Voodoo Rocks

Novosibirsk was where Voodoo Rocks began in 2012, and the company later moved its headquarters to Kaliningrad, closer to the European and American customers it works with most.Its work covers mobile applications for current platforms, web development and the server systems that sit behind them. By its own count, more than two hundred products have launched since it started, running from small utilities to large systems with a million users.

Complete solutions built from several applications

Most of the studio's projects are complete solutions rather than single apps. A typical engagement combines a set of several mobile applications, a remote server application that holds the business logic, and several web clients that share the same back end. Building the whole set together means that the apps, the server and the web screens stay consistent with one another, and that a client has one team to answer for the full product.

Financial and banking systems as a specialty

Over the years the studio has built a particular competence in financial, banking and inter-application systems. Around nine in ten of its projects come from that field, and the studio treats the specialty as the reason its developers understand the rules and integrations that such products need.

Clients from consulting agencies and new businesses

The studio divides its clients into two groups of roughly equal size. About half are consulting agencies that combine a real business sector with IT, and the remainder are young companies looking for a technical partner to turn an idea into a working product. Most projects last between six and twelve months, which allows significant products to be built properly rather than rushed.

A small team with an individual approach

The company has kept its team small, with an average size of no more than fifteen people across all its years of work. It argues that a small team produces significant products without spending heavily on management, and that it allows each person's training, career and growth to be followed individually. The strategy is to build deep competence in a specific niche rather than to grow into a large organisation.

Mobile and web technology choices

The studio adopts current design and technology trends, including flat design, cloud technologies and agile project management. It reuses code where it can, and it reports that as much as sixty percent of an application may be reused for another platform. Its web layouts are built to be responsive, so that the same design works across phones, tablets and desktop screens without a separate back end for each device.

Offices in two time zones

Voodoo Rocks runs two offices in different time zones, one on Central European time and one on Novosibirsk time. This lets it work for at least four hours of a client's working day, and its staff speak, read and write English, so conference calls and written reports do not present a language barrier. Its partners are spread across the world.