People come about with entrepreneurship in their veins and they take the challenge to make our world a better place. Be it in IoT, Cloud, IT or even Mobile Apps, they make their mark on the business world with their creativity, passion and vision.
Likewise, Noah Labhart, Founder of Touchtap, has entrepreneurship in his veins. Even more so, he enjoys seeing lives impacted by creative technology and elegant solutions. Thus, when he saw the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives with mobile apps, he took the plunge into starting his own native app development agency based in Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas.
Touchtap provides iOS and Android native app development services for digital startups, creative agencies and businesses. They also provide front end web development, back-end development and technical services to support the apps that they build. Since its inception, Touchtap has built and deployed 20 apps and platforms across the gamut of verticals, and have since grown into a multi-member, fully distributed team.
Touchtap Started with One Goal: Build Great Apps
Nowadays, there’s no excuse for a company to not have a mobile app. In the same light, it’s mandatory for companies to build something robust, user-friendly and fully functional, if they are to gain traction. When they do this, they have an intimate, direct line to their customers via their smart phone. It’s hard to predict the future, but there is no doubt that mobile is here for the long haul. Anything we do manually can and will be transformed by our smartphones – from turning on the lights to starting the car to opening our garage door. That’s what Noah recognized and ventured his vision into Touchtap with the sole goal of building great mobile apps. As time has passed, this vision hasn’t changed, but has matured.
An Entrepreneur Who Took Mobile Apps to make People’s Lives Better
Architecting solutions has been Noah’s passion throughout his business journey. Having worked in numerous lead roles over the past 12+ years, he gained tremendous experience in small to large scale organizations and implementations – from multiple web applications to utilities to mobile apps.
With Touchtap, he continues to build upon his passion for software by designing and developing mobile solutions that impact people and their organizations. Outside of creating, Noah maintains a personal-professional life balance by taking care of his family and home. “When I’m not being a geek or reading old calculus books, I can be found chasing after my beautiful bride, being chased by my kids, enjoying a good cup of coffee, playing my guitar(s) or being outdoors”.
‘Four Ds’ that makes Touchtap Unique
Every project that in the Touchtap pipeline goes through a four-phase process (or the Four Ds, as they call it internally). The first part of the process is Discovery. They offer a discovery service apart from development services. It’s a multi-session approach where they focus on and learn about the client’s business vision and goals. The goals of this phase are to ensure alignment, and to give new clients insight into Touchtap, the process and the marketplace. Once Discovery has been completed, the next step is Design, where they develop a project’s aesthetic and architectural design. After that, the team starts into Development, where they utilize agile project management methodology, developing in two-week sprints and executing feedback cycles before moving on to the next sprint. Finally, Deployment takes place where they push the app live for market consumption.
Keeping Client’s Vision and Business Goals at Top
Touchtap focuses on two primary things – strategic alignment and user experience. They deem it paramount to understand their client’s vision and business goals so they can effectively partner with them and build their product to meet those targets.
In addition to understanding client’s vision and goals, they focus on user experience and urge their clients not to compromise in this area. Each decision they make on a feature set during discovery and design is first vetted through the lenses for a quality user experience. If something isn’t going to be supportive to the end user’s experience, they explore alternative solutions to improve the design with their client.
Meeting and Exceeding Budgetary Expectations
The Touchtap team is very attentive to their clients’ business needs. As such, they immediately get in the co-pilot seat. With each new project, the team is excited over how the product will impact their client’s organization or customers. Moreover, the team manages their project scope and project budget very closely, meeting or exceeding budgetary expectations. By making a low-to-high estimates based on an assessment project features and risk, meeting project deadlines are as simple as tracking numbers. At Touchtap, they are experts at estimation.
Overcoming Struggles while Being Prepared for the Future
Like every startup, Touchtap faced some challenges in terms of keeping up with demand, from which they learned to keep their development network close at hand and to be masters in communication with clients. By doing so, they learned early on how to manage client expectations. These early lessons are the foundation on which Noah developed a more robust discovery process. The Touchtap team always aims at strengthening the company culture of transparency and understanding before executing.