Mayven Studios

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a department director for one of the lead venture capital firms, primarily focusing on software companies. One of the things my department is responsible for is our company’s website.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mayven Studios?

We needed help with our website, so we hired Mayven Studios.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Mayven Studios is on a retainer with us for website development services. Basically, they’re our development team, so they do everything we require related to web development, including maintaining our main site and building some ancillary sites.

Sometimes, we need special web apps or event sites decoupled from our main site, so Mayven Studios also help us with those. For example, they’ve helped us build our brand guidelines web app, an app we use to monitor and maintain all of our brands under our umbrella. At any given time, we have 15–20 web development projects going on.

Currently, Mayven Studios is redeveloping our main site. They didn’t develop that site originally; it was inherited. When they joined, they understood the need for its redevelopment, but they kept providing us with maintenance until the time was right.

As for the technology stack, Mayven Studios mainly uses WordPress — that’s our website’s CMS. Although they do a lot of custom HTML and CSS work for us, most of what they create is built so that we can easily go in and leverage the templates that they also create for us within WordPress.

In addition to web development, we’ve also leveraged Mayven Studios for web design. Still, we have an in-house design team, so we usually do all the design work upfront and bring Mayven Studios’ team when appropriate to bring those designs to life.

Mayven Studios also does a lot of website maintenance work for us — they don’t just focus on new builds. They help us fix bugs and support our website hosting to some extent, working with our IT team to ensure we acquire the right URLs and other similar things.

What is the team composition?

We mainly work with Nate and Connor (Partners), Luca (Technical Director), and Josh (Project Manager). Still, we’ve worked with quite a few other teammates from Mayven Studios. For example, they have a creative director and an entire design department, so we’ve also worked with Kamil (Designer) for some design work. Moreover, Art (Senior Developer) has done a lot of HTML5 animations for us.

How did you come to work with Mayven Studios?

Around 4–5 years ago, we were using another development agency that none of us liked. We had inherited that partnership, but they were constantly dropping the ball, so we knew that we needed a new development agency. At the time, someone who joined our team had worked with Mayven Studios on developing a website for their former company, so she introduced us to them.

Then, Mayven Studios flew Luca in from Italy to join the rest of the team, who were already in the Bay Area. We met with them and had a fantastic start to our working relationship. In fact, our retainer contract has grown over time. They’re now doing a lot more than what they were doing initially because they’ve proven their worth.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $1 million–$5 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in late 2018, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since working with Mayven Studios, we’ve seen an improvement in all the areas their maintenance services cover. For example, they’ve helped us improve our SEO by fixing our site's structure and cleaning up how certain URL structures were created. As a result, we’ve seen an increase in our hits and click-through rate; they’ve been part of our success in that regard.

Moreover, the special pages that they’ve built for us to add to the main site have had a lot of social media coverage. Typically, these pages are created around big editorial projects that have some content to go with them. Mayven Studios has helped bring those visions to life — without them, our page launches wouldn’t have been successful.

Given that we’re in the middle of redesigning our main website, there will be a few new KPIs and other metrics that we’ll be using to measure the success of that project. However, we don’t have results for it yet.

How did Mayven Studios perform from a project management standpoint?

Mayven Studios always meets our deadlines and stays within budget. In fact, I don’t know how they keep up with the tasks we ask them to do. Their team has been fantastic at following through with deliverables and deadlines.

We have weekly Zoom calls with Mayven Studios every Thursday to keep up with the different projects in our queue at any given time. Still, my team reaches out to theirs as needed to provide art direction.

As for other collaboration tools, Mayven Studios uses Buildstack, a product they actually built. On it, we submit and track tickets for new features, new pages, or bug fixes. Buildstack is also linked to our email, so we can either email them directly or send messages through the platform. Additionally, we have our own Slack channel where people from both teams can communicate — that’s our direct line of communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve worked with many development agencies over the years, and it has always been hard to find a talented frontend developer who understands the nuances of design. Not many developers can bring designs to life and offer suggestions for things the designers might have missed to collaborate in making a better end product. However, Mayven Studios is one of those few agencies that have that kind of talent.

Luca is Mayven Studios’ secret; he makes magic happen. He has the impressive skill of seeing the client’s vision before starting with the coding. He’s very understanding, asks the right questions, and assesses projects very quickly. Whenever Luca talks to a designer, he can speak their language. Additionally, he’s very visual, so he can bring designs to life very easily because he sees our concepts and knows how to build them.

I’m sure other people from Mayven Studios’ team are equally capable and talented. For example, Art is also very visual, and he can code great animations. However, Luca is the person I talk to the most, and he does a lot of the work. Having an engineer capable of making a unique UX come to life is hard to find. Overall, Mayven Studios is a one-of-a-kind agency, so anyone would be lucky to work with them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Although Mayven Studios does a fantastic job at project management, I would like them to take more of a leadership role, be more proactive, and tell us when they need certain things from us. They’re not doing anything poorly, but they can do more in that regard.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I don’t have any specific advice for working with Mayven Studios. As with any other development or design agency, you need to know exactly what you want to do. If you have a good sense of what success looks like when engaging with a partner, you’ll achieve a better end result because you’ll leverage them in a more meaningful way.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of AdTech partnerships at Audacy, Inc., a company that owns radio stations, podcast networks, and other audio assets. One of our assets is Podcorn, a marketplace for brands and podcasters to get connected and strike sponsorship deals.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mayven Studios?

The marketplace’s founders hired Mayven Studios to build the platform before our company acquired them.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Mayven Studios has built the marketplace platform with its original owners. Now, they still handle all of the marketplace's software development and customer support. I work with them to service and support the platform. 

I inherited the project from the marketplace's founders, who initially provided me access to the code base and Mayven Studios' development tools. We had initiatives to improve the platform, so I presented Mayven Studios with problems and business challenges, asking them to devise a strategy and solutions. Currently, the team applies development resources and plans technical tasks to achieve business outcomes. 

I've reviewed the platform's revenue, active users, enrollment metrics, and other business KPIs. Mayven Studios has helped me prioritize tasks, focusing on helping us improve those metrics through strategies and design. They've changed the platform's proposal workflow to make successful partnerships more likely. The team has also analyzed data to determine why certain accounts have become inactive and no longer generate revenue. 

I've also given Mayven Studios' developers specific tasks that they've completed. For example, our platform had at least 10,000 junk accounts, and I wanted to clean them up. Mayven Studios reviewed the platform and found over 14,000 junk accounts eligible for deletion, according to data they explained. They cleaned up the accounts. 

The key technology they use for the backend application is a PHP web framework, Laravel. Mayven Studios has built several applications using Laravel, so they're comfortable with that tool. In addition, they use SQL databases to store the platform's data on our creators and brands. 

Additionally, Mayven Studios does design work for us. They have dedicated design resources, and when we need to make a significant change to the platform's frontend, Mayven Studios' designers get involved. When we changed the proposal workflow, we leveraged these designers to ensure the workflow made sense and was easy to use. 

Mayven Studios' design team has also helped me with marketing. We use a mailing newsletter platform to send emails to the creators that use our platform. Mayven Studios has helped me design an email template so that the emails have a similar design aesthetic to the platform's interface. 

The team also provides technical operations and support. Our platform has thousands of users and is mostly self-serving. If a user encounters an issue, they can open a ticket on our intercom instance that comes in through email. We retain resources from Mayven Studios to handle inbound support requests. They also handle maintenance and administrative tasks such as data cleanup, accepting new campaigns, and acting as an admin. 

What is the team composition?

Selmir (Project Manager) is my day-to-day point of contact; he works with us on business tasks and strategic initiatives and connects us with Mayven Studios' engineers. At least 4–5 software engineers contribute to our code base; 1—2 are senior engineers and interact with us the most. 

For support tickets, Mayven Studios has allocated 1–2  teammates. Additionally, Connor and Nate (Partners) have made themselves available for us when we want to talk. Overall, at least 5–10 teammates are working on our project at any given time. 

How did you come to work with Mayven Studios?

The founders of Mayven Studios had a long-standing relationship with our platform's founders, who have sold multiple tech companies. Mayven Studios had built their previous company's platform. I got introduced to Mayven Studios when I inherited this project. 

How much have you invested with them?

The original build cost $1 million–$5 million. Currently, we pay Mayven Studios between $10,000–$50,000 per month. 

What is the status of this engagement?

The original development project started in 2019, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We look at development tasks measurable through technical metrics, and Mayven Studios is really good. I've given them objectives to grow our daily and monthly active users, and they've already achieved progress; more users are logging in than before, thanks to Mayven Studios' efforts. 

The team does a great job with technical operations and support. We get an extraordinary amount of value from what we pay them monthly. They provide support, build on the platform, and provide us with a lot of person-hours. We appreciate that they allocate many resources to our project, especially given their size.

I oversee the business side but also have an engineering background, so I've been able to work with Mayven Studios at different levels. Some days, we work at a higher-level business strategy plane, but if I ever want to get into the code or have them show me how something works, Mayven Studios is willing to get into that in-depth level. Selmir brings an engineer to meetings and has them answer my technical questions. 

Even though a larger company owns it, our platform is still a small startup, and we couldn't have gotten this advancement on the platform without Mayven Studios Overall, they're high-value, efficient, and intelligent — they're a trusted partner. 

How did Mayven Studios perform from a project management standpoint?

They're remarkably good at getting work done efficiently, on time, and within budget. Mayven Studios is transparent when something may cost more or take longer than expected. 

I've seamlessly joined the team as a contributor and, in some cases, a project or product manager. I use the tools they've provided to track their progress and tasks. We use Buildstack for project management, primarily communicate through Slack and Zoom, and use email when necessary. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I'm impressed with Mayven Studios' efficiency. They're one of the most efficient companies I've seen in their use of time and money. 

Furthermore, they take ownership and accountability, operating as if the platform were theirs — they work under that premise. For example, when I tell them to do something that's a bad idea that will waste our company's money, Mayven Studios isn't afraid to tell me so, which is really important. They've asked me to pause and reconsider decisions many times because they want to ensure we spend every dollar as best we can, which defines trust in this partnership.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Coming into this project, I wished my colleagues had already been more embedded with the Mayven Studios team. I've made a great effort to create a collaborative relationship with them, and my only regret is that there wasn't a more collaborative partnership before I came on board. 

When working with a big company like us, Mayven Studios could get in front of the strategists and create that collaboration sooner rather than later. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Ensure that Mayven Studios' founders and decision-makers understand your vision and are invested in what you're trying to build — that's what's made our platform successful.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of marketing at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a venture capital firm.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenges were you trying to address with Mayven Studios?

We needed help with website design and development to fit our recent brand refresh.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Mayven Studios does WordPress website design and development for us using Figma and Canva. We started by providing them with our brand guidelines and a brief with our requirements in terms of website infrastructure so they could have an outline to follow.

In addition, they’re working with us on graphic design.

What was the team composition? 

We’ve worked with 5–6 members of their team, including Nate (Founder), an account manager, designers, and developers.

How did you come to work with Mayven Studios?

A design studio referred them to us; they said that Mayven Studios was proficient and easy to work with.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2022, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve noticed a traffic increase and higher engagement with our social posts, blogs, and SEO, which include designs from Mayven Studios. In addition, the integration of their work is seamless, with useful tools that we can use to make new workflows.

How did Mayven Studios perform from a project management standpoint?

Their communication is excellent, they stay within budget, and they meet deadlines — there’s always someone ready to help us. Moreover, they update us on the project’s status and quickly take on any task. We use Zoom, Slack, phone calls, and email regarding communication and tools.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their team is globally-minded, experienced, creative, and able to think outside the box. Overall, they’re easy to work with and an efficient team with a lot of expertise in the design and development area.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think there’s anything they can improve on; they’re always willing to take feedback and learn about different industries with a receptive and swift approach.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They're the perfect match if you’re looking for a friendly, talented, and updated team with the latest modern design aesthetic.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm a product specialist at a content marketplace. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mayven?

We were looking for a company to help us redesign our home page and develop a new Android app.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

In terms of the website redesign, we handed over PSDs to them and they were in charge of bringing them to life. We also gave them our API and design files for the mobile application and they’re currently building the Native Android app for us. We didn’t have the app before, so they started from ground up.

What is the team composition?

We work directly with the developers and the CEO, who is also our project manager.

How did you come to work with them?

It was a recommendation.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent about $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in December 2017 and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They’ve delivered the products that look exactly like the finished designs we gave them. When we worked with other firms, we had to go back and forth to make UI changes, but it was never the case with Mayven. They met all of our expectations, bringing in third-party developers when needed.

How did they perform from a project management standpoint?

They stay on top of everything, regularly sending us updates and fixing bugs when needed. They go above and beyond to meet their deadlines and fulfill all of our requests. Besides, they're very flexible. We usually communicate via phone, email, and Google Hangouts.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We've gone back to them three times and we're now committing to the fourth project. They have excellent project management skills and always make sure the deliverables are the perfect representation of our expectations and designs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. I've never had any issues with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We have a very unique and open relationship.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Hotel Tech Report is a premiere global research startup firm for hotel technology. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Mayven?

Mayven built our intial WordPress MVP, which we had scaled to over 300 companies. The platform, now overtaxed and too complex, was becoming a huge bottleneck. We needed to migrate to a custom build. 

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted a scalable, reliable web app for our customers. The website’s core functionality included multiple user types with different privileges and permissions, an integrated sponsor platform, and full capabilities for ratings and reviews. Our goal was to use our existing frontend assets (i.e. HTML, CSS, and JS) but rebuild the backend as simply as possible to allow us to leverage more resources and speed up development. (At the time, we only had two developers who understood the specifics of a complex WordPress customization.) We were also trying to decide between a Ruby on Rails platform or Laravel, as recommended by Mayven. 

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had used several vendors before Mayven. We found them through some online research and selected them after multiple interviews. A big selling point was their unique project management product that allowed for seamless communications and operations and let us demo their work before committing to them, which was great. 

Can you go into detail about the services they provided and the scope of the project?

Mayven rebuilt our cobbled-together WordPress website into a slick, streamlined Laravel app at a very reasonable cost. They completed the full migration without requiring anything from us. They even added some additional functionality to the website free of charge and complaints. Mayven really feels like a part of our team, not just a service provider. We love Team Mayven! 

What was the team composition?

Adam handles the product requirements, full designs and mockups, and QA. Mayven provides a core developer who is unbelievably talented, ridiculously good at communication, and often notices minute details that we may have missed. Passionate and driven, he is a delight to work with and has really learned about our business. There is a lead project manager who doubles as a lead technical for information architecture, server setup, and recommendations, and they have allocated a frontend resource to scale the team on demand based on our needs and capacity. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

They were spot on and did an outstanding job, completing the rebuild in less than five weeks. The end product is extremely fast, flexible, and easily customizable for the future. We are very happy we took their advice. With Mayven by our side, we’ve expanded our customer base from nothing to over 330 global clients and monetized our business, breaking even without raising any outside capital. None of this would have been possible without them as a true partner. Despite some initial hesitation on the Laravel platform, we trusted Mayven’s reliable reputation and history of leading us in the right direction. We've been blown away on multiple levels, specifically on the cost. We're estimating that it would have taken another development shop twice as long at double the cost to rebuild a Ruby on Rails app.  

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Mayven has by far the best project management that we have ever experienced with a development shop. The proprietary platform operates in two-week release cycles and allows us to constantly see our development status, manage billing, track hours, and communicate with the team. We have a sprint meeting every other Monday with the developer and project manager, during which we specify product requirements for functionality and design and we run through questions, We discuss the cost and feasibility of our requests, then work together to develop the appropriate functionality and execution for our needs. Team Mayven does its magic with development and final designs, and I QA, although they can QA, as well.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We are honestly impressed by everything. They offer white glove service and a really useful backend SaaS project management product. Nate and Connor (Founders, Mayven) are awesome and incredibly responsive, with execution that goes above and beyond. Because they care about our business and are there in emergencies, we feel as if they really are a part of our team. They excel at finding outstanding developers who are not just talented, but who take pride in their work and in going the extra mile.

Are there any areas where they can improve?

We truly have no feedback for improvement; we are very happy clients. Don't change Team Mayven! 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the UX/UI manager at TaxAct, a tax software company similar to TurboTax or H&R Block. I focus on optimizing the look and feel of our site and applications.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mayven?

We didn’t have the internal design/development resources to support us through development season. Our company tried using freelancers, but the initial onboarding phase took too long with them, so we decided to go with Mayven to augment our resources.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve done a broad variety of work together over the course of our engagement. Notable projects include a redesign of our email layout after working through potential templates, as well as a total revamp of our homepage, which is still in development.

Our first project was a redesign of our login page, for which I provided prototypes and information on the site’s UX. Other projects required them to understand our user and apply best practices independently, including the homepage redesign. We use a .NET framework, and they provided us with HTML and CSS that we plugged into the system ourselves.

What is the team composition?

We primarily worked with Nate (Founding Partner, Mayven), who functioned as our project manager. The team was composed of a lead designer and two or three other developers that came on depending on the scope of the project we were working on.

How did you come to work with Mayven?

One of our product managers knew Connor, the other founding partner at Mayven. He set things in motion and got us working together.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $100,000-$150,000 total so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2017 with a four-month contract, and things went so well that we decided to renew the contract this past January.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve gotten very positive internal feedback on their work. They’ve allowed us to share and review a larger variety of designs in a shorter amount of time while reducing our development timeframes significantly.

How did Mayven perform from a project management standpoint?

This has been one of the best aspects of the engagement because I don’t have to actively manage the work that they do. They deliver by a specified date, and we follow up with them through a project management platform that they use internally. We also have the option to collaborate with specific developers on their team when we need to. Most of our communication takes place on their internal platform, but we speak on the phone when necessary.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve been very effective in meeting tight deadlines, which is incredibly helpful. Last December, we had several projects that we were looking to complete before the end of the year and Mayven was able to get them all done with no issues.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’ve gotten the impression that some of their designers and developers might be overseas, so there are sometimes language barriers or typos while prototyping. However, the content they use for prototypes is only sample text to give us an idea of the design, so it hasn’t caused any real problems.

Advice for potential customers?

Try them out; they’re a great team to work with. They’re very personal, easy to communicate with, and they do their best to ensure that what you want is what you get. They’re extremely fast, they do high-quality work, and their prices are remarkable. I can’t think of anything bad about our experience with them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

At the time I was working with Mayven, I headed the product marketing team for a large job postings aggregator.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Mayven?

We wanted to speed up our development work. At the time we engaged them, we didn’t have a market development team that could turn work around quickly. We needed help with frontend development, landing pages, email templates, and prototypes.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We used them for their speed of execution and for development help. There were two big areas they were involved in. We mostly worked with them for product marketing. They also handled our ongoing WordPress services when we didn’t have a dedicated individual in-house and helped manage the maintenance of those sites.

They created landing pages as well as infographics and email templates. We created an interactive digital infographic that would move with the screen. The most complicated project they completed was a prototype we could use to deliver our sales story. It included best practices to use and show data. Most of their work was clear frontend development.

We typically provided the designs, some of which were just rough sketches or wireframes. They took our style guide and made decisions. When we wanted something really customized, our designers worked on it first before we took it to them.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Nate [Founding Partner, Mayven], who acted as our project lead and account manager. We also had a developer, but didn’t interact with them directly.

How did you come to work with Mayven?

A good friend of mine has a relationship with the founding partner. We decided to test them out to see if they would be a good solution for us. We saw the level of project management and service they provided, especially their speed. I shared their contact with different people in our organization who do internal development. They were a great solution when we needed things done efficiently.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $75,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2015. We wrapped up our projects with Mayven at the end of 2017. If we need their help in 2018, we will definitely be reaching out.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They were extremely fast and provided what I expected. I don’t work with them now, but would work with them again in a heartbeat if I had design or frontend development work for them.

How did Mayven perform from a project management standpoint?

They were awesome. It was nice to have someone with their technical knowledge who could translate my ideas into a product. Communication was always clear. Whenever I wasn’t giving them enough detail they would follow up to clarify. They always asked questions in a good way and never nagged us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their speed, high level of communication and service, and understanding of our needs were all impressive. We didn’t do a ton of scoping up front, but as long as a request was clear they knew what they had to do. They could start working immediately. Sometimes we got things back the same day, which I’ve never experienced before. They gave us exactly what we needed.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I’d just encourage them to expand the services they already offer. They’re so good with customer satisfaction and delivery. I’d love to go to them for different jobs in the future.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Scope out your requests and have an agreement on deliverables. Build a good understanding with them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder of our company and am responsible for all PRDs, specs, design, development oversight and communication. On the development front, I lead design, product management, and project management. We run a B2B reviews site for hotels looking for various software and IT solutions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what reason(s) did your company hire Mayven?

We were looking to build an MVP for our ratings and reviews website.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal was to develop a high-quality MVP site that provided our proof of concept. It was also important that we could scale it for our first several hundred users and thousands of website visitors.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had worked with Mayven before to build an interactive demo while testing another proof of concept and they had done an awesome job.

Describe the project in detail.

They provided custom WordPress theme development for our specific use case. I am very picky when it comes to design and frontend experience so I was looking for a team that was highly detail oriented and able to execute what I wanted.

What was the team composition?

I specified all designs and requirements and worked with Mayven via their administrative project management platform. The Mayven team divvied up tasks themselves between their frontend and backend developers. After completion, tasks were moved to the completed stack and myself and my co-founder performed QA for additional feedback and bugs.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The project has been going well and we've scaled to almost 200 companies who've signed up on the platform and thousands of users. We are still working with Mayven on development and don't plan on changing that anytime soon.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow has been great. Mayven has their own backend project management tool you log into that has web hooks built in with Slack notification so communication is nearly instant unless they are very busy. However, even in the case where they are busy, Connor [Founder, Mayven], will step in and help.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

When Connor does step in to finish our weekly work himself, he often works over the weekend to do so. That kind of dedication that they provide would be difficult to find with another outsourced development shop!

Are there any areas for improvement?

As a smaller client of theirs, we sometimes get pushed to the back burner a little and communication slips, but they do a good job of managing that in general. 

They could improve the level of granularity and transparency regarding exactly what task is being worked on, when, how far along it is, and what the expected completion date is. That said, they almost always hit their deadlines and the above suggestion is micro-managing, which can be really time-consuming so I understand why they don't. If they built it into the platform to automate that, it would be awesome.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a founding partner of DroneVideos.com and work on SEO, Marketing and Advertising.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what reason(s) did your company hire Mayven?

We were looking for a development team with great reviews that was based out of the U.S. Our website was complex, and we needed a team that was able to work with us to fulfill our vision as there were many small parts that had to work together effortlessly.

What were your goals for this project?

To build a completely automated media production company for the drone industry allowing us to easily scale to new markets with a click of a button.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

After careful review of many development companies and after speaking with the Mayven team, it was clear that they had the expertise and experience to build what we needed. Also, they were extremely fair with their pricing structure.

Describe the project in detail.

DroneVideos.com is a nationwide drone media production company specializing in aerial photography and videography. Our website has a built-in scheduling system to allow us to handle hundreds of drone operators and clients effortlessly through an easy user interface system.

What was the team composition?

We had a great team of Mayven developers working to create all of the features that we were looking for. Mayven was able to scale their workforce of developers to stay on schedule. After the bulk of the website was completed, they scaled down to a few developers who continue to work daily on features we request. We've never experienced any issues with not having enough developers available.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The website included all of the features we were looking for to make for an easy customer experience. All of the feedback we have received from the Drone Operators and customers has been positive.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We interact daily with Mayven as we are constantly adding new features to the website. Their communication through the Mayven portal allows us to stay on track and stay up to date with their work.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I was extremely impressed with Mayven's communication. Anytime we had a question or needed support, they were available normally within the hour. It's great knowing that anytime we needed something, they had the people available to get the job done fast, and professionally. They have a great team who was on top of our entire project 7 days a week.

Are there any areas for improvement?

None. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a recently launched startup that has technology reviews from a global community of hoteliers to help buyers find the best products (think Clutch...but for hotel technology).

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Mayven?

We needed to build an MVP site quickly to launch before an important conference. The site needed to match our mockups to a tee and be able to import all of the review and listing content that we had gathered.

SOLUTION

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

They built our MVP site using our mockups as a reference.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The result was as it always is with CMV, awesome. We've gotten rave reviews from the conference that we launched at because CMV delivered to a tee and brought our mockups to life almost pixel perfectly.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

I've worked with outsourced dev teams for the past 2 years and CMV is in a class of their own. Their backend platform makes it super easy and clear to manage your project and their communication and responsiveness is unreal.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

While the price tag is definitely higher than outsourcing outside the US, you're definitely paying for quality and reliability.

They also do fixed bid estimates which on the one hand adds a premium, but at the same time it means that if you spec it out properly, there is no question they will deliver exactly what you want in the gauranteed timeline and price which is really reassuring.

With OTHER outsourced dev shops that I've worked with I've had projects run over by literally months and been forced to prove why I shouldn't be paying extra hours for it, but not with CMV.  If peace of mind, communication and reliability are important, CMV is the team for the job.