TrueChange Brings Scale and Innovation to Low-Code in South America
The journey of TrueChange, a Mendix channel partner, to leading the low-code market in Brazil started in 2009, well before the company started.
Co-CEOs Tiago Farias and Lázaro Pinheiro were then at a healthcare company and tasked with migrating legacy apps. Traditional development was simply too expensive, so they looked elsewhere.
“We were trying to find some RAD solutions,” says Pinheiro. “Something that could accelerate the development of web applications.”
Farias and Pinheiro saw their story as an opportunity—what worked for them could potentially work for others, and they started TrueChange in 2011.
TrueChange created the low-code market in Brazil, and the organization has focused on low-code exclusively for more than a decade.
The results? More than 200 customers, 1000-plus applications, and being certified as a Platinum Partner with Siemens DISW and Mendix, the first company in South America to do so.
“We believe in the technology,” Farias states. “We believe in the low-code market.”
Solutions developers, not software providers
One of the reasons for TrueChange’s record of success is how they approach their customers’ needs.
“The difference between TrueChange and other companies that work with low-code is that we don’t work with low-code as a technology to deliver projects,” says Farias. “We really believe in the concept, the paradigm. If I’m offering to deliver something using low-code, it’s because we believe that it’s the better approach.”
In other words, TrueChange looks to help solve not just a customer’s first problem but the next and the next. That’s, of course, part low-code, but also equal parts strategy and mindset.
As Pinheiro puts it, “The value we deliver is helping our customers to be more competitive and helping them to deliver software that solves their business problems.”
He continues, “For us, there’s nothing better than to deliver business applications and to solve problems. Our approach is that we don’t want to sell a single project. We want to sell the adoption, the change of paradigm.”
“We don’t want to sell just one project and move to the next customer,” he states. “We want to offer them something that makes sense to them and delivers value and then find something else that delivers value.”
That mindset isn’t just something TrueChange preaches to customers. It’s something that they focus on within their developer hiring and training. Farias says, “When we hire, we want to teach a different way of thinking about software development. If you just try to make a traditional software developer use a tool, they don’t use the best of the tool. But if you show them how to use it and trust in everything behind the scenes, then they use the platform in the best way possible.”
Partnering with the low-code leader
In the beginning, TrueChange worked with another provider. However, the organization always followed Mendix due to hearing positive experiences from others, analyst reports, and other factors. Mendix wasn’t available in Brazil at the time but Siemens’ acquisition of Mendix in 2018 created the conditions for TrueChange to make the transition in 2020.
On working with a global organization with the size of Siemens, Farias reports, “We had support that we never imagined we’d get from a company so big. We thought there would be a lot of bureaucracy.”
But on meeting with the Mendix team at Mendix HQ in the Netherlands, Farias and Pinheiro were happy to see a collaborative attitude. “We traveled to meet with the Mendix team to discuss the strategy, the technology, and to build something together,” recalls Farias. “What we heard was “You know this better than us. Let’s go there together.” For us, it was amazing.”
Moving from one primary provider to another could lead to some stress and issues, but Farias reports that moving onto Mendix was straightforward: “It wasn’t hard moving from one technology to the other because what we show to all our developers is the benefit that they are getting with the new platform.”
For TrueChange, everything always comes back to the bigger picture. As Farias notes:
“Our developers that like learning new things and evolving were passionate from the start. When developers are willing to learn new things, they discover that Mendix offers a different approach to building applications with a more modern and robust architecture. If we compare platforms, Mendix already has had distributed architecture since 2016 and others aren’t there yet.”
Predictable, scalable pricing -> predictable, scalable customer relations
Due to TrueChange’s belief in solving problems across the enterprise, partnering with a provider that shares that mentality is mission-critical. That makes Mendix and TrueChange a perfect fit.
“Mendix is focused on bringing the business and developers together in a professional platform, linking business and pro developers,” Pinheiro states. “Other platforms are focused on ecosystem solutions for more business analysts to create smaller, simpler applications.”
A shared mentality is excellent, but that also needs to translate into reality. Any development comes with costs, both to TrueChange as a provider and the end customer. Those costs need to be transparent and predictable to build trust. Happily, Pinheiro reports a great experience with Mendix compared with other providers:
“Siemens and Mendix always think about if an opportunity makes sense. Everything is always transparent and clear. We get our new pricing information months out, and we can start thinking about how to work with it. And that pricing makes sense. We’ve seen the same licensing model since 2016, with no major changes that we need to explain to our customers.”
One particular point where philosophy and logistics combine is with usage. Unlike many other providers, Mendix licensing costs are based on number of users rather than the number of applications. That allows the experts at TrueChange to focus on scale, change, and outcomes.
“There’s not a restriction on the number of applications,” Farias says. “I can develop as much as I want and focus on delivering value for the number of app users, instead of having to limit the number of apps we want and the size we need.”
“You don’t need to think about your architecture to avoid an increase in licensing,” he continues. “When we think about this, we can offer the best option instead of thinking of where to cut costs in building something out.”
In addition, Mendix and TrueChange share a commitment to innovation. As Pinheiro puts it, “Mendix is always announcing things that make complete sense and then releasing them. It’s not like with other vendors where something is announced, you see a video, and then the feature doesn’t line up or release.”
And with TrueChange already using new tools like Maia Chat (a generative AI-powered development assist chatbot), they’re at the forefront of innovative thinking in the low-code space.
High-complexity problems, low-code solutions
Before partnering with Mendix, one of TrueChange’s customers was CredSystem, a Brazilian credit issuer. However, TrueChange’s previous partner’s architecture and technology couldn’t meet banking’s requirements. The Mendix partnership provided a new opportunity.
Pinheiro recalls contacting the CEO to tell him, “We have something better to present to you.”
Because of previous challenges, though, the CEO presented TrueChange with a proposition: “If you can convince my architecture and security teams, then I want to see it. First, present to them.”
The result? “We did, and we succeeded,” Pinheiro remembers.
CredSystem needed to rewrite their two core B2C applications, an internet banking portal and a credit card application. They’d spent years trying to fix and improve their existing applications with limited success. With TrueChange and Mendix, CredSystems had first versions in 3 months that vastly improved on previous offering. Shortly after that, both systems were available for customers. Currently, the new application has more than 6 million downloads and is responsible for 30 million transactions per day.
The first project was a success, and now CredSystem delivers new projects with Mendix and TrueChange each month.
Mendix and TrueChange: Evolving together
The future of development is constantly changing, but with the partnership between TrueChange and Mendix thriving, Farias is looking forward to the future:
“We really believe that Mendix is the best platform that we have,” he says. “It’s the best, most modern, most robust architecture and has an ongoing investment from Siemens. The relationship we’ve created with Mendix and Siemens in Brazil and America and growing the business makes complete sense for us.”
“We work with Mendix because we trust in the technology, the company, and our partnership,” he continues. “I expect to continue to work with Mendix as long as we can as the technology continues to evolve and be the best fit for our customers.”