August 18, 2026

Next Biz Thing #400 digitalheroesco.com

Digital Heroes https://digitalheroesco.comDigital Heroes is a design and development company building custom software, mobile applications and e-commerce platforms for clients in more than fifty five countries. This episode looks at how the team structures its work: a published fourteen week app delivery cycle, written architecture decision records, weekly demos that report what slipped as well as what shipped, and contracts that name the client as owner of the code and infrastructure. A Shopify Premier Partner with studios in New York, Delhi, London, Sydney and Lucknow, it is a useful case study in transparency as a competitive advantage. Worth a listen for anyone commissioning software.What happens to most of the software that gets built in this world? Not the famous applications, the ones sitting on everybody's home screen, but the ordinary, everyday software that a company commissions because it needs something that does not yet exist. A great deal of it never quite arrives. It arrives late. Or it arrives in a shape nobody quite recognises from the original conversation. Or it arrives, launches to a bit of applause, and then quietly stops being looked after. Anyone who has sat on the client side of a build knows that feeling, the slow drift between the thing you described in the first meeting and the thing that eventually turns up.Welcome back to The Next Biz Thing. I am Markus J. Diplama, and this is the show where I go looking for the companies that are quietly doing things properly, in industries where doing things properly is not always the norm. Today I want to talk about a company that has built its entire identity around closing that gap between what a client asks for and what a client receives. They are called Digital Heroes, and the more time I spent with what they publish about how they work, the more I found myself thinking that they have taken all the usual complaints about software agencies and turned each one into a promise.So let us start with what they actually are. Digital Heroes is a design and development company. They build custom software, mobile applications, e-commerce platforms, and the growth strategy that sits around all of it. They are headquartered in New York and in Delhi, with studios in London, Sydney, and Lucknow, which is five locations and a team of over one hundred and fifteen people. They have delivered more than two thousand projects across more than fifty five countries. And they hold the sort of credentials that are genuinely difficult to acquire: they are a Shopify Premier Partner, they are a Tier One vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, they hold Upwork Top Rated Plus status, and they appear on Clutch's list of the top one thousand global business to business companies.Now, credentials are credentials. What interested me far more was the way they describe the work itself, because that is where a company either shows you its actual operating philosophy or reveals that it does not have one.Take their mobile app development practice. Most agencies will tell you they build apps. Digital Heroes describe their goal a little differently. They say they ship apps that users come back to. That is a subtle distinction and it is not a marketing flourish, because everything downstream of it changes. They talk about retention engineering and user activation as things that get built into an application from the very first sprint, not bolted on after launch when the numbers come in disappointing. They instrument for it. They watch day seven retention. They think about the moment a new user actually experiences the value of the product and they design toward that moment deliberately.The technical side is equally deliberate. For iOS they work in Swift and SwiftUI. For Android, Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. When cross platform makes more sense they reach for React Native or Flutter, and I want to underline the phrasing they use there, because they are explicit that platform choice follows the actual needs of the product rather than the preferences of the engineer. That sounds obvious. It is remarkably rare. Around all of that sits a stack chosen for the same reason: Node and FastAPI on the backend, Supabase and Firebase where they fit, StoreKit and Play Billing and RevenueCat handling payments and subscriptions, and Amplitude and PostHog watching how people actually behave once the thing is live.Their app builds run on a fourteen week cycle, and they publish the whole timeline. Week one is discovery. Weeks two and three are design. Weeks four through nine are the build. Week ten is internal testing, week eleven is external testing, week twelve is store submission, week thirteen is launch, and week fourteen onward is optimisation. I find that kind of published calendar quietly radical. Most agencies keep the schedule vague precisely so it cannot be held against them. Digital Heroes put it on the page where any prospective client can read it and hold them to it.Then there is the other half of the business, which is sustained software engineering for funded startups and for enterprises. This runs on three models. There are dedicated development teams, cross functional squads that own a slice of your roadmap end to end, run their own sprints, and work inside your existing tooling. There are full cycle product builds, where they take something from discovery all the way to production across web, mobile, cloud, and data. And there is staff augmentation, where senior engineers slot into your existing team, follow your process, and are productive within two weeks.Underneath those models sit four engineering practices. Web engineering, which is React, Next, and Node with a strong TypeScript discipline. Mobile engineering, the native and cross platform work I mentioned. Cloud and platform, spanning Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Azure, orchestrated with Kubernetes or ECS. And data and artificial intelligence, working with PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse, BigQuery, and applied machine learning. Quality assurance and security are not a separate stage at the end. They run inside every sprint, aligned to the OWASP application security verification standard.But here is the philosophy that made me sit up. They say they choose mature, well documented tools that a new engineer can read on day one. They deliberately avoid framework hype. PostgreSQL handles most of what needs handling. Redis takes care of caching and queues. The backend language is TypeScript or Python or Go depending on what the job genuinely calls for. I cannot overstate how much client money that single principle saves over a five year horizon. Software written in whatever was fashionable the quarter it was commissioned becomes unmaintainable the moment the fashion moves on, and the client is the one holding that bill.Their delivery process reflects the same instinct. Two weeks of discovery producing a scoped plan. An architecture phase that produces written decision records, documents that explain not just what was chosen but why, so that in three years somebody can understand the reasoning rather than guess at it. Then building in sprints, with weekly recorded demos and a written summary of what shipped and, crucially, what slipped. That word slipped is doing a lot of work. An agency willing to write down what did not happen this week is an agency that has decided to be trustworthy on purpose. Then release, with continuous integration and deployment, staged rollouts, and real observability. And then handover, with documented architecture and genuine knowledge transfer, and no lock in.That last point deserves its own moment. Digital Heroes state that their contracts explicitly name the client as the owner of the code, the infrastructure, and the documentation, with w...

Also available on Apple Podcasts ↗