SapientPro

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the head of product at Welcome App. We’re a startup company that offers a platform for newcomers in the Netherlands to help them find housing and integrate better into their new community. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

We initially contacted SapientPro to develop our mobile and web application.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SapientPro has developed our mobile and web app using React Native, React.js, and Google Cloud Platform. Our platform allows users to book activities, chat with local citizens, explore events in their neighborhood, and get updates on their profile feed. On the other side, active local organizations can upload their events and activities to the app so newcomers can participate.

Moreover, SapientPro has helped us create a solid team for continuous development. When we started working with SapientPro, we didn’t have an in-house development team. 

What is the team composition?

We consistently work with SapientPro’s project manager, frontend developer, and backend developer. However, we’ve also worked with several other teammates from SapientPro during our engagement.

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

I’m unsure how we initially found SapientPro since our engagement started before I joined the company.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested around $100,000–$150,000 yearly with SapientPro. 

What is the status of this engagement?

When I started working at my current company a year ago, they were already engaged with SapientPro. I started working with SapientPro in March 2022, and our partnership is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

SapientPro has developed an amazing product. The system’s uptime is almost 100%, and there are hardly any complaints from our users. They help us with the problems we face since we don’t have a large in-house development team, and SapientPro has really helped us in the best way possible. They've built an amazing product.

Moreover, SapientPro is flexible and responds to our needs. For instance, if we require more development resources in a specific month, we can ask SapientPro. On the contrary, we can also ask them to reduce the team according to our current needs. 

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

SapientPro’s project management has been good. They’re available when we need them and respond quickly. We have weekly meetings with SapientPro’s project manager and collaborate through Jira. We also use Telegram for informal and quick communication. 

Moreover, we have a fixed monthly rate with SapientPro. They meet deadlines, although sometimes they take longer than expected. Our testing process has evolved, so we’re now more critical than we were a year ago.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m most impressed with SapientPro’s development skills. They’ve developed our entire platform, and we didn’t have any in-house specialists to instruct them on how to build it. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s room for improvement on both sides since we’re still a startup company. Moreover, SapientPro can improve their communication about deadlines. If we agree on a date, I’d like them to inform us if they are delayed. I know these things can happen, and I’d like to know upfront. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I recommend agreeing with SapientPro upfront about project management and deciding how you will keep track of the project. Be close to their work and give them feedback, so there’s room for improvement.

I definitely recommend working with SapientPro if you’re looking for a flexible development partner who can build a project quickly and with good quality. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the co-founders of a blockchain-related application specializing in NFTs.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

We were having technical challenges and needed to index the chain of NFTs.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SapientPro has been involved in different kinds of development over multiple projects, including smart contract development and coding; they’ve also performed front- and backend work. Key technologies include Solidity, React, and MongoDB. 

What is the team composition?

Our team size depends on the project, but we only work with one person now. 

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

We found them on Upwork. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested more than $500,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

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

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve been really happy with their work and continue to use them for projects. We’ve given between 80%–90% of our development to them because their quality of work is so high. SapientPro also understands our business needs and how to communicate with us effectively. They steer us in the right direction, and we trust them to show us the best solution.

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

We have no issues with project management from their side. We communicate via Telegram and Google Meet. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They understand the full development process and always start with an explanation and a clear project description. They are very professional, and when we need assistance in other areas, they bring in the right person. They’ve been able to complete projects where other developers have failed to do so, and we feel like we’ve learned a lot from SapientPro. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing we can come up with. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We recommend working with them, and think they have a very fair price.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the operations manager for Krcmar Surveying LTD., a company that distributes and creates land surveying plans. In my position, I run our surveying crews and get them to do their jobs. Recently, I was assigned to manage the development of our CRM application to support our operations.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

Our CRM system was built by a different company using a very specific PHP framework that not many developers know called Gyroscope. We started having many requests from our operations side because our CRM system didn’t assist our operations to the extent that our managers wanted. Therefore, we needed to increase our efficiency in developing the features we needed, so we hired SapientPro to help us out with our CRM expansion.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SapientPro is helping us expand our CRM system capabilities using Gyroscope and PHP as the main technologies. Currently, our objective is to get away from Gyroscope, and we’ll keep working with SapientPro for this.

One of the key features they’re developing is the virtualization of the management for surveying workflows. To do this, I first found all the steps related to every surveying workflow. Since then, they’ve organized all those steps into a frontend feature that allows users to assign various requests in those steps. With this feature, we’ll also be able to skip steps and customize how a job will flow through our organization, allowing us to track the analytics of said steps.

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

We researched only and came across Clutch, where I found SapientPro. They seemed able to do the work, so we hired them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $50,000–$70,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2022, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Thanks to SapientPro, our product is now basically ready to go, and we’re close to seeing the actual functionality. If we hadn’t hired SapientPro, we would be nowhere near where we are now. However, we haven’t deployed anything yet because SapientPro is putting on the final touches and implementing stakeholder feedback.

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

We work SapientPro on an hourly basis. We haven’t assigned a budget to the project because the new features will save us a lot of issues down the road. In terms of time management, they’ve been great.

We use Google Meet for our meetings and Microsoft Azure for project management. We’ve leveraged MS Azure’s project boards to assign tickets using the Agile framework. However, we’ve gotten to a point where our tasks are getting very specific, so we now use a Word document to write the tasks.

What did you find most impressive about them?

SapientPro’s work has been phenomenal. They’ve learned Gyroscope, our business needs, and a very complex paradigm on how to automate our processes, allowing them to implement new features to our CRM. They’ve even stopped me from implementing some features that would have caused errors, which is great.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything SapientPro could improve on — they’ve done everything we’ve asked for.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company specializes in software development. I am a sales person responsible for establishing partnerships with outsourcing vendors.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We hired SapientPro to co-create a new e-commerce site and transfer data from an old one.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found them on Clutch and from then on communicated via email or Skype (if there was something urgent). The deciding factor was their vast experience with E-commerce and outsourcing maturity.

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

SapientPro helpled us build the new website from the ground up including requirements elicitation, design, front-end development, and back-end development. Among the technologies they used were PHP (Laravel), Magento, MySQL, Elasticsearch, and React. Discussions are now underway about the website's ongoing co-maintenance.

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

We worked with a team of front and back-end engineers, including designers, QA specialists, and a project manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

As a result of the website's improvements, it now responds faster to large traffic than the old version. The content can be easily updated on the website thanks to the intuitive and responsive admin part. SapientPro also automated QA processes, so we detected the issues much much faster. They also recovered the information from the old site without any data loss or damage, so we were able to update the new site quickly.

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

Communication was very smooth, we used several tools for it - emails, Slack, voice calls. Project management was transport, we always knew the status of the project.

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

Whenever we needed to contact them, they always responded quickly even outside of business hours. They have an underlying value of transparency, so they delivered what they promised and communicated all risks and areas out of their scope early on.

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

There's nothing that comes to mind right now.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

The company is a media company working with affiliate and membership based solutions with different subscriptions. My position is CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SapientPro?

I hired them for web development of WordPress-based sites. Both smaller tasks but also bigger projects and developments.

What were your goals for this project?

I hired SapientPro for an overall collaboration around smaller bugs and adjustments on my sites. I therefore use them on daily basis. But I also hired them for one bigger task, where they developed a new subscription system with more difficult elements in it.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

SapientPro was recommended for me by a business friend, and therefore it was a personal recommendation. I did one meeting with the team at SapientPro and after this, I was sure, that I wanted to use them for my web development on my projects.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

It is difficult to precisely describe the total project since we both did a big project but also smaller ones. But the development started out with smaller adjustments like customization of plugins, translations, building checkout-flows, removing bugs, etc.

For the bigger project, I created both mock-ups and a working board in Trello that Sapient Pro used. They developed a new landing page and subscription checkout flow making different systems work together. This process was not easy at all, but we had good communication and progress about it and made it through.

What was the team composition?

The project team was a project manager from SapientPro and developers. From my company, only one person. This constellation worked super-efficient.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The bigger project has meant a great deal since this helped the business grow with new subscription services. This meant more growth and possibilities for my customers. The project launched at the agreed time and everything worked out.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

SapientPro did an amazing job. They were always available for smaller and bigger urgent changes and kept aligned with the project plan. We mainly communicated through Skype.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their ability to change fast and work with urgent deadlines was impressive. They are very flexible. Their competence level is also very high.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There are no areas for improvement - not as I see it and on the projects I have done with SapientPro.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the product owner of the Welcome App, a Dutch nonprofit. Our goal is to support newcomers with a refugee background to find their way in the Netherlands. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

Our services are offered through a mobile app, which we hired Sapient Pro to help us build and design. The Welcome App functions as the central platform where programs, training, events, and questions come together.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We originally outsourced the development of the iOS and Android application to another company, but we brought SapientPro on to complete the updated version of it. The fundamentals are the same, but the team installed new capabilities and completely changed the flow of the platform. 

When SapientPro was brought on board, we provided the team with some wireframes and designs, but they weren’t complete. The UI/UX team jumped in to help out in the design process right away so that the developers could quickly get to work.

We have several key functionalities. The first is a question portal, where newcomers can ask questions to be answered by either the local community or by experts. Many of the questions for the experts are quite sensitive, whereas the ones directed towards local users have more to do with navigating everyday life.

There’s also a space for newcomers to build up a social network through trainings, events, and programs. 

Next, we’re launching a translation feature, where newcomers can get an interpreter on the phone within 40 seconds. 

What is the team composition?

There were about seven or eight people involved in the project. The CTO and CEO will jump in and help out if necessary. 

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

We found SapientPro through word-of-mouth. I had several conversations with Dutch companies, and their team came up. A friend of mine had been working with them for years and was very satisfied with their performance.

In our initial meeting with the CTO and COO, we were quickly impressed, so we decided to partner with the team.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around €100,000 (approximately $109,000 USD) on the project so far. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in August 2019, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We just launched the update of the app, so it’s a bit too early to provide any substantial data.

However, we’re very happy with the collaboration so far. We tested the new flow of the app, bringing in various stakeholders. All the feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. Thanks to SapientPro, we’ve taken a great leap forward.

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

Our project manager works nonstop, and is always ready to jump on a call when necessary.

We keep in touch mainly through Telegram and track progress through Redmine. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Not only is the communication strong, but it’s also personal. We really appreciate that senior members of the company are available to jump on calls and help us through different points of the project. Everyone on the team is willing and able to fully engage whenever we ended them. It’s the reason why we want to keep moving with SapientPro moving forward.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We had one small issue, where the team was using a different design platform than we were used to, but it wasn’t difficult to overcome.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Take advantage of their personal engagement and communication in the collaboration.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the COO of Footshop. We are a big online e-commerce player that sells sneakers and high fashion clothing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

We needed a team to help us with e-commerce and web development. We needed to increase our development team because we grew very quickly. We wanted new features and to stabilize our website and system. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

SapientPro worked on our e-commerce and website development needs. They produced new features and the customer-facing side of the platform. Their team used a variety of technologies including PHP, Elasticsearch, and RabbitMQ. They also created the site in 10 languages. 

What is the team composition?

We worked with six people from their team.

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

I found them through an online search, so we communicated through an initial email and a Skype call. After that, I went to Ukraine to meet with them. I chose their team because the communication went great with the owner and they had a good knowledge of technology. 

How much have you invested in them?

We spent $4,000 for each developer.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from May 2018–December 2019. We’re building our own internal team so we stopped our collaboration. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We had a very good experience with them. Their knowledge makes them a great candidate for another e-commerce project, so I’ve recommended them for others. 

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

We managed the project internally. We used Slack, Jira, Zoom, and GitLab.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The best part about working with SapientPro was their energy. Their young team and willingness to do new things made them great. They were good workers and were always looking to improve quickly. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Adding more proactive design features would be great. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It’s important to have good internal project management to manage their team for longer-term projects.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner and founder of a business in communication, design, and innovation. My position is at the moment call the chief creative solutions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

We have a customer that works in special needs education, and we do all of their communication work. We hired SapientPro to develop a website with a custom CRM.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They built a web-based platform with a custom CRM and CMS. They also built an adjacent native Android/iOS app that the website can interact with. In addition to being an e-commerce site, it’s a booking and subscription platform.  Agendas are accessible on the app or through the backend of the website.

Members also use it as a collaboration platform—they can schedule meetings, join meetings, share files, and discuss things through a forum.

What is the team composition?

There are two people who we contact regularly, and an emergency contact. Over the years, we’ve worked with many people. They always are able to staff the team and fulfill their promises.

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

Someone recommended them to me.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend about €30,000 per year (approximately $335,000 over ten years).

What is the status of this engagement?

I’ve been working with them since before they were called SapientPro. Our partnership began around 2009 and we’ve been working together ever since.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Subscriptions have increased by 20% each year. The quality of the systems we’ve built together is very high. The site is very useful and really helps our client stay in contact with members without growing their staff.  Without this system, they would need to hire another person to maintain communication with over 700 schools in Holland. The impact is huge.

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

They always keep their promises—when they schedule something, they get it done in time and in budget. Over the years, it’s always been very easy to contact them. We used to Skype, but now we usually use Slack. Even though they’re far away, are in a different time zone, and speak a different language, they’re always available.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It doesn't matter what platform, language or digital solution we're looking for; they always have an expert available who can get things done in a reasonable time frame. So that's really impressive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s a shame they’re not closer, but that’s difficult for them to improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The nice thing about SapientPro is that they’re approachable and always reachable. Still, you need to be reachable too. Web development is a very agile process and things change quickly. You have to be open to their input because they have some really valuable insights. If you’re open to their ideas, you’ll get an even better product.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company offers financial and operational reporting and services. I am one of the co-founders.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SapientPro?

SapientPro developed the complete front end in ReactJS

What were your goals for this project?

The goals was on time delivery within a fixed budget.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I already worked with SapientPro on other projects and startups, and I am very satisfied with SapientPro.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Implement and configure ReactJS, developed all the different application pages and functionality, implemented the full design as delivered through Zeplin.

What was the team composition?

A small agile team set-up with a scrum master and the developers, the SapientPro operations manager was also engaged to ensure on time delivery and efficient communication.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Very positive impact.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We used Slack/Zoom/Skype for communication and SapientPro is using Redmine for sprint planning.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They provided excellent value for our money.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No further improvements needed.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the marketing operations manager at Easygenerator, an online authoring tool to help companies create engaging e-learning courses easily and manage their learning and development stack.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SapientPro?

We had the same marketing website for about six years. It was obsolete technology-wise and had a lot of outdated content. In six years, many changes have been made gradually: a few pages have been deleted or added, but a lot of older features became irrelevant.

Navigating through old data became messy, and we needed someone to redevelop our website following our company rebrand. This time, we wanted a modular solution that allowed us to add and manage features over time, and gave us the ability to easily tweak every part of it ourselves. We didn’t want to have to rely on an external agency for every single change in the layout.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started a pilot project to create the groundwork for a full website. The first phase was creating a blog with all the content we already had and a homepage with modular blocks that we could reuse creatively on other pages. That was a 200-hour project. They had to create a whole new WordPress environment and lay down the groundwork for the next steps. Development was extremely fast and timely. We were happy with it and created a scope for the bigger project. The foundations being made, they just had to work on top of what they already did.

The scope was made in collaboration with them. They helped us decide on technology and then built everything from the ground up. We already had new designs for most pages and knew how we wanted the website to feel. Some parts of the site, like the blog, were brand new designs, as we used to host articles on HubSpot.

Another big thing we asked them to do was to make the website multi-lingual.

What is the team composition?

We had two frontend developers, a WordPress developer, and a QA person. I was mostly communicating with Max (CTO, SapientPro) and Serge (COO, SapientPro). Whenever there was something I wasn’t very sure about or a feature that needed tweaking, they were there for us.

How did you come to work with SapientPro?

We used to work with a freelancer for quite some time to develop a new website. It didn’t go so well. In about the same time it took us to develop the full website with SapientPro, the freelance development made only two static pages and a draft of the new environment, using obsolete technology. I was referred to SapientPro by another company we’re working with that went through a similar project, and I found them to be the best fit.

After going on Clutch and reading the reviews, I saw we had similar values. Trust is very important to them, and they deliver high-quality work. We gave them a pilot project and, according to how it worked out, we would go for a bigger commitment to create the website.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $18,500 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from June until October 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

There’s a huge difference between the old website and the new one in terms of usability.

Not only have all of the blog posts been migrated, but we now also have new types of content pages specifically optimized for search engines.

We can already see the difference internally, as we are now able to change anything we want on the website very quickly. The modularity allows us to design new types of pages or content. Migration also went rather smoothly, as we didn’t experience a single downtime while making the transition from the old environment to the new one.

How did SapientPro perform from a project management standpoint?

They were very autonomous for the pilot project, but for the second phase, we were in close contact to make sure everything rolled out properly. I really appreciated that approach. We agreed at the beginning that every week they’d give us an update of all the changes they’d made to the website. On their end, they used Redmine and gave us access to a staging server, so we were able to see the changes in real-time.

They were quite agile as well. For most of the deeper modification and advice, it was one-on-one communication with Max. He was always available on Slack, but we also had a couple of calls together. They uploaded the code to their GitHub account so our own developers could keep track. Even on the technology side, they’d advise us on plugins in order to save us from adding hours of development. They helped us save money by being really proactive.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

The freelancer we had was maintaining the current environment. We also asked him to create a new page and develop a new environment. Our engagement with him was a bit over a year. In a fraction of that timeline (about a third of that time), SapientPro was able to do way more in a very high-quality manner. They’re extremely precise. I wouldn’t say to a fault, but almost. They’re highly technical. That made our whole website faster and efficient. It was a project to get done in three months incorporating the migration.

What separates SapientPro from others is the quality of the code and communication. They’re very present, and we felt heard as a company. They were really striving for the best they could in making sure we’d be on par and not lose any time. They’re dedicated and have competitive prices.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They were always implementing things as they were written in the document we came up with. If it was too blurry, they’d ask questions. We used Zeplin.io to share our designs, but the tool doesn’t incorporate animations. As a result, sometimes the pages created would end up not behaving the way we wanted in the end. An easy fix to that would simply be for them to ask more questions when they’re not sure or wonder why some design features behave the way they do.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you think there are things you take for granted, dive a bit deeper into conversation with them, as you won’t necessarily see the same thing. Ask more questions or be more precise in your intentions.