Interview with Daniel De Castro Ruivo, Co-Founder - Altar.io

Daniel De Castro Ruivo  

Co-Founder, Altar.io

Give us a quick overview of Altar.io. When and how did you begin this journey and what were your motives to be successful in app development?

Altar.io is an award-winning product & software agency based in Lisbon, London and Milan. We create custom software products for entrepreneurs and business leaders looking to revolutionize their industries. We’ve been described as an “extended team of co-founders”. We’re very passionate and rigorous about the work we do.

We are a group of ex-startup founders. I built six startups before Altar.io and the other co-founders did the same.

Whilst running a previous business, I found a very specific problem in procurement; I couldn't find a solution in the market, I started building it myself and at that moment I fell in love with technology. After that all my projects were tech-related.

Five years ago I started Altar.io with my co-founder from a previous venture. My motivation is always building the greatest product ever. Every single day at Altar is a quest for perfection. And we believe all products should be excellent. We may know that true perfection doesn’t exist, yet we wake up every morning with the spark to find it.

We are also obsessed with progress and the idea that tomorrow hides a brand new challenge to explore and conquer.

What is your role in the management and development of Altar.io?

Strategy and product ownership.

Product discipline is the heart of a technology product. It is the orchestrated vision emerging from the strategic intersection of business, UX, and technology.

The product owner is someone that knows so much about the business, UX, and tech that he is in the right position to decide what is a priority, and what is not, in the product pipeline.

Of course, the client is always the product owner, making the critical decisions, but I usually come to all projects as product co-owner and get involved in a project’s decision process bringing a candid opinion, as if the product was my own.

Tell us about your biggest achievement in the industry 

For me, there are two achievements that are equally big.

The first:

We’re proud to say that, among the startup clients we’ve worked with a bold 75% got VC funding and are alive and kicking after two years of life; in an ecosystem where only 0.05% of startups are funded by VCs

The second:

In our five year history, only one collaborator left Altar.io. The achievement is not this fact but rather the achievement is the great company culture that we’ve built.

How do you scheme your pricing model? How do you fix your budget?

Top 1% development talent. This allows us to use small, highly focused, “SWAT-like” teams. This means we can provide top quality at a lower price. We also believe that smaller teams mean less communication interference, making the process much more efficient.

What according to you are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

There are all kinds of recipes for client satisfaction, but for me, it all comes down to a very simple state of mind “Managing every client project like as it was my own business.” and as such my success truly depends on my client’s success.

I keep this moto because I have a very strong indicator that it is working since our clients are our evangelists and some of our clients are our strongest business developers.

That is why we take a few projects at the time. It allows us to make a strong curatorship of our clients, we only work with projects we truly believe in.

How do you update your business system to be in pace with the technological advancements?

We’re active in the Open Source community.

We provide Meetups and conferences about the latest tech innovation.

For every project, we always study the best adequate infrastructure, database tech, backend, frontend, middleware, etc.

Our CTO is constantly studying new ways of doing the same things.

We don’t just stick to RND, whenever we have a project that strongly depends on the right technology decision (for example a project that needs an infrastructure that handles millions of requests per short amount of time) we do what we call a Tech Spike.

A Tech Spike is used to test and benchmark the best option from the industry standards to solve the critical points of a system. Even for complex project spikes, we carry this out in less than a week, and it is a very important step.

What do you think will be the future of software technology?

“The invisible is entangled in an abundance of abstract beauty underneath technology and since the Imagination is the foundation of potential balance between progress and human natural needs, this interdependence will illuminate the flow of tomorrow.

The industry is moving towards a higher place where we constantly see, seamlessly actualize resource-leveling e-services, fungible engage high-quality information. and compellingly maximize excellent experiences. This will lead us to a place where we can use assertively morph holistic tech and uniquely orchestrate innovative web-readiness to continually fabricate frictionless mobile technology that optimizes plug-and-play convergence.”

These two paragraphs were written by an AI model and this is where I think technology is heading.