When designing a mobile or web app, a great idea is required, but it is only about 5% of the equation. To be successful, your design must be beautiful, approachable, user-friendly, intuitive, and it must leverage best practices. Do you know how to optimize registration to reduce abandonment? Do you know how to acquire information through usage to streamline registration? Do you know the things that stop registrants dead in their tracks? Do you know how to capture more information, while asking the user for less? Do you know how to make the registration social and viral? All of that applies just to registration, imagine the host of other issues for all other aspects of your app. In fact, our customers talk about the advanced degree in “app design for market leadership” they get from working with us.
Selecting the right tools, frameworks, cloud environment, etc. play a big role in the success or failure of your app. Those choices also have a big impact on the cost to build and run your app. Choosing the wrong cloud environment can saddle you with 10X the operating costs. Choosing the wrong tools and frameworks can impact time to market, functionality, costs, scalability, lock you into the wrong platform, and much more. We have deep knowledge in the latest technologies, trends, and trade-offs. We’ll guide you through the process, keeping one eye on the bottom line, and another on the future, ensuring that you get it right from the start.
Assembling the right engineering team requires that you start with a technical “alpha-dog”, someone who engineers respect, and are eager to work for, and learn from. If you don’t have that technical alpha-dog, the best you can hope for is B- or C-level engineers. Do you have someone on your team to handle architecture, create code templates for the team, handle code reviews, point out best practices and scalability killers? Someone with expertise in app security, scaling, DevOps, and more? I’m not talking about someone with a degree that says they can code, I’m talking about a manager/leader who has actually done it before; who has built great products. Because if you don’t have that person, you’re sunk. We have that person. In fact, over the years we have cultivated a number of people on our team to grow into that role. In short, we have you covered.
After selling our last company to Microsoft, we took some time off. Then we started another software company in Silicon Valley. We were blown away by the challenges of finding, hiring, training and retaining technical talent in the Valley. The costs were outrageous and as soon as your employees built their skills they are swamped by rich recruitment offers from around the valley. Turnover is a real killer because you lose both experience with the codebase and domain expertise that can only be built over time. Over the past 4 years have zero employee attrition. Other startups I mentored saw our high-velocity product pipeline and low costs and tried to emulate it, but couldn’t. They didn’t understand the culture and they didn’t have the core team to build around. So they came to us and asked us to build technical teams for them. It’s worked out really well. Designing and building new apps keeps our skills honed, it keeps us on the cutting-edge, and it’s a lot of fun helping fellow entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. My two partners, both originally from the Philippines, suggested that we build our technical team in the Philippines. Even with their background and understanding, it took 12-18 months to build a core team with a Silicon Valley culture and passion for excellence. Now, each new hire adopts the company culture. We pair the new hires with an experienced team lead to train them in the MPH Way. As a result, we have a highly-efficient team that delivers excellent products at a fraction of the cost of Silicon Valley. And unlike Silicon Valley, we have no turnover, everybody loves working for us.
We’ve built companies with a combined value in excess of $2B. We’ve done the IPO route and we’ve sold our companies, three of them, the last one was acquired by Microsoft. In short, we know how to build killer products and profitable companies. We have done every aspect of it, and we’re happy to share our experience to guide you on the path to success. So, why would you hire random coders who have never worked together, when you can get a proven team that has been there, done that and won? Complete the contact form on this page and let’s have a conversation to see if we are a good fit to build something great together.
Share what you have. We typically respond by showing you aspects of products we’ve built before that can add value to your idea. Well also make suggestions to increase user conversion, social, gamification, data visualization, and more. We’ll design an amazing screen-by-screen wireframe that defines exactly how your app will work before we write a single line of code.
We’ve built and scaled products before. We know what scales and what doesn’t. We know how to build apps that can support multiple clients, different backends, and an ecosystem, when you get to that stage. In short, we know how to architect your app to make it future-proof and avoid costly rewrites.
We architect and build your app just like we do for our own apps. We build for operational efficiency (read cheap to operate), security, scalability, extensibility. We dedicate a team to your product, we don’t swap people in and out. That team takes ownership and pride in your product. We manage the entire process with regularly scheduled product and code reviews that supplement our agile development process.
Most apps, when successful, require constant enhancement based on customer feedback. You may choose to keep your team and expand it as the app and revenues take off. Or you may just need a few tweaks over time. The good news is that we provide team continuity throughout the process. We have almost zero turnover in five years, so we won’t lose expertise with your product for future enhancements…because that can be a real pain!
You may choose the expensive and time consuming route of hiring, training, managing, and hopefully retaining your own software development team. It requires a lot more time and expertise on your part and it is more than three-times as expensive. Or, you might choose to assemble a team of individual offshore contractors. This approach “may” be cheaper in the short-term but it will be a lot more expensive in the long-run. Or, you could go with MPH International. This table sums up the pros and cons of each option.
| Functions | Hire Your Own | Offshore Freelances | Dedicated MPH Team |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruit | You | You | Included |
| Evaluate | You | You | Included |
| Hire | You | You | Included |
| Train | You | You | Included |
| Manage | You | You | Included |
| Salary Cost | Very High | Low | Low |
| Health Insurance | Additional | Included | Included |
| Taxes | Additional | Included | Included |
| Office and Equipment | Additional | Included | Included |
| Total Cost | Extremely High | Very Low | Very Low |
But that’s not how we charge you. We only charge for the 50% involving actual design, coding, QA and operations. In other words, you’re getting half-off the actual value. And that half that we include at no cost is the hardest expertise to find. There are plenty of programming body shops that charge more than MPH and only provide 50% of the value above.
On top of that, our costs are 1/3 the cost of hiring your own engineers, not to mention hiring an engineering lead. Since we provide 50% of our value for no additional cost, this means that you are getting 6-TIMES the value you would get by assembling your own team.
You need a top-notch technical to attract A-talent, provide direction, management and leadership. Who is your technical lead?
You may think you just need a couple of coders to write an app and then they walk away. Well that only works if you are planning to fail. Successful apps are a continuous process. You will need to respond to customer requirements, competitive threats, integrations with other tools, new features from sales, and much more. This requires access to the technical team that built your original app. Otherwise, you will invariably find that nobody knows the source code (and maybe key pieces are missing), there is no domain expertise, and you are starting from ground zero for each change. We have almost no turnover, so this isn't a problem for us.
Designing an app takes a lot of science and experience. Starting with a great idea is important, but a design that delivers usability, social, viral, gamification, elegance, and more is a huge component of your success or failures. Who is handling design and what have they done before?
This is also critical. You need the right tools for the job and they are constantly changing. You need to get it right at the beginning, because it is very painful to change after the fact. I've had people ask what are the right tools, but it depends on the task. Sometimes you need a screwdriver, sometimes a hammer and other times a wrench... it depends on the task at hand.
Also a key component, get this wrong and your app won't scale, will be insecure, will load slowly, and may never enable alternate clients and back-ends. Has your architect built any apps that scaled big-time?
You may think you just need a couple of coders to write an app and then they walk away. Well that only works if you are planning to fail. Successful apps are a continuous process. You will need to respond to customer requirements, competitive threats, integrations with other tools, new features from sales, and much more. This requires access to the technical team that built your original app. Otherwise you will invariably find that nobody knows the source code (and maybe key pieces are missing), there is no domain expertise, and you are starting from ground zero for each change. We have almost no turnover, so this isn’t a problem for us.
If you want to partner with proven winners who have built successful apps and built over $2B in company value in their startups, you won’t find anyone better than MPH International .
Contact us and we'll schedule a 30-minute Zoom meeting to discuss your project and how we can help.
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