Reactapp and the crowded market of programming education

Startup Many have worked in the field of programming education, and many failures have been experienced among them. One of the important reasons for these failures is the similarity of the services provided. Reactapp It is a startup that has chosen this field for activity, but by focusing on a certain part of the market, it has been able to create a competitive advantage for itself. Follow the conversation between Ecomotive and Alireza Bakmal, the co-founder of Reactapp.

Start with yourself and your experience in the startup space.

I am Alireza Bakhmal. I studied software engineering. Since 1994, I got acquainted with the entrepreneurial and startup community. At first, I worked as an active web designer and developer with Mehdi Hassanzadeh, and after a while we decided to start our own business. Two startups in the fields Tourism And we experienced training since 1996 Educational startup We launched Reactapp. Thanks to God, after a year and a few months, we were able to gain a good position, of course, we are still looking for the development of our business.

What made Reactapp attractive to you?

As I mentioned, before reactapp, we experienced two other startups. The second experience of Mon Startup Stopsy was in the field of tourism, which provided the user with wonderful facilities to experience a completely different trip. Working in the form of a startup made us pay special attention to time and money, so we decided to use React Native for faster development. This allowed us to bypass the problems of programming with Java and Swift and output on different platforms with minor changes. Despite the 80% technical progress of Stopsi, we finally faced challenges in the business that we preferred to stop the work, but this project created an important experience and opportunity for us.

We encountered many challenges to implement the application using React Native and there was no educational resource in Persian language that could solve our problem. On the other hand, React was not yet widespread enough among Iranian developers that we could solve our problems by communicating with other developers. It was here that Ideas Launching the Reactapp educational website came to our mind. This time, we used previous experiences and decided that all the team members are not technical force and we will start our work according to a specific plan.

Our main goal was to produce quality content in the field of React and React Native training, so that users and interested people can share their experiences together and create an interactive space for developers in this field.

This time for team building What was your plan?

In the previous question, I mentioned our mistakes in past experiences, one of which was the formation of a completely technical team. Of course, we had solved this issue to some extent in Stopsy, but we tried to have a technical team in Reactapp, along with people for business development. to have Currently, I am active as the company’s business development manager and Mehdi Hassanzadeh He also manages technical development. After several months of our activity, we were able to increase the size of the team from 2 to 8 people. The team members are doing their best to advance the goals of reactapp and we continue to recruit active and good-natured employees who are interested in challenging their own abilities.

The formation of the team and maintaining the empathy of the team members in the continuation of the work is considered one of the most important concerns of any business, and we are no exception to this rule. In the first months, we tried to manage the work with two people, but with the increase of users and the growth of the startup, the number of company personnel increased over time. We tried to find motivated and expert teammates by participating in weekly like-minded meetings, publishing ads in universities, and active users of our site.

What path did you take to launch the service?

To launch the site, we spent about 5 months intensively preparing three troubleshooting videos, a short introductory course, and some articles about react and react native to start, to raise the prototype and receive feedback from users. Our plan was to see the reception of users and those interested in this field in order to plan for the future. Our first blog posts about react and react native were well received and attracted a good audience and made us more determined to continue. Due to the specificity of the content, we were able to get an acceptable number of users from Google very soon and present our product in a final form, and we are still completing and updating reactapp, and these activities will definitely continue.

How could you be successful despite many competitors?

When we started our work, many educational brands were active, but the thing that was a privilege for us was choosing a single topic and its derivatives. We tried to put all our efforts in this area and avoid dispersal of content. The focus we had made us able to present ourselves as the best in our field of activity. We paid a lot of attention to the quality of the content of the website in order to increase the level of user satisfaction. We spent a lot of time on the SEO of the site and thank God we got results. In addition to all these email marketing issues, it helped us a lot and we tried to promote our emails based on the correct principles and rules of email marketing. In my opinion, social networks can have a great impact on our business, but I think we did not use this capacity well. It’s been a while since we reconsidered the way we operate in social networks and we got good feedback. Another thing that contributed to our growth was active participation in exhibitions such as Elcamp. Even though we didn’t have a booth at the last Elcamp that was held, we made the most of the community that was formed and got in touch with many collections.

Considering that you had a good growth rate, how much did you pay attention to user feedback?

Businesses are alive despite their users and this is the most important issue for us. The opinions and suggestions of users are very important in reactapp and they have helped us a lot to improve our service. We always try to proceed according to the opinions of users to create new content. We usually categorize user comments and deal with them in time. The interesting thing that I have come to this time is that users’ opinions can be very influential even on things like the site’s UI. Our team is encouraged by every feedback it receives from the user and continues to work better than before.

Regarding the effectiveness level of the suggestions, I should also say that we had suggestions that completely changed the process of recording a course and we preferred to change the titles entirely. Of course, these suggestions reached an acceptable number, and after checking with the technical team, we decided to implement them.

Other services to provide on the platform reactapp did you predict

If I want to answer this question, it might be better to say that we have many new plans in hand and we are going to expand our field of work, but based on a specific principle, and again, our decision is to avoid that fragmentation of the issue. We have specific plans for the next year that I hope we can implement well.

It seems that you went very well, what challenges did you face?

If we are without any challenges and everything is going well, I think it is a good place to work. Naturally, like many of our colleagues and other businesses, we have our own challenges, and if I want to give an example, I can say recruitment and teammates, and then team management. We tried different plans for managing the team and recruiting teammates, and even though some of our teammates are in contact with us in person, we were able to create and maintain good relationships so far. One of the plans that helped us a lot in this matter was the meetings between the team members. We get together every Tuesday and talk about the challenges we faced during the previous week, the plans and ideas that came to our minds, and the new topics we learned that we think can be useful for our teammates. Even if we are upset with one of our teammates and we have a misunderstanding, we will raise it instead of getting upset between the rest of the team members.

If I want to give another example of the challenges we faced, it is the financial issue. We started with almost nothing and went through a really critical situation. Fortunately, we got good feedback from the users very soon, but besides that, we always tried to create hope among ourselves so as not to be discouraged, and by the grace of God, we were able to overcome that situation.

Finally, I would like to thank the Ecomotive team for giving me the opportunity.

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