Tony Doronin from Overgear: The Low-Code Movement - More Disruptive Than You Realize

Tony Doronin, CEO of Overgear, talked about the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the first product of his team.

We launched an MVP with a small team of eleven, and seven of us were on the product development team. In retrospect, it was too ambitious.

I don't know what made it possible in the end: the fact we had no idea how complicated the service will be, the pure enthusiasm of our team, or the amphetamines our designer consumed. But we managed to launch our MVP in four months. Did we think it was perfect? Hell no. But it was something new and different, in a good way.

Point out that and MVP has some advantages that allow you to:

• Confirm the viability of an idea and test hypotheses using real data;
• Identify trends that can be used in the development of the full version of the product;
• Reduce the risk of major financial losses in the event of a failed product release;
• Reduce the development cost by prioritizing important features and identifying unclaimed features;
• Speed up error detection and internal product testing;
• Build a user base before a full-scale launch;

Occupy a market niche and attract investors ahead of competitors.

What points of low-code are already working?

A Telegram Bot for auction orders. - A manager publishes an order, the bot collects orders and prices, issues a list to the manager, gives the manager the opportunity to choose an executor for the order, and informs the selected executor of the details so that they can start processing the order;

Automated charts (Google Sheets CRM). All orders are uploaded from the website and divided into sheets and categories. We collect the last 7 days data. It was implemented on Salesforce.

Universal integration with payment systems — we can connect to any Integromat system without developers (writing a single line of code?) ;

Payment bots that allow for up to $1M turnover per month.

A notification system for the contractor/client that tracks order status.

An invoicing system that collects invoices for the tax service based on the information about completed orders;

A QR-code bot for paying bills via bank account transfers (sole proprietor or LLC);

A statistical bot that reports key metrics to Telegram at the end of each day;

Cashback for users: under any specified conditions (easy to change);

We use Jotform to build the process of boarding performers. Now all requests of performers (20-30 per day) are collected through the forms;

Tilda-legal-pages, the team's website, various landing pages, and information pages;

We outlined the concept of the Discord bot. We studied the API, tested various service limitations and hypotheses.

Point out some advantages of low-code:

• Low-code solutions help simplify application development with minimal use of manual code;
• Focuses on internal business processes;
• Requires a minimum of specific knowledge in the field of IT with maximum flexibility;

Refuses to build from scratch in favor of ready-made blocks.

Important: Low-code is not a substitute for full-fledged development. It is an excellent auxiliary tool that allows you to create the necessary functions quickly without losing profit.

Describe the process of launching the business.

It was the most challenging launch for all of us. We were super motivated and hyped. As it usually happens, overly motivated people tend to make mistakes. I think our biggest one was that we failed to sync our vision into a single MVP.

One of the difficulties regarding our MVP preparation and launch was that we did not have any real competitors. We had no one to look at to assess whether our results were good or not, to analyze how others were working. We had to experiment and create new rules.

An important point, which few people think about at the start of a business, is the contacts of your first customers. Sometimes they are more important than sales. We all know about MVP principles, about possible problems at this stage. People might be reluctant to buy your product, and that's okay. It's more important to understand the reason, that's why you should collect contacts, literally in any way - landings, chatbots, or answer the mail yourself. The key point is not to miss the opportunity to get feedback and use it.

What platform and tools do we use for our business?

Like any modern IT company, we have a long list of SaaS we use. And most of them are the industry standard. But if I were to pick one, I'd definitely highlight Mixpanel. We really fancy on that tool!

Now that instrument is in progress. They are developing and improving Mixpanel in a greater way. It will have many more useful opportunities. So, you can keep track of Mixpanel, if you are interested.

I would like to also give a shout-out to my boys at Integromat. Their service has saved us months of development time. We are now able to build entire features on Integromat that would otherwise take several sprints to complete. And we always build with Integromat, if possible. You get, basically, a superpower to MVP some of your features with 0 development time.

Just a few examples of the features we were able to implement:

A Telegram bot that helps our managers with custom orders.

A billing mechanism that automatically creates invoices for our customers and tracks successful payments.

A notifications bundle that informs our staff of important events that require their attention.

Overgear helps gamers all over the world achieve their gaming goals, learn and have the best possible experience in online games.

Over the past decade, playing games has become an important part of the lifestyle for more than Two Billion people.

But in our modern world with busy jobs, families, and fast-paced lives, it is difficult to dedicate dozens of hours of playtime to find the right teammates, grind through hours of tedious content, and overcome various difficulties - all to finally enjoy the game.

Most modern online games require you to spend a minimum of 10 to 20 hours each week just to keep up with the content. A tremendous amount of effort that most players just cannot dedicate to.

That’s where Overgear.com comes to the rescue, to guide our customers through the challenges in their favorite online titles.

We connect our customers with professional players who help them overcome any in-game difficulties they have. They learn from the best, play with better teammates, have incredible experiences, and explore content they were unable to access before.

Typically, our customers are successful people willing to spend thousands of dollars to make the most out of their favorite games. And time is their most valuable resource. That’s why we utilize the power of automation.

We invest a great deal of our time and effort to make it so our customers get the best service without any manual assistance. Right now, 60% of orders on Overgear are completed without any human interaction from our team.

And that allows us to grow rapidly without hiring aggressively. We’ve grown twice in the last three months, but our headcount has only increased by 7.