Neighborhood: Redmadrobot founder Maxim Voloshin - about the company's formation and development prospects

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

Until the very moment when “Robots” (as the guys call themselves) were first contacted and offered to come to their office, meet and talk. It so happened that our "general" acquaintance immediately became productive - Boomburum told how to properly conduct a blog on Habré, and after that the developers of "TM" got drunk in the Redmadrobot office. So everything spun, spun and at one certain moment only I, Maxim and the voice recorder were left at the table.
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- When the first iPhone came out in 2008, I ordered 3 things at once through my friends in the States, they flew to Moscow by DHL - one was “lost” at our customs. In general, I always liked the gadgets, I always followed the technology. When Apple started all this hype, iPhone, app store, developer ecosystem, I caught fire.

- What did you do then?

“I’ve probably spent eight years managing projects in a large design studio, we did graphic design, branding, web, 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 the 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 - IQ test. A simple program with a clear algorithm - in the store it was sold for $ 2. Then there was such a point of bifurcation - food by car, and I received SMS, which to the account fell $ 4 thousand. Of course, we picked up this story.

Soon I stopped working in a design studio and started my own business.

I backed up my product development with commercial orders. Went to friends in the advertising market. Mobile applications at the time 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 interactive. I registered a legal entity in order to receive money under a contract, and we released the application AX Muchas Maracas. So Redmadrobot appeared.

Then there was some more promotional orders and not only promo. 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 general director of the media group, Yuri Katsman, believed in us and this allowed us to get on our feet - to rent an office, to hire people. We made the application worthy, it even received some awards.

At the same time, we released our own products in the App Store - we tried to engage in games like “Escape from the room”, we did social networks. Very soon, large gaming studios like Electronic Arts with gigantic budgets, all sorts of publishers who understood in marketing and promotion, came to the front. We did not have budgets, but we did not understand anything in marketing and promotion. But we had experience in managing large client projects - we focused on that.

- What year was it?

- 2010-2011. In addition to mobile development, we picked up the wave of augmented reality - we made a virtual stand of the Kaluga region's technopark for the international exhibition “Days of Russia in Paris”, the “Smart Home” stand “Rosnano” 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, one-time ones, dedicated to some actions or simply without a clear continuation / development), then with the second wave of interest in the mobile channel, things were more serious - large companies began to look at applications as a business tool, not only as an image component. We in Redmadrobot had to rebuild - go to another level of quality.

In 2012, we won the RBC tender for remaking all the holding’s applications that had been developed there on its own. We are quite self-confidently involved in this story. And they saw their true face at that moment :)

- screwed up?

- To implement such large and complex projects, an industrial development system is needed - not only with design engineering and coding, but also with testing, technical support, development of functionality and everything else. "Hole" we then opened a lot. We saw what we do not have, where we are strong, where we are weak. I would not say that we screwed up. Our Android app RBC News has been included in 12 Best Google Apps 2013.

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

If before that we were moving in the “what we can do, then we do” format, then now we understood: either we change or we die. (I’ll make a reservation: for us the prospect of remaining “sausage” for 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 postpay cost.

- What did you do for Beeline?

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

Then we strengthened the team with managers - we had professionals from leading outsourcing companies in Europe.

- Are you hantily purposefully some kind of person?

- We posted vacancies on hh.ru. Plus, we always paid attention to our PR and marketing, they knew us in the market. And the people themselves came. It was 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 big projects - we managed to survive, to assemble a very cool team (both in terms of professional skills and in terms of motivation) and learn how to make complex multiplayer mobile products.



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

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

- Redmadrobot 7 years, as well as the mobile application market. What did you grow as a company and what did you grow the market? What is "fat"?

- We made a system that allows not only to earn money at the moment, but also to develop. Develop projects, products, team. I was talking about hr-service and hr-brand. This, including our “fat”.

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

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

We have created a corporate university, which has undergone several transformations over the past 1.5 years. The idea was to transmit work standards to the team, complete production with competences, grow people inside, improve communication and 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 construction is also useful for business, but in our case - in the stage of rapid growth of the company, it ate more resources than it brought benefits. We had to cut and sew on the living, and not smooth out the roughness. And then we changed the uni model, created a powerful internal tool for developing employees in combat conditions - we call it the “knowledge management process in the company” , this is the translation of experience from employee to employee. And this is exactly what allows us to develop rapidly.

Well, our hr-brand is very pumped up - we quarterly, on average, perform 10 professional conferences, conduct training courses in the British, ICR, UNIC, try and mentor large hackathons, conduct internships for which we receive 600-700 applications, produce the coolest mobile projects for “ABC of Taste” , “Discoveries” , “Alfa Insurance” , “Beeline” and other big names. Plus, active work with the media, ratings - this is all the "fat" in terms of top-of-mind in the mobile development market. And Habr, of course :) I’ve just received a diploma for the best corporate blog in the Mobile Development category. Statistics show that 3 out of 5 applicants chose our job because they were looking for a job in Redmadrobot.

At the end of 2015

6 877 resumes reviewed HR-service Redmadrobot
420 interviews held at Redmadrobot
770 Redmadrobot mentions in the media
674,000 views of posts Redmadrobot on Habré

- Do new employees bring many new things to the company?

- New employees are two types: those who come to learn, and those who bring something new to the company (technology, experience). We do not take averages: either well-trained cool guys, or beginners, but with potential. Our junior programmer grows into SE in six months. 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 the developers live, and due to the general pace of the company. People with experience are also growing - in our new businesses.

- Do you compete strongly with startups in frames?

- This is such a strange competition. Some guy gave the project a few millions, and the project began to hunt developers for a salary of 300 thousand rubles. We can not afford to compete with such numbers, because we make money ourselves, not some guy feeds us. But what will the developer learn in this startup? And how long will he work there? And will it come to release in the stores? Because we see guys from blown-up startups, they are outraged: "we received twice as much as you offer us." And we say: “Guys, what can you do in general?” We are doing a code review - everything is bad there. And at this moment, the developers have a choice - to build the foundation of their professional development for real, 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 follow the dynamics of annual budgets (custom development and development of an application under one platform), then the figures are approximately as follows: 3 million rubles. (2013), 6-10 million rubles. (2014), 30 million rubles. (2015), 60 million rubles. (2016). And this story with mobile jobs is also a new promising niche now. If earlier companies automated their business processes at the expense of stationary systems, now they just do the same with cell phones and tablets. More mobile jobs and fewer physical jobs are good for business. And if people are given digital tools in the “fields”, and managers have the technical capabilities of control and management, then business efficiency will increase significantly.

We went to the Web Summit in Dublin. Reports listened and passed on startups - to see what is happening. Activity around mobile jobs (MRM) has become much more. MRM for building walkers who see cracks, shrinkage-drawdowns, realtors, sales agents, etc. Business processes began to be dragged into mobility. So we somehow looked at this case, found a partner from the pharmaceutical market and made a mobile workplace for medical representatives of pharmaceutical companies, which was then transformed into a mobile platform Oncall for any field force in general.

- Field Force are insurance and bank agents, salespeople ...

- Yes Yes. In general, a field force MRM is a toolkit that covers an employee’s field requirements and helps his employer control the quantity and quality of daily workflow. We supply such a solution to 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 target audience to the presentations, and the human factor is generally minimized - in MRM, the entire workflow is automated, the employee goes through scripts, fraud

The gap in office services and field force is a problem with great 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 sell little or sell the wrong thing - also a gap. And MRM places can be in different formats - on the building devices, on byod-ah (bring your device). It doesn't matter - it is in any case convenient for field staff and beneficial for companies.

- Come on about the future. I realized that you want to grow quality. What are the big goals facing the company? The fact that now is not an easy time, you can not even say out loud. But this time gives quite large opportunities.

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

This is the next level of development of our customer relations. Business turns to us for the transformation of its services - and we translate them into mobility along a verified path.

- What “robots” will become? What would you like Robots to become?

- We are fundamentally switching in the direction of solutions, we enter the western market (we are already working with Australia and Canada) and in Russia we confine ourselves to those clients with whom we are interested in working in terms of building a large ecosystem with breakthrough products. We are not lagging behind the US in mobile technology, and moreover, we manage to make products with Russian customers that have no analogues in the world.

For example, for Renaissance Insurance, we have released the Safe Trip application for traveling abroad with a “panic button” . There is no analog. 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 the insurance case goes to the support service, which calls back with a ready rescue instruction relevant to the client's location and type of incident. And from such pieces the whole team is running. In general, they make products that are used by millions of people.

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

At the end of the year, we always have a corporate event combined with the company's birthday. We do this event not as a drunk with a complete separation from reality, but as an inspiration conference for the team - the guys (myself included) prepare reports on their experience (from technology to sport) and the vision of the future of humanity, interesting scientists and entrepreneurs write down for us some kind of parting words, in parallel, the championship on Mortal Kombat, our iOS developer Roman Churkin, aka Dj Firmach, plays hard-style sets. The team is inspired, synchronized according to the picture of the world, goals and values, and is simply bursting with all the heart This is also our point of convergence - corporate culture.



So, last year we talked about the HYIP cycle technologies, about the fact that everyone is following Tesla and Hyperloop, the cars without a driver and the Mars rovers. And on the one hand, these things seem to us to be really revolutionary, and on the other, how many people travel to Tesla all over the world? Well, a couple of hundred thousand people. . , — , , , , , , , , , Redmadrobot . :)

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