Tips for building digital products without getting hurt

Perfect software is an essential part of the success nowadays. Even the smallest imperfection can cost you millions

Questions to be Answered Before any Development

Software is an investment that can threefold your revenues and pay itself off in no time.

01

Do I have a clear vision?

02

Do I know my target group and their desires?

03

What value is my project supposed to add?

04

What do I expect from the development partner?

05

Where is my target group present and which platforms do they use?

06

How much do I want to put into the digital product?

If you are not sure by the answers, we can help you to find and specify them. We can discuss how to work with the budget during the initial consultation, so that the project has a shot to success.

Don't be afraid, we don't expect advanced knowledge of programming and frameworks from you. We are ordinary people, we speak humanly and we are here to help you make or save money, not to flood you with the stream of technical IT jargon and terms.
We will meet, have some good coffee and talk about your business, your competitors, what is it that makes your customers happy and how to make them even happier. Thanks to more than 300 projects past the last years we know exactly how happy stories start.

Contact us
What clients do we like the most?

Fighting with a coder is something you don't want to experience. You want a person that feels you

We best cooperate with people who:

01

Understand their field and know how to do business.

02

Have a perfect vision and stand by it.

03

Pursue success in a long-term cooperation.

04

Are natural finishers.

05

See software as an opportunity to save time and money.

06

Plan ahead and invest to the future.

07

Want to hear the honest opinion no matter they will like it or not.

08

Prefer the personal touch and have a good sense of humor.

Tip
Ask the developer how long it takes to develop some feature - e.g. a chatbot. The wrong answer is: "No problem, it will take 1000 hours of development." The correct one is: "Why chatbot? What is its real added value? Can we have a look at existing solutions that are already out there?”
Mirek
Business Consultant
Premium Custom Websites vs. Templates

The biggest players on the market build custom websites. Why? The want to see results!

Why do you think that Amazon or Facebook have their websites tailored to their needs? Because they perfectly know their customers's behavior and an ordinary template will never meet them in full.

Template is the right choice when:

01

Your revenues are not generated online.

02

You don't want new customers from the Internet.

03

You don't plan to grow.

04

Results are not expected from the website.

05

The website means only a digitial business card to you.

06

You are a city hall or amateur hobby forum.

Are you one of the companies that take it seriously and want to make money? No template can satisfy you

It is not surprising that a cinema hall where teenagers are buying tickets for the last Avengers looks completely different from a pharmacy visited mostly by seniors. How could then a stylish shop with men's suits use the same website template as an educational site for children?

It couldn't - it's as simple as that. Custom development is not about fancy colors. It is about tailoring everything to the needs of your customers, to the way how they use it, what interests them and how they respond to different aspects. You adjust every single pixel to their preferences. We measured the performance of hundreds of websites and templates never reached the numbers of custom-made sites, Worse stats by tens of percents - higher bounce rate, low conversion rate and many lost opportunities. It's nice that some template seller promised you shiny results for no effort, but the full potential of your business can be unlocked only through a custom solution.
The biggest trap of the template is the lack of flexibility in adjusting UX to your customers' needs. As your business grows you will find out that a tiny update is required - just a little shift of a button for example. With a template, this minor change can cost a fortune, with a custom-made web it is no pain at all. And we are getting back to the fact that you are not reaching the full market potential.

You only have 5 seconds to grab the customer's attention

The visitor, no matter how he found your page, is deciding during the initial 5 seconds whether he is going to find out more or run away. This decision is based on the metrics called "feelings" by humans. We only need a few seconds to get the impression. No reading, just a feeling.

You are not the only one

You might run a huge online store or look for massive construction projects. It is the same. Your clients or customers never inquire only about one company. Trust us that if you are not going to make the right impression during the first visit, they run away and try another place. They will buy a vacuum cleaner from your competitors or pass them a multimillion contract that you won't even hear about.

Our apps are tailored to the target group and respect their feelings. Every detail on our website instantly evokes tons of positive emotions - curiosity, passion and sympathy. In the second when the visitor feels intrigued, he starts reading the texts and opening more pages. We haven't won yet. We have to navigate him through the well-built website and bring him without obstacles to accomplishing the goal.

The design and user-friendliness decide about the success

Have you noticed that so far, we didn't write a word about programming? That's because it is design and user-friendliness that decide about the success. Tiny bugs in code can be overlooked if even noticed but any inaccuracy in design has catastrophic consequences. That's why we feed a hungry pack of testers that never let anything like that to happen.

Design studio
Let's get to it together
Can I save money by hiring a freelancer?

Every other client asks us to fix cheesy work of freelancers and poor agencies

Many companies decide to push the price down as hard as possible. They want to save money by hiring a freelancer. His attractive hourly rate looks promising, he has a few apps in his portfolio, so what could go wrong?

When hiring a freelancer is a good idea?
  • You have a well-managed development team with a project manager and CTO, where the extra person can fit in easily.
What freelancer's traps can bring you down?
  • He is a developer, not a project manager, so you have to manage him. If you are hiring more than one, it's gonna be tough. For example, mobile app development needs 3 developers and 1 designer at minimum.
  • Unreliability. It is usually a student, who is available according to the schedule of exams, later he can start work from Bali or disappear completely.
  • He goes by the motto: Develop & Cash out. He does not care about your business. That is massively different from our attitude.
  • He has no motivation to be effective, because the more he codes, the more money he makes.
  • There is no senior controlling the quality of the code and weeding out trivial mistakes. You won't notice it until your project gets successful and you will start expanding or pitching investors.
  • His code is incomprehensible to anyone else and you risk re-making the code from the line #1. Which is always pricey.
  • You might be surprised when AppStore or GooglePlay refuse your app as it doesn't meet their strict quality requirements. Oops.

Shortly, the freelancer will never give you the professional guarantee that is so important for every advanced development project. If you want it to work like a charm.

Did you know that:
If you are not able to manage and control the quality of the freelancer's work, your intention to save money can seriously backfire. The freelancer has no background and know-how of a software house, so everything takes him more time. It is like changing the oil in your car when you would forge all the tools from scratch, refine crude oil and manufacture filters on your own. Isn't it smarter to take your ride to a shop and have it changed in ten? So let the agency develop software.
Matt
Business Consultant
Are you planning a project? Let's meet. It's non-binding and free!
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Reasons

Why to think about a solid agency

  • With an agency, you have guaranteed know-how, quality control and project management. It is not your problem that backend developer is leaving for a two-week vacation, you only care about the delivery on time. Which is always specified in the contract.
  • The agency's team has already solved many of your problems for other projects, so they spent less time on development and it means a lower price for you.
  • A good agency is not focused on the number of hours. They want to effectively meet the technical requirements of the project. They should care about your success and not about selling their developers time.
  • They use proven technologies and keep up to date with the latest trends.
  • The agency can deliver the project and be there in 6 months when you need an update. By the way, clients often come to ask us to fix and finish such poor and incomplete projects.
  • They can offer a much wider spectrum of services - business consulting before to development or marketing and maintenance.
How to recognize a perfect agency

From the reputable agency, require a complex project and not only development. You don't need the code, you need a superior design and sometimes even marketing

How to select the right agency without getting burned?

A reliable agency has tradition and its team counts at least 20 people. A 3-man micro agencies often go bankrupt, can't plan in the longterm or are getting bought by another project. They most likely deliver a solution that will be bound to them and no one will ever be able to take it over in the future. Find out whether the agency has licenses in the contract. You don't want to find out after 2 years that you either pay immense sanctions for contract breach or you can give farewell to the whole code. The only acceptable solution is the full-license in your hands. You won't believe something like that is possible? We meet such cases several times each month. If the agency can start working without a technical specification it turns any project into a black hole sucking out all your money. The initial specification is there mainly for your protection! Stand by it and you will prevent annoying fights about details in later phases.

Tip
The Internet is full of spectacular references and magnificent case studies, but it doesn't have to mean a lot. Trust to the independent platform collecting reviews of the software companies such as Clutch.co or Goodfirms.
Mirek
Business Consultant
Building the digital product smoothly by Pixelmate

Any jackman can do some programming, but to build a successful project, you need much more

We got our hands on hundreds of projects - every single one had a slightly different requirements and expectations, but with every meeting or workshop we learned how to create successful innovations.

We encounter 3 types of clients:
E-business Card
He has a website, but no clue what for.
Dead App
He has a really cool app, but it accidentally hasn't reached any users.
Leaving Train
He wants to keep up with the competition that is crushing him.

The success of our company is based on one thing only

On the success of our clients. We don't want to deliver chunks of code, we want to stand behind projects that are making or saving loads of money. Every happy client, every positive review is a step towards our goal.

We choose with whom we work

We are not cocky, but we know that we have to refuse 8 out of 10 startups, because they have no chance to shine in the hypercompetitive market. Before any development, we want to understand your business and clearly see the promising business model.

We sleep well only when we know that our client got the best solution for the budget

It is not important whether he paid 80 hours of development or 3,000; that is no sign of success. We became salesmen from developers a long time ago to provide clients with the best care and overview, not only with the code.

“I am sure that marketing is the most powerful tool for people thriving to change the world.”
Seth Godin
Have you thought about the most powerful tool?

The digital product is all done and we can focus on marketing

There are several ways how to actually make marketing:
01

In-house marketing fully in your hands.

02

Completely outsourced to marketing agency.

03

Full-service innovation studio.

Selection of a marketing agency

We can give you a few good pieces of advice here. Our very own experience has shown that a good marketing agency is interested in your product from the beginning. They are literally fixed on your experience and successes, not on the size of the budget or ways of its spending. They understand the promotion of mobile apps or websites through effective PPC campaigns, but they are not afraid of other extremely important activities: high-quality content creation and offline communication with your customers. Marketing overlaps to many other fields - what if you need a video or write an article for the local newspaper or if you want to improve your product based on customer feedback? With all that the agency should be able to help you. If you won't find it at the agency and still give it a shot, they will usually suck out all the dedicated budget, report seemingly good results and ask for additional resources. The bad marketing agency campaigns will reach millions of people, but it won't bring you any new customers. And if yes, then the price will go through the roof.

Tip
Propose to the agency reporting of the campaigns by their real results. Choose the metric that directly supports your revenues and don't get satisfied with Reach, CTR or CPC. Want more! The often problem is, that the marketing agency pumps new users in, but they are confused and can't accomplish the required action.
Matt
Business Consultant
The best solution can be the 3rd option

Look for a full-service innovation studio such as Pixelmate. Not only we can design the whole business model and develop any app, but we can also provide professional marketing services. We are happy at the moment when our solution gets among people and starts reaching the planned goals.

Our cooperation doesn't end with code hand over, we can offer:
01

Upload of the mobile app to AppStore, GooglePlay.

02

Launch of web servers and their administration.

03

Marketing campaign for the new mobile app.

04

First hundreds of downloads and check of satisfaction.

05

Communication strategy proposal.

06

Social media and blogs administration.

07

Copywriting, storytelling, brand positioning.

08

Product design, banners, merchandising.

09

Offline promotion - events and conferences.

10

Feedback collection and growth hacking.

Our experience says that the marketing of the new web or app is great to plan in cooperation with developers. Only then everything works in synergy and generates surprising results. During the project, you can reach your target group and prepare the marketing campaign so that it reflects their deepest wishes and worries. If we manage to lit the right boom to support the launch, your app will hit the top charts and gets thousands of downloads for free.

The perfect business model
Marketing

Design

Development

Go-live

Growth

Success
Success

A Few Words About Pixelmate Development Studio

We are a development studio based in Prague, specializing in custom mobile and web application development.

Whether you are looking for a simple application to improve your internal processes or need a complex solution to enhance customer interaction, we have the answer.

Our experienced development team provides top-notch services and support. From application design to business model consultation or project phasing, we are not just an IT company; we think in the client's best interest to make their application effective and successful.

Want to learn more about how we can assist you with custom application development? Contact us today, and let's meet in person in Prague.

Free Consultation

Do you want to know more before making the final decision? We recommend you to look at:

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