How do Software Development Companies Work in Mexico? IT Traveler with Maria De Buen from BluePixel and Stadibox

We’re thrilled to announce that we extend our tech talks from conversations with our clients to tech entrepreneurs and C-level executives from all over the world.

The founder of Redwerk – Konstantin Klyagin adores visiting new places, meeting new people, and engaging in a diverse spectrum of experiences. He likes to shoot interviews with IT professionals and tech agency owners, like himself, to learn how companies in different countries deliver projects, attract customers,  hire and retain talent.

Are you eager to learn more about work specifics of the software development agencies in Mexico and Ukraine? What does it take to start and run a company being a sole founder?  Discover this and much more in the interview!

Meet Maria!

In this interview, Maria De Buen, CEO of BluePixel and Co-Founder of Stadibox, together with Konstantin Klyagin, Founder of Redwerk, discussed their path to building outstanding companies, as well as the challenges they faced during COVID-19. They also touched upon the gender bias in tech and how sole founders pave their road to success in the industry.

Let’s get into this!

– Well, yeah, we started six years ago. We were founded as a UX/UI agency. Now, we also have a pretty big development department, so we are both like the UX/UI designers and developers.

– It was very organic, I would say. I studied industrial design at college, and I started freelancing doing all kinds of stuff from interior design to logos. Some people asked me to do websites, but I didn’t know how to do that. I looked into it and then, little by little, I started to go into UX/UI design and decided that was what I wanted to do. When I was getting more clients that I could deal with, I started hiring people. So, that’s how BluePixel was born.

– Not much, actually. It was about a year.

– Well, the past year has been a big challenge because we grew a lot. First of all, we started the development department of the agency. We already had a lot of clients who asked for development, but we didn’t have any people to do it, and we just passed it on to other agencies. This year we started doing that, and we have a lot of work already. There has been a series of hirings. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the technology requirements grew all around the world. My main role as a director is managing and hiring talent, and just looking to keep the quality and start creating scalable processes, you know?

– I would say no, because my personal experience with it hasn’t been challenging in that sense. What I have noticed is that I almost always have these sales meetings myself, and the people who help me in commercials are also women. However, there have been times when I asked, for example, my husband, who is also a partner, to have a meeting together, and I started noticing that people were actually talking to him. But it’s not something I notice every day.

– I think not. Sometimes I haven’t been taken seriously because of my age. Now I’m 30, so it’s not a problem anymore. But I started at 25, so people were like: “Are you sure we can trust you?”.

– Yes, I think it’s more of a challenge with age. But, generally speaking, gender hasn’t been so much of a problem.

– It’s 60% men, 40% women. But most women perform the managerial roles, and most of the guys are more operative. For example, my CTO is an incredibly smart and talented guy, but other than him, most of the roles in management and direction play women.

– It has been challenging. A lot of learning curve, for example, in measuring times. I think that the most of the challenge has been in measuring, because as a designer, I can more or less tell you how much a particular process is going to take. And for me to calculate a development process, that’s a bit of a difficult part. Even in price, right? You say it’s going to be four months and cost this much, and then if it’s six months, then you’re losing a lot of money and time. But we’ve worked a lot on it and we’ve gotten so much better at it just by establishing processes, and measuring analytics. But from the tech side, the way we structured everything from the beginning was pretty great.

– We try to make most of it completely from scratch with our own code. The tech stocks that we use are React/Node.js.

– No, it’s also mobile development. There’s been a lot of asking for e-commerce this year, so we also do some Shopify and WordPress, but mostly custom development.

– I actually have a fun story here because I have two businesses. BluePixel – that was a super boom, and Stadibox – kind of Airbnb but for renting suites and seats which was going amazingly at the beginning of the year. It looked like it was going to be our best year. Everything was going great in January, and then with COVID-19, BluePixel went up, and Stadibox – down.

– Well, right now I think it’s four years. We had been upgrading for three and it was going pretty well. We had already made a name for ourselves in Mexico, and we were in seven different stadiums also entering the US.

– There are a lot of people who own private suites in different stadiums or who own them for a certain period of time, say ten years. There’s a small bar, fridge, and TV. You can invite your friends, and there are usually 9 to 12 seats, but they are crazy expensive. The main difference between Mexico and the USA is that most US suites are owned by the club or by the stadium, and most of the people who rent them are from big companies.

– Well, does it make sense to fly in a commercial flight if you can have a jet? I mean, it depends on money. But there are people in Mexico who bought the suites 50 years ago and now they don’t even use them, and the kids or grandchildren don’t use them anymore. They just rent it out so that people can go and enjoy an amazing game. It’s not really that expensive to rent it out. The price depends on the suite and you can bring your own food, drinks, and everything inside the suite. So, it’s a pretty good deal.

– I’m not that familiar with how they manage it in Europe, but I know they do have suites. I think it’s similar to the USA, and the companies are the ones that usually use or rent them out. It’s something that can be scaled to other countries as well.

– Things have radically changed for all companies. There were a lot of people who were resisting technology change. And when COVID-19 hit, everyone realized that they had either to evolve or die. Even the people who didn’t like to have online meetings and video calls, and always had personal meetings, now are seeing that technology has the ability to do different stuff. I think that’s why a lot of people and companies have been looking for us even though there’s not a lot of money now and the economy is super slow. They want to invest money that they do have in tech because in such a way they will be able to survive or grow.

– Well, it’s funny because we’ve never had a marketing strategy when we were growing. It has always been from word-of-mouth. Then I suddenly noticed that there was a Clutch profile on another website, and I saw that BluePixel was just waiting there for us to claim the profile. So, we did that and then started asking the clients to publish some reviews, and we’ve been nominated afterwards.

– I haven’t paid for Clutch yet. We have had so much work organically and so many leads that we haven’t been able to launch a marketing strategy. We don’t want it to get out of control, you know?

– Most of them are from word-of-mouth (60-70%).

– Actually, it scales, because every good client that you work with recommends your services to 2-3 prospective customers.

– That’s pretty interesting. What would you say has been your biggest challenge over the years?

– I completely agree. It’s a big challenge, but I think that’s how it should be. Are all your workers in Ukraine?

– That was another interesting challenge. Before, the price varied by the project type. So, we could say this project costs this much, taking into account more or less the price of man-hours plus fixed costs, and then our margin. But if we’re looking for example for a 40% margin and then we’ve miscalculated the project by 30%, then there goes our margin rate. We even lost money on some projects, which wasn’t nice.

What we have been doing lately is that we do calculate and we are very meticulous with these calculations because we try to be as accurate as possible. We calculate the low end and the high end, and we report hours on a weekly basis. If we at some point see that we are not getting to a part of the project where we have to have 50% of the project by these hours, then we always have a conversation with a client.

If it’s our responsibility, we of course have to take care of it. If it’s because we have gone over the adjustment phases, the clients have been pretty understanding with that. Usually if it takes more hours, it’s because the project demands so, and it’s in the client’s interests to get those hours in so that we can make the best project possible. That has been our pricing strategy.

– It really depends on the profile. But I could say our hourly price ranges between $30 to about $80.

– I think it’s good pricing for clients in Mexico. It’s a mid-ground – not cheap, but not expensive either. We do have attractive prices for the US clients because if we compare ourselves to other companies inside the USA, then our wages are better. If they go, for example, to India, they have a problem with time zones and all of that stuff. So, that’s why I think we are also gaining some customers from the USA.

– It should be at least 50% in tech. There are some projects where we go up to 70%, and there are some projects where we haven’t even lost money. I think our average right now is about 40%. So, one of our challenges this year is to raise it up a little bit.

– I’ve had some financial advisors that I’ve been working with lately, and they have been working in tech for around 15 years. I asked them what would be a good margin and stuff, and those were just the numbers that they have worked on before.

– Most of them are here in Mexico (65-70%), around 20% are in the U.S. and Canada, and the rest are in Latin America. Mexico is a pretty big market.

– Since we started as a UX/UI company only, most people that come to us are looking for a custom application with a very good user experience. So, it can be a start-up that’s looking to launch a new app or a big company that wants to launch something either internally or for their clients. We had a lot of e-commerce last year, but still, most of our work is custom.

– It depends on each project and each client. We try to first understand the user really well, by doing interviews and different workshops where we invite the users and try to get to those very cool differentials for their app.

We also involve the users in the prototyping process from information architecture to wireframing. So, we do user testing, and after we finish the design, we work in multidisciplinary sales with developers. We have different cells in BluePixel, and each one is composed of three developers and three designers who work together and are always involved in the whole process.

– Now we are 29 people, and we’re in the process of hiring two more.

– Our team consists of designers (40%), developers (40%), the rest are project managers, administration, and it’s only me and another girl in the commercial.

– I think we’ve been very lucky with our project managers. We have 3 and all of them are super smart. We always look for very smart people. During the hiring process everyone has to take a kind of IQ test on our hiring platform, regardless of the role on the team. It’s like an intelligence capability test, and it tells you if applicants are very good or not that good. We always interview just those who are in the very intelligent spectrum.

The other thing that we always try to go for is their attention to detail. Moreover, we do look at how analytical they are, their experience, as well as personal skills, people’s skills, and communication skills. Based on that, we have done some pretty good hires.

– We use indeed.com, and we really like it. They told me that “indeed” gets your profile into a lot of platforms or something like that, and it has worked very well.

– I have been personally involved in the hiring process, and I think that’s very important. You can have a very smart and talented person, but if they don’t fit the culture, it will never work. In the past, we have made that mistake of hiring someone just based on talent and intelligence, but not on culture.

– It’s a very personal process. I ask questions like why they do what they do, how they see themselves in a while, and then we take into account their answers, and their personality.

– I think it is, actually there are two parts of it. Everything has been great with internal hiring. We have an alliance with a school called Kodemia, where I also teach some classes. When we hire, we ask them for some talent, and we look in indeed.com, and also social media. When we are doing the hiring process, we always find very good people.

However, it has been challenging to find freelancers. There are some pretty good developers, but I haven’t found the ones that are good, and also responsible and communicative. From my experience, that balance of staff is kind of difficult to find in freelancing.

– We have them all in-house. We do have an alliance with two other companies, and their quality is the same as ours. So, when we need some technologies that we don’t manage or when we have a lot of projects instead of hiring – we work with them. We don’t do freelance anymore because it hasn’t been a good experience, but I think you learn from that.

– It has been. I think we are very humane in the way that we treat people. As you said, we are always looking to give them comfort. However, it’s a challenge because usually comfort also means giving them benefits that equal a financial spend.

We try to balance that, and see what’s good for the company at this stage, and what’s good for them. I think we treat them well and try to be very understanding when they need something. They also appreciate the home office, of course. We do “semestral retirement” when we all go to the lake house or something like that, and they really appreciate it. So, we have been amazing with the retention of talent up till now.

– The first ones that we hired are still with us. Some employees have left in the first 1-3 months because we’ve noticed that they’re not a match. We try to cut them off in the beginning because it’s not good for anyone. Only two people have left because they have been offered a scholarship elsewhere to do their master’s degree. Right up till now, no one has left without a reason.

– First, we started slowly, so I do have some of the hires that are from the beginning. I’d say we have hired most of the people in the last two years.

– In Mexico, people try to change companies maybe every two years, which is more or less like in the USA. I think when they’re comfortable with something – they don’t have any reason to move, other than if they receive a very good offer.

– Did you found your company yourself?

– Actually, I haven’t talked about this, but it’s a good point. Even though I could say I’m the founder of BluePixel, I did found it with someone else – my mom. I started out when I was freelancing. My mom had a background in painting, she was an artist. She offered her help, so we started working together and I was teaching her how to do some Photoshop stuff.

As the company was getting formalized, she went more into the administrative side. She’s the one who manages money and all of that. We have been doing it from the beginning. My husband, as I said, is a partner and an advisor. But he has never worked in BluePixel, because he has his own venture.

– I think my answer is going to be a cliché. I love the people and the country. I think the scenery is beautiful. I hate insecurity. I personally have had a lot of bad incidents throughout my life with mugging and all of that stuff, so I was very afraid for a while. So that’s something I don’t like, you don’t feel very safe as a woman, just like being out there. That’s why I live in this place, it’s super secure now.

The other thing that I don’t like is traffic. You could lose so much time going from meeting to meeting, so now I love that everything’s online and you don’t have to lose a second in traffic.

– I have never gone to Ukraine. I would love to know this country.

– I love to travel. I think I live to travel. This year, there hasn’t been much traveling, and I really felt it.

– I would have to say Stadibox.

– That’s a tough question. I really get excited with each current project I have, and it would be difficult to say it for a client project because they are always changing. For example, we worked on one project through the client who’s in Canada. He works with a lot of companies doing gamification, and one of them hired us to do a lot of UX/UI for them.

There were three different projects. One of them was with Sisal – Italy’s leading online gaming operator. We did like a football and a soccer world where you could gain roster cards and then change them for prizes. That was a super big project, and we worked on it for over a year.

Also, we’ve done a lot of innovation consulting. So, when we do that, I always get super involved, more than with any other project. For example, one of the first projects I had was with BBVA Bancomer. I was doing all of the design thinking process for an internal app that they had to launch. I was pretty excited to work with them and lead a team in innovation.

But I think my favorite projects are always the ones that I’m a partner with or I have some stake in the project because you embrace them a lot more, and you place all of your passion into them. Whereas with the client projects, I almost don’t get that involved because I don’t have any time. I’m more in the commercial part of it.

What about you?

– Sounds good. I think there are so many different projects that it’s very difficult to choose from them, right?

– That sounds very interesting. The projects that make you travel are always the best.

– I think our biggest plan is making new business ourselves. We have noticed that we’re working so hard to make other clients the best apps possible that we are not doing it for ourselves. We have the ideas and talent – everything except for time. So, in the second semester of this year we want to start working on internal ideas that we can launch.

– I think they’re always coming from a problem. You notice that there’s something missing or something that you can’t solve, and then you think there should be an app for this. There usually are apps for that, but sometimes you do find that there are some things that haven’t been done the way they should be. This is where we get the opportunities.

– Well, we’ve created a new platform because the first one was like an MVP, and it was a little bit slow. We didn’t make it ourselves, just the design. This year, we worked on it with our own tech, and we did an amazing fully international platform which you can see in many languages and coins. We’re going to push that forward. Moreover, a lot of people from South America contacted us because they want to open in Brazil, Colombia, Argentina. So, there’s a lot of opportunity there.

– People usually find us through Google or Facebook, since we manage Google and Facebook ads. We were doing a content focused strategy on social media. For the suite owners, it’s also word-of-mouth. It’s a small community of people who own suites, and if you get to know one of them, you can always ask for more contacts and start getting a lot of suites.

– We didn’t own a suite, but we did own two private seats that we didn’t use. We just had them because of a client who wouldn’t pay. He just told us to take his two seats and that’s it. We agreed, but we didn’t go to the stadium match. We started trying to rent them out and it was a problem. Eventually, one of the guys stole our passes, so we had to file a lawsuit and do all of that crazy stuff. We thought there had to be something, and we looked but there wasn’t any platform that did this. So, that’s how it started.

– One of the things that we have been using a lot since last year is GraphQL. It’s kind of an evolution of the REST API. We are always looking for new stuff, and right now we’re trying out Strapi – headless CMS, and also headless design for Shopify or WordPress.

From the UX/UI standpoint, we are currently using Figma for the design, which is amazing. Every day you can see new plugins, and new stuff from the community, since it’s community-based. It keeps you up-to-date on that. Speaking of trends, I’m always trying to read about what’s coming up this year, tech trends, and all of this context that feeds the projects. What about you?

– So, we haven’t really gone into blockchain or crypto. We have talked about it, but I don’t have anyone in my company who has specialized in that or in fintech. That’s maybe one of the reasons that we haven’t gone very into it. I think it’s super interesting, but you have to put everything into it.

We were talking about doing a fintech project, like a Stripe platform for Mexico. We analyzed it, and we were very psyched about it. Afterwards, we had to either do this or do everything else that we’re doing. I think it’s not the time for us to go into that yet. For example, we know there’s a lot going on in cybersecurity, and it’s going to be a huge trend this year. But we’re more focusing on innovation, UX/UI, as well as very fast and secure technologies. We’re not going into those macrotrends yet.

– Even though it’s not that far away from other countries I have visited, I’ve always heard of Ukraine as very remote and always very political. I think it’s one of those countries that remains a mystery to me, to be honest. I’ve seen pictures, and Ukraine is super beautiful and culturally interesting, but I’m not well-versed in this country.

– We were building a platform for eSports betting. We were talking to a sports development company in Ukraine, and they looked pretty good. It seemed that they were very specialized on this stuff and they knew what they were doing. But in the end, we decided to do it ourselves because we didn’t have that much control over the process. Ukraine is so far away that if something happens we’re never going to find those guys, and it was a pretty big investment. So, they were the only Ukrainian company I had contact with.

– Good, we had a conversation with an account manager or project manager. She was writing to us, and we had a couple of calls with her. She spoke pretty good English, not as good as you, but her accent didn’t get in the way, which is also appreciated. For example, when I’ve talked to people in India, it was so difficult for me to understand, you know?

– Yes, exactly. So those barriers are very important when you do a project.

– Try not to be very afraid because when you are starting a venture, fear of failure is always very latent. You are always thinking what happens if this doesn’t work? If you have good communication skills, and you really strive to do your best for the company and what you’re offering, then things are going to come your way. When you persevere, eventually you’re going to have success.

My advice for women is to take the stigma away, and don’t think “I’m a woman”, because it’s not relevant. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a guy or a woman, it’s about what you do, so just believe in yourself.

– I do have to recognize that I have a privilege for this. I know it’s not the same for all women, and there are women who have to struggle a lot. I don’t want to sound biased but in my personal experience, if you do believe in yourself, you are professional, and you are striving to do your best, then it shouldn’t be a problem.

– You too, thanks!

Work With Ukraine

The interview was recorded before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. Now, more than ever, Ukrainian companies are extremely motivated to work and enhance the country’s economy in these hard times.

With the outbreak of hostilities, most people remain in Ukraine and keep working from safe places with Internet connection. Despite the numerous obstacles that Ukrainians face, they continue to impress everyone with their outstanding accomplishments.

As the challenges mount, support from the entire civilized world becomes increasingly crucial. It can be mutually beneficial to cooperate with Ukraine-based software development agencies.

By employing a Ukrainian IT vendor, you will not only accelerate software releases and improve the quality of your product, but also support the local communities dependent on businesses like Redwerk that create jobs, volunteer, and make life-changing donations right now.

Stand with Ukraine by working with Ukraine!

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