About molfar.io
Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, started his product journey with the video "How it Will Work." He had the idea and the vision of how it will be. However, he didn't start coding because such a product required significant technical development. To avoid the risk of waking up after years of development with a product nobody wanted, Drew did something unexpectedly easy: he made a video. He just made the winning video with a service preview and placed it on the landing page getdropbox.com. After that, he sent a link to all friends, and boom — 75k pre-signups.
But stop, what's that got to do with Dropbox?
Book 1. outsource sucks
Our founder, Serg Pirogov, has been a software engineer in the outsourcing business since 2011, building solutions for the US and EU. In 2014, Serg left the outsourcing board and built his own product in the travel industry. This is how wayme was founded. It was a long haul, full of wins, losses, rises, and pitfalls. But working for several years in the product sphere he found out that there is a huge difference between outsourcing and product. The main problem is that outsourcing companies don’t understand product business, offering their clients slow, ineffective solutions at crazy prices.
Book 2. Y Combinator
With startup wayme, Serg successfully graduated from Y Combinator Startup School. All experienced accelerators like Y Combinator and 500 Startups don't recommend using outsourcing companies for development. And here is why.
Each startup needs to move fast, validating ideas and finding their product/market fit. To make it possible, you need to have a team of developers who can build solutions in 1-2 days and bring them to market. Sometimes, you need to make a pivot and redo your product, changing the main functionality, pricing, design, etc. This makes outsourcing hard for early-stage startups, because if you outsource, you need to pay several thousand bucks for each such change.
Book 3. The market needs changes
When Serg realized this situation, he came to the idea that the software development market needed big changes. The old approach of “people per hour” doesn’t work anymore. The startup ecosystem has changed so much in recent years. Just remember how it was in the 90-ies (Dinosaurs era): physical servers in offices, complicated architecture, a minimum of two years of development, a long sales cycle, and a small market of people online. And how it works today (Birdies era): cloud-based solutions, a wide variety of SaaS tools, two months of development, a global startup ecosystem, and 3B+ people online. So, the reasonable question appears: why does nobody leverage this enough? Why are people still spending years developing to bring the first version to the market?
Look at the best Silicon Valley startups. Doordash made their MVP in 2 hours (a landing page with a PDF menu), Facebook in 1 night (FaceMash website), Airbnb in several days (a page with airbed + breakfast rent). So, why do you think that you need years? Our company motto says, “The first version of a product should be done in 6 weeks, not 6 months”. That’s why in 2016 we founded molfar.io, a product development company.
Book 4. Welcome to the product
molfar.io was founded in 2016 to bring product development values and reasonable approaches to the software development industry. We help startups and entrepreneurs build products and take them to market in a smart way, with the right team. We use the Lean Startup approach that allows us systematically validate customer demand and build products people want. We use available SaaS services, open-source solutions, and our own pre-made tools to build much faster than outsourcers do and save time & money.
We will keep doing what we love the most: bringing new companies to life and making them successful. I hope you will enjoy the ride.
Best,
molfar.io team,
your product wise guys.
