Late one night in 2003, bolstered by the motivation of one of the uni duo’s heartbreak, Adam Fitzgerald and Matt Lambie devised a plan to move into a shared house and start a web development company.
Late one night in 2003, bolstered by the motivation of one of the uni duo’s heartbreak, Adam Fitzgerald and Matt Lambie devised a plan to move into a shared house and start a web development company.
The genesis of Frontier Group reads like a movie script and the company’s open-plan West Perth office is the perfect setting for a story like this.
It is sprinkled with Frontier’s 20 staff who Skype into client meetings, write code for websites and applications and go about their business, taking hold of a piece of the new digital pie.
Eight years after it was established, the company’s repertoire has grown and, at the beginning of this year, Frontier tapped into application development for mobile devices.
They launched the Menu Book app in March, which quickly climbed iTunes’ popularity charts to feature on the site’s mobile app homepage. The app helps users locate and navigate to nearby restaurants.
“It’s had 10,000 downloads, which is huge,” Mr Fitzgerald said.
It is a quick turnaround given the company only started developing the app in January and is in line with the company’s business model of short delivery times as opposed to the more traditional large-spec documents and long project timelines.
“We typically organise it into sprints … having shorter iterations means we can actually get to where the customer wants,” Mr Lambie said.
“One week into the project a customer will change their mind and we don’t think that is something to be criticised, they shouldn’t be penalised for getting a better understanding of the problem they are trying to solve and traditional software development methods meant they would be.”
The business partners said they intentionally started the business in a low-key manner to make sure of their skills.
“I think in a lot of ways the Perth web industry didn’t know about us until we were big enough to make a splash,” Mr Lambie said.
With a lot of Frontier staff having a personal interest in mobile apps, that side of the business has grown in a similar way.
“We didn’t want to go into it and say, ‘hey look at us, we’re awesome’, and then get hit with a challenge we couldn’t have met, you only get one opportunity at a first impression,” Mr Lambie said.
Frontier used an international standard of coding for its web and mobile applications known as Ruby and Mr Fitzgerald said the next stage of growth for Frontier would be to take advantage of the international opportunities for projects in line with that coding.
“At the beginning of this year we started doing a lot more promotion in the United States, a lot of our competitors are there … that is a way of us starting to generate inquiries, to dip our toes in the water and find out if it is worthwhile going that way,” Mr Fitzgerald said.
