Meet the CxO – Dragoș Bubu, Co-founder, Head of Design eleven-space.com
Tell us a few words about how your company started.
ElevenSpace has started with the intention of helping companies start or scale their digital products, solutions and ideas to a new level of design capabilities. With user experience research, UI/UX design, design systems, interactive prototypes we can validate fast any design idea to make best use of resources.
What drives you each day?
Our mission is to bring clarity to digital solutions and highlight the benefits of great design within organisations, everywhere. We are moved by our constant need to create beautiful and functional solutions.
What do you believe are the 3 main accomplishments that brought you here today?
– Pursuing my intuition of starting a career in design
– Working with a great variety of companies and domain industries
– My wish to become a great entrepreneur and leader
What do you believe are the 3 main failures that brought you here today?
– Failing with the first company I started, taught me a lot about business
– Setting unrealistic expectations from myself and the people surrounding me
– Not getting aligned with myself to generate greater value
Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?
Sure, I love traveling, reading psychology, going to the cinema and hanging out with my friends.
Tell us more about the business you are running. Let’s start with the number of clients you currently work on (name them if possible)
We’re currently working with 46 Labs (USA), Toboro (France), MyAbode (USA), all SAAS dashboard app applications focusing on redesign and extending the current capabilities with new features.
What is your most beloved project you worked on?
Hostelworld is one of our favourite projects and our biggest so far in terms of active users. We were delighted to be involved in this project for countless reasons.
Hostelworld is a leading global Online Travel Agent (OTA) focused on the hostel market. The design was lagging a bit and with a user experience focused exclusively on tourists and their travel experience, the app was in need of a glow-up: a timeless user interface and an intuitive user experience. The app already had a great user experience and after our contribution, the rating grew to 4.9 (out of 5) and to an amazing 5 million downloads!
What we did was to consolidate their main design system (Wanderlust) and to define the mobile user experience for the main screens, from logging in to completing a hostel booking. It was such a delight having this much freedom and eagerness to create a high-quality, competitive app supported by the internal team and the external stakeholders.
What project forced you to be creative and innovative (if possible)
Being active in the creative field, we managed to come up with new ways of thinking in every project we’ve been involved in, either by studying the competition extremely well, mixing ideas from different domains, or suggesting ideas that make us of the latest technology developments like VR, AR, AI.
What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise?
Our company has a systematic approach to design by documenting everything from the smallest atoms to components, modules, screens and design rules. This approach saves a tremendous amount of time and creates clarity for everyone involved from sales, marketing, management, design, and development can look at our work that is extremely documented and be on-boarded immediately within the design
solution.
What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?
My advice for entrepreneurs is to observe limiting thoughts and feelings: examine what they are, what influence they have on you and what change in behaviour you can do to dissolve them. More often than not, we are our own brakes in the face of progress and profit expansion.
What do you want to accomplish in the next year?
We wish to double our team size and build a greater network to offer complimentary services in order to deliver bigger and complex projects.
Why did you join Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster?
I think it is an amazing idea to be among so many experienced companies that have created so many digital solutions in the Romanian digital ecosystem. My wish is to help as many companies understand and implement great design in their solutions, to help the cluster and their customers.
How does it benefit you?
By partnering up, we can grow together faster. The partners and customers of the cluster can benefit from great design, idea validation, interactive prototypes, design systems, ease-of-use in solutions. My main benefit is completing projects together with complimentary teams and expanding my network of ambitious partners that can deliver solutions in a timely manner.
How do you see your company as being part of the cluster?
Our company can be a reliable partner for everything design related: discovery, 5W1H Method, User Persona, Competitive Analysis, UX Audit, Visual Identity, Brand Guidelines, UI/UX Design, Wireframes, Prototyping, Web Design, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, Dashboards, Design Systems, Copywriting, Pitch Deck
