The app developers turning experts into tech entrepreneurs
App design and development agency Bad Dinosaur know a good idea when they see it, having worked with more than 50 start-ups in the last three years. But those novel concepts don’t always come from where you might expect. Bad Dinosaur has found the most successful entrepreneurs are not young bucks straight out of college, but those who have built a career and have a couple of decades of experience under their belts.
“We respect their experience,” says Bad Dinosaur director Russ Peterson. “They are experts in their field and have a revolutionary idea; they just need to work with someone to turn it into a digital product.”
Bad Dinosaur, which started as a two-person agency in 2017, now has 15 staff with offices in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and is looking to expand into Aberdeen. The team primarily delivers apps, but can provide any digital product to help a start-up or business thrive and move in a new direction. The agency believes in the importance of client relationships. They want to work closely to understand their problems, rather than focusing on technology straight away. It is only once they know the business’ aims that they build and develop an app to deliver that.
Peterson says: “When you typically think about an agency, you imagine ending up with a big contract to build a lot of software, but the tech may not be suitable because there are so many assumptions on both sides about what is needed. That is a weird client/supplier relationship which is very rigid.
“We want to work with people by understanding the problem they are trying to solve, rather than just hitting it with a big tech hammer. They might not know what technology they need so we work with them on a human level – talking about what they want to achieve long-term and what technology is able to do, rather than them coming to us with a rigid technical specification.”
Often the software a client thinks they need is too large-scale, according to Peterson: “People sometimes have preconceived ideas about what tech they need, but when you dig into what they want to achieve that is not always the most appropriate way. We help people to focus and a lot of the time the projects that people come to us with actually get smaller, saving the client time and money.”
Peterson says that as Bad Dinosaur has grown, it works best with a certain type of market: “If you close your eyes and think of an entrepreneur, who is going to build an app, it probably is someone who has just left college or university, early 20s – a couple of hackers in their dorm room.
“But we find the most successful entrepreneurs are people later in their life, perhaps with 15-20 years’ experience in their industry. They are very driven; these are people who could become consultants but they want to do something much bigger than that. They are people who are older and wiser and more serious about what they are doing. They are passionate about a problem in their industry they have found and solved, and want to roll their sleeves up and build it.”
Peterson also says younger people do not have access to the same amount of finance as those further into a career, particularly smaller amounts of seed funding, which is critical to get a project moving early on.
It is not just Peterson, but all the staff in the growing team of 15 who talk directly to clients. Hundreds of conversations can be had at the early stages, from phone and video calls to face-to-face meetings and workshops. Discovery and understanding what the client is looking to do is essential when building digital products. Peterson has even gone on board a ship and eaten in the mess, amongst the crew, when working with a client in the maritime sector in order to better understand their end users.
Rather than spending months thinking of all the features an app could have (and end up using only a fraction of them), the team work on a core version and get that up and running, which is quicker – and cheaper.
“That is crucial and allows us to get the product out there and learn from it – for example, a customer might want to pay by a certain type of payment card that you’ve never heard of, or prefer to pay by invoice when you assumed it would be by card. It is impossible to think of all these things while you are trying to build the main features of your digital product, so getting it out and in the hands of real people is vital.”
The first stage of the journey at Bad Dinosaur starts with a discovery workshop. These sessions allow clients to collaborate with members of the design, development and account management team; working on the overall vision of their digital product, as well as simultaneously distilling the product down to its core components.
Educating clients about technology comes in at this stage. Peterson says: “Just because someone doesn’t understand technology doesn’t mean they are no good at being a tech start-up. They start to appreciate that they don’t need to have all the answers.”
SME clients also form part of the business and often have the mindset of being a start-up. “They are still running their business, but we benefit them in the same way we benefit entrepreneurs – we can be the expert in the digital part.”
Peterson teamed up with Kyle Whittington to found the agency in 2017, and since then they have seen the business grow strongly. Both were contractors, but saw the need for a team of experts from multiple specialisations. “We brought in designers and developers and grew from there,” says Peterson, who says staff must fit with their ethos of being able to communicate directly with clients. “We are very selective and want our team to be able to relate to a client and ask the right questions if put in front of them, no matter what their specialisation is.”
A series of cramped offices were endured until they moved to Sugar Bond House in Leith in August last year, as well as taking on office space in Glasgow and in the near future Aberdeen, where the tech sector is growing. Next, they are looking to the Midlands and the north of England. “It is not just London with app ideas,” says Peterson.
Bad Dinosaur works in a vast array of business and tech sectors, from education to medical and finance, and wants to widen the net even further to work in exciting, emerging sectors such as agriculture and climate.
But why Bad Dinosaur? “A lot of the business names in technology are really boring,” says Peterson. “It’s nearly always ‘something solutions’. You couldn’t fit all we do into a company name, so why bother? Bad Dinosaur sounds like a children’s book but no-one ever forgets Bad Dinosaur.”
To find out more, visit https://www.baddinosaur.co.uk/