WordPress Implementation For Investment Management Firm
- Web Development
- Confidential
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"We've been very impressed."
- Financial services
- New York City, New York
- 11-50 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
Human Made built a scalable WordPress platform that could handle a high volume of users. They provided consultation, custom back-end development, deployment, and testing on an aggressive timeline.
Both visitors and employees love the site, which has doubled user engagement and logs nearly a million views each month. Human Made built a visually and functionally rich platform. Their proactive culture, round-the-clock availability, and dynamic customer service made them an ideal partner.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Could you briefly describe your organization?
We are a leading provider of institutional quality investment research that’s widely available to the public. We publish professional research coverage on ETFs, master limited partnerships, and global equities. We’re a fast growing venture-backed company in New York City.
What is your position?
I’m the co-founder and chief executive officer.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you first approached Human Made?
The core challenge for us was identifying high-end WordPress developers that could work on a project that could potentially reach millions of monthly users, certainly hundreds of thousands of monthly users to start, in a way that was scalable. When we began working together with Human Made, we had maybe tens of thousands of monthly page views, maybe a hundred thousand, and now we’re approaching close to one million monthly page views, with astronomical monthly and quarterly growth rates that just keep increasing.
It was really important for us to build a platform that could scale with us from early on in a quality way, and that we wouldn’t necessarily need to rebuild. Many times when startup technology companies hire developers, they build something that works pretty well. It doesn’t work after a certain point, or it doesn’t perform as well, and you need to scrap it and rebuild the whole thing. We wanted to prevent that coming in, so we decided to partner with Human Made in order to have them build it correctly in a very early stage.
We partnered with them even when the founders were investing with the company before we had any investors in the company. After we had our angel investor, we’ve been able to increase the size of our relationship and really scale with that team. It was very difficult to find developers that had experience in large-scale deployments; in particular, it’s difficult to find developers who have had experience developing large-scale projects at multiple companies. There aren’t that many large websites where you can work. The ability to work on multiple large websites is particularly hard to come by. WordPress deployments on a large-scale are very difficult, so we needed to ensure that the vendor we chose would be able to handle that.
The second dimension we were looking for were competent people that could work well with our team, our culture, and our startup environment. We knew there would be times where we might have problems. There would be times where we might have aggressive deadlines. There were problems where there might be an issue in the middle of the night, which would require immediate intervention. We wanted a team that understood that, and was able to be nimble and work with us when the pressure was on. They also needed to understand what our needs were and essentially be very reasonable, but also very high quality. We concluded that Human Made would be able to perform on both of those dimensions, and that was extremely attractive to us.
SOLUTION
Could you describe the scope of work in greater detail?
Human Made collaborated with us on every stage of the project, from conception through development all the way to deployment and testing. We provided the necessary strategic guidance, but they handled the actual site build.
How did you select Human Made as your solution partner?
We had initially worked with a couple of engineers: one very experienced, and another one with less experience. We realized that we needed the core skills of engineers that could really build a site that would scale nicely, and that had a culture that would also fit with our team. We’d worked with an engineer that worked with one large site, and we realized we needed engineers that worked on multiple large sites. There weren’t that many of them to start with. On the one hand, that’s a big disadvantage because it becomes a lot more expensive to hire said engineers in volume. On the other hand, it actually means that you know exactly who to speak to because there’s a limited number.
We reached out to a number of WordPress VIP engineering agencies. Some were very large companies. When we first met Human Made, it was essentially two brothers and a third partner, and maybe a handful of additional, high-quality engineers and that was it. They were much smaller than any other firms that we spoke with. It was really clear that each of the VIP agencies had the experience with scalable solutions. Many had indeed worked on a very large scalable website. What was appealing about Human Made, though, was that they had experience with multiple scalable sites while most other companies didn’t have that. Human Made also had the closest cultural fit for us, and that was a huge deciding factor for us.
Could you provide a general cost estimate for this project?
It’s very high relative to anything else you can do, but it’s worth it for us because the alternative is having developers that are less productive, or having code delivered to you that might require revision.
How long has your relationship remained ongoing?
We stated at some point in early 2013, so more than a year and a half, close to two years.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of their work?
We launched a feature on the website, which grew engagement by more than 50 percent, so that’s a massive success. It was a two- to three-month project, and it was extremely successful. Feedback from staff members and other end-users was quite positive, both in terms of the design and the functional usability of the site. We’ve been very impressed.
When working with Human Made, is there anything you’d consider unique about their approach or development methodology that distinguishes them from other vendors?
We didn’t work with other vendors. In the cultural sense, we consider our engineers our partners. One of the challenges with partners is what happens when you have rough times, and they’ve been there for us 100 percent when there have been problems. I’m not sure that you’d get that kind of service and commitment from the vast majority of vendors.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"They do a very good job of meeting their estimations."
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"I certainly have. For companies like ours, I would be more than happy to refer them.
