There’s no secret here: we’re not a good product partner for everyone. Nobody is, really.
And having a good fit with the founders and startup team we work with is essential in creating value together.
Because this is eventually the purpose: people come to us to help them build and capture value for and from a specific audience that they target. And together we engage in a process of building solutions that create value for those people.
For a small product agency like Tapptitude (because 50 mobile product specialists is indeed a small to medium team), making sure that we only work with companies that we can really help is both a quality assurance objection (because we know that we can build awesome products where the context is right) and a way to make sure we’ll have an enjoyable time working together (because we have too little time to waste on relationships where we struggle to get along).
What’s important for you to know before deciding to work with us
We’re a product agency
Not a development house or a ‘coding factory’ that does the typical outsourcing things. Don’t expect us to be told what to code. That is not where we bring the value. Expect us to be very inquisitive about your entire business model and many times to challenge your core assumptions before deciding to doing stuff together. Expect us to look at your business in a holistic manner, not only at the product you decided to build (because we know that in most of the cases, the product itself it the simplest component in this dangerous game called innovation-focused startups).
We have a lean startup mindset & agile processes
And a team experienced in delivering lean products for startups that need to scale. We’ve worked a lot with founders and startups from all over the world and saw some of them grown but also saw the majority of them fail. We’ve seen the typical mistakes and hard-to-get-rid-of biases and patterns. On the other side, lean is a solid philosophy (with some methodological implications) that can help us people jump outside our weird circles of biases and major tendencies to imagine inexistent realities, by forcing us to state some hypotheses that can be tested practically. Then deploy testing experiments.
We are a full-stack product team, built around mobile products
We have smart and senior people on the entire flow on solutions for defining and building a mobile product: from product strategy, to UX and UI design, to coding on all the product components (iOS, Android, backend, and web components), to testing and product management. We work agile and integrated and, being a tight team, we communicate directly and rather fast.
We don’t rent coders
Instead, we allocate solid product teams to help you build the right product for a market, given your constraints and objectives. Lately, we rarely do parts of projects, as we tend to cover all the product components and all the services needed to ship a product.
We don’t send estimates based on an idea you mention in a brief email
There are a few reasons for that. One is that, as that level of details, we don’t understand enough and whatever we might tell you would most likely be wrong. Second, even if we’ve done something somehow similar, we know that no product is like the other and specific challenges, constraints and objectives matter more than the similarities.
Third, we are obsessed with delivering good products and that means also that we focus a lot on revealing the risks and the hidden angles every project includes. And in order to mitigate those, we need a detailed, real-experience based understanding of your product. Such an understanding is done when we see at least a proxy of the of the user experience (in the shape of wireframes or prototype), have the architecture and tech implications and trust the value the product promises to create.
Only then, our product team will do an in depth analysis of your product plans and come back with an estimate and a product building plan. Before that, whatever you get from others, I bet my career on it, are well-dressed guesses. And the problem with guesses is that they tend to not behave as expected, especially when you planned your future around them.
If you only want to fish for knowledge on product building pricing, this article might help you better: The Real Cost of a Mobile Product.
So, this is fundamentally us, with what’s been important for us for the last 4+ years and with the values that we’ve been praised for by our clients. Now back to you.
Gabriel DOMBRI
CEO
Business strategist with product focus. Digital Entrepreneur passionate about building tools that help others live better lives and helping committed founders de-risk their product investments and cross the valley of death with their startups. Product strategist & CEO here in Tapptitude.
