In the neighborhood: the founder of Redmadrobot Maxim Voloshin - about the formation of the company and development prospects



    The story of the friendship of two companies: TM and Redmadrobot began in the courtyard ... of our office center. In addition to jokes, the offices of our companies are located in the same building and, despite this “proximity”, for a long time we only heard about each other.

    Until the very moment when “Robots” (as the guys call themselves) were the first to get in touch and offered to come to their office, get to know and chat. It so happened that our “common” acquaintance immediately became productive - Boomburum told how to properly blog on Habré, and after that the developers of TM got into a booze at the office of Redmadrobot. So everything spun, turned around and at one certain moment only me, Maxim and the recorder remained at the table.

    - When the first iPhone came out in 2008, I ordered 3 at once through my friends in the States, they flew to Moscow DHL - one was “lost” at our customs. In general, I always liked gadgets, I always watched the technology. When all this hype, an iPhone, an application store, an ecosystem of developers began around Apple, I caught fire.

    - What did you do then?

    - I probably spent eight years managing projects in a large design studio, we did graphic design, branding, web, and something else. After participating in the organization of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, I realized that I had burned out - I’m unlikely to have a more complicated project. And he began to look for new opportunities. I launched my IT platform for RM, some online store, etc. And then my iPhones arrived. And I decided to conduct an experiment. My friend and I found a programmer who wrote us the first application - an IQ test. A simple program with a clear algorithm - in the store, it sold for $ 2. Then there was such a bifurcation point - I was going by car, and I received an SMS that $ 4,000 fell into the account. Of course, we picked up this story.

    Soon, I stopped working in a design studio and began to engage in my own business.

    I backed up my product development with commercial orders. I went to friends in the advertising market. Mobile applications at that moment had such a wow effect. And the first wave was picked up by advertising agencies - they were ready to use the mobile channel for promotional campaigns. We then made the first commercial project for Unilever. Vlad Sitnikov (digital agency Grape) worked with the AX brand, and he needed some kind of interactivity. I registered a legal entity to receive money under the contract, and we released the AX Muchas Maracas app. So Redmadrobot appeared .

    Then there was a certain number of promo orders, and not only promos. Customers have gone. For example, we signed a contract with the “Live” media group to develop an application for the blog platform and the F5 newspaper. The media group’s general director, Yuri Katsman, believed in us and this allowed us to get on our feet - to remove the office and hire people to staff. We made a worthy application, it even received some awards.

    At the same time, we also released our own products in the App Store - we tried to play games such as "Escape from the room", we made a social network. Very soon, large gaming studios such as Electronic Arts with gigantic budgets, all sorts of publishers who understood marketing and promotion, came out. We had no budgets, and we did not understand anything in marketing and promotion. But we had experience in conducting large client projects - we focused on that.

    - What year was it?

    - 2010-2011st. In addition to mobile development, we caught a wave of augmented reality - we made a virtual stand of the Kaluga Region technopark for the international exhibition “Days of Russia in Paris”, the “Smart Home” stand of “Rusnano” for the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and others.

    In terms of applications, the market situation has changed. If advertisers were unpretentious in terms of product requirements (promotional applications, as it were, are one-time, timed for some promotions or simply without a clear continuation / development), then things were more serious with the second wave of interest in the mobile channel - large companies began to look at applications as a business tool, and not just as an image component. We at Redmadrobot had to rebuild - to go to a different quality level.

    In 2012, we won a RBC tender to remake all of the holding's applications that had previously been developed there on our own. We pretty confidently got involved in this story. And they saw their true face at that moment :)

    - Screwed up?

    - To implement such large and complex projects, we need an industrial development system - not only with design design and coding, but also with testing, technical support, development of functionality and everything else. A lot of "holes" were opened then. We saw what we do not have, where we are strong, where we are weak. I would not say that we screwed up. Our RBC News Android application was included in the 12 Best Google Apps 2013.

    But we used that situation with the “holes” to the fullest - formed an as is picture and a plan to be, which included the competencies, people, processes we needed to transition in the field of industrial development. And they began to implement this plan. Create new units, invite professionals with experience from the industry to the team.

    If before that we moved in the format of “what we can do, then we do it”, now we understood: either we are changing or we will die. (I’ll make a reservation: for us, the prospect of remaining “sausage-friendly” in the production of small applications was unacceptable).



    The next test for Redmadrobot was Beeline , because it was an order of magnitude more complicated than RBC. Here we really almost died. One postpayment was worth it.

    - For Beeline, what did you do?

    - Mobile personal account in the structure of self-service of subscribers. Beeline showed us new “white spots” in our production. In this project, we integrated with several VimpelCom contractors. It was a different level of difficulty. Not from the point of view of professional team skills (development, backend, design and everything else), but from the point of view of management. Communication took a lot of time. And gaps were revealed with the management of expectations, changes, and so on - that is, with building a flexible development. Beeline first went like Waterfall, then it went along Agile sprints.

    Then we strengthened the team of managers - we got professionals from Europe's leading outsourcing companies.

    - Did you purposefully hunt some individuals?

    - We placed vacancies on hh.ru. Plus, we always paid attention to our PR and marketing, they knew us in the market. And people themselves came. It was only later in the “Robot” that the HR service and work with the HR brand were deployed. And then only vacancies, only hardcore :)

    Returning to the first large projects, we managed to survive, put together a very cool team (both in terms of professional skills and in terms of motivation) and learn how to make complex multi-user mobile products.



    Having embarked on the path of industrial development, we again began to look towards our own products. This time they chose a model of cooperation. This is when we supplement our competencies in the development with the competencies of a partner from some market - and we do joint business at the junction. Alpina Digital was created according to such a scheme.- Redmadrobot and Alpina Publisher have released a platform for delivering electronic content: a reader on the b2c market and corporate libraries for b2b clients (the absolute market leader - more than 100 contracts with major Russian and international companies).

    We also have the Oncall mobile platform for “field” employees, which we developed together with Onpoint , the monster for the production of content for eDetailing and CLM systems.

    - Redmadrobot is 7 years old, as is the mobile app market. What have you grown as a company and what has grown the market? What kind of "fat"?

    - We made a system that allows not only making money in the moment, but also developing. Develop projects, products, team. I talked about HR service and HR brand. This, including our "fat".

    Now the staff of the group of companies is more than 200 people (the geography is: Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tolyatti, Kaliningrad, Kiev).

    The problem that we see ahead of the entire IT market is the lack of people. And I'm not only talking about developers. We start some kind of new business - we need the right CEO, the right direction managers. Where to get them? This is a restriction for development. And here we need a training system for managerial personnel reserve.

    We have created a corporate university that has undergone several transformations over the past 1.5 years. The idea was to translate work standards into the team, to equip production with competencies, to grow people inside, to improve communication, efficiency. The first model of the university worked out a number of intensive courses with internal and external experts. Six months later, we realized that we had a training center - a theory divorced from real problems.



    I want to say that such a design is also useful for business, but in our case, at the stage of rapid growth of the company, it consumed more resources than it brought benefits. We had to cut and sew alive, and not smooth out the roughness. And then we changed the model of the university, created a powerful internal tool for the development of employees in combat conditions - we call it the “process of knowledge management in the company” , this is a translation of experience from an employee to an employee. And this is exactly what allows us to develop rapidly.

    Well, our hr-brand has pumped up a lot - we speak at an average of 10 professional conferences on a quarterly basis, conduct training courses in Britanka, RBI, UNIC, judge and mentor large hackathons, conduct internships for which we receive 600-700 applications, and release the coolest mobile phones projects for the "Alphabet of Taste" , "Discovery" , "Alfastrakhovaniya" , "Beeline" and other big names. Plus, active work with the media, ratings are all the fat in terms of top-of-mind in the mobile development market. And Habr, of course :) Just got a diploma for the best corporate blog in the subject of "Mobile Development". Statistics show that 3 out of 5 applicants chose our vacancy because they were looking for jobs in Redmadrobot.
    By the end of 2015,

    6,877 resumes were viewed by the HR service of Redmadrobot;
    420 interviews were held in Redmadrobot;
    770 references to Redmadrobot in the media;
    674,000 views of Redmadrobot posts on Habré

    - Do new employees bring a lot of new things to the company?

    - There are two types of new employees: those who come to study, and those who bring something new to the company (technology, experience). We don’t take the average ones: either cool guys who have been pumped up, or beginners, but with potential. At us the programmer-junior grows up in SE for half a year. I do not know other companies where such speed is possible. And with us it is possible - due to the system of translation of experience and standards, due to the environment in which developers live, and due to the general pace of the company. People with experience are also growing - into our new businesses.

    - Do you compete strongly with startups for personnel?

    - This is such a strange competition. Some guy gave the project some millions, and the project began to hunt developers for a salary of 300 thousand rubles. We cannot afford to compete with such numbers, because we earn money for ourselves, not some peasant feeds us. But what will the developer learn at this startup? And how long will he work there? And will it reach the release in the stories? Because we see guys from deflated startups, they are indignant: "we got twice as much as you offer us." And we say: “Guys, what can you do at all?” We do a code review - everything is bad there. And at this moment, the developers have a choice - to really build the foundation of their professional development, to engage in serious products, or to cut prototypes again, which end users will never see.



    - Well, let's talk about the "fat" in the market.

    - If you trace the dynamics of annual budgets (custom development and development of applications for one platform), then the figures are approximately the following: 3 million rubles. (2013), 6-10 million rubles. (2014), 30 million rubles. (2015), 60 million rubles. (2016 year). And this story with mobile jobs is also a new promising niche now. Previously, companies automated their business processes through stationary systems, but now they just do the same, but with mobile phones and tablets. More mobile jobs and fewer physical jobs are good for businesses. And if people in the “fields” are given digital tools and managers are given the technical capabilities of control and management, then business efficiency will increase significantly.

    We drove the Web Summit to Dublin. We listened to the reports and went through startups - to see what is happening. Activity around mobile jobs (MRM) has become much more. MRM for builders of buildings that look at cracks, shrinkage, drawdowns, realtors, sales agents, etc. Business processes began to be dragged into mobility. So we somehow looked at this matter, found a partner from the pharmaceutical market and made a mobile workplace for medical representatives of pharmaceutical companies, which then turned into an Oncall mobile platform for any field force in general.

    - Field Force is insurance and banking agents, salespeople ...

    - Yes Yes. In general, field force MRM is a toolkit that covers the employee’s needs in the field and helps his employer control the quantity and quality of daily workflow. We supply such a solution in the pharmaceutical, banking, insurance and telecom markets. There, unscrupulous agents are highlighted, because our platform conducts various tricky measurements, and marketing works more clearly, tracking the response of the CA to presentations, and the human factor is minimized as a whole - in MRM, the entire workflow is automated, the employee follows scripts, no gag, no errors, fraud.

    The rupture of office services and field force is a problem that has big consequences. Insurance companies annually lose tens of millions of rubles, compensating for damage from non-existent accidents and fires. This is a gap problem. Banking agents do not sell well, or they are selling the wrong thing — a gap too. Moreover, MRM places can be in different formats - on corporate devices, on byods (bring your own device). It doesn’t matter - it is in any case convenient for field employees and beneficial for companies.

    - Let's talk about the future. I realized that you want to grow quality. What are the big goals the company faces? The fact that now is not easy, you can not even say out loud. But this time gives quite big opportunities.

    - In difficult times, companies run to optimize business processes. They are running to us, including. As a technology business partner who says that you need to digitalize, which ecosystem to build with a foundation for future development and to achieve targeted business indicators. We have a proven expertise not only in the quality of the code and design (certificates and awards, thank God, enough), but also in complex solutions - loyalty systems, MRM, financial services, a personal account in the self-service structure (subscriber, patient, insurer) , SDK, guidelines.

    This is the next level of development of our customer relationships. Business turns to us for the transformation of its services - and we transfer them to mobility along a well-defined path.

    - What kind of "Robots" will become? What would you like the Robots to become?

    - We fundamentally switch to the side of solutions, enter the Western market (we are already working with Australia and Canada) and in Russia we restrict ourselves to those customers with whom we are interested in working with a plan to build a large ecosystem with breakthrough products. We do not lag behind the United States in mobile technologies, moreover, we manage to make products with Russian customers that have no analogues in the world.

    For example, for the Renaissance insurance, we released the Safe Trip application for travelers abroad with a panic button.. There is no analogue. Even if a person is roaming without the Internet, he clicks in the SOS application, and a special SMS with his geodata, information about the policy and insurance case goes to a support service that calls back with ready-made rescue instructions relevant to the client’s location and type of incident. And from such pieces the whole team “rushes”. In general, they make products that are used by millions of people.

    If we talk about the future, the vision is this: we pump experience in development and management, pump the team and look at the points of convergence - our capabilities (taking into account development), technologies and human needs.

    At the end of the year, we always have a corporate party combined with the company's birthday. We are doing this event not as a booze with a complete separation from reality, but as an inspiration conference for the team - the guys (including myself) are preparing reports on their experience (from technological to sports) and on the vision of the future of humanity, interesting scientists and entrepreneurs write there are some parting words for us, at the same time there is a Mortal Kombat championship, our iOS developer Roman Churkin, aka Dj Firmach, plays a hard style set. The team is inspired, synchronized according to the picture of the world, goals and values ​​and just sausages from the heart. This is also our point of convergence - corporate culture.



    So, last year we talked about hype-cycle technologies, about the fact that everyone is watching Tesla and Hyperloop, about cars without a driver and rovers. And these things, on the one hand, seem really revolutionary to us, and on the other, how many people go to Tesla all over the world? Well, a couple of hundred thousand people. That is, this technology is still available only at the top of the pyramid. At the same time, the technologies that we work with - new patterns of user interaction with services, new types of synthesized services, new product integration and digitalization, are all everyday revolution that people don’t notice, but it happens every day, and it changes the lives of billions users, makes it more efficient, more convenient, and Redmadrobot is involved in this. Realizing this is incredibly cool :)

    In this case, of course, we look at the peak of technology. We, for example, are interested in the area of ​​convergence of IT and healthcare.

    - From the development point of view, are you satisfied with how the team and projects are growing harmoniously?

    - Yes, the rhythm suits me, I understand what we need to do.

    - Is there something outside that critically affects the processes taking place in the company?

    - I do not see it. A crisis is kind of bad, a dollar is expensive, costs are rising. But we began to order more. People who sat on the import system and paid dollars for it are now looking for something to replace it with import - to develop their own or buy a ready-made Russian solution.

    From a labor market point of view, exactly the same. In 2016, we expanded, there was an office in St. Petersburg, a second office in Moscow, new projects, we are steadily paying salaries. This is such an island of sustainable development. It is simply important to be able to reflect and learn. When we entered the mobile market, we did not know much. But we definitely knew how to look at ourselves from the outside — not to be mad at the client for punishing us for something, but to figure out why he was doing this, look for white spots in himself and work them out, plan for changes.

    A lot of companies with the general idea of ​​"well, do and do." Although this is also an approach. But, as a rule, when a crisis occurs, they are abandoned in the first place.

    - How is your managerial hierarchy built? After all, all the shareholders are still at the helm?

    - The shareholders are at the helm, but we are gradually starting to transfer “power” to top managers. The company is growing, it is impossible to manually manage all processes. We are moving to a clearer structure with dedicated business units inside. It’s easier to regulate activity and efficiency. Google and Yandex have come to this in the last couple of years, that is, at a very mature age, but we are trying to get into a state of complete transparency of business processes much earlier.

    Over the past 3 years, we have had a rotation of management zones with shareholders, we have set up large internal projects to form and stabilize the core - the conveyor of industrial outsourcing. At different times, we were engaged in HR-service, commerce, production ... Now that this core is formed and can live more autonomously, we switched to launching external projects - in fact, new businesses that are in symbiosis with this core (well, it’s silly to have strong competencies and use them only in client outsourcing). This is a mobile platform for field force, and a solution for medicine, and a solution for housing and communal services, and a design studio, and a QA-laboratory, and international projects, at the same time an organization of the management system for a group of companies takes place.



    “What about your future?”

    - Participation in global processes - with capital, team and technology. We go to these three things. I am very interested in the topic of education. At the system level. In this sense, the concept described in the Astrovyanka impresses me . An ingenious book and we, with its author, astrophysicist Nick Gorkav, will definitely do something in the field of a new approach to the development and application of knowledge. By the way, we will soon release an audio version of the novel .

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