The Apex Story

It was 2016. The three of us were alumni of SAMPAD schools in Karaj, and we'd known each other since high school. We all wanted much the same thing: to do creative work, keep learning new things, and make a living from what we built.

So we decided to start a software team together.

We had no office, no clients, and no very detailed plan for the next few years. We started from home, and the first thing we built was our own idea: a mobile app.

The idea worked, and we even made a little money from it. But the money wasn't the part that mattered most to us.

We also got a lot of positive feedback from people who used the app and enjoyed it. Seeing a real person on the other side of the screen use something we'd built—and actually like it—felt incredibly rewarding.

That experience showed us that you could learn something from scratch, build it, release it, have real people use it, and turn that into a real professional path.

From there, things moved forward pretty naturally.

We kept learning, got better at what we did, and went after whatever we needed to bring our ideas to life. If we didn't know a technology, we learned it. If a product needed design, we learned design. If it needed servers, content, video, or animation, one of us took it on.

Clients started coming in too—not through big ad campaigns or a sales team, but mostly through friends, acquaintances, and people who had seen our earlier work.

One of our friends saw what we were doing, became interested, and joined us. Then someone else joined. We became four, then five, and little by little the family grew.

Later, university friendships, new connections, and introductions through people already on the team brought more people into the group.

What was interesting was that many people who joined Apex weren't specialists on day one. We weren't usually looking for someone with a résumé packed with technologies or years of experience. It mattered more that they were smart and curious, could teach themselves, think independently, and above all, work well with others.

And once they joined, nobody told them they had to become a backend developer, designer, or game developer. People gradually found what they were interested in and shaped their own path. Many of the skills we later had in the team developed exactly this way: through self-learning and working on real projects.

That also meant the way we worked never looked much like a conventional company.

If someone had an idea that others were interested in, a few people would gather around it and form a working group. That group made the decisions about the product, technology, execution, and direction of the project.

The CEO or founders weren't supposed to stand over a team telling people what to do or which tools to use. More experienced people offered advice and helped solve problems, but the project belonged to the people actually working on it.

Those experiences made something else clear pretty quickly: imagine you've built an app. Writing the software is only one part of the job.

You still have to find customers, figure out how to present your product or service, talk to customers, understand what they need, understand the market, set prices, improve the product, support users, know your competitors, and work out how what you've built can become a real business.

All of that is part of building the product. That's why, over time, our perspective shifted from “building software” to “building businesses.”

When a client came to us, if the scope of the work allowed for it, we didn't start by asking, “What app do you want?” We first tried to understand what problem actually needed to be solved.

Someone might say, “I want a ride-hailing service,” but building the app is only one part of it. You need to know how you'll attract drivers, what licenses you need, how the business makes money, how pricing works, what kind of agreement you'll have with drivers, and how you'll acquire users.

When it made sense, we got into those questions too. The client wasn't supposed to get just a development team; they were supposed to have a partner thinking about the whole business with them.

That mindset took us into very different kinds of work over the years—from simple projects and small landing pages to products and businesses with real users and day-to-day operations.

A lot of our experience came from fintech and financial products. Later, we also worked on sports projects, enterprise systems, and many other areas.

We worked with clients outside Iran, shipped products across different platforms, and even handled design, content, graphics, and video ourselves. For us, Android, iOS, the web, or any particular programming language was never the point. The problem mattered; the tools could be learned.

Over the years, people at Apex found their own paths. Some built their own businesses, some joined larger companies, some moved abroad, and today some of us may be thousands of kilometers apart.

But something interesting happened: stepping away from the day-to-day work at Apex didn't necessarily mean leaving Apex.

From the early years, we always said Apex was a family. Today, we understand what that sentence means better than ever.

For us, helping someone succeed has always mattered more than keeping them at the company.

There have even been times when someone, after years of growing at Apex, realized there was a better opportunity for them at another company—and we helped them take it. We worked on their résumé, wrote recommendation letters, and helped them move into the next stage of their career.

And years later, many of those same people still answer technical questions from the team, help when a new project comes together, spend time together, and still say, when they talk about themselves: “We're Apexers.”

Maybe the best definition of Apex today is this: a team of like-minded, creative, skilled people.

Those people might come together like a company for one project, form an independent team around a new idea, share their experience with a student just getting started, or reunite years later to build a product together.

Idea Pardazan Kolah Sefid Alborz remains Apex's active legal entity, but Apex has never been just the name of a company to us. It's the connection between people who, at some point in their professional lives, learned, built, and grew together—and who still know that if an idea worth building comes along, there are people they can come back together with and start building again.