Sather Development

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the CTO to a cognitive science startup called vertex biology, we use machine learning to make easy to use medical apps.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We needed a website redesign and some platform improvements. We wanted a team that worked fast and delivered real resultsz

SOLUTION

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

We found sather through a referral from a personal friend, we liked that sather performed conversion rate optimizations after designing and building a website.

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

First, we had a kick off meeting to figure out our scope of work and sather worked with us to narrow down a few web design styles before we final settled on an elegant dark background style that sather custom designed. Sather took about a month to figure out how to design all the screens with us and then delivered a wireframe mock-up. After the wireframe was delivered, sather coded our site and gave updates on a daily basis on progress of work.

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

A front end developer who served as the account manager + a really great backend engineer - both are engineers from uc Berkeley and were very communicative.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

After launching our site, we noticed a significant decline in site speed - cutting our load time from 6.7 seconds to 1.4 seconds. We also noticed a 18% increase for onsite conversion, which we were very happy with.

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

Sather worked in an agile manner, taking our opinions on sprint results into account when designing and implementing the marketing site and platform. We appreciated the fact that they always responded in a few minutes or hours, even on weekends. We used Trello for task management and slack for communication messaging.

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

They cut our site speed down to less than 2 seconds and delivered unbelievably clean coffee that our technical team was very impressed with. More importantly, they delivered the final deliverables about a week early from the rushed timeline we were operating on.

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

Working with sather was a great experience and we would recommend their services to any colleague.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of a financial analytics firm that is at the intersection between financial services and technology.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We hired Sather to do three things. We needed a brand new website - we wanted the site to be modern and conversion-driven. We needed some platform algorithms as well as landing pages that would be tested for conversion rates.

SOLUTION

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

We found Sather through a referral; the deciding factor was that Sather is the only firm in town that actually uses conversion-driven design and really walked us through their optimization process which I found to be quite unique.

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

Sather broke the project into 5 phases. First was UI/UX redesign - Sather sent over some initial designs that looked fantastic but worked with us to reach a vision that was on-brand for us.

Phase 2 & 3 were the actual website development, which is where Sather really shined: They were able to optimize the site speed to be lower than 1 second, and perform some basic on-page SEO for free. We wanted switch away from Wordpress so Sather custom-coding our entire site using HTML, CSS, and JS libraries.

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

I worked with two of Sather's development team - one was an UI/UX designer & front-end engineer, the other one was a full-stack.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to wrap up the website 3 weeks earlier than expected as their work flow was quite efficient. Importantly, we reduced our site speed from 8.7 seconds down to 0.76 seconds and saw increases in search engine rankings & on-page conversions.

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

Sather's team always responded within a few hours, even on weekends. We communicated through a slack channel.

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

Everyone we talked to were "experts" in web development who could understand our ideas, rather than a single account managers. This sort of transparency made communication much more efficient and ultimately resulted in project delivery 3 weeks early!

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

They were great!