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BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Co-Founder and CEO of online advertising and growth agency.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Sitex, and what were your goals?

We have been working with Hameed, Shozab and their team for years to design and develop multiple websites and landing pages for ourselves and for clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select Sitex and what were the deciding factors?

It's been so long I can't remember how we first found them, but they are very fast, very skilled, and reasonably priced.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We've designed and developed multiple sites across WordPress, Shopify and other platforms. Haven't found anything they can't do yet along these lines.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We work with Hameed and Shozab.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

They are such a strong team. Hameed is an amazing designer, everything he does is always perfect and high-taste. Shozab runs an awesome web dev effort, they get everything right, any little bug they fix fast.

They are so fun and great to work with, very skilled at what they do, super professional, and just great people. They are a key partner for us and I am always very grateful for their help.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

They are very communicative. Clear about deadlines and hit them.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Quality and reliability.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No they are seriously perfect and awesome.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of OptiLingo—a language learning platform. We have a web app and a mobile app that works on Android and iOS.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Sitex Private Limited?

Originally, I reached out to Sitex Private Limited to help integrate our platform with AWS, specifically with Amazon Polly for voice services. Amazon Polly is well documented, but the use cases for integration were well beyond the use case that I had. As well, the documentation is designed for a voice app operating in one language. I wanted to take lesson plans and convert them into an algorithm to produce a synthetic speech audio file.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Sitex Private Limited helped to build the entirety of our tech platform. They built the mobile app using React and compiled natively for iOS. Their team also built a web app, which includes all the mobile platform’s functionalities. They created the web version using a tool that exported the React code into plain HTML.

Sitex Private Limited converted my teaching notes into a format that a computer can read. Their team created a backend system that orders phrases, sentences, and vocabularies based on a user’s current language and target language. Their team developed an integrated audio file in multi-languages. They extended the backend tech-stack to support metadata that not only produces an audio file that directs users but also takes additional metadata to display the spoken text on the screen of the mobile or web app in real-time synchronously with the audio. So, they built features to display text in both a user’s primary language and their target language in real-time. Their team created transliteration features for all the languages on the platform. Syntactic translations and gloss translations display on the screen in real-time with the audio. They also created the interfaces so that a user can turn functionalities on or off.

What is the team composition?

Our primary point of contact is Shozab (Chief Executive, Sitex Private Limited) who works with 2–3 other developers on the project.

How did you come to work with Sitex Private Limited?

I found Sitex Private Limited on Upwork. I originally posted a tiny portion of the scope. For this project, I went through about 4–5 freelancers. I found people who swore that they knew what to do, took a lot of time and money, and didn’t produce many results. Other people tried to convince me that my platform was infeasible. Shozab came to me knowing what I wanted to do and could do it quickly. They blew everyone else out of the water in terms of speed to market, budget, and quality of work.

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve spent between $50,000–$100,000 on their services. By the time the platform is where it needs to be, we will spend another $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2018, and we’re still working together on the project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

When they build a product, it is done with a high degree of quality. The work will be thorough and well thought-through. Even if I document a product really well, their team will invariably come back and show how functionalities could not support a specific sequence of actions. What gets produced even at the alpha stage really would be a beta or a final build for other startups. My whole team decided that we’ll continue to work exclusively with Sitex Private Limited. We'd give them six out of five stars if I could.

How did Sitex Private Limited perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate on an ad hoc basis 2–3 a week. Every Friday, their team provides a detailed email update to tell me where the project stands. They do what they say and say what they do and their team is always on budget. They’re almost always on time and the only time deadlines slip is when we agree collectively to expand the scope. Their team’s also open to feedback on how to improve the quality of services. They’ve been a collaborative partner, essentially becoming a part of our internal team.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their engineering capabilities are top-notch. There’s not an engineering problem that I’ve thrown at them that they couldn’t figure out. They have creative and robust solutions to implement quickly at a reasonable price. Their team helps to clarify what needs to get done and then help collaborate on the best ways to get it done.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I’ve only told them that the communication of project management could be improved. Once I did that, they immediately started to send the weekly updates. Every time I’ve told them that there’s something to be done better, they’ve done it.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Scope out the end result and be open to collaboration on how best to achieve it.