Sebastien Aube’s Cognitive X Vision
Sebastien Aube has been steadily building his Moncton-based software solutions company Cognitive X since 2006 and now has a skilled team of software development professionals that help bring projects to life for individuals, businesses and organizations.
We spoke with him to find out how things have gone so far and where Cognitive X is headed.
How did Cognitive X get started? What’s your story?
In around 2006 I started doing some consulting for a client directly. This was still operating as Cognitive X but it was just myself as the core, the only developer in the company. I worked a couple of interesting contracts in Moncton and Winnipeg and then for two years I worked in Portland, New Hampshire travelling on a weekly basis. I started that in 2008 and I finished in 2009.
After that I came back home, travelled quite a bit and travelling can be fun but it can also be exhausting so I took a little bit of a leave from working for a few months then worked on a few contracts for some local companies just here and there and helped some startups build software. In 2011, ended up having a contract that I wasn’t going to be able to supply all the code for just by myself so at that point I hired my first employee and incorporated the company as it is now in 2011 in April.
How many do you have on staff now?
We hired our tenth employee just recently so since 2011 we’ve grown steadily up to ten people. Obviously, we’re looking to grow a bit more as well. That’s quite interesting for us. We hired a COO to help us with operations in April of last year. We’ve also added a project manager as well and he came in in June of this year.
What’s your primary focus now?
We’ve built a lot of desktop apps and web apps and whatnot but our specialty in the last few years has been web-enabled mobile apps. So everything that has to do with managing the data in the back-end and providing the rich content for the mobile application as well as building the full mobile application for our clients. We’ve also been doing a lot of apps for startups, so software for service companies that don’t necessarily have the in-house knowledge and capabilities. They sort of hire us as their IT department so that we can go and build the software for them.
How has your focus changed? Have you moved in a specific direction or just expanded?
I think a little bit of both … At first we were doing mostly web applications and interfacing a system that was already existing and things like that so we were adding value to existing applications and now we’re moving towards more of a product development style where we’re building everything from scratch for the customer and then delivering based on their requirements.
Do you take a particular approach when it comes to developing these applications for clients?
We’ve adopted the agile methodology, which really, in the end, is to allow for flexibility within the project. The reason for that is obviously in the past people would spend months trying to figure out what the app will do and trying to plan everything and then start working on it and then six months later, they noticed that ‘okay well this isn’t really what we need anymore.’ … We basically try and deliver something useful every two weeks. That allows us to have a continuous feedback loop with the customer as well as deliver what it is that they actually need because if you were to plan for a feature and only work on that feature three months later, chances are a lot of things have changed within the project that make that feature slightly different. That allows us to have that flexibility. It’s surprising, even established companies, they think they want [one thing] but they realize that they want something different.
Where do most of your clients come from?
I think it’s mostly referrals … A happy client is easy to use as a referral and definitely allows us to grow our business. We haven’t really used traditional marketing methods … but getting good referrals from our clients, that’s definitely been a golden one.
Currently, most of our clients are in Atlantic Canada. Although we have some clients in New York, Long Island, and we also have some clients in Ontario. But most of it is from the Maritimes and Atlantic Canada.
Where are you taking things next?
We want to grow to 25 by 2020. What we’ve been branding ourselves as recently is the sentence “we build mobile and web applications that solve real business problems.” We’re moving towards that branding and we’re also releasing a new website early in the new year to reflect that brand change and we also changed our logo recently.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.