The history of Doubletapp

6 min readMay 25, 2021

5 years ago, three graduates of UrFU got the idea to make learning English easier by writing an app for a language school. What came of it — in the story of Sergey Anchutin, CEO and one of the founders of Doubletapp.

Introduction

My name is Sergey Anchutin, I am the CEO of Doubletapp. In this article I will talk about starting a company.

I was born and raised in Kurgan, studied Olympiad mathematics, and in 2009 I entered the Faculty of Mathematics and Mechanics of UrFU. At the Mattech, we met Anton Ryabykh and Viktor Krasnov, who later became the co-founders of Doubletapp.

Our first client

We launched our first joint projects even before Doubletapp. The idea to unite and open a company was in the air. The decisive period was the fall of 2014.

In September, I started learning English at the federal network of schools ALIBRA SCHOOL. And in November he attended the FailConf conference. One of the speakers was the founder of EasyTen, an English learning app with daily reminders and repetitions. Even at the conference, the thought that it was possible to implement an application with similar mechanics to improve the learning process at Alibra School hit my head.

In the educational process of ALIBRA SCHOOL, the methodology of spaced repetitions was used: the groups of the studied words should be repeated 7 times and the frequency should be gradually increased. This was done using cardboard cards that you need to cut out yourself, and the progress was recorded manually on separate sheets. This approach was tiring and not convenient for students.

A mobile application would automate this process and make learning more convenient for students and teachers. Anton and Victor supported the idea.

Anton already had extensive experience in Android development, Victor was a generalist and could quickly learn programming for iOS, while I am a professional backend developer in Python. The team for creating the product was completed.

When we wrote the first commercial offer in our life, we checked every word, read and changed the text three times, worrying that no one would answer.

The game was worth the candle — representatives of ALIBRA SCHOOL answered! They also thought about automating the educational process, and they had already created an experimental version of the application, which is a small dictionary of words, which, when the application was first started, for a very long time pumped out the entire database at a time.

At the end of 2014, we were invited to participate in the school’s tender to create a full working version of the application. We decided not to miss this opportunity.

To demonstrate our abilities, we implemented a demo version of an Android application, made a detailed commercial offer and began to wait.

At the beginning of 2015, we learned that we had won.

We consider the day of registration of an individual entrepreneur created to conclude an agreement with Alibra as the day of foundation of Doubletapp — February 17, 2015.

The first version of the application was released in the fall of 2015. And Alibra School remains our client to this day.

Where did the name Doubletapp come from?

The name for our company was invented by Anton. For a long time we went through different options, looking for something related to mobile applications. On August 10, 2015 Anton proposed to call himself DoubleTap. But those domains were busy, and it dawned on me to add a second “p”, playing with the association with the word “app”. When developing the logo, I decided that it is better to make “t” not uppercase, but lowercase. This is how the name Doubletapp appeared.

Positioning and further development of the company

Having received our first large commercial project, we wanted to develop the company and receive new orders. Mobile applications were in demand, and we positioned ourselves exactly as an application development studio.

In 2016, we got acquainted with the Devvela studio, which implemented projects for clients from the USA. For 5 years we have done 9 joint projects with them. In the same year, we started recruiting other developers part-time.

At the beginning of 2017, we hired the first full-time developer, and six months later we rented our first office. Front-end developers appeared and we were finally able to develop a full-fledged website. By the end of the year there were already 11 of us.

2018 was marked by the fact that we hired a designer, started doing machine learning projects (both for customers and internal experiments) and moved to an office 3 times more.

The company grew, as did the number of projects. In 2019, for the first time, we took part in the Tagline Awards, the largest digital competition in Eastern Europe and Russia. We presented 2 projects to the jury and won prizes with both.

In 2020, Doubletapp launched his course on development for Android at the UrFU mathematical department. Many graduates of the course became our trainees, in total we took 13 people for an internship this year.

2018 was marked by the fact that we hired a designer, started doing machine learning projects (both for customers and internal experiments) and moved to an office 3 times more.

Current state of the company

Today Doubletapp is a full-cycle international production studio. Our clients are startups and large companies in Russia, Europe and the USA.

We can completely lead the development of a digital product: from studying competitors, writing technical specifications, creating a design to developing, publishing in stores, communicating with Apple technical support, operating on servers, setting up monitoring, etc.

Our expertise includes:

Machine learning — neural networks, computer vision and other tasks.
Mobile development for iOS and Android.
Web development for high-load services and chat bots.
Design and design of interfaces.
Create 3D and Flat animations for videos and digital products.

In 2020, we have grown by more than 1.5 times. As of the end of the year, the company employs 33 people.

And we are not planning to stop.