Executive Voice

TH-EY celebrates growing web and mobile app development firm from 2 freelancers to over 25 employees in less than 5 years

London, United Kingdom

TH-EY was founded in London by two entrepreneurs who had moved to the UK from Poland to provide bespoke web and mobile app development services exceeding the already-high standards held by their clients. For every company that comes to them with ideas, designs, and plans for a new project, they’ve been able to make it happen, building trust and gaining new clients through word of mouth all the while.

Who are TH-EY?

TH-EY is the brainchild of Filip Kubala and Wojciech Soczyński, two IT-obsessed friends who grew up together in a small city in Poland. Filip’s interest in IT started during his teens, throughout which he studied maths and informatics and high school, learning HTML and CSS on the side. After getting much deeper into the IT industry during his university years in Krakow, he started his career as a graphic designer. However, once he discovered that his development skills were better than the engineer at his agency, he slowly transitioned from the world of design to the world of coding.

Looking for the next challenge, Filip began to study Java, securing an internship before moving on to work for Comarch. Soon after, Filip moved to London, where he worked for Playtech as a Java developer, before finally setting out on his own as a freelancer. Wojciech, who had also struck out on his own as a freelancer after several years in between the IT and finance worlds, decided this was the moment for the two to launch their own venture, offered Filip his first proper Java project, and TH-EY came into existence soon after, in 2017. Project by project, client by client, TH-EY gradually scaled their operation to become one of the leaders in the web and mobile app development space.

A Reputation For Efficiency And Excellence

One of the main things TH-EY prides themselves on is their ability to create great software with minimal friction and miscommunication. In a nutshell, transparency is at the heart of everything they do. The founders credit their years in the corporate world as the inspiration behind this approach. In their previous contexts, both had become increasingly frustrated with how many hierarchical layers every single decision had to pass through before being approved. Even in situations where every member of the team working on a project was a master at their role, they saw that when supervisors, project managers, quality assurance experts, and all sorts of other roles had to get involved, things took too long to get done.

TH-EY does things differently. While traditional corporates still struggle to get things done efficiently, when one of TH-EY’s clients requests another feature or update, it’s on the production line within a couple of hours, and ready to roll out much faster. In a sense, what they’ve done is disrupted the traditional corporate model by streamlining everything that works and removing all the unnecessary layers, thus creating a development process that runs like a well-oiled machine.

Most impressively, they’ve managed to maintain their reputation for excellence without ever deviating from their remote-only operational approach, which was in place well before the pandemic made it the norm. To ensure that this remains the case, they ensure that every new hire is responsible and organised, and can take care of any task or part of the system assigned to them. There’s never a challenge too great, or a wall too high — TH-EY’s network of professionals are reliable in the same way as a full time employee in the eyes of their clients. Showing the world that anyone can achieve their goals without a physical office, TH-EY have helped dozens of clients grow over the years, to the benefit of all parties involved.

For TH-EY, the development of every new project is extremely exciting. The entire team takes great pleasure in reviewing their work a couple of months after it goes live, normally the stage at which their clients have been able to build a solid foundation of user feedback that enables TH-EY to push updates faster and faster. Through this, they are not only realising the vision of their client, but solving actual problems for real users too, with a much higher sense of involvement than a normal development agency.

Building A Foundation For The Future

Wojciech and Filip are conscious of the fact that the development industry is heading in many directions at a variety of different paces, but one thing remains certain — that more and more companies, even the smallest ones, are starting to look to disrupt the market with their own brands of dedicated software solutions.

Yet, while no-code or AI coding solutions, among others, are inevitably going to grow in popularity, implementing custom, human-created solutions will always have its place, and companies like TH-EY with years of success under their belts will be the ones that people will reach out to first. TH-EY have never worried about receiving backlash after criticising their clients’ ideas, as in the end, if after rejecting an idea they go on to save the client money and time, they become even more trustworthy as figureheads of the industry.

TH-EY are still scaling their company to be able to serve more customers and handle more projects, growing their team as well as working on their internal libraries to enable cross-project collaboration and increase reliability and delivery speed. In addition, they are looking to distil their expertise and launch a more productised offering to help ensure that companies in the early stages of growth, who don’t know much about software, are able to flourish.