The History of the Doubletapp Company

Introduction

My name is Sergey Anchutin, I am the CEO of Doubletapp. In this article I will talk about the start of Doubletapp.

I was born and raised in Kurgan, participated in different mathematical Olympiads. In 2009 I entered the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Ural Federal University. There I have met Anton Ryabykh and Viktor Krasnov, the future co-founders of Doubletapp.

Our First Client

We launched our first joint projects even before Doubletapp. The idea to unite and found a company was in the wind. The decisive period was the fall of 2014.

In September, I started learning English at the federal school network ALIBRA SCHOOL. A few months later, in November, I attended FailConf. One of the speakers was the founder of EasyTen, an English learning app with daily reminders. The thought that it was possible to implement an application with similar mechanics to improve the learning process at ALIBRA SCHOOL instantly clicked in my head.

ALIBRA SCHOOL used to utilise a spaced repetition methodology: the groups of the studied words had to be repeated 7 times, while the time intervals between repetitions gradually increased. This was done using cardboard cards that the students had to cut out themselves, and the progress was recorded manually on separate sheets. This approach was rather tiresome and not at all convenient.

A mobile application would automate this process and make the learning process more favorable both for students and teachers. Anton and Viktor supported my idea.

At that time, Anton already had a lot of experience in Android development, Victor was an all-rounder that could quickly learn programming for iOS, while I was a professional Python backend developer. The team to create the product was assembled and ready to work.

This was the first ever commercial offer in our life. While completing the text, we checked every word, proof read and redacted everything thrice. We worried that no one would respond to our proposition.

The juice was worth the squeeze — ALIBRA SCHOOL representatives replied to us! They also thought about automating the educational process, and they had already created an experimental version of the application, which was a small dictionary that took a very long time to download the entire database at the first start on a device.

At the end of 2014, we were invited to participate in the school’s tender for the creation of a full-fledged working version of the application. We decided to not miss this opportunity.

To demonstrate our capabilities, we constructed a demo version of the Android application, created a detailed commercial offer and began to wait.

At the beginning of 2015, we found out that we had won the auction.

We consider February 17, 2015 the day of registration of an individual enterprise, created to conclude an agreement with ALIBRA, as the day of foundation of Doubletapp.

The first version of our application was released in the fall of 2015. Meanwhile, ALIBRA SCHOOL remains our client to this day.

Why “Doubletapp”?

The name of our company was created by Anton. We have been considering many different options, looking for something related to mobile applications. On August 10, 2015 Anton proposed to call the company DoubleTap. However, all of the DoubleTap domains were already taken. Suddenly, an interesting thought struck my mind! What if we add a second “p” at the end of our name, associating it with the word “app”? When designing the logo, I decided that it is better to make “t” not uppercase, but lowercase. The result was the company’s name as you know it — Doubletapp.

Positioning and Further Development of the Company

After completing our first large commercial project, we wanted to develop the company further and receive new orders. Mobile applications were in demand, thus we decided to position ourselves precisely as an application development studio.

In 2016, we got acquainted with the Devvela studio, which worked on projects for clients from the United States. In a 5-year span we have completed 9 joint projects with them. The same year, we started recruiting other developers part-time.

At the beginning of 2017, we hired our first full-time developer, and six months later we rented our first office. With the help of some newly-recruited front-end developers, we were finally able to develop a full-fledged website. By the end of the year there were already 11 of us.

2018 was marked by the fact that we hired a designer, started doing projects related to machine learning (for customers as well as for the sake of internal experiments) and moved to an office 3 times bigger.

The company grew, as did the number of its projects. In 2019, for the first time, we took part in the Tagline Awards, the largest digital competition in Eastern Europe and Russia. We presented two projects to the jury and both of them won award-winning places.

In 2020, Doubletapp started a course on Android development at the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of the Ural Federal University. Many graduates of the course became our trainees, in total we took 13 people for an internship this year.

Current State of the Company

Today Doubletapp is a full-service international production studio. Our clients are startups and large companies in Russia, Europe and the USA.

We can fully lead the development of a digital product on all of its stages, which include competitor analysis, writing terms of reference, creating a design before development, publishing in stores, communicating with Apple technical support, exploitation on servers, setting up monitoring, etc.

Our expertise includes:

• Machine learning — neural networks, computer vision and other tasks.
• iOS and Android development for mobile devices.
• Web development of high-load services and chat bots.
• Design and construction of interfaces.
• Creation of 3D and flat animations for videos and digital products.

During 2020, we have grown by more than 1.5 times. As of the end of the year, the company employs 33 people.

We are not planning to stop!