Web development has come a long way since its inception and is now a critical component of modern businesses and organizations. The increasing demand for web development services is due to the growing importance of having a strong online presence and the increasing complexity of the web and its applications. Here the startups take the lead, being able to adopt fast the constantly changing trends, to stay relevant and competitive in the industry.

We spoke with Vitalie Chiperi, the founder of Donkey.io and Atomate Software, about this rapidly evolving field and the reasons why we should choose his startup when it comes for Web development.

Startup Moldova: Your initiative comes with a really useful idea for all those who want to create, but do not have knowledge in IT. Tell us about the originality of the product.

Vitalie Chiperi: Donkey.io makes code deployments simple and fun, regardless of the location you are delivering your software solution to. By employing automation and visibility, it improves deployment process efficiency, reduces possible human errors and ensures your product is always ready when users need it.

Startup Moldova: What makes you special? What innovative solution does your startup bring up?

Vitalie Chiperi: The traditional way of deployment involves heavy reliance on devops, with their specialist knowledge on how to configure and deploy projects in various environments. This tends to decrease the flexibility of the team and increase the implementation risk.

Donkey allows software development teams to facilitate deployment in a more social, interactive and responsible way. Every member of the team can deploy via Donkey. It makes deployments a snap, allowing you configure, deploy or rollback your releases quickly.

Donkey streamlines your deployment process to efficiently reduce deployment time. With Donkey, you can easily roll out new features to all your users with one click of a button. Instead of deploying to each server one at a time and then waiting for it to be done-you can push them all out at once. Make less errors, deploy faster and have a better time doing it!

Startup Moldova: Where did the idea to create this startup come from?

Vitalie Chiperi: Developers are increasingly facing challenges when it comes to building software products. There’s more competition than ever before and they have less time to get things done. They need tools that allow them to focus on what matters most: building great software products.

That’s why we created Donkey.io – a tool that allows you to quickly set up your development environment and start coding right away!

Donkey bridges this gap between deployment processes and the development team. It’s a unique team collaboration environment which combines social interaction with engineering principles to create an environment that fosters innovation.

The name “Donkey” comes from the actual loyal, hardworking and stubborn animal, which we all think is really adorable. Your donkey is your companion, traveling with you, carrying all the heavyweight. You’ve got all these great tools at your disposal and all this knowledge—you’re driving forward, making progress every day. It’s fun!

Startup Moldova: Your idea is really cool and promising, but did you encounter any challenges along the way?

Vitalie Chiperi: We’ve always been a team that likes to keep things simple, but we have to admit that the journey of developing such a project has brought some pretty complex problems to be solved, so it’s no surprise that we faced some challenges as we progressed through our roadmap.

First, we had to learn how to communicate effectively with each other and make sure we were all on the same page regarding what we wanted to achieve.

In order to scale our product, we had to evaluate our codebase and determine how to make it more efficient and stable. This involved identifying potential bottlenecks in the system and working on ways to improve those elements of our codebase so that they could scale better as well as be more reliable under heavy load.

As a part of improving the efficiency of our product, we looked at ways to speed up the development process by automating some tasks or providing people more tools to operate within.

All these challenges gave us the following learning outcome: keeping things simple doesn’t mean you can’t be innovative, and it doesn’t mean you can’t make a complicated process easier for your users!

Startup Moldova: Who is your target client?

Vitalie Chiperi: We’ve been testing Donkey for the past three years. We’ve accumulated over 70 different organizations as users, but we’re still growing. Our target group is digital agencies, freelancers, independent developers, and small to medium sized software companies who need to get their products out there as quickly and easily as possible.

Startup Moldova: Have you already managed to attract investments in your startup?

Vitalie Chiperi: To date, no external investments have been made in this field. The company is currently funding the project by itself. The approximately total amount invested so far is around 100,000 euros.

We are currently looking for funding partners to help us continue developing our product and make it available to more people.

Startup Moldova: Tell us about people currently working at Donkey.

Vitalie Chiperi: We are now 6 people in the team, but we are constantlu growing. We are proud to have:

Software Engineers, Quality Engineers, UI/UX Specialists, and of course Marketing & Communication Specialists.

Startup Moldova: What are your plans for growth and development?

Vitalie Chiperi: We have developed a working and stable product, but we want to continue with our roadmap and make it available to anyone who needs it—and that requires more resources. We are looking for someone who will commit to funding us for the next year so we can stop working on side projects and focus all of our time on making this product as great as possible!

We invite you to get to know Donkey.io on their official website and keep following #CunoasteComunitatea to find out about local startups on their way to success!