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Rada Labs is a Norwegian software development company and innovation house. With their team of six, they both develop their own ideas, as well as helping other companies make their ideas come to life. We had a chat with their founders to get to know Rada Labs and their business better:
Could you please introduce Rada Labs and your team?
The core idea behind Rada Labs is to develop and realize ideas. We have developed several of our own ideas, the most successful example being Clikk AS, an app and web app which gives a home to all of your social media profiles, digital information, content, and combines their feeds in one place, everything can easily be shared through one QR-code or link.
We also help customers at all stages in the innovation and the development process, from idea and innovation to development, launch, follow-up and support.
The team consists of four highly skilled internal senior and junior developers with different backgrounds, in addition to their CEO and founder, Rasmus Tyrén and CTO and founder, Dan.
How and why was Rada Labs founded?
The founders of Rada Labs met for the first time in 2017 when they together with Vestfold student society arranged a LAN party and a hackathon for students. Rasmus studied Economics and Dan studied IT, but it did not take long before they found out that they shared the same commitment and interest in technology and innovation. Later that evening they sat down to hatch their ideas together.
Together they came up with Joober, an app that collected all the job listings in Norway in one place.
The boys continued to work on more ideas and acquired smaller customers to pay their way through the university and build knowledge. We lived on a smaller amount of income and bootstrapped the company through the first years. Down the line, they wanted to develop more of their ideas, and decided to found Rada Labs AS as a professional company.
Now Rada Labs has built several apps and software internally, for customers and with partners. We have gotten contracts worth millions of NOK and raised over 10M NOK in funding for our app Clikk.
What problems or challenges did you see in the world that you wanted to solve with Rada Labs?
Rada Labs AS started with a wish to make the recruitment and job-seeking industry better, easier, and more simplistic. We soon discovered that pretty much any product was possible to enhance. Hence our goal became to seek out products and services in markets where we saw the potential to innovate and disrupt technology. That is why we made Clikk – To innovate the social media industry and gather everything in one app.
A lot of services out there that are of bad quality or have bad user experience. We want to do something about it, which is why we specialize in building great quality apps, websites, and software with top-class user interfaces and experience.
What’s the biggest impact you have seen on both your customers and the industry you work in?
During the pandemic more and more businesses and organizations had to go over to fully digital solutions. This led to a change in consumer behavior, where consumers expect good digital solutions with a good user experience. To stay competitive businesses now need to be more digital than ever and have good solutions to meet the consumer’s needs. This has led to an opportunity for Rada Labs.
Another big impact is coming from the number of apps and web solutions out there, and the quality in which the users have gotten used to with i.e. Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. This leads to higher expectations from the users, so naturally we are in a highly competitive market.
What challenges have you faced along your journey and what are your biggest learnings?
We found that we had to iterate a lot of our products and services along the way. One of our biggest learnings is when we develop our projects, we can technically accomplish almost anything, but it is all about the right timing for the product.
We have learned that with a good project management strategy we can lower project estimations by hundreds of hours. We have also worked a lot with the effectuation of programming hours, in the areas where we are skilled our developers now develop the same feature in one-half or one-third of the time they did a year ago. Our customers like this because it decreases the prices.
How do you work with innovation within your organization at large?
At Rada Labs AS we love using user-driven innovation methods. In one of our projects, we started with arranging a big hackathon event for the customer, where we invited 100 of their potential users, who competed over a weekend, to come up with the best app idea which solved the problem. Rada Labs hired some of the members of the winning team and started developing the app. We believe that users developing what the users want is one of the best procedures to come up with really good products.
When we are developing apps and services, we are lean-focused where we are using agile development methods. We mostly use our variant of scrum which has led to really good results. We found that adapting and making our versions of agile approaches worked very well, and because no projects are alike, the best method is given from the project and the understanding of the vision of the product.
Rada Labs AS is team-driven and the synergies and incentives created as a group are what drive our innovation forward. We encourage creativity in Rada Labs, and we are doing everything we can to facilitate creativity. For us it is important to have fun at work, we believe that our employees will be more focused and produce the best solutions if they’re having fun and get continuous breaks.
What’s in the pipeline that you’re working on? Anything exciting we should know about?
There are a lot of things in our pipeline at the moment. We are helping one streaming provider with rebranding and making a whole new innovative web service, we are building and improving several eCommerce solutions for some retail businesses and we are iterating and managing the apps and services we have already built.
As we in Rada Labs have a great passion for sustainability and ideal projects, we are seeking out a governmental contract for a digital solution within the social part of sustainability. We also have some exciting partnerships in the pipeline.
Soon we will also launch a crowdfunding campaign for our app Clikk via Folkeinvest. After that we are going to commercialize Clikk in the Nordics, we also have very exciting partnerships upcoming in Clikk AS. We believe that we can bring a big value to many people, from influencers to normal people and for big and SM businesses like our friends at Epicenter. Try Clikk: https://clikk.me/register
Why did you choose to work from Epicenter?
As Rada Labs wanted to expand, we seek out innovation hubs across the Nordic countries and want to connect with networks in tech and innovation. We did research and gathered opinions from co-workers and other founders, as a result, Epicenter was the top-ranking choice in Oslo. Epicenter is also a great gateway for us to expand to Stockholm and Helsinki in the future. We are more than pleased with our welcome here and see this as a good foundation to grow our business, learn and expand! We are looking forward to getting to know all the people and companies here.
Contact details Rada Labs:
Want to know more about Rada Labs? Visit their website or contact them via Clikk.
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