Mify will provide infrastracture code for new online services

By Francesco Morelli

Writing infrastructural code when trying to start an online business from scratch is not the easiest task, but it can be a very generalizable one. Still, it takes some skill to develop the foundation for any kind on digital service. Mify, a start-up launched this month by two Russian programmers who recently moved to London, provides the skill. Innovation Origins spoke to Ivan Chebykin, who, together with co-founder Dmitrii Mokhnatkin, looks to make it easier for online entrepreneurs to get going with their projects.

What is the underlying problem you saw and based your start-up upon?

“From company to company, developers usually are doing the same thing over and over again. Right now, there are a lot of code libraries and technologies to put together to start a project. Mid-size companies create a set of common libraries and ready infrastructure just to write code. The interesting thing is that everyone does it in the same way. They eventually come out to the same way of doing things in terms of coding.

Every application or service basically shares the same foundation as far as code, and Mify is providing that to help other businesses get ahead with their code-writing tasks. In other words, according to Ivan, everyone needs to go to the same point. The infrastructure can be prefabricated and then distributed.

Dutch Coding Company helps companies with digital innovations

It is a familiar problem for many companies: moving along with contemporary digital innovations. Many of them want to make the transition to online, but do not know how.

Is the infrastructure code difficult to write? Is it tedious, is it long, is it boring?

“Yeah, all of this [laughs]. It usually takes time: when you start a project when you’re doing these iterations, the process could cause some problems and code issues along the way, if you’re not exactly familiar with this. So, yeah, it is quite hard to write”.

Why is it so hard?

“There is a lot of stuff written by developers which is free and open source, but you need to set up and configure everything to work together without problems. As the number of users grows, you must ensure the service does not break. For that, you need some forward thinking on architecture, and this kind of knowledge comes with experience. If you try this enough times, you’ll be able to write good architecture from the start, but it takes time and a lot of attempts. That’s why you sometimes see pages not loading correctly or weird stuff popping up”.

So, you’ve got the expertise, you’ve put the hours in, and you can provide a good product from the jump?

Yes.

What’s the vision for the future, and how will Mify evolve?

“Right now, we have a pretty simple structure to help people get started. We have an “image in our head”, but to evolve, first of all, we’ll be talking with people to understand what people really need in this space. This is the first step. Then, as our customers will ask for more and more sophisticated infrastructure, eventually, we want to get to high-level customers. Again, everyone, every company has the same infrastructure”.

For now, since it has just launched, Mify is completely self-funded.

How is Mify appealing and marketable to potential investors?

“It is in the cloud and online development infrastructure market, so it’s appealing right now. We are in talks with some angel investors right now. I think we can grow pretty fast because I see many people having the same problems. We’ll have more goals after we get some solid initial users. This will happen in a few months or so. We are building infrastructure, so we’ll have some “ladder” for scaling up. First, we need to make a good product for a small number of users, then we’ll expand. If you can make a good product for ten users, then you move on to 100 users, and so on. That’s all”.