Today we’d like to introduce you to John Norkas.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
As a young boy, I ran many different “companies” growing up. Whether it was mowing yards or selling candy and snacks at school, I’ve had an entrepreneurial drive my whole life. At 23, I was promoted to run and manage the family chemical company I had been working for since age 13. During this time, I learned so many valuable lessons that would guide me through my career. In 2010, I was introduced to software development, while working for the Department of Defense. I was hired to help design, develop, and support a bio-metrics platform using cellular for military operations. After completing my deployment to Afghanistan in 2012, supporting the Army on the first cellular platform used in combat, I began writing a business proposal to start my own company. After several iterations and many hours of writing, I contacted several former executives that I had worked for to hear my plan and provide me some guidance. After compiling all their input, I decided that my company would focus on software development, as that is where my passion lied. It took about 6 months of planning and many long hours of prep, but after much hard work, Wildcat Software Design was founded in Oct 2014. The first year, we focused on building custom software solutions for a few strategic clients. We soon learned that we needed to change direction to better accommodate a wider client base. This is when we began to offer our website, mobile app, and digital marketing services. In order to prevent a learning curve, at our customer’s expense, we decided to partner with vendors who could assist us in providing scalability and a proven history of delivering quality products on time. Finding a quality partner actually turned out to be much harder than we expected. Even with our knowledge in the industry the first few partners we had failed miserably and almost caused us to go bankrupt. After discussions with other major players in the industry, we were able to find true partners who valued our business as much as theirs. Since then, our growth has been fantastic and our company and partnerships are stronger than ever! It’s been an amazing adventure to date and we look forward to the future with true excitement.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Finding good partners was a difficult task. As a small firm, we can only hire so many in-house people, so we have to rely on partners to increase workload. In the beginning, we had two instances that nearly bankrupted us. However, through the bad, we actually ended up better than if it had not happened. Our new partners are amazing and they have proven to us time and again that they truly value is success and growth.
Wildcat Software Design – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
We are a small software development company, who specializes in building websites, mobile apps, and digital marketing services (SEO, Social Media Management, Ad-word campaigns, Reputation Management, etc). Our specialty is to create the marketing strategy first, then build our customer’s website or app around that strategy. This philosophy has proven very successful and our customers have gained anywhere from 15% to 45% increase in sales within a years time. The key is, from a marketing perspective, to build a persuasive website or app by understanding first WHO is visiting your site and then WHY they are there. One of the biggest website conversion issues companies have is delivering the wrong information to the wrong visitors. Because of this understanding from our research, we create content that answers the visitors’ questions, lay it out to target to the correct audience, and deliver the content in the best medium.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The launch of our first mobile app “XfuelLive”! XfuelLive is a website and mobile app platform to unite competitors, venues, and fans, where you create event local events in your area. They also specialize in racing events, such as Truck and Tractor Pulls, that provides Live Scoring during the event, as well as Driver Profiles and Past Event Results. It was a long road to complete the first phase, to get published, but helping the customer go live was an amazing and fulfilling experience. Features that will be coming in the next year will be: selling tickets, (Driver, Event, League, & XfuelLive)) sponsorship opportunities, new race types, etc. This is truly an amazing platform, with endless opportunities, and the sky is the limit for them to succeed and we are proud to be involved with them!
Pricing:
- Websites starting at $4,780
- SEO 5 Local Keywords starting at $599 per month
- Reputation Management $25 per month
- Social Media Management starting at $627 (20 hours) per month
- Managed Digital Advertising (Ad-Words) starting at $350
- Content Management (1 Article) starting at $75 per month
- Mobile Apps average starting price $60k-100k (time & material basis)
- Logo Design starting at $550
Contact Info:
- Website: www.wildcat-sds.com
- Phone: 813-530-6881
- Email: [email protected]
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