Hi, we are AppUnite, we take care of the businesses from a tech perspective. We build products and teams around them enabling our clients to bring the difference to the world.

We believe in knowledge sharing and software as a tool to improve companies and peoples’ lives. We take lessons from our daily challenges and share that experience and knowledge to help you build better products. 

Let’s talk about products, businesses, and software development!

I remember that phone call very well. In fact, it might be one of the most memorable phone calls I have ever picked up or even one of the most important calls in my life. You know, one of those phone calls that give you a mini heart attack when you look at the screen and see a familiar phone number.

*Mr. Kuleczka?*

*Hello, yes.*

*Good news - **you’ve just got a job at AppUnite**. When can you start?*

It was a warm, yet cloudy October day. I picked up the call while having a break between some Math classes at my university campus, holding a cup of overpriced, bad coffee from a machine downstairs. I just left some company after 3-months of being a junior developer, which, in fact, felt more like an internship - not at my will, but because the company was going bankrupt. A charm of small startups, I guess. I was not that concerned about it, I thought that it might be a good start, a three months adventure that would eventually lead me to become a real developer, solving real-life problems. Problems that I solved in that company were not so challenging - we worked on an internal application, whose purpose was to be a showcase app to potential customers. My plan was to focus on my education and get back to the industry with some proven experience in the following year.

I felt joy, thrill, confusion and dread at the same time. *Wow, they want me! I’m gonna be a real developer! What if I’m not good enough? What if I am not able to solve trivial problems that I will encounter and I will be considered a failed investment? Maybe I’m not ready yet?*

All those thoughts clouded my mind as I started my first day at work, the beginning of an unforgettable journey. The first project I was assigned to was a logistic project, whose goal was to solve the problem of finding contractors to transport goods from point A to B.  At first, it was quite hard for me to handle the complexity of the project. Doubts kicked in again. What if I was not good enough?

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**I received huge support from my teammates** - especially from my mentor, MK. (who I had kind of admired even before I started to work in AppUnite, as he was a pretty known persona in Elixir community and gave many interesting talks in tech conferences before) and my buddy, P. - and they guided me through the basics of development, showed me how the process looked and what to do to be able to solve complex problems in an efficient way. We spent many hours drawing diagrams on whiteboards, trying to illustrate our thoughts and ideas. My role in the project was not that vital, however, I felt I was helping the team and bringing value to the table from the beginning. It is a great merit of my colleagues, who made sure that I felt comfortable and knew what I was supposed to do and also gave me great feedback regarding my work. They always treated me equally despite my young age and lack of experience. Anxiety slowly creeped out of my mind as I was slowly making meaningful progress and being praised by my teammates. I enthusiastically observed how quickly the number of comments to my pull requests was reduced, indicating the growing trust of the people that I worked with. **Truly unforgettable feeling**, when you feel this ‘click’ in your head and you become a useful team member, delivering quality production code in a reasonable time.

However, it was just the first episode of the story. I was assigned to this project to learn the basics, but the long-term plan was to engage me in the development of some other product. After three months, it was time to leave. I felt sad, as I worked with truly amazing people and it was a shame to leave them, but also excited about the new opportunity - I felt as if that was where the true challenge would begin. I was surprised by how warm my team members were to me, saying goodbye and wishing me the best of luck. It was a cold Friday at the beginning of January. At the end of my workday, I gave my last high-fives to my now-ex-teammates and went home to unwind through the weekend and prepare for a new project.

*It was a pleasure to work with you, guys. Thanks for your knowledge and everything.*

*It was indeed, Szymon. You're gonna learn a lot about the new product.*

I was moved to one of the biggest teams in the company, working on one of the first products that AppUnite had ever launched - a social media app, dedicated to the Christian community in Africa. Sounds quite unusual? Yes, that is what I felt, but in the end, it was a really interesting experience. The user base was quite big, as there were approximately 160k active users. **In AppUnite, we aim to have a huge impact not only on the technical stuff, but also on product development and business**, and this project was one of the finest examples as our client often was not only focused on their ideas but gave us a freedom to propose our own features and ideas to improve the product and user experience. To do so, you need to know your user base - it was really interesting to observe content posted by users from completely different cultures than I was raised.

*Are you Szymon? *- asked K., my new buddy.

The whole team was working on a completely different floor, so the environment was quite new for me. I didn’t know anyone, which made me feel uncomfortable in some way, however, K’s friendly, a little bit goofy approach, quickly loosened me up as he introduced me to other team members and helped me to set up the project, showed me where to look for documentation and gave other useful advice.
Everything was going well during the initialization, however, I was terrified again soon, when I started to explore a brand new codebase.
It was far, far more complicated than the previous one. The lines of code seemed to be infinite, conventions were completely new and unfamiliar to me. I felt completely the same as in the beginning - a little bit lost and doubtful. I was just scrolling through the countless modules brainlessly, thinking that there was no way I could handle that. 

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Things started to get worse when I got my first task. I had to refactor the old, legacy code, which was using the database that our backend team wanted to get rid of. The problem seemed quite simple in the beginning, but later, partly because of my lack of skills, knowledge and experience, which would help me to organise work in a way that would be much easier for me, it occurred to me that the task was much harder than I had thought. I spent days and days of this cold January in the office, getting warmed by a hot coffee and working on the first tough maintenance problem.
**However, I never felt alone**. Whenever I had an issue with some particular step, K. was always there for me and advised me without any sort of judgment.

*Look, try to draw what happens and when. It will help you, trust me* - K. encouraged me, reminding me of what we had done in the previous project.

And it worked. Things were much clearer when I simply sat and breathed for a second, trying to think of the solution and existing circumstances instead of starting coding immediately. The funny thing is that I received this lesson not only before, but also many times after this situation before I ultimately realized how I should approach problems. A trait of junior developers, or my trait, I guess.
After a couple of weeks, I finally got my first task done. Great! I was going to deploy my code to production in the new project for the first time! As usually in this job, I was both excited and nervous. I didn’t really know if things would go south or not. **Fortunately, I had the support of my colleagues, which ensured that they would help me in case something bad happened.**

*You ready, Szymon?*
*Yeah, kind of.*
*Don’t worry, it’s gonna be fine! You are not gonna break the production, for sure* - K. chuckled.

So I made the deployment.
Waited…
Nice, everything seems to be fine! The deployment was finished, and all servers were up and running. We were home!
I went to the kitchen to make some coffee with a smile on my face. I did a really hard job, I deserved a break.
After about half an hour after deployment, the client texted us in our shared Slack channel. Something was wrong, reaction counters in the posts showed 0 for everything!...
My face turned white and my stomach felt weird. *Is that possible that I did something pretty much irreversible? No, it is impossible that I broke it up so hard! How is it even possible it doesn’t work after all the tests that I had written were successful?!*
I sat in front of the computer and immediately started to look for reasons. *Why did it happen? It’s impossible! Why, why, why? Wait, I think I got it!*
It turned out to be a really specific case, which I am not going to explain in detail. However, I managed to perform a live migration in the production and restore all counters. Phew, I will not lose my job today!
**That was my next lesson, and from the time perspective, one of the most valuable ones**. Always remember that tests are based on your assumptions and the fact that they turned out to be successful is only a hint, you should not take for granted that the system will behave correctly. But what was probably more important, I realized that it makes no sense to deploy a lot of changes in the code at once. K. explained that to me, but either I didn’t listen, or I was not skilled enough to be able to properly divide my work. Anyway, this situation, the stress that I felt and the satisfaction of solving the issue were the emotions that I don’t think I will ever forget, nor the conclusions that I drew from this situation.

*Great work, bro, it’s really nice that you managed to fix your mistake. We are not gonna fire you today *- K. chuckled and patted me on the back in a gesture of encouragement.

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That is one of the things that I liked the most about my then-current team, the previous team, and, as I quickly realized, the whole company. Everyone was so professional, yet so chilled at the same time. I messed up, but I quickly came up with a solution. All of my colleagues were super helpful and understanding. They did not underestimate the fact that I broke functionality in the prod, however, they were able to joke about it (even a long time after it happened…) and they were not bringing me down or yelling at me. **Atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere - one of the key things that I love at AppUnite.**



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Curious about working for AppUnite? Get inspired by Szymon's story.

The journey of an AppUniter - Szymon

## Reversing the tendency

Imagine, you are getting ready as an entrepreneur in the world of e-commerce. Your business plan is ready, the funding is well balanced, the supplier's list is confirmed and all you need to do is to make a decision what tools your e-commerce place will be built with to shine. 
You start your profound research for launching your instantly profitable e-commerce platform, to choose the most optimal solution for yourself. You dig in through the searches, you prepare your comparison master chart for the best solution. The sources easily explain to you that either you go with the incredibly fast-growing e-commerce giant Shopify, maybe with slight consideration of Woocommerce in the back of your head, or you make your choice among the SaaS solutions that are adjusted to your local market in terms of many integrations.
The categories on your lists are getting more complex, it seems that everything is covered by pre-built e-commerce solutions (fancy designs, strong API, standardized dropshipping, warehouses management, sending notifications to customers, price synchronization, generating invoices, dispatch shipments or printing labels.)
So you start to ask yourself why  developers and businesses bother at all with making everything from scratch. Is there something that should make me choose customized e-commerce?

## Customized e-commerce as a product

Well, it is great that this question arises, what’s more, prepare yourself for the next avalanche of question marks. There are two different ways to enter the world of e-commerce entrepreneurship. What might help make a decision between customized e-commerce or pre-built products is a list of questions that you might ask yourself all over again when making your business plan. How do I want to distinguish my brand from others? Do I want to customize my mobile shopping app to propose to my customers something fresh and innovative? Do I want to offer my customers easy navigation through my shopping mobile app thanks to well known patterns? Or do I want to have open doors for further development of various business ideas? If I develop fast, will my technical environment grow with me? And the most important and primordial question that should be asked at all stages is the one about the vision and the identity of the product.

![Screenshot 2022-05-02 at 16.39.31.png](https://strapi-appunite.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_02_at_16_39_31_ceeb1db4ae.png)

## Best way to spring into e-commerce existence

When dreaming of web and mobile shopping app development that will be monetizing quickly, you might wish to find the solution that will help you go live, especially if you are new to the business. By choosing the right SaaS platform, you will definitely be able to launch your shop fast and manage it mostly on your own with the help from the technical support. It is very possible that you will increase your revenue quite quickly. Shopify, a giant on the market, offers you a huge package of complete business tools. From brand visual identification, through e-mail marketing automation, data analytics, founding rising options, even to Facebook Ads, payments integrations, fraud analytics, SEO. But the catch is - not all the markets are ready for this leader, or the leader is still not ready for emerging markets as they invest in broadening the offer among well established economies. In case you're looking to launch your product in an emerging market, you need to turn to local offers. When choosing among SaaS pre-built platforms, you might need to pay particular attention to cost calculation - very often each additional integration with marketplaces costs extra and appears in a connected chain. At first it seems you just need one supplemental feature, but since in online marketing nothing goes as a separate unit and by purchasing a new option for your e-shop you might need to additionally purchase the option that has appropriate plug-ins, you ought to consider making good matches to avoid overpaying. And when summarizing all the hidden costs, here again, you might come back to the question of what the identity of your business is. Do you plan to build your capital on a strong, unique product, or do you want to build it on offering a unique buying experience? 

![Screenshot 2022-05-02 at 16.52.36.png](https://strapi-appunite.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_02_at_16_52_36_d982ca46b3.png)

The first option is straight forward - you move within a structure, your efforts are shifted to mastering the product you are selling and pleasing your customers that way. Thanks to pre-built platforms you don’t need to worry about building new layout, synchronizing add-ons for CRM, separate backend development, some part of your attention is relieved, you simply concentrate on your product, not entirely on the tools. This path as a closed system is relatively easy to follow, but as every construct, it has its firm borders. Other brands will follow the same pattern, so if you will no longer be able to play with product’s attractiveness, you might reach the growth threshold, as your competitors will be making similar moves by default. 

Choosing customized e-commerce for your shopping app, on the contrary, is not only a different method for developing e-shop, it can also act as a product itself. You can outsmart the market by going out to your public with not only a unique product, but with unique techniques and experiences, crossing the borders of fixed shopping behaviors. It may even happen that you will change the customers' behaviors globally. Or maybe sell your solution further? Dream big as they say - but being more down to earth - for sure building your shopping app step by step with your development team will save you from losing nerves on technical support that doesn’t have the answers for you in their standardized manual. It could save you migration problems and costs once your local solutions get absorbed in the end by bigger platforms (check recent purchasing of Shoplo by Shoper). Working closely with a development team, although it might seem more time consuming, will allow you to test the ideas and behaviors of your customers and get feedback on a regular basis. 
 
At AppUnite we worked on a case where the decision to get the mobile shop app customized caught the attention of a wider public. Have a look at the [Fishbrain case](https://appunite.com/portfolio/fishbrain) to learn about the process of resigning from an off-the-shelf solution. 
 
## Own your business aspirations

![Screenshot 2022-05-02 at 16.43.56.png](https://strapi-appunite.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Screenshot_2022_05_02_at_16_43_56_218e4a8709.png)

Have a look again at your comparison chart and the answers to the above questions. You might have the choice for your web and mobile shopping app development right in front of your eyes. If the weight of your business plan is on the side of offering a unique buying experience and you have vast scaling of your product in mind, then a ready-to-go scheme is clearly not enough. It is due to the fact that in any pre-planned closed system, you are able to move only in pre-defined directions, whereas big ideas require a development partner that will customize your e-commerce path to all the turns and pivots you want to take during your market exploration. And once you are ready to drive the development highway, you’d better have alongside you engineers who are ready to build it for you.





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Read this article to find out why customized e-commerce can be the right choice for you. 
Advantages of making a customized e-commerce app you didn’t know about. 

Read this article to find out why customized e-commerce can be the right choice for you.  Advantages of making a customized e-commerce app you didn’t know about. 

Łukasz Niemier

Open sourcing Imager - yet another image processing service