Digital technologies have evolved so much through the years that users have grown to be very picky when choosing what to invest their attention in. From understanding the market need to applying the latest technology, and defining that UX to the core, digital companies have to upgrade their game in order to build something significant.
Among those who have taken up this challenge and also add some salt & pepper to this industry, we found a troop of spirited professionals that go beyond technology and add their own creative touch. Named no other than Salt & Pepper, they have an interesting history in delivering digital products that matter, and we wanted to dive more into it by having a chat with the company CEO — Cristin Iosif.
There’s no secret that you want to add the salt & pepper to the digital world, but that must come with some challenges, too. Can you tell us more about your organizational backbone and what are the main principles that keep you creative and efficient at the same time?
Starting as a company with its roots in my co-founder’s kitchen, you can imagine that our current organizational structure differs a lot from back then :). Now on a more serious note, what I want to say is that our organizational structure evolved organically over the years as the team grew and had to respond to different challenges.
Thanks to our previous experience working in different NGOs from Cluj we had a pretty good idea of what type of organization we wanted to build and we’ve always had the next step in mind, trying to put together a company structure and way of working that can respond to tomorrow’s challenges, not today’s. Looking back I think this was a key point that helped us grow as a company.
Even if the company structure evolved and will continue to change as we grow, there are a few things that will always be true and guide us in everything we do: our values and principles. When you’re building a business that wants to have an impact, you involuntarily think about how to differentiate yourself and let’s be honest, this is not an easy thing to do, especially in Cluj. This is something that I gave a lot of thought over the years but recently someone that worked with a lot of tech companies from Cluj confirmed what I already knew: there aren’t 2 companies exactly the same because there aren’t 2 people (founders) exactly the same. They are the ones who set a business’s foundation through their values and principles from day one.
We consider ourselves to be a new generation company, a mix between the world of big organizations and the startup ecosystem. This gives us the required mix of professionalism and agility in getting challenging projects done.
We can describe ourselves as a multi-skilled, curious, passionate, and always on the lookout for a challenge to solve. One of our guiding principles is Get $#!τ Done and for this, we apply the principles of openness, trust, automation, and of course continuous improvement in relation to our clients.
And to keep the creative juices flowing, we like to also have fun together, for
example, last year we did S&P Yacht Week for our 3rd anniversary and sailed
together from one Greek island to another for 7 days.
As we can see, building digital products that matter is what drives you. Let’s go back to where it all started and maybe you can describe some of the products that launched this mission.
Yes, that’s what drives us. Our aim from the start was to build products. But back then, we didn’t have a clear view of what that product could be or what product should get all our time. To top it up, we started with little money, which was also a big set back. That’s when we decided to build products for our clients, learn by doing, invest our time and energy to get better every day and then create our own. Now, fast forward 4 and a half years later, we don’t have our own product (yet), but we have a great team alongside we can build whatever we set our mind to.
You can imagine that in the early days of the company we weren’t in a position to turn down business opportunities, so we started building applications in a lot of fields. Initially, we were only developing native mobile applications, as I was an Android developer back then, but slowly we’ve also started doing web development, especially after falling in love with the JavaScript stack.
One of the first applications we’ve built starting from the founder’s idea, to UI/UX work and development was StreetPro, an app for football players where they can train like the professionals. ❝Street Pro is the first soccer app specifically designed for soccer players by soccer professionals — with exercises that you can easily do anywhere, anytime. All you need is a ball, a court, and a goal.❞
Moving forward to where we are now, a full-service software development company providing a complete range of services required for building great
products: consulting services, business analysis, UI/UX design, web and mobile development, quality assurance, and maintenance.
We work with startups and enterprise clients mostly from the UK and North
America, and we started focusing mostly on the fintech sector with secondary
projects in healthcare, education, and entertainment.
Clutch named you top developers in Romania last year (congrats!). What are the projects that landed you on this position?
Thanks, that has been a team effort.
I have some great projects in mind but you know how it is with NDAs :). Jokes
aside, the first client that offered us a review on Clutch was Nick (hi Nick!), who had a dream of building a fitness application that reflected his knowledge and experience as a personal trainer.
On this project we’ve started only from Nick’s idea, we’ve learned as much as
possible about his business needs and we’ve also advised him around his product strategy. From here we moved as almost everyone knows, to building wireframes and UI/UX designs, followed by the development and testing process done in the S&P Agile way. I like to say “S&P Agile way” because I think everyone does agile but everyone does it in their own way. At Salt&Pepper we adopt a modified Agile/Scrum methodology in our approach to client projects while respecting the Agile values.
Virtual Nick is an app that uses a rules engine (some might say is AI-powered 🙂 ) to create personalized workouts based on the user’s schedule, available equipment and progress inside the application. As you work through each exercise, your workouts will collect feedback to make each movement bespoke and will adjust to your own needs and progression.
Another project that helped us get our position is Tiroll. Tiroll.ro is one of the newest and most innovative events ticketing platforms from Romania, offering event organizers the possibility of quickly publishing for sale their events through an easy to use web platform. On the other hand, event fans have the possibility of quickly buying tickets to their favourite events. Services used here range from business analysis, product development, project management, UI/UX design, frontend & backend development and finally, QA testing. You can read everything about the challenges we faced in this project and how we overcame them in our study case here.
Salt & Pepper are official partners for Techsylvania: Beyond Borders. To find out more about them, please visit: https://saltandpepper.co/