Alexandr Mashkov, MBicycle Software Development
About the podcast: Unlocking Your World of Creativity
Unlocking Your World of Creativity is a podcast hosted by best-selling author and global brand innovator, Mark Stinson.
This is a podcast where diverse guests who share in common being creative professionals from all over the world. They talk about how they get inspired, how they organize their ideas and gain confidence to make the connections needed to launch their amazing work.
Our guest: Alexandr Mashkov and the MBicycle team
In today’s episode, we welcome our first guests from Belarus, the MBicycle Team.
First, we have Vlada who is the business development manager, she is in charge of reaching out to potential and current clients. She is the first person you can talk to get introduced into the MBicycle world.
Then, we have Alex who is the manager of the company and his role focuses on software development. He has worked with Vada for over 11 years and as far as their agencies are concerned, they work creating custom software development in such domains as sports, health, wellness, health tech, and fintech are some of the most common cases they concentrate on. They usually work with startup companies because that gives them an opportunity to feel the fresh air of new ideas that are innovative for any market.
Alex has spent 25 years living in various parts of Eastern Europe and he started a number of companies and one of those businesses he has was located in Belarus. There he got to know a number of people in the engineering and software development technology fields. While his markets may seem quite separate from each other, from a technical perspective they’re similar. So their most successful case studies are connected to a sports application because they’ve done numerous apps for basketball for players, coaches and fans.
Up next, Mike works more in the business and finance part of the company. He spoke about how from a competitive standpoint a dynamic market such as Belarus found more expertise in engineering manufacturing. There were a lot of top-rate scientific institutes of technology and technical universities. So the cost structure of a company such as Mbicycle can provide superior services at a much lower cost. That gives them an amazing competitive advantage.
About potential new customers
Vlada talks about what are some of the differences in what potential new clients are looking for. She says it depends mostly as some people just want the company as a support to their current team. Others just had a general idea and they were looking for a team to help them create something new. To make their ideas into something real and measurable by taking their ideas and concepts and bringing them to life.
On team organization
After working for 11 years, they have developed a very good delivery model. They cover the full cycle of delivery. They will propose to start with a discovery stage so the potential client can work with their business analyst for up to a month. They communicate a lot about the idea and it should be organized and it can be divided into other stages. After that stage is done, the analyst prepares a solid document that can be used for making estimates and for further communications with their tech leads. After that, the tech team starts the actual development process. They of course have project managers, QA guys, and everything needed so they bring the idea to life with the help of the team.
With MBicycle, helping dreams align with reality is all about execution and the help of their experienced business analyst. They know how to communicate, how to define the specific things or features that will be needed for these projects. Based on that, they also use their expertise from previous projects to get the most information from a person to make a combination of what is needed and should be done. This combination is what helps them succeed with new startups.
Current exciting projects
Currently, the company is working on an app that will be the Uber for people wanting personal chefs. So, say you have an important dinner or you just don’t want to cook one night but want that home-cooked meal flavor, you can go on the app and you look for chefs in your area. You see what types of meals they offer, their pricing and you get a chat feature to talk with the chef.
To learn more about the exciting new projects that MBicycle is working on, you can follow them on LinkedIn.
