B2B.software

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder and CEO of Armada Delivery Solutions located in Kuwait. We operate as the middleman in the logistics and merchants industry by providing software that links the logistics industry with people who want to place delivery requests. We provide service through three different portals: an on-demand delivery portal, and API connection portal, and a street management solution. Our clientele comes from various industries, but all have one need, which is last mile delivery. They like that fulfilled and we link them to our various providers and suppliers that are hosted in our system. We have 12 employees.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Codesushi?

Our CTO left the company and left me without tech support and we are a tech oriented company. I hired some freelancers to fill in the gap, but I needed a more robust support system that allowed me access to various endpoints to DevOps, Android, backend, frontend, and debugging.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started off providing them with what we needed and the deliverables. I already had my own story’s Pivotal Tracker. I asked Codesushi to join that kind of board and implement my story of the pitfalls, gaps, problems, and bugs there. They fixed those issues. Then we migrated onto another platform they use regularly called Breeze where they structured their own work using backlogs, to do lists, code review names, and quality assurance in regards to our end and their end. At the end, we pushed everything onto a Sandbox environment, and finally, to production.

My on-demand, one screen platform allows merchants to place delivery requests, which are transmitted to the drivers via our Android app. There were a lot of bugs on both ends of this spectrum. They debugged and stabilized the product, allowing me to get back to operating after stopping for at least two or three months.

Then they added new features that transformed our platform. When merchants place delivery requests one after the other, the order merchant feature smartly merges those orders based on proximity and sends one driver to complete those orders, providing that driver with an optimized route to fulfill those deliveries. At the other end of the equation, another feature tracks those orders by the end consumer. When the merchants claim the delivery request, the end consumer sees an SMS that opens up a web page, which allows the consumer to track the delivery much like FedEx and UPS.

What is the team dynamic?

We started off with one account manager and two dev guys, one frontend, one full stack, and one Android. Slowly we were able to stabilize our project and go back to our normal business. We grew to where we were then able to hire our own CTO who is now managing Codesushi and onboarding our own team. They allowed us to bridge a huge gap that would have otherwise handicapped our operations.

How did you come to work with Codesushi?

I had a job posting on angel.co and Codesushi responded. Finding a CTO takes more time than I could afford. I looked around, but the only one that showed me the support, feedback, and understanding of what I wanted was Codesushi. I met them and they told me what they could do. I was in need of a quick fix. I was able to sign a contract with them and hit the ground running. They were able to quickly help me and humble themselves to understand the concept quickly. I really liked that they grasped the concept quickly. They gave a lot of input and feedback about what I was doing and how I could do better.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in February 2017 and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

It took almost a month for them to read our original code, to familiarize themselves with our business logic, and to understand our various endpoints and how things work. After that, things started progressing faster. Bugs were fixed faster. Features were implemented faster. Deliverables started off at three and a half weeks, but then decreased to two weeks and then to one week.

How did Codesushi perform from a project management standpoint?

Perfectly. They assign a project manager who communicates and assigns roles and projects to everyone and makes sure everyone is fulfilling those projects. He communicates with the tech team at the company as well to make sure that things are being worked at par. For clients who don’t have a CTO, it really helps if you have a project manager to understand the tech lingo and translate it for you. 

We use Bench. Our meetings sometimes require sharing screens and sharing stats. We use Skype, Slack, and WhatsApp to communicate depending on where our different parties are and what the needs are. They’re very flexible in regards to their communication methods. We work mostly with Breeze, a project dashboard where each project has a card created at every stage with its own time estimation. They commit to that estimation and sometimes it’s provided even earlier. For example, one estimation on the board is seven hours and they completed it in five.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve never dealt with a company before as opposed to staff hired in-house or freelancers. It’s been a good journey so far. They quickly understood my business logic and went through my codes to understand how to attack. That was really impressive because usually, it takes much more time and effort on my part to make people understand the business logic. Their team is very flexible and they can quickly assign members to the team. For example, I needed a quick, extra Android dev and they were able to quickly assign that person given that they have assets in Poland and Los Angeles. Also, they provide support across time zones, which is really important.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I’ve been happy with their services. I don’t see any fallbacks, to be honest.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a partner at a digital marketing agency called atLarge, Inc. We primarily do web application development, website development, e-commerce systems, customer support systems, email marketing, and digital media buying.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CodeSushi?

They are helping us augment our internal development team because we have a need to scale up and down quickly.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Over the past year, we’ve been using CodeSushi exclusively for our resources. The largest project we’ve done with them is an online ordering system for a sports academy. They handle the dominant portion of the development of the system. It is based in Angular with Symfony2 backend for the API that synchronizes with their Microsoft Dynamic CRM [customer relationship management]. It’s a multistep ordering system where customers can purchase sports camps for youth or adults. They can do so for one or more athletes across nine different sports. The system streamlines the user experience around purchasing a pretty complicated product.

CodeSushi has a wide scope of services. We have a team member in-house that lives in the UK. He and some of our team collaborated on the project, but CodeSushi did most of the development work. The client handled the designs. As the agency at-large, we did the user experience, the technical specifications, and some of the development on the API. CodeSushi did all the of CSS and Angular development while we collaborated on the API. The whole group worked on the more complicated parts of the project like the credit card gateway for PTI compliance.

How did you come to work with CodeSushi?

We were looking for an in-house frontend developer and CodeSushi responded to our post. We specialize in Angular, Drupal and Symfony and they specialize in the same stack. I liked Anton and we did a few small projects together and got a feel for working with each other. Then we started doing some larger projects. We were having a performance issue with one of the platforms and one of their developers is a genius level Symfony programmer. He was able to figure out what nobody else could.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with CodeSushi in November 2015. This particular project started October 2016 and we launched in December 2016.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The big metric for us on the agency side is called chargeability. That is the percentage of time that we can confidently bill. For example, if we know a professional resource can do a task in a day and we have similar tasks that validate that, we won’t charge a client if a junior resource takes two days; we charge them one day. If we knock down half their time, their chargeability is 50%. CodeSushi has consistently been 100% and we have confidence in the amount of time their work takes. They’ve never charged an unreasonable amount of time. On the client side, they’ve doubled their increase in revenue.

How did CodeSushi perform from a project management standpoint?

The project manager on their end was Damien. He understands the business requirements and what is necessary from a design perspective. They keep their time logs updated so we can stay on budget. I’ve been very impressed with his ability to translate requirements. We have a pretty regimented task flow system.

What did you find most impressive about CodeSushi?

I think they differentiate themselves because of their quality control. I very rarely have to send them large bug reports on their work. By the time I get it, they’ve already QA’d everything and it makes my job a lot easier. Having built trust with them and knowing they’re releasing something high-quality, I’ve stopped reviewing everything at a detailed level. Their whole team is great. When Christoff figured out the one issue that no one else could in one day, that’s when we really starting taking them on as one of our only contractors.

Are there any areas CodeSushi could improve?

I don’t have any complaints, except that I wish they could take on more work.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the co-founder of BusinessDay, a tool that incorporates modern productivity science and research into a tool for leveraging task management to boost team productivity. Our current focus is on enabling accounting teams to close their month and year-ends quicker. 

The company was founded in December of 2015 and we are located in California and Texas. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CodeSushi?

Both my partner and I work full-time and have other businesses, so we needed to find someone who could quickly implement new features and fixes into our tool.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had put together a bare-bones prototype but when users wanted new features added or changed, we didn’t have the time to do it. We needed someone who was a PHP expert to lead the development. We first talked to the owner of CodeSushi and then we were given a manager as a point of contact to coordinate the work. The developers were the ones doing the actual work, and the turnaround time was pretty quick. They adapted an existing software solution called Kanboard, which is an open source Kanban tool that provides an API. Using Kanboard as an initial platform, we leveraged CodeSushi to build a huge feature set that was not the roadmap for this tool. 

How did you come to work with CodeSushi?

On other occasions, I've gone through different freelance boards to find agencies but never felt I was getting value for my money. After a long process, I found CodeSushi through Upwork. The owner was one of the initial resources who did development for our project this time last year.

How much have you invested with CodeSushi?

We have spent between $10,000 and $50,000 on the project so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in January 2016 and the project is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

They added a test suite to the tool, which I didn’t expect. This added significant value and increased our feedback cycle on pull requests. They've also altered a significant portion of Kanboard's internal logic to make it more suitable for financial terms. 

How did CodeSushi perform from a project management standpoint?

The managers were very responsive and timely. I would file an issue in GitHub and they would give suggestions on a solution. All the code written has been excellent. There were some minor issues as far as sharing code between our GitHub organizations, but this was resolved quickly. 

We’ve worked with one project manager and two to four other developers who are rotated since we don’t have a consistent road map at the moment. 

What did you find most impressive about CodeSushi?

They are highly communicative. At firs the language barrier may have been an issue but they have improved by leaps and bounds in the area. Almost everyone on their team is fully fluent in English. They charge a reasonable rate compared to other senior developers considering how quickly they work. 

Are there any areas CodeSushi could improve?

Besides the GitHub issue, not really. At the outset, there were some project management issues, but I think they were experiencing growing pains. Having a dedicated project manager has made all the difference!