Coderbunker: How we work
How we work
Adizes lectures about running&managing company advise to spent the major part of resources between production and sales as two engines which drives business. The rest should go in marketing and R&D. We do our best to follow this rule.
When we have done with paid project we go to the stage when we are open for new opportunities. We spent 50-70% (~30h) of the week by learning new technologies and implementing PoC (production, R&D) the rest goes to analysing the market, networking, meeting with potential customers and sharing with the world what we do and where we are good at.
In marketing&sales activities we put a weekly goal to visit one external event, give an one presentation and publish post or article. LinkedIn, meetup and wechat our major tools where we establish and maintain relations with our customers and partners.
Our assumptions we validate by observing people interest to our events, case studies or customer agreement to go further after PoC. It is very important because by receiving such feedback we make a decision in what we should invest our efforts further and align our next steps. For example, in mobile development domain on Shanghai market new companies prefer to go first with wechat mini apps to validate idea and go native afterwards (*). However even in the second stage some of them want to go with hybrid cross-platform frameworks like react-native or Xamarin -- clear sign for mobile devs to learn JavaScript/C# to stay on the market in the future.
When we reach the point where we and our potential customers agree to work together, we sign two page contract with scope of what should be done, payment details and obligations. It is different from traditional contracts: we sign it for one year, in addition to scope&payment it contains a cash burn rate -- amount of cash our customer comfortable to invest in his projects on monthly basis. We call it retaining contracts which helps our customers get people to his projects during the year: we staff their projects with engineers , it is like a credit card -- keep in the pocket and use when you need it.
Our ideal customers are foreign CEOs who doesn't have enough budget to hire people in-house (long term contracts, administration overhead, training expenses), but have budget for freelancers. Another reason is lack of right skill for specific project or task -- outsourcing and gig economy gives excellent opportunity to the best fit from the worldwide market.
* The reason why our customers prefer go with wechat apps as it has 500 million users across an Asia. Wechat get this audiences by help people communicate, share media and pay for goods/services. It creates ecosystem which are already part of their lives and it is the easiest way for new product to get people attention here rather than via mobile stores or websites.
When we have done with paid project we go to the stage when we are open for new opportunities. We spent 50-70% (~30h) of the week by learning new technologies and implementing PoC (production, R&D) the rest goes to analysing the market, networking, meeting with potential customers and sharing with the world what we do and where we are good at.
In marketing&sales activities we put a weekly goal to visit one external event, give an one presentation and publish post or article. LinkedIn, meetup and wechat our major tools where we establish and maintain relations with our customers and partners.
Our assumptions we validate by observing people interest to our events, case studies or customer agreement to go further after PoC. It is very important because by receiving such feedback we make a decision in what we should invest our efforts further and align our next steps. For example, in mobile development domain on Shanghai market new companies prefer to go first with wechat mini apps to validate idea and go native afterwards (*). However even in the second stage some of them want to go with hybrid cross-platform frameworks like react-native or Xamarin -- clear sign for mobile devs to learn JavaScript/C# to stay on the market in the future.
When we reach the point where we and our potential customers agree to work together, we sign two page contract with scope of what should be done, payment details and obligations. It is different from traditional contracts: we sign it for one year, in addition to scope&payment it contains a cash burn rate -- amount of cash our customer comfortable to invest in his projects on monthly basis. We call it retaining contracts which helps our customers get people to his projects during the year: we staff their projects with engineers , it is like a credit card -- keep in the pocket and use when you need it.
Our ideal customers are foreign CEOs who doesn't have enough budget to hire people in-house (long term contracts, administration overhead, training expenses), but have budget for freelancers. Another reason is lack of right skill for specific project or task -- outsourcing and gig economy gives excellent opportunity to the best fit from the worldwide market.
* The reason why our customers prefer go with wechat apps as it has 500 million users across an Asia. Wechat get this audiences by help people communicate, share media and pay for goods/services. It creates ecosystem which are already part of their lives and it is the easiest way for new product to get people attention here rather than via mobile stores or websites.