1702 – The Shifting Industry: Software with Jafton’s Sardor Akhmedov

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0:58with us right now Sardor Akhmedov. Sardor you are the CRO and co-owner of Jafton you're found on the web at jafton.com that's j-a-f-t-o-n.com Sardor thank you so much for joining us. Of course yeah thanks for having me Josh. And give do please do give us an overview of the work that you do and the impact you have with Jafton? Sure. Yes. So I'm the chief revenue officer at Jafton. I drive everything revenue. And that includes like the sales team, marketing team under me to currently about, you know, four people there in my team. But total of we have in the company, 120 people that, you know, is mainly developers and designers that we have.

1:43We've been in business for 10 years. I've been a part of the company for four years as a managing partner. And we work with a ton of clients, like anywhere from a smaller startup to all the way to enterprise clients like Alaska Airlines. And app development is our main focus. So anything mobile app is us. And you might actually have one or two of the apps that we built on your phone. So, yeah. Let's do some bragging because you do have some pretty significant clients. And you made the statement, all right, what are some of the case studies or examples of clients that you've had the opportunity to work with?

2:23And then I'd love to maybe pick one or two of them and talk about what you were able to create with them. Sure, yeah. I mean, if we were to really name drop, I mean, those would be some national names like Kroger, the grocery chain. We did some work for them. There's Albert's, the sneakers company. There's Alaska Airlines, Airlines company, right? These are all like mobile apps that we worked on, on either fully or partially. They do some staff augmentation with us as well, by the way, is one of our top categories of service is staff augmentation, where we add in on-demand designers and developers to the existing tech teams, right?

3:04so yeah happy to talk about any of them what excites me most is actually the startup clients that we have because you know corporations is one thing yes they pay very well but the startup clients are very exciting because they create something new create something that is you know hasn't existed before you know like right now we're building a couple of very interesting social media or dating apps, you know, that are going to be very much disruptive to the industry. Ooh, good. On behalf of my single friends who use a lot of dating apps, please disrupt that industry. For sure. For sure. Yeah, it's definitely been very outdated, although, you know, very competitive space, but I feel like there's a lot of opportunity there.

3:52you know uh we like released um earlier this year an app for a dating app for dogs even you know like no kidding uh you know it's not for dog owners it's actually for dogs like themselves right so post a picture of your dog and match them with other dogs it's a very fun app well and that's certainly one that would get some positive but it would get some get some good it would be easy from a PR standpoint. That's kind of an easy story there. Sardar, obviously, this is what you do and you've been in this world. One thing that I really value in these kinds of conversations is other business leaders, owners, you've got your ear to the track.

4:39This is your world. What has been going on over the past few years and you know what are some of the most important things that you've observed in your industry of app development that that you think are kind of notable that everyone should be aware of yeah i mean one of the things if you know we were to go a little more technical is um the overall industry is actually shifting right now uh from like completely custom and uh from scratch match-built coding toward more like constructive and modular building of software and apps, mainly apps. What I mean by that is there's a lot of different platforms for like no-code and low code, and those are becoming very, very good at what they can build.

5:28Because like a couple years ago, you couldn't really build anything advanced on a low-code platform. Now you can build a lot lot of things on those platforms. That's one. Plus, obviously, the AI has advanced our development speed and the quality because with AI, you know, there's this program called Copilot, which basically it's like autocomplete on your iPhone, but for your coding and a lot more advanced. Like you'll literally start coding and AI will complete your coding, like that part of of coding for you, right? It's like your AI. Yeah, and our team is using it and they say they'll never go back to traditional coding, right?

6:08So a lot of changes and that happened in the last year or two, right? AI is mainly this year. Low code is mainly, you know, past two years. So a lot of different advancements. So in a nutshell, we have accelerated the speed to market and barrier to entry to build an app or any kind of software because it's faster and cheaper now to build those. So if five, six, even 10 years ago, you could only afford to build the software if you had like hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right now, it's a lot more affordable. The barrier to entry is a lot lower. Yeah. What's so exciting about this is I think that now when we look at what we can get done with budgets, I think that there's, because of the cost savings and the streamline things that we could do with no-code platforms.

7:01And also, again, you're right, you know, being able to get an assist from AI. Now, you know, whereas I think of, you know, me before, you know, owning a SaaS company, you know, there was stuff that made the budget. And then there's stuff that's like, you know, that's just going to have to be a Q4 thing because we don't have the budget to do this, this, and the other thing. Whereas now we might. Exactly. Yeah, it's a lot more affordable. A lot of things are now, you know, when you consider buy versus build, you can actually choose the build route because, you know, it's come down, you know, the speed and the cost.

7:44Yeah.

7:48When you're talking with clients, what are those conversations initially? Let's say maybe they just have some ideas on a board, but they don't have anything fleshed out. They're just like, listen, here's the concept that we want to do. What is that conversation usually like? Yeah. So when people come to us at the idea stage, that's totally fine. Depending on the complexity of the idea, we can take one of the two routes, right? If the idea is very simple, and we've done it many times, we pull up one of our standard scopes of work that we've created for a similar application that had a similar logic.

8:25We go over with them on the discovery call, kind of like, you know, checking boxes and saying, hey, all right, do you want this? Do you want that? Right type of thing. And then we can modify certain things. So we do a quick discovery call. We give them a proposal based on the outcome of that discovery call for the next call. So like call number one is an intro. Call number two is a discovery scope of work call. Call number three is a proposal, basically, where we give them a timeline and a cost. That's if the app is simple. If the app is very complex and it requires a lot of research and they are not sure what they want to add, what they don't want to add, we offer this new service that we started offering about it two years ago called discovery phase where we it's actually not just one discovery call it's actually a multiple like up to four week process that is paid people pay us a deposit and we allocate a whole team that is going to work with them if necessary do a market research or even you know at the very least they'll do like a technical research visibility research and they will be actually scoping out things in a lot of details, creating a mini prototype and all that.

9:36And then only after that, will we give them a proposal, right? So it all depends on the complexity. It can range anywhere from one discovery call all the way to like 10 discovery calls. Yeah. And where do you see, I mean, it's like we're in that, you know, kind of Moore's law cycle right now where I feel like, you know, so much is accelerated in this world. I wonder what, what's going to happen over the next couple of years. I mean, you know, I think, you know, it's almost like there's this excel, there's an acceleration of what we could do. And this is really exciting because I think, again, it's just going to give, ultimately it's going to give consumers better experiences.

10:19It's going to give, you know, consumers and brands the opportunity or, you know, whoever those consumers may be, business owners or whatever. But again, just the opportunity, you know, where and how we can connect and empower our clients is very, very exciting. For sure. Yeah. I mean, the industry is changing at the fastest pace ever. I think with generative AI, this is going to be the biggest disruptor yet to the industry. I mean, and we're not sleeping on it. We're building our own generative AI product that we're about to launch soon. It's going to be able to build like simple websites in like less than a minute with a couple of clicks of a button.

10:59And I think that's where the industry is going. I mean, we'll all start with like some generative AI products that are kind of like fast build type of thing. We're still not there where a consumer can fully build software themselves without any agency or an expert interference. but I feel like in the next five years, we're getting there where if AI is going to be able to sustain a conversation with a human and comprehend and understand and document and then produce from that conversation, then it's game over for a lot of businesses. So it's interesting to see where we're going to go with the next five years.

11:38With that, I think it's definitely a possibility. that yeah we'll think about this is this does this sound like science fiction to you uh it is uh okay so here's what i want you to do i want you to build a website and these are our color schemes this is what we want to do here's who our audience is here's some of the basic functionalities here's kind of the you know the psychographic profile you just start giving all this information to an ai and it starts building that for you i'll be at a website or an app uh You know, again, we're probably a little ways off from that, but I don't think this is inconceivable in our lifetime.

12:18A hundred percent. Yeah, I think it's even like in the next five years, we might definitely see that, which is going to be very disruptive, not only for the agency space, but for any business. Because the moment that AI is able to sustain a human-like conversation and then process that information and give certain commands to the computer from that, that's it. You know, it definitely is going to, the world's not going to be the same anymore. Wow. So obviously, Jephton's been able to work with some really great brands. As an app agency, how have you been able to grow and be able to work with as many clients?

12:57How did you kind of attract that growth or kind of design that growth? yep so a little backstory right uh we've been in business for 10 years four years ago i joined in uh you know to grow the sales of the company and become a partner uh in here and my goal was you know to to scale the company right because at the time my business partner he had this agency was you know about 15 people um you know it was it was pretty like a small type of agency right It was running, but it wasn't like, you know, it was not scaling as much because he was trying to do other businesses and different things. Right.

13:35So it wasn't a focus. So in 2019, he said, hey, why don't we focus on this business? Right. And why don't we actually grow this? Because this is actually a really good business if we if we focus on it. Right. If we tackle certain challenges, because like, you know, consultancy is not an easy business because of the human factor. You have humans on each side. You have clients that are humans and you have the developers, the delivery people are also humans. And, you know, it's a difficult thing. But once we started focusing on this, I took on the sales side of the business and I knew nothing about sales.

14:11You know, I was like super green and, you know, I'm still young, 25. At the time I was 21, you know, haven't even finished college. I dropped out and I was just tasked with the challenge of like, hey, I need to grow this company. So for about three months, I was just sitting trying to make some cold calls, trying to do certain market research, nothing helped, haven't gotten any clients. And then I started slowly figuring out like the inbound game. So I got us to certain positioning on the web where we can be found where you're looking for the service, right? So instead of like generating demand with outbound, I started actually, you know, positioning ourselves for inbound.

14:55And I'll say in certain geographic areas in the US, if you're looking for app development, there's no way you cannot come across Jafton, right? I was just able to very much like penetrate the internet, certain positioning on the internet, on the web, you know, through SEO, through some, you know, other ways, so I positioned ourselves really well for that. And then, you know, it was just a matter of patience sitting there and certain clients just come, you know, even a major company, they'll go and search on the internet, you know, they're not, you know, it's as simple as that, you know, and if you're there when they're searching, if you're on these certain listings, then you're positioned for success.

15:37So that's how they found us. And then the rest was just like, being able to really sell and show your relevant portfolio, get some really good results and gaining people's trust. Even at these big corporations, you're dealing with humans and humans buy from humans. It's not about the logo or the fancy other things. It's all about building that trust and connection. And I've been very aggressive with sales. Still to this day, if I see a big client, you know, I'll fly out to their town and I'll meet with them in person. You know, I'll do things that nine out of 10 companies that they're talking to will not do, you know, and that's how I stand up, right?

16:19And that's how I was able to land some big clients, you know. I can literally fly in. People are so impressed, you know, like I talked to you today in the evening, tomorrow morning, I'm in your town and I'm grabbing lunch with you, you know. Yeah. I was wondering if I could get your advice on, say that someone's listening and they're like, listen, we're thinking about doing an app next year. And so we'd love to maybe kind of begin those early processes. But I think one thing that to me is overwhelming is kind of picking that development partner, because I think there's a lot of talent out there and it can be overwhelming.

16:59and certainly it can be rife with peril. As someone who spent a lot of money on developers in my lifetime, it's not a perfect world. Sometimes it's not a very pretty world. Any kind of maybe high-level recommendations like, yeah, when you're having conversations with app developers, ask them this, do this, don't do that. If they say this, run. If they say this, that's a green flag and any kind of things that come immediately to mind. Yeah, really good question. So one thing to be kind of aware of even before going on this procurement journey is keep in mind that this is a super penetrated space, super saturated space.

17:43And a lot of companies, I call them sales organizations. They're not really agencies that have their own talent. They're just sales organizations that put a ghost brand and they put some salespeople or the owners themselves do the sales. And the moment they close the deal, they'll just outsource to another company they have partnerships with, right? But they don't really control the process. They don't have their own developers. So one of the ways to call that out is if you're talking to a company, definitely go on their LinkedIn and check the list of employees. That's the trick I do all the time.

18:16If you see three employees, ask them how many employees they have. And if they say, hey, I have like 20 developers or 50 or 100 developers. And then you go on LinkedIn and they have three, you know, there's this owner and two sales guys. because that's how a lot of brands operate. So that would be a red flag for me right away because if you deal with that kind of company, the odds are they're going to fail because they don't control the process. If you pay them$50 ,000, they're going to pay somebody in Pakistan or India$25 ,000, keep that half to them or more. And then the actual company that's developing it is going to get a lot less.

18:56And another rule of thumb is going to the second point is do not over negotiate because the less the agency is getting paid, you know, we're all like in business here, you know, the less motivation they have to complete your project, you know, because they have not just your project, they have other projects as well. right so that's the second thing because some people are like oh i'm just gonna like you know um really go hard on negotiation and and uh bring the price down and they use different methods for that then yeah you can but you know it's not like a company's gonna operate at a loss they need to maintain their profit exactly and otherwise and even if yeah i i i yes yes you want to pay a fair price you know yes exactly some owners are not experienced and they'll agree to a price just to close the expenses that they have that month, but then they're just going to regret it and they're going to resent the client and they're not going to deliver good service.

19:51I've seen those situations. And then the other one would be look at the tech stack they're using. I mean, if you're a technical, if they're using some outdated tech stack, that's a red flag as well. You know, some companies will still use like, I don't know, like some very unknown coding languages. And then what happens is if you end up transferring the code to somebody else, there is going to be problems. Like, you know, you have to pick the stack that's most common. That's why we use very common stacks like Python on the back end. On the front end, we use like water for mobile. You know, these are like the green flags, you know.

20:32So those would be my top three. There's many more. I should probably release a separate video on this, but really look out for that thing. And oh, if you're in the US, try to make sure that at least the owners of the company are in the US and the company has an entity in the United States, because if you're going to have legal issues and it's not unheard of, you're not going to be able to really go after them if they're completely offshore, if the entity is offshore. If you're making a contract, In fact, if they don't have a US-based LLC, I would never go in business with that kind of company.

21:06It's too risky for me. I would not do that.

21:11And there's many other things on the technical side, depending on how technical you are. You can do an audit of their code. You can really ask them some technical questions on, you know. But for an average consumer that's trying to help, trying to hire a company, those would be the three tips. check if the company is, you know, actually employing their own staff. Yeah, solid, solid tips here. Jafton.com is your website. To our friend that's been listening to our conversations, like, okay, well, I want to talk with Sardor. I like Sardor. Like, I've really loved what you have to share. You know, kind of what would be that next step in the process for someone who's been listening and is open to having that conversation?

21:55Sure. Yeah. I mean, the fastest way is to give us a call at 212-499-0000. And one of our team members will respond and set up an appointment to discuss your project. Or you can submit a request on the form that we have on the website. If you click on the right top corner to get a free quote, you can submit your information. We can sign an NDA. By the way, you know, we're very big on the privacy and confidentiality. So we will sign a non-disclosure with everybody so that we don't give up your ideas to anybody because that's concerning to a lot of people. And we also record all of our calls and a copy of recordings are sent to our clients.

22:37But yeah, the fastest way would be to call us or if you can't call them, just submit a form and you can schedule a meeting right there on the website with one of our specialists. Yeah, fantastic. All right, Sardor Akhmedov, again, co-owner and CRO of Jafton, found on the web at jafton.com, J-A-F-T-O-N. Sardor, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me, Josh.

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