Arkuda Digital: “We Want To Create A Digital Smart Environment.”

Describe Arkuda Digital in 50 words or less.

Arkuda Digital provides a Media Network Solution toolkit. Based on our media network SDK, we have developed several applications that enable your phone or tablet to perform as a key for sharing, streaming and controlling media content such as photos, videos and audio within any local network.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dreams rather than someone else’s?

We wanted to find an elegant solution for smart devices implementing the concept of sharing content. It had to be easy, fast, convenient and beautiful. If you are looking for something and you aren’t happy with the existing tools, you need to create your own. So, we created our application, and that was the only way to pursue our dream 🙂

Arkuda Digital is becoming a household name for new technologies fastly. Our aim is to proffer solutions for specific technological problems you never even knew existed. We market wireless media solutions to consumer electronics ODM/OEMs, cable and telecom operators as well as IPTV and STB solution providers and consumers. Our SDK media network allows manage, control and playback multimedia contents on various digital electronic devices and retrieving internet media. It is specifically engineered and programmed to meet the demands of software application producers as well as developers of embedded software for networked UPnP/DLNA/Allshare devices.

7 years from now: How did your startup change the world?

Today everyone stores their music, videos and photos on different platforms, but cannot play it everywhere. It is our vision to see music being played and controlled in the kitchen and at the same time movies being played in the car. In other words, we want to create a digital smart environment.

In the past years, we’ve seen a large scale influx of new gadgets that will help build a smart environment. With our products we will create an ecosystem where entertainment lovers can enjoy their media contents independently of wherever it’s stored or where they want to play it.

It is our dream to ensure that 7 years from now you have totally unlimited freedom and access to your media world. Our media sharing solutions will allow you to get easy access to stream, share, manage and enjoy your personal multimedia contents like pictures, music and videos through home Wi-Fi network or/and Ethernet.

Describe your typical working day from coming to the office to leaving it.

Productivity, passion and responsibility. These are our everyday working components. We like what we do, and this is reflected in everyone’s attitude in our working assignments. The day usually starts with a short status meeting with a team, mapping the daily activities, finding solutions if there is a problem, and planning the required steps to accomplish different tasks. Each team member is taking individual responsibility for their area of expertise, while the whole team is contributing to the common goals.

Despite the fact that we work as a team, each team member is free to work independently from a location of his or her choice. The modern ways of different communication channels (skype, google hangouts, calls, emails) allow us to stay in touch easily.
We take on short breaks every hour to ensure better productivity and of course, we consider sporting activities as an essential aspect of our life, every member of the team try to find time for 2-3 sports weekly.

In what ways do you measure your success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

The key to success is a happy customer, of course. We are very passionate about our users, and the fact that they are enjoying our product is very important to us.

Today we have over 2.5 million installations of our applications on Apple’s App Store and Google Play markets.
We have taken on B2B projects with several Fortune 500 companies in various parts of the world and we constantly update our software to meet the ever-increasing demands of the internet world. All this however does not mark the peak for us. We have future projections and we are constantly preparing for future demands for products and digital solutions.

Already pivoted? Did customers use the services like you imagined it in the beginning?

When Arkuda Digital started as a B2B company, we developed our first app as a model for a proposal to our corporate clients. Imagine our surprise when individual consumers started downloading and using the app for personal purposes. This was our pivotal point and we consequently had to effect lots of changes in our ArkMC app in order to meet the users’ expectations: improve app usability, change the user interface to ensure its comfortability. So far, we’ve developed two other apps; the MCPlayer and MyAudioStream.

As stated earlier, today we have recorded over 480 thousand active users of our apps.

Bootstrapped or financed: What fuels your startup now and what will in the future?

We’ll say our start-up was 100% bootstrapped because, at the first stage, we were lucky enough to find a good number of company-clients. We took this projects seriously, working hard for them while at the same time improving the quality of our own services. Our team started out really small but we had abundant experience in international project implementation for wireless media network solutions and a clear vision of the immense value we could bring to our clients.

We have developed our networking software from scratch as a custom-made package where the integration layer sits on top of the processing engine and offers an efficient and reliable tool for porting to any platform. We offer maximum flexibility and interoperability, so that R&D processes are under control, saves money & time to guarantee our users enjoy all the features offered.

Furthermore, we have several monetization strategies with our apps in place. So, our regular cash-flow covers all ongoing activities and R&D processes. What’s more, in our bid to improve robustness, possibilities, services for customers, we have a road-map for media network SDK and apps in place.

What were the biggest challenges you faced building your startup?

The biggest challenge we faced during our build-up period was with the issue of resources. We wanted to grow our team but had no resources to achieve it, we had the intention of getting a national coverage but our budget did not cover that. We had to work as hard as we could to make things happen. Thankfully we found the right set of people to help out and we got here without ever having to have any investor or do any serious fundraising.

With ferocious competition and a booming trend to build new companies: How do you make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle?

We have strong faith in our products; we are confident with the job we do in our niche of media network wireless solutions. Similarly, we believe that to be customer oriented is a great way to succeed in the competitive space. We get lots of feedback from our customers, listen to what they all have to say and from this we learn more of their needs which we aim to meet.

Furthermore, we have trust in our team and we believe in each other’s strength as well as our collective ability to meet the demands of our customers in a competitive market. And finally, we strongly believe in the business of acquiring more knowledge and learning new things, so each member of the team has to learn something new to contribute to the company products and services.

What are you planning for future?

We have no intentions of relying on our successes and relaxing our efforts; we have such great plans for the future. Following the installation of our two new apps (MCPlayer and ArkMC), we’ll be presenting our desktop solutions for Mac and Windows & add more interoperability features in our solutions.

Our main objective is to transform your home or workplace into a smart media environment where your phone or tablet becomes a kind of Swiss-knife for streaming, sharing and control of audio, photo and video from your storages devices and players.

What do you look for in team members?

At Arkuda Digital, we strongly believe that creativity, autonomy and professional skill are important to solve complex problems and find solutions. We are creating an innovative product, so there should be always a space for thinking outside the box and passion in what we do.

When you are bright-eyed, working hard does not become a problem, instead it becomes pleasurable. Hence, we always welcome brilliant minds who we could collaborate with and inspire the team to doing greater things every day.

Why would a talent join your team?

Arkuda Digital provides the possibility to create products that influence the lives of many people, to challenge yourself.
We need people who can stand up to the challenge we bring to the table and proffer solutions to various problems. We are always looking for talented people to join our team. And we believe our team is one which anyone will easily feel welcomed to as we create a healthy and lively working environment with a flexible timetable. In other words, everyone with a strong desire to create, support, promote and develop the company product will love working with us!

What was your most memorable moment so far?

Every new user that installs the app or reviews app, published article about the company or its products and create those memorable details. These and much more moments give us a new reason to support our users, develop something new and add that long-awaited feature. For every new innovation we have that we believe will serve as an improvement to our product, we have no hesitation in implementing them as we are proud of our users and we know that no matter the accolades and praise we get; this is just the beginning of our business journey.

We are constantly on the lookout for more moments like these because we believe that the more the highs we experience in our lives and businesses, the more we’ll be able to achieve.

What advice would you give fellow founders for their startup?

We do not let praises get to our heads. We believe it’s best not to give yourself too much credit when times are good and not to blame yourself too much when times are bad. There are some our advices.

First of all, a startup is a business, not a hobby. Sharing knowledge and experience is good, but shouldn’t take a lot of your time.
The goal of a startup is to become a successful business rather than get investment. Be ready to work really hard all the time.
Troubles don’t mean that a company doesn’t have perspectives. Each company meets challenges on their way. Learn lessons and go ahead toward your goals. Don’t give up and believe in yourself.

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