FAMOUS.TEAM: a full-cycle digital agency
A studio that builds digital products end to end.
The usual way it goes on the market is this. You order the work from an agency where some of it is done in house and the rest is passed further down the chain. Or you put together several contractors: one draws, another writes the code, a third runs the ads. Either way you are the one left assembling the product out of pieces made by people who never spoke to each other.
We work differently: we take the whole task. We work out what actually needs to be built, decide how it should look and behave, write the code, launch it and stay with you afterwards. In the usual language of the market, FAMOUS.TEAM is a full-cycle digital agency: research, design, frontend, backend, infrastructure and support all live in one team.
The difference between the two is simple. When a product is cut up between contractors, everyone is responsible for their own piece and nobody for the whole. The designer handed over the mockup, the developer built it his own way, support answers from a script. Formally everyone did their job, the product went nowhere, and there is no one to ask.
We are an engineering team, and we answer for what gets built: the architecture, the code, the interfaces, the infrastructure and the way all of it works together. We can also speak any of the other languages around a product - user behaviour, marketing, unit economics, support. If we see that someone's decision is hurting the product, we will say so plainly and explain why. The decision stays yours; our part of the job is that the technical side is done right.
What we do
Websites and web services.
From a company website to a customer account area or an internal system your staff work in every day. Everything that lives in a browser and has to hold real load, not just look good in a mockup.
Mobile apps.
Apps for phones - for iOS and Android at once, from a single codebase where the task allows it.
Blockchain and Web3.
Wallets, exchanges, staking, network explorers, services on smart contracts. This is our deepest area, and the section on industries below shows why.
Automating the routine.
Bots for messengers and CRM, business process automation, and analytics that shows what is really happening with the product rather than pretty charts for their own sake.
Artificial intelligence where it belongs.
We build models into products that already work: search that understands a human question, handling of incoming requests, parsing documents. Not for the sake of a fashionable word, but where it takes work off people.
Testing an idea before the big spend.
We build MVPs - a working version of the product that lets you check demand in weeks rather than a year.
A view from outside.
Audits of infrastructure, code, interfaces and security, IT consulting and business consulting - for when you already have a team and need the decision to come from outside it.
The full list of directions is on the services page.
How we work
We start from the problem, not from the specification.
Clients arrive with different kinds of task: some with a problem, some with an idea. Working out the solution from there is our job. At Silent Notary we were called in to extend a service that had stalled. We studied the market, talked to a business audience, reframed the task, defended the new framing to the owners and rewrote the service from scratch.
Preparing a project this way looks slightly longer. In exchange it saves money on rework, time on arguments about what was meant, and people who were not tied up in unnecessary work. Time and people are the same money. And it is simply more honest: we do not take on building something we believe will not solve your problem.
We test demand before development.
If you are not certain about the product and not ready to commit to years of development, demand can be checked in advance - on a small working version rather than on a slide deck. That is how SignItNow came about: we were running the technical side of an advertising campaign together with the client's marketing director, talking to entrepreneurs, and those conversations showed that certifying a document and signing a document are different needs - and nobody was serving the second one. The product grew out of that, not out of someone else's hypothesis.
Sometimes the check ends with the conclusion that the thing should not be built. We hand back that answer too: it is unwelcome, but it costs one small version of the product rather than a year of development and a launch nobody was waiting for.
We do not break what already works.
New parts are built alongside the running product rather than in place of it: SignItNow became an add-on over the Silent Notary API rather than a second service from scratch. When Silent Notary moved, users kept their accounts and were told in advance. At Ubix.Exchange the system could not be stopped even for a few minutes - other people's money and other people's reputation were on the line, and the update went through without downtime.
Updating without downtime costs more than an ordinary release: it needs backward compatibility, a rollback plan and switching over in stages. We name that line of the budget before the work starts rather than discovering it halfway through, together with the suggestion to "just take the service down for a night".
We hold the full depth of the product.
Frontend, backend, design and infrastructure - inside one team. Nothing gets stuck at the seam between contractors, and nobody explains that the problem is on somebody else's side.
That does not mean we take on everything. If a task needs a skill we do not have, we will say so in the first conversation and point you to who does have it. We will not learn it at your expense.
Where we are strong
Our strongest suit is seeing a product as a whole.
There is no such thing as "just code": code written without understanding why a person came ends up as a set of buttons nobody presses. There is no such thing as "just design": a beautiful mockup never tested on people becomes an expensive picture. There is no such thing as "just an ad campaign": traffic sent to a raw product burns the budget and the reputation at once. A product is one connected thing, and a decision in one part of it changes all the others.
That is why much of our work is not about technology but about how people behave. Why someone abandons the sign-up on the third step. What they are actually afraid of losing. Which action they will take for free, and which one they will pay for. At Silent Notary that kind of analysis produced certification without registration, a certificate carrying the client's own brand and a monthly free quota that renews itself - none of which was in the original brief, and all of which defined the product.
The same applies inside development. We know how "let's just rewrite it all from scratch" ends, what a change to a live project really costs, and why an agreement to "finish it later" is never kept.
As for the areas where this experience has been built up:
Blockchain and fintech
The densest of them. The Ubix.Network chain was already running, but the services around it lived apart: different technologies, different design, different approaches to updates. We brought them to common standards, a common interface, common technology and common support. Some needed no more than a new interface, some had to be reworked completely, and part of it we built from scratch. That is how the wallet, the exchange, the staking platform, the network explorer and the ecosystem analytics came together. Separately, two blockchain document services: Silent Notary and SignItNow.
Online education
Course platforms, student account areas, selling and granting access.
Games
In-game item stores and storefronts for gaming platforms.
Retail and services
Customer account areas, storefronts, subscriptions and everything around them.
All the work is in the portfolio.
Ways to work with us
You can start small and go further, exactly as far as it turns out to be useful to you.
A single task.
Send a specification or book a meeting, and we will do it. It is the shortest way to get acquainted: we get to know your product, you see how the team works, and the next decision comes easier. The task can be anything - an account area, an integration, a bot, a move to new infrastructure, an addition to what you already have.
There is no product yet.
Start with an MVP: a working version that shows the market's reaction in weeks rather than a year. Or take one direction in full - a website, an app, a corporate system - and look at the result before planning the rest.
The product already exists and runs.
Outsourcing - you hand over a direction in full and we answer for the deadlines, the scope and the handover. Outstaffing - you have a team but it is not enough: a deadline is burning, a key person left, or you need a rare skill for a few months rather than on the payroll forever. An audit - something is going wrong and the cause is unclear: we look at the infrastructure, the code, the interfaces and the security and hand back an analysis with priorities - what to fix now, what can wait, and what does not need rewriting at all.
Still undecided.
IT consulting - choosing technologies, architecture and contractors. Business consulting - what to automate first and whether it will pay for itself at all.
And if it is not clear which of these is yours, just describe the task in your own words. An enquiry costs nothing and commits you to nothing: we will work it out together and tell you what we would do in your place - even if in the end you work with someone else.