CodementorX

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

As a physician-facing medical website focused on dermatology, our company has amassed a wealth of resources over the decade we’ve operated. Our offerings include board-review apps, a point-of-care app, and over 50,000 clinical images. As the director of operations, I oversee work on a day-to-day basis.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with CodementorX?

Our recent change in ownership made onboarding new freelance developers or outsourced teams more challenging. This new process has been demanding excessive paperwork and effort. We hired CodementorX to simplify our scaling process on an ongoing basis.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

CodementorX finds us resources to directly support our internal web development efforts. It’s easy to email them whenever we need to scale our team. After I send a request, they respond with their top-choice candidate and occasionally offer a backup option. We usually like the talent they find so much that we frequently onboard candidates right after their first interview. Since our web needs are fairly simple, we tend to request resources with similar skills. Most of our work requires supplemental WordPress expertise.

At times, our specialized projects require developers who can pair SEO with basic programming. We’ve invested substantially in CodementorX to improve our website. Building a new resource tool for dermatologists was one of the simpler tasks we outsourced to their team. The payment system, which uses both PayPal and Stripe, was the most challenging work we assigned them. Our site isn’t the best at handling these complex membership and payment systems. The expert they assigned us resolved numerous bugs that were causing functional problems.

What is the team composition?

CodementorX exclusively assigns us remote developers. We didn’t need a project manager because that role is filled in-house.

How did you come to work with CodementorX?

My colleague first hired a developer from CodementorX around 3 years ago before our company was acquired. Back then, we had a much simpler process for paying contractors. Based on the success of our existing relationship, we continued working with them after the transition.

How much have you invested with them?

We usually hire developers at an hourly rate of $75–$90. Our engagement as a whole has cost about $100,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working with CodementorX continuously since March 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since our team is still small, we haven’t needed to use any complicated tools to track metrics. We’ve partnered with CodementorX for this long because all their developers have quickly produced both strong deliverables and viable solutions.

How did CodementorX perform from a project management standpoint?

Our director of technology communicates with the remote developers on a daily basis. We use Slack for communication, and Assembla for version control. If a project requires several frontend reviews, a non-technical in-house team mate handles those interactions.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Each developer CodementorX assigns us has been not only technically proficient and insightful but also friendly and easy to collaborate with. They patiently cultivate a deep understanding of our needs. Developers from their agency have always been able to deliver everything we request.

Are there any areas they could improve?

When we first started working with CodementorX, they provided candidates within a few days of our requests. More recently, this process has been taking up to two weeks. It would be great if they could find us new developers a bit faster. Two weeks is still a good turnaround time, so we’re not in a place to complain about it.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

If the client is hiring someone part-time, they should acknowledge the fact that the provider has other jobs to do. It’s important that the client go through an interview and set expectations about how much time they can dedicate to the task. We’ve recently been transitioning from part-time team mates to fulltime developers, which helps our projects run more smoothly.