Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Brent: I'm Brent Weaver, and you're watching uGurus, the most watched web series to become
a more profitable and in-demand web professional. Today I'm here at Neon Rain with Arif
Gangji and we're talking about web, apps and what his company's up to, so welcome to the
program.
Arif: Thank you, thanks for having me.
Brent: So tell us a little bit about Neon Rain.
Arif: Sure. So I started Neon Rain in 2002 and we've kind of grown in services and team
members throughout that process. We started building web applications for franchise
companies and large organizations and just custom web-based applications, essentially;
from that came, websites. They have an application,
they want a website. We started designing websites, building websites, mainly Word Press
way back in the day, now we do Drupal and other things; from that point on we added
SEO as a service and now we're actually building a
ton of mobile apps, Android and iPhone apps; that market is growing pretty quickly.
Brent: So what's the current makeup of the team, how many team members do you guys have,
what kind of disciplines do you have in house?
Arif: So our team members kind of fluctuate as far as number, anywhere from ten up to
twenty depending on who we have doing what; the disciplines,
we used to break everything up into different groups; so we had our app team that
did web applications and mobile apps and then we also had our web team that did design and
development, and then we had our SEO team as
well. We've recently combined our web and app team, and so now we have one development
team and they take care of mobile apps, web apps, design, and development. Obviously,
people who are good at those work on that project,
right? But we've kind of pulled it all together under
one account management team, project manager and QA and combined those instead of
duplicating resources.
Brent: And what was the driver there, just that you guys were duplicating resources or
was there some kind of pain that you guys found?
Arif: In order to, we had two different processes; and so our discovery process for web and
design was very different than our apps and mobile apps; and as we started working on
larger projects in our website, we would find that
there's actually some similarities; when we got to a
point where both teams were really doing very similar things as far as processes, like using
repositories, and needed the same requirements as far as QA and project management and that
sort of thing; it just seemed natural to combine the two and utilize those resources across
teams instead of trying to have redundancies.
Brent: Who's your ideal customer?
Arif: It depends on in what area, so for example, SEO; for SEO we look for clients who are
looking to grow, they understand the value of marketing, they understand the value of
internet; we don't have to convince them that,
"Hey, people are actually looking for you on the internet." they know that already.
They're spending money on pay-per-click or something
else; they just don't have what they need on
their current website and they need to refocus it and make sure it's actually doing what
it needs to do. So revenue-wise, we have a lot of people
starting out really all the way up to companies with revenues of 30,000,000 plus. So the spectrum
is there as far as the type of client there on
the web side, they are very similar, it's people looking to grow as well; they understand
the power of the web. We do a lot of custom design
and some template work, so custom design, designing from the ground up, really looking
at what the user wants; what the customer wants;
what they're trying to portray; what their messaging is that they're missing and working
on design from the ground up there. Again, revenue-wise,
companies really anywhere from half a million up to hundreds of millions plus, because
we have larger companies, we've worked with a little project for them. Web app team, we
have people, we joke around that we have clients that are somebody sitting in their mother's
basement with their credit card and that's actually
true. All the way out to Fortune 1000 companies that need something built, so the gambit's
really out there; it really depends on what they have to work with budget-wise; do they
actually have a vision, are they organized? That's
really what is more important in that regard versus
actual company size.
Brent: So with a lot of different potential customers, you've got a lot of different potential
services you can offer for app development websites; how do you approach that? It seems
like "custom" is the word that comes to mind. Is
every project just its own unique snowflake and
you guys are having to do a lot of discovery to figure out what that is or do you guys
have any kind of cookie-cutter process?
Arif: Sure. So our process is actually very cookie-cutter, where the projects are very
custom and that's really how we have to do it, because
the projects are custom; we had to create a process
that would give us a very similar result, because they're all so different; so you mentioned
custom, the other word I would mention is "transparent". One thing we try to do with
our clients is be very transparent; even with
our SEO, they knew exactly what we're doing, what
links we're building, we don't hide any of that from them. If certain rankings are going
up, certain shrinks are going down, we show it
to them. On the app development, they actually see
a budget spreadsheet every week; they can see where they are in budget and what their
decisions are doing to the budget; whether they're in budget or they're adding new features
and increasing that, so the processes themselves are really what help keep things in line.
So for example, our process would be where somebody
comes to us and they want an app developed; we would start with an initial conversation
called the information gathering, figure out who
they are and what they want, right? And then we come up with a ballpark number, some
recommended budget; now if I recommend a budget that fits their budget, what they're trying
to accomplish, then we can move onto the discovery phase; what they do is they pay a small
fee for discovery and we sit down in a room for hours, broken out over a couple of days
or weeks, depending and go through all the different
pieces of the project. What they end up with at the end is a list of, "Here's all the features
that you want, here's all the different options of
how you can accomplish them, based on our conversations here, here's the budget for
each one." Now you have the total budget, let's
see what fits and what doesn't fit or what's phase
one look like? And we can proceed from there; and then we also use agile methodologies,
so every week we're doing demo and feedback calls
with the clients to show them what we've done in the last week, get feedback on what
we've done and then proceed forward from there; but during that process, we're also showing
them the budget and everything else to make sure
that they're in line with what we're doing and vice versa.
Brent: How do you find that clients work within the agile process? Is that something you have
to teach your customer, how to work with you
guys on projects? Or are they just kind of responding to whatever you guys lead them
down?
Arif: You know, what we actually explain the agile process it makes sense to them, because
they think they connect with it as common sense
in some regard. We can talk about our experience and say, "OK, we've done waterfall" which
is trying to plan everything out and saying, "Alright,
eight months from now, on this Thursday at three p.m., so-and-so's going to work on this
part of the project." I mean, you change one thing
and that schedule is blown, right? It's going to
change, and they understand that, even if they've never developed a product or project
before and we say,
"OK, listen. You need flexibility; we also need to make sure that you're not going to
change the scope drastically, so here's what we're going
to do, every week we're going to talk about what
we've done and where you want to take this; if you want to make a change, great; we'll
tell you how it's going to affect the budget and give
you that flexibility to do so." We'll also draw a line
in the sand and say, "OK, here's what needs to happen for launch, these are the non-negotiable;
these have to happen and we'll always focus on those to make sure those get done so that
those can launch, and everything else might come after launch; maybe it will come before
launch, it's really up to you to decide." And that seems to resonate with them and make
sense.
Brent: One thing that I'm kind of picking up is that you mentioned that you guys do
a little bit of budget planning, but you, very importantly,
charge for discovery, which I'm a big advocate of;
and then you come up with what sounds like a more definitive budget, so do you guys operate
on a time and materials basis, or is it fixed price at the end of the day for your customers?
Arif: It's a combination. So there's certain things that we've done ahead of time, especially
in Ecommerce, where we can re-utilize modules
we've developed in the past; those are essentially fixed-price, because we know what time goes
into it; we can get it done faster, because we've
already developed it, but they're still paying for the value in it; there are certain pieces
that are very custom. Nobody's built this before or
there's 40 different ways of doing it, but we have to
interact with some API out there; is it going to work, is it not? Is it going to take two
hours, is it going to take 200 hours? We don't know and
therefore we'll give our best estimate, and then
that might be based on hours; and you know, we'll work with the clients. We might cap
it and say, "Alright, let's spend five hours looking
into this thing." and at that point, we'll come back to
you and tell you what we've found and what we think it's really going to take to accomplish
this and let you decide.
Brent: Did you guys ever start just doing fixed-price and kind of learn your lessons
from getting burned too many times and move to a more flexible
method?
Arif: Yes, absolutely. So initially, yeah, fixed price; especially when the scope isn't
defined very well and when you're dealing with third parties,
because you never know what they're going to
throw at you, right? And so if you fix the price and you don't count for the variables,
you're going to lose money on the project and you're
going to end up with an unhappy customer; on
the flip-side, if you're only charging by the hour, they question, "OK, well, are you
working fast enough?" How do I know that you're actually
working those hours as well? And so we kind of
make it a mix of value and then hourly to be fair to both parties.
Brent: For sure; when it comes to actually getting customers, you know, I noticed on
your website you guys have what appears to be a
couple of kind of celebrity relationships, Dave
Ramsey and Mr. Food was another one; do you guys do a lot of PR outreach to get new
customers?
Arif: Actually no, we don't do a lot of outreach; more than 80% of our clients are referral,
so it's really grown by referral, which is interesting,
because it's hard to dial up and down because of
that; but at the same time it's great, because that means people like what we're doing and
both of those testimonials were unsolicited, which
was also great.
Brent: I mean, referrals are probably one of the most expensive in terms of marketing
budget to actually get, but at the same time you have
to do a really good job on the projects.
Arif: Right, and there's also a social capital that you're spending, right?
You might not be spending dollars towards some sort of advertising campaign, but you
are supporting your community; you are networking;
you're doing other things in order to let the
community know that "Hey, you're a quality person." And that you actually care about
people and people around you, and I think that matters
a lot, because a lot of the referrals that we get
really come from helping other people in what's important to them.
Brent: Is there anything especially unique that you do to drive referrals?
I mean, people talk about putting something at the tail end of their invoice like, "Hey,
mention us to a friend." Or doing formal, affiliate-
type agreements where somebody's getting a cut of something.
Arif: Right. We've tried the affiliate agreement, didn't work. We tried putting little stickers
on our invoices that said, "We love referrals."
Didn't do anything, I mean really, it's been taking care of our clients; it is when a client's
company turns one, we send them a bottle of wine; it is sending them a Starbucks gift
card just to say "Thank you." Even our vendors, people
that we work with or bring in on projects, we'll
send them a card to say "Thank you" or put a Starbucks gift card with the check to pay
them; mainly because we want them to feel valued
and if our clients feel valued, they want to
introduce their friends to us as well.
Brent: So kind of going out of your way to show appreciation to your customers beyond
just the project work?
Arif: Absolutely.
Brent: What else do you do with Neon Rain in terms of your team? You said you kind of
fluctuate in team size, how do you go out there and find talent? Do you have any secrets
of the trade you're willing to share on that front?
Arif: I don't think we find talent fast enough sometimes; like right now we're booked quite
a ways and we need to find people who are looking.
Our hiring process actually came from Dave Ramsey's process in some regard; initially
we would put an ad out there; we would get a couple
of hundred applicants where we'd waste a lot of time, because they don't really know what
we're looking for and obviously it's the character issue, too, we want to make sure it's going
to be a good fit for our team. We protect our
team quite a bit, so we actually evolved our process
and now what we do is put an ad out there, and we'll network and get the word out that
we're looking for people; lead them to an assessment
and the assessment sometimes is two hours. It's like an online assessment asking various
questions to see if they know what they're talking
about technically. It's funny, because sometimes in the assessment, people will swear at us.
They're like, "You know, this is crap. You can't expect somebody to do this." Well, obviously
not going to get hired because they can't make
it through it, right? We've had people Google answers and put them in there because we can
copy and paste their answer and see somebody else posted that. So we actually know how
long it takes to get through the assessment and if
somebody takes too long or not enough time we can actually tell. They get through the
assessment, read through the answers; we know that they know their stuff. That's all it
is, you know, we just want to make sure you know your
stuff; then comes the real interviews where we talk on the phone, figure out if it's a
good fit to have you come in and actually interview.
Talk in person, bring in other team members and get to know the candidate; we might even
give them assignments. This is one area you're kind of lacking, go try this, go learn this,
come back and tell us what you found and they'll
do it. We go through that process and at the very
end we do a dinner and so my wife and I will go out to dinner with a candidate and their
significant or themselves, and you get to know a lot about a person during that dinner
that they would never mention in an interview.
Brent: Have you gone to dinner with a candidate after all of that and had to say no?
Arif: Yes.
Brent: Wow.
Arif: Yeah and it was interesting, in particular, the one I was thinking about, my wife and
I have a system, so if she sees something that's
alarming, she'll squeeze my leg under the table; and
that night, within the first ten minutes, my leg hurt; everything coming out of their
mouth was negative about everybody that they'd ever
interacted with. They didn't treat the wait staff very
well; that's important to me, I want to make sure when I come into the office, I say "Hi"
to the person mopping the floor, because they're
doing something valuable as well; so getting to know
that person outside of the work environment is important; if that person is not going
to treat the wait staff very well, how are they going
to treat our customers? Not very well!
Brent: If I ever go out to dinner with you and your wife, I'm going to be like, "Hands
on the table." Keep an eye on that just to see if
there's any negative energy on me going on there.
Arif: No, not at all.
Brent: I think that's fantastic, I think a lot of people get so excitable around hiring
new people and just want to find a candidate that fits
and throw him into the ringer and see if he or she's a
good fit. I think that's great that you guys are spending what sounds like a lot of time
on the front side.
Arif: It is, and the other piece of that is we tell people that we want it to be a good
fit for both sides and so we tell them a lot about us;
we tell them where we've been; we tell them what our
struggles are; we tell them where we're doing really well and where we need help; we'll
tell them where we're lacking, just because we
don't want to get somebody in and have them be
surprised, right? It has to be a good fit for both parties, otherwise it's not fair
and we want to make sure that they're just as excited to
be here as we are excited to have them.
Brent: For sure. I also noticed on your website, you were recently recognized for 40 under
40. How did that come out? I think a lot of people,
we try to teach people how to do PR, outreach and get recognized; I'm curious how you guys
actually tactically got something like that.
Arif: So let me take a step back; before the 40 under 40, by the den represents journal;
we won the Small Business Person of the Year award
by the Denver or the metro north chamber. I think
getting the 40 under 40 was also based on having some other awards, I'm assuming, so
getting the Small Business Person of the Year award
was really getting involved in the chamber. We
figured out that going to leads group was not a good way for us to be involved in the
chamber; we were just getting junk leads that we didn't
really have much that we were sending out to
people; we were really looking for quality relationships; we're going to refer people
to people if we think they're doing a good job and vice
versa; so we decided to help the chamber themselves and we started working with the
chamber for free essentially, helping them with
their redesign, their marketing and pouring value into them so that they can then pour
more value into their members. I think, because
of that we won the Small Business Person of the Year
award and then we went online and essentially applied; I can't remember if we applied for
the 40 under 40 or if somebody else nominated
us, but having other awards in the past obviously helped with that as well.
Brent: Have you found that that's been an effective way for you guys to get introduced
to new people, new contacts, and new clients?
Arif: You know it doesn't drive a lot of business, but getting to know other people it does help
with that; I've met a lot of people that have also been on the 40 under 40 list and they're
great contacts to have, so that's been very valuable
and business comes out of those networking relationships we do get; it's off and on,
but we were also ranked in the top five, ten firms in
Denver by the Denver Business Journal as well; that's another thing you just go apply for,
you put in various information and they'll pick
whoever; some companies will actually go to that list
and contact the first five or ten, that's one way of getting in front of people as well.
Brent: Sure. So I want to switch gears a little bit and focus on you a little bit; obviously
you've had this business since 2002, seems like it's
continued to grow, continued to be successful. What do you think are qualities that you have
that have gotten you where you are today?
Arif: So I think there's two qualities I have and then I'm going to tell you why I think
we really grew; so the first two qualities I have, number
one, I work my butt off; I don't have an off switch; I'm always thinking about new ideas,
trying to do something for a client; Hard work,
there's no replacement for that. Sometimes I drive people crazy because I email them
at one in the morning, but that's just my personality
of always being on.
Brent: Do you call at one in the morning too?
Arif: No, I do not.
Brent: I'm asleep when emails are on, I might not get an email at one in the morning, but
if you call me, that's different.
Arif: Exactly, and I'm not expecting a reply at one in the morning, but when you wake up
you'll see it; so that's the first piece is hard
work, number two is treating other people like I want to
be treated; I want to make sure that we're providing value to people, not expecting anything
back from them, but usually something comes back; but I'm not expecting it, I'm not going
to help somebody just to get something back,
whether it's volunteering my time; like tomorrow we're doing a CASA luncheon and I'm on the
marketing committee for their luncheon and they
help neglected children in Adams County. How could you not want to help children in the
foster care system? You want to, right? So we give
our time go do stuff like that; just helping others
and will something come out of that? Who knows? But at least we did something of value.
Alright, so that's me. Now, I think we've grown because of our team. One thing that
I tell them is that I don't know all the answers, I don't
know? I can try to figure stuff out, but they are also
bright and we've hired them because they're smart and creative and they can help figure
out problems or answers to problems as well, and
they have. The combination of the teams was actually the idea of people on our teams.
They realized that they had some overlap and it might
actually be very beneficial to combine the teams, and it was; and so we let them run
with it, but having the people on our team that number
one, are smart and are creative; and then I think
me stepping out of the way and letting them run with some of their ideas has really helped
us grow.
Brent: Within your business, what are you best at? What one skill or ability do you
typically contribute to projects?
Arif: Me, personally? For me would be vision and creativity, so I'll come up with new ideas
on where to take a project where they haven't
thought of that before; maybe combining different ideas from various different ideas from various
different industries. For example, I was reading a
book on process manufacturing, and they were manufacturing steel components; and it clicked
to me that it was very similar to software development; so we actually utilized some
of the processes from manufacturing in our software
development and started looking at our software differently, and that really helped quite
a bit.
Brent: Neon Rain was founded in 2002, so what, 11 years in business?
Arif: Right, yeah.
Brent: What have you found out over that period of time that you think other web professionals
should know?
Arif: That's hard. This industry is hard; everything you do is subjective, right? Whatever
you're building is going to be judged by somebody
else's subjectivity. So you have to be prepared for
that. There's always a good solution, there's always an answer, there's always going to
take good place. But you know, we do a lot of mentoring
with people. Some of the web spaces are just starting out; they want to know how to
create an agency or how to do something and they're going to make a lot of mistakes just
like we have and grow from them, learn from them
and change things so that you get better and better and better; but that's one thing that
they need to know, it's definitely hard but it's
definitely worth it.
Brent: That's such an interesting answer, because I feel like the barrier to entry into
web, into app development is so low.
Arif: Right.
Brent: It's almost like there's so many "Build your first app in eight hours" type of courses
out there. For you to say it's hard, that's interesting,
because there is such a low barrier to entry; but do you find that there's a lot of people
getting in on the very beginning level, and there's
not a lot of people out there that are really doing it right?
Arif: Two things; number one: if you're looking at a developer on an individual level, there's
a big difference between somebody just starting
out and somebody who knows who's a senior developer or an information architect; that's
a whole different level and you have to get to that
level, it takes a lot of experience. If you're talking about going from a one man shop or
a freelancer to creating an agency; now you're
talking about other pieces, like marketing sales,
project management, management of team members and all these other pieces that
somebody, here's an example; had drinks with a guy who's a freelancer, and he's like, "How
do I get to creating a firm of 30, 40 people?"
That's a whole different beast than what you're doing
right now; you want to create websites or you want to develop apps or whatever you want
to do, but you have to figure out HR; you have
to figure out book keeping and payroll; there's all
these other things that you're going to have to figure out in order to get to that stage
and just know that's going to come, so you may not
be able to focus on web when you get to that point
and just be OK with that.
Brent: I find that kind of user story interesting; Freelancer wants the 30 or 40 person company
and I think, in our content here at uGurus, we talk about that a lot.; about how it's
the business acumen over the technical stuff that if you
want to go on that growth pattern that you really
have to get into; do you find yourself doing much actual technical work anymore or are
you doing all of the business management stuff?
Arif: Hardly any technical and that's actually good, because I can hire people that are smarter
to do the technical stuff and they do a great
job of it; so the amount of technical stuff that I do
anymore is very, very small.
Brent: So if I was a freelancer and I want to build the 40 person agency; when you're
in that mentoring session, what are the things besides
HR or whatever that you're telling that person that they need to start studying up on now?
Arif: I just want them to read a lot, truthfully; you know if they don't like to read, which
I didn't previously try to do a challenge; I did one
with our kids where we came up with a challenge of
reading a certain number of books in a year and my goal was 25 or 24 books, and I didn't
hit it, but I hit 20; and I'm like, "That's still
20 books in a year that I wouldn't have read otherwise,
right?" So business books just read, because you'll learn a lot from other people. The
eMyth [SP] talks about being the person working in the
business or the person on the business and that's
what we're talking about. You're no longer the technician or the mechanic who's working
on the projects, now you're actually helping bring
in business and making the system run.
Brent: When it comes to web trends, technical stuff, what are you following right now? What
is Neon Rain following in terms of trends that
you guys are looking at that might be of value to
your business or value to your customers businesses?
Arif: So we try to keep our eyes on various other things, not just technologies, but also
processes, marketing and combining those. For example, mobile development is huge right
now. Not just mobile apps, but also responsive design. So everything we're doing is responsive
at this point. Even integrating our marketing knowledge of affiliate networks and advertising
into our mobile apps. Because somebody wants to build an app and they have no idea how
to monetize it, we can bring in some of our marketing
experience and other knowledge we have to help them come up with a solution. So it's
really getting to know all the different pieces, even
SEO, a lot of social components. It's not just doing on page and link building, there's
social; there's always other pieces you have to be
aware of and know how to manage in order to be
successful.
Brent: What are you trying to build with Neon Rain? What's the future look like for the
company?
Arif: So the future for our company, we have kind of a two prong approach. Before the shoot
we talked about products. We're a service company where we actually help build the future
and build the dreams for our clients. We essentially
try to build prosperity for them. They have to do
their piece but we'll take care of the technical portion. In addition to that, we want to build
products. And we have been building some products. In order to get those products out there
and get user base creating tools that are valuable for people. So the vision of our
company, number one, on a short term scale, is really
taking care of our clients. On a day to day basis we
want to take care of them and treat them like we want to be treated, right? Go out a little
bit from that, we're helping them develop applications
so that they can grow their businesses and companies and create value for them, dollars.
And then past that, we're also developing apps,
products and tools for ourselves that we can go out there and market as well in order to
create additional revenue. So what's the answer to
what we're trying to build, where are we trying to
go? We see the end line, how we get there kind of diverts sometimes. But what we try
to accomplish for this time is to be the experts,
and be the development agency that you come to,
to get something done correctly the first time.
Brent: Where can our viewers find out more information on Neon Rain, where can they follow
you at?
Arif: Sure, so neonrain.com, our website. Arif Gan, A-r-i-f G-a-n on Twitter, and then
on Facebook; it's facebook.com/neonraininteractive.
So you can follow us there as well.
Brent: And are you guys currently doing any kind of industry blogging, are you trying
to get your name out there at any level? Is that all just
on the Neon Rain website?
Arif: You know we do some industry blogging; we're doing quite a bit of technical blogging
coming up as well. We partner up with a lot of other firms, so that's what's interesting;
we actually work with a lot of other development
firms and SEO agencies in Denver and around the
US, because we have our programmers. With those connections we've actually started doing
a lot more work for clients together, collaborating
on projects. Whether it be blogging or info graphics, whatever it might be bringing those
together. So we're out there all over the place,
not intentionally in certain places versus others but just really wherever we can be
of best use.
Brent: For sure. We'll definitely link out to all your different properties, we really
appreciate you taking the time to join us here with uGurus,
and hopefully we'll have you back sometime soon.
Arif: Thanks for having me.
Brent: Alright, well stay tuned for more great content from ugurus.com.