About LeanyLabs
LeanyLabs is for businesses seeking a reliable software partner to assist with their web application development.
From more than a dozen years of experience working as employees in different software outsourcing companies, we've seen how the process looks from the inside. Those companies did their best to meet clients' expectations. They've delivered excellent working products, occasionally wasting a bit too much time on management overhead.
Few businesses, unfortunately, were more driven by profitability and not always provided perfect service. Some of them grabbed every project they could get their hands on, even if it were evident that they lack technical experience or expertise in the industry to deliver the best results. Others were over-engineering even the simplest applications, convincing everyone involved that the infrastructure should handle Facebook-level load and the requirements will become exponentially more complicated in the future.
Professional engineers should design good architecture and write the right code for the job in front of them, and not always build the best starship they possibly can.
A year before creating LeanyLabs, we got involved in a startup. We were the developers who built the prototype necessary to raise initial funding and then iterated on the MVP until it continuously made decent profits. The CEO relied on our analytical minds to refine the business model and all the math around it. It was somewhat successful, yet we had little control over high-level decisions and were pretty cold to the niche. After hiring excellent developers to replace us, we’ve sold our equity and left the project to pursue new challenges.
Startup experience provided an opportunity to see everything from our former client's perspective.
Even Ukrainian startups, with easy access to a large pool of talented IT professionals, face pretty much the same problems with software development as our clients from all over the world:
- Hiring great developers is a long process that drags the attention away from working on what matters — the product itself.
- Coordinating a team of developers requires a lot of experience.
- Delegating side projects and products for new markets will keep the core team focused on achieving the current goals.
- In-house developers might be lacking unique expertise with new horizons in front of them.
- Having full-time employees for doing infrequent work is too expensive.
By combining our technical expertise and tremendous experience working in service companies with a much better understanding of startups' problems, needs, and wants, we decided to create a unique company dedicated to solving them better than everyone else.
At LeanyLabs, we:
- Focus on full-stack web development. That's our primary technical expertise, where we're proud to deliver impressive results by continually perfecting our craft. Sorry, no WordPress, landing pages, or marketing.
- Care about people. Building good relationships with both our clients and our employees is a top priority. We are building a culture where everyone is encouraged to share their ideas and provide honest feedback. Our clients count on full transparency, attention, and immediate support in urgent situations. Our developers continuously learn from each other, and everyone has a personal growth plan designed by our lead experts.
- Improve the product by collaborating on their initial ideas and creating an even better solution together. Sometimes we have previous experience with similar applications, and sometimes it's just a fresh look from a users' perspective. Even asking the right questions often helps to escape the brainstorming bubble.
- Take every project and every client seriously. We're not looking for quick and easy money. Our clients either receive the professional and reliable service they deserve, or we honestly tell them why we're unable to help and suggest other companies we trust personally.
- Avoid unnecessary management overhead. We're not fans of spending precious hours every day listening to non-relevant talks at different meetings. Usually, we do quick retrospectives and sprint planning with the whole team and everything else in one-on-ones as needed. On some projects, we also do very short daily standups together with the client team.
Those are our core principles and values. We haven’t tried to make them fancy and outstanding. Instead, they are deliberately meaningful, simple, and easy to follow.
Meet the Core Team
Mykola had won many competitions in chemistry and even was a jury member in world-class ones. Six months before defending his Ph.D. dissertation, he suddenly fell in love with programming and abandoned chemistry.
Learning the basics and becoming a junior JavaScript developer took only a year thanks to his sharp mind, dedication, and a habit of small gradual improvements. A couple of years later, he became an expert in JavaScript, a certified scrum master, and got promoted to a team leader. During our startup ventures, he also finished a product management course.
Mykola truly likes people and finds new friends everywhere. His reputation as a doer that always holds his word helped the company get on its feet.
LeanyLabs fulfills Mykola's dream to extend his values and experience beyond one person, creating a world-class team that helps people and companies achieve their goals and solve their problems by crafting tailored software solutions.
We trust him to build good relationships with the clients, hire awesome people, mentor them, and orchestrate the delivery process, so everything goes smoothly like a swiss watch. He makes sure that everyone in the company achieves their personal goals, stays motivated and productive all the time.
Marian started tinkering with computers in middle school. Soon after learning programming, engineering for the World Wide Web became his passion.
He got a job as a junior software engineer in the largest Ukrainian outsourcing enterprise while still being a student. Working together with hundreds of people on a massive project, he quickly gained diverse experience in the field and became a senior engineer.
Love learning new technologies and digging into technical details gradually forged him as a unique expert. Another 800+ employee company hired Marian on a JavaScript competency lead position. Soon he started a strategically important project, leading the Ukrainian team working on a well-known Israeli startup in the digital media industry.
Together they incorporated new technologies and improved the product making the development process more enjoyable and the codebase much cleaner. The same team achieved more than before on every sprint, improving the UX and implementing new features a lot faster.
In LeanyLabs, Marian continues to pursue web development excellence, keeping his hand on the pulse of new technologies. He works on the most challenging projects, makes complicated architectural decisions, and guides the most difficult tasks to successful completion. Expertise with AWS internals allows him to debug, explain and fix unexpected problems much faster than every DevOps we know.
Marian creates effective personal growth plans even for our senior developers.
Andriy was fortunate to read a book about Turbo Pascal, an ancient programming language, before seeing a real computer when he was 10.
He won multiple programming contests in school and created interesting pet projects from physics simulations to games, 3d engines, and even a small DOS-compatible operating system. After satisfying his competitive spirit by winning a nation-wide programming competition for students, he got a part-time job in a small outsourcing company, becoming a project leader in few years, even before graduating.
His career continued as a lead developer of high-performance trading software that processed vast amounts of data with consistent sub-millisecond latency, running on specialized servers right next to NYSE. On this job, Andriy fell in love with analytics, data insights, and fast code. In free time, with Blockchain and IoT.
As a real backend developer, Andriy takes care of the LeanyLabs backend operations. Legal, compliance, security, accounting, bookkeeping, finances, tech, office management, and other stuff. He enjoys digging into data, optimizing processes, spying on competitors, doing marketing, and absorbing new information required to generate various growth-hacking strategies for the business.
