where employees are happy and the attrition rate is very low as our biggest achievement so far.

Moreover, we have been growing in the global market at a rapid pace with expansion in various countries like Canada, the USA, and Australia to name a few. It is a matter of immense pride for us that many ideas that we converted into digital products have now turned into multi-million dollar companies and we are still working in collaboration with them.

How do you schedule the development phases and projects to promise the timeline to your clients?

We discuss the complete project with our client first. After that, a minimum viable product is defined and we divide the MVP into multiple phases. Each phase is then broken down into delivery milestones followed by Quality Assurance checks and feedback from the client to ensure that we are on track with the product vision of the client. It also helps to take any initial feedback and do any changes to the plan as per the client meeting with external parties during that period.

Which framework, programming or scripting languages do you prefer for web development? How do you convince your clients for the same?

Our preference is to adopt micro services architecture, and therefore, we opt for JavaScript frameworks on the front end. The two most widely used and well-supported frameworks, Angular and React, are our top choices. However, we keep a watchful eye on emerging frameworks like Vue and Svelte. On the backend, we rely on Asp.NET, Java Spring Boot, and Node.

What would you suggest for a successful and profitable business progression, when it comes to mobile app development? How do you define the factors that influenced you make this choice?

The first and foremost element for the successful progression of a business through mobile app development is a clear understanding of the purpose and goals of our mobile app. Identifying your target audience, feature requirement, and features required to meet those needs are important.  

Apart from this, creating an app that is easy to use and provides a great user experience through easy navigation, quick loading, and clean design is instrumental in driving business progression. Other important factors that can help your business scale through your mobile app include a technically sound app, appropriate marketing and promotion, and continuous improvement over time.

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

We have a standard approach for deciding on the budget. First of all, we discuss the complete project with the client. After understanding their requirements, we create an (MVP) Minimum Viable Product and do our estimations to come up with a number of man-days. Those man-days are derived against each requirement. Once we have the number of man-days, multiplying these man-days by our hourly cost gives us the project budget.

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

In my opinion, proactive communication with clients is the most critical part of success and satisfaction. Being the service providers, we believe in communicating with our clients after short intervals and showcasing our development milestones as well as receiving their feedback. A lack of communication and delivering the product in one go can never bring desired results and satisfaction.

Secondly, using some code repository or some cloud infrastructure for maintaining resources and documentation and deliverables is very important.

Thirdly, with the ever-changing technological landscape, regular learning and adaptation to new technological changes and applying those new changes in the work we do is very important. If we keep delivering obsolete technologies, client satisfaction can never be achieved.

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

First, being at pace with technological advancements is one fundamental necessity in our business. So, to achieve this goal, we encourage our team members to subscribe to various forums and newsletters where they get all the relevant information about the changes in technology.

Secondly, we have assigned different people as SPOCs (Single Points of Contact) for different technologies. Their responsibility is to learn about all the new changes in that particular technology and share their knowledge with others. This way, the whole team stays updated.

Also, we organize technical sessions in our company every two weeks or so, where new technological updations are discussed. This way, we keep brushing up on our technical skills and then applying those learning’s to the projects at hand.

What are your thoughts about progressive web app and Internet of Things (IoT)?

Progressive web apps and IoT are the new technologies that have already been incorporated into the present and are here to stay. We have already worked on multiple products around IoT where we have used hardware capabilities to create very innovative solutions. This is going to become an integral part of any new app development work in the next couple of years.

What do you think will be the future of web design and development technology?

I believe web designing and development is going through a phase of rapid evolution and will continue to do so with newer trends emerging frequently. Features like a mobile-first design, voice search optimization, use of Chatbots and Artificial intelligence to create more personalized experiences, design responsive to all screen sizes, progressive web apps, etc. will be the dominating trends in web designing and development.