Daniel Haiem didn’t start out to run a software company. He started out to build one product, a calculator app for students, and learned along the way how complicated outsourced development can get. The vendors he first hired, by his account, missed deadlines and shipped code that broke.
By the time the app was finished, he had formed a specific view of an industry that many founders find difficult to navigate. Rather than move on from the experience, he used it as the basis for his next venture: AppMakers USA, a Los Angeles software firm he built around the way he wished the work had been handled the first time.
His experience was a common one. Dun & Bradstreet’s long-running research on outsourcing found that 20 to 25 percent of outsourcing relationships fail within the first two years, and half end within five. McKinsey has estimated that 70 percent of large technology programs fall short of their objectives. Deloitte’s global outsourcing survey found that most companies came away wanting more from their outsourcing outcomes. The figures line up with what Haiem describes: a market where low hourly rates and final results don’t always match.
The part of the story he returns to is less about the setback and more about what he took from it. The usual explanations for why outsourced software runs into trouble are a communication gap, a time-zone difference, a culture clash. Haiem sees those as symptoms rather than the root cause. In his reading, the deeper issue is a model that treats developers as interchangeable, where a vendor’s incentive is to close the ticket and move to the next client.
Before any of this, Haiem was a classroom teacher. He taught AP Physics in Los Angeles and built ClassCalc, a free app meant to serve as an alternative to the $150 graphing calculators students were required to buy. By late 2018, it had roughly 1,000 users and a waitlist of around 10,000 students. Building it was how he first encountered the outsourcing question.
He knew what he wanted the software to do, and finding a team he trusted to build it turned out to be the harder problem. That gap became the founding idea behind his next company.
AppMakers USA, which Haiem started in 2014, reflects the lessons of that first project. The firm builds mobile, web, and custom software, with an emphasis on cross-platform development, one shared codebase running across iOS, Android, and the web.
Its approach is aimed at clients who have been through something similar: keeping the engineering close rather than passing it down a chain of subcontractors, keeping the same team on a project from start to finish, and treating regular communication as part of the work. According to the company, that approach has carried it into projects for brands including CVS and Los Angeles Apparel, and an app built for NFL running back Austin Ekeler.
Haiem frames the idea in modest terms. He isn’t claiming to have reinvented software development. His argument is narrower: that many of the industry’s difficulties come from how the work is structured, and that the fixes are fairly ordinary ones. Hire people who stay accountable. Keep them on the project. Handle the routine parts carefully.
It is a straightforward thesis drawn from a firsthand experience. For a founder who spent his early years learning how software actually gets made, it is the throughline connecting a calculator app for students to a development firm working with national brands. The company he built is, in the end, an answer to the question he ran into at the very beginning.
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