Software Mansion

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm co-founder/CTO of Abridge, a health-tech company based out of Pittsburgh

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Software Mansion is contracted to develop new backends and improvements to our existing mobile application

What were your goals for this project?

Our key goal was to improve performance of our mobile app

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We got connected to Software Mansion via mutual friends

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Project began with a scoping exercise after which the team at Software Mansion worked together with us on designing, building and shipping the solution

What was the team composition?

We had a stable project manager and 2 developers who were pulled in based on the availability

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

It will be released in the next 3 weeks, but we are optimistic about the positive impact it could have on our business

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was very prompt, frictionless and impressive. We were able to communicate effectively using collaboration tools

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Technical expertise and solid project management

Are there any areas for improvement?

Price estimates were off, but that is understandable given the nature of the project

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the cofounder and CTO of Rainbow. We are a mobile Ethereum wallet with a React Native stack, currently on iOS and soon to be on Android. Our goal is to enable users to easily use the wonderful land of magical internet money that is Ethereum - by earning interest on their crypto holdings, being able to margin trade, and participate in the ecosystem with their assets.

Currently, doing such activities is rather difficult unless you spend a lot of time learning about the space first. We want to make these actions so intuitive that anybody can participate. We are a small team of 3 people (2 engineers and 1 designer who also codes). I work daily as an engineer on this product while also handling administrative duties and partner integrations when necessary.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

We are a small team of 3 people. We had heard about Software Mansion because some of the people we follow and are well regarded in the React Native community work at Software Mansion. We wanted to get as much engineering help as possible (for React Native mobile development, mostly for iOS platform), and as soon as possible, while still taking our time to find the best React Native engineers for full time hires.

We had no other engineers to rely on but ourselves, but the work we wanted to do was much more than what could be done by 3 people at the pace we wanted it. Our challenge was to get as quickly as possible to product market fit, building out the app with all the features we wanted to be a minimum viable product that a user could engage with. Software Mansion had engineers who were much deeper in the stack of React Native than we were, so their unique expertise gave us tremendous leverage.

For instance, their knowledge about React Native internals allowed us to accomplish the sorts of UI navigation, animations and interactions that we wouldn't have been able to do ourselves (at least, not at the same speed.) Also, their flexibility in scheduling allowed us to be dynamic about how much help we could get from them at a very reasonable cost.

What were your goals for this project?

This is an ongoing project. Our goals for this project continue to be creating our many "shots on goal" for product market fit. We are a consumer facing product, and want to introduce "decentralized finance" from the blockchain world to everyday users who may not be too familiar with the blockchain space. In order to accomplish this, we want to have the best user interfaces and interesting experiences that people can find useful and fun for their crypto holdings.

The beauty of the blockchain space is that anybody can participate - you don't need to open up a trading account or be of a certain age to participate. However, it's still too difficult to use the products that are live and available on Ethereum, so we want to change that. The metrics for this include general user numbers, high daily engagement (with some of our experiences that are more interactive), and revenue from commissions on certain features of the product.

Additionally, from a technical perspective, we wanted our code base to have the cutting edge of what React Native could offer - and if it couldn't support it, to help build that out with Software Mansion. Many of the user interfaces we created helped push the open source React Native packages forward.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

As mentioned in an earlier response, we learned about Software Mansion because some of its people are well regarded in the React Native community. It was easy to find the people as everything is open source, and we can see who the main contributors are. We had discovered the people first, then discovered Software Mansion.

We cared about finding the right people first, instead of rushing to find any dev shop. We had compared 3-4 other shops, some of which also had good people from the React Native community, but who we knew were already fully dedicated to other teams. In the end, we decided to go with Software Mansion because of this respect in the community they had garnered for their talent.

We trusted the quality of the work would be high, as well as motivating for the engineers who partnered with us since they wanted to give back to the open source React Native community, for which our projects would be pushing the cutting edge. We also could define a flexible agreement at very reasonable costs. The whole founding team (just the 3 of us) was involved in the selection process.

Describe the project in detail.

We really enjoy working with Software Mansion, and so we decided a continuous engagement would make sense for us, as there is more than enough work to go around. Even though we have recently made our first hire, we still want to continue working with Software Mansion. Of course, once we grow the team big enough, this may need to change, but for now, this allows us to focus on finding the perfect talent for our team.

With Software Mansion, we didn't have a limited scope of projects - we just had a stream of new features and technical requirements for the capabilities of our codebase (getting our mobile app to do complex navigations and gesture handling, etc). Our design process is mostly on Sketch + Figma, which we share with the developers as new features are announced.

We also enjoyed the fact that the engineers we worked with would take on ownership and make decisions about the product, after understanding the extremely high UI standards we have for a shippable feature. The platforms we developed for thus far were mostly iOS using React Native, but we have recently been working on getting our app working for Android. We have not received any other services from Software Mansion outside of engineering.

What was the team composition?

Ultimately, we were provided with 2 engineers and 1 project manager. It had started out with 1 engineer, then because our scope had increased, we hired 2 more engineers (1 more full time, 1 more part time). At a certain point, we were giving some of these engineers tasks that were "ahead" of our current timeline, but we later realized this was a tricky situation to manage, as these new features would sit around for a while to get merged, and that in itself required more overhead.

So we decided to slow down and not get too ahead of ourselves, instead focusing everyone on "current" issues. We ended up not needing the 3rd engineer as we decided to be more disciplined about our scope. We've had 2 engineers steadily since then. The project manager came in at some later point, as Software Mansion felt the role would be helpful and asked us about how we thought about this.

We felt especially comfortable with this because the project manager's time was not an additional cost for us. It was a win-win because communication could be eased, without the stress of extra costs when our main priorities were for shipping the product (and getting as much engineering help as possible.)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to ship our product live onto the App Store! We were also able to overcome navigation and gesture handling challenges that we were facing for the type of UI we were designing. As this is a continuous engagement, we are still working on adding more features.

Our initial expectations were that we would be able to ship more features sooner (I think this is generally how it goes for everyone), but at the time, we did not realize that the limitations of React Native were an issue for us until we got to the point where we wanted to build some features. Of course, the limits of React Native is not Software Mansion's responsibility, but the engineers were able to expand the functionality of the React Native libraries they contributed to, in order to help us meet our needs.

We have had excited feedback from our users for the "fun" nature of our app and the look and feel, with intuitive data. We are also excited to be shipping more features which will help drive user numbers up. It is still a niche user base. As we are not finished, there is no final app, just the current app, which of course still has minor bugs that are currently de-prioritized compared to all the new features we want to include. To be clear, Software Mansion engineers do not write buggy code - it's just the nature of complex apps that bugs will arise for edge cases.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Software Mansion recommended that we receive help from a project manager, so it has been very helpful. Our workflow has evolved over time, and now we have come to a steady flow of using Linear for task assignments, as well as a weekly call to sync up on what's next. Software Mansion is extremely proactive about getting feedback and making sure that communications are transparent, and that there are no surprises.

I really appreciate that - and this feedback goes both ways, to make sure that we and the engineers are all happy. Software Mansion is in Poland and we are in New York, so there is a time difference there. We have not really experienced issues caused by time differences, as we have everyone on Slack, and use async communication regularly. We have not experienced any issues caused by language barriers, as everyone speaks English.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We really appreciate the high quality and proactive nature of Software Mansion employees. We appreciate their contributions to the open source community and their expertise. We haven't worked with other vendors, but we know that we are happy with the work from Software Mansion that we haven't wanted to look for other vendors.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I frankly cannot think of anything to be done differently. For any new team of people, there is a learning curve for how to work well and communicate with each other. Software Mansion has been on top of it in asking for our feedback in order to get this learning curve to be shorter.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a solution provider for the broadcast television industry. Our main solution is a software/hardware package for managing IP based cameras that TV stations place on towers and buildings for weather, community and local video from around the cities they serve. I am the owner, one of the developers and manager of the product line.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Software Mansion?

Software Mansion provides deep technical capability and expertise for the development of the firmware/software for our hardware Linux based multi-channel AVC/HEVC decoder.

What were your goals for this project?

My main goal was to establish an ongoing relationship with a team on whom I could rely for expertise in C++ and implementation of specialized libraries to enable and enhance our hardware for the broadcast industry.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

After considering 2 others it was very clear that Software Mansion had the expertise and capability - but also a culture with which I was very comfortable. Their expertise on several key libraries we use, including GStreamer and other AVC and HEVC libs as well as REACT was very important. Their approach to project management was very open in that the project manager they assign acts as a resource to get the ball rolling, but most interaction occurs directly between the product manager (my) and the developers.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Software Mansion provided developers who were able to completely rewrite a terribly flawed front-end web based control application (I had hired someone locally that was not very good). They rewrote it using REACT and did an outstanding job. They also took over the work for our main hardware decoder that runs Linux and uses an OEM HDSDI video card from AJA Video. They had the necessary expertise to add significant new functionality and improve performance beyond my expectation.

What was the team composition?

The team normally consists of a project manager and one or two programmers. Lately we've been using a single programmer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Software Mansion is a very important part of our business model. Without their expertise and capabilities, our product line would not be complete.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management works best as a resource when you need coordination or additional resources - and with Software Mansion it works very well. Most interaction is directly between our company's product management and developers and the Software Mansion Developers - which is perfect.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They were able to take over an existing code base and make significant improvements. In once case they rewrote it entirely (I had already known it needed to be re-written). In the other case the C++ code was a bit clunky and inefficient. We do not have the luxury of rewriting that - it is dependent on many pre-existing open-source libraries. The Software Mansion Developer was able to make enough significant changes that it vastly improved performance and added tremendous new capabilities.

Are there any areas for improvement?

While there are always areas that can be improved - I've worked with remote teams enough to recognize that Software Mansion has structured itself to make working with remote programmers as painless as possible! If I were to nit-pic I might ask that comments for code check-in were more extensive.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Stoq

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Voice based inventory management.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• On device LLM Management
• Real time speech to text

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

Online Search

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

Existing work in the field

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Build a proof of concept based on their ReactNative Executorch implementation for real time speech to text transcription.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Work was delivered, but the platform is unfinished and does not implement GPU acceleration. This lead to miserable performance.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Decent, but sometimes needed to be pushed for completion.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

Virtual Meeting

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

Be up front about the platform. Label it as an alpha or work in progress, and warn people of its limitations.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder and CEO of Daimo

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Stablecoin personal bank.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• Mobile app development

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

Online Search

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

Github

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Mobile app development

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

App polish, nicer animations, nicer navigation, and a few quality features.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Yes.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

Email or Messaging App

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

We're impressed with their open-source contributions, in particular react-native-reanimated and -screens

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

Code quality varied.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of CrankWheel

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Screen sharing solution for telesales teams (B2B SaaS)

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• Add dial-out via SIP capabilities to our VoIP solution based on Membrane

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

Online Search

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

• Company values aligned
• Niche expertise

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Adding dial-out via SIP capabilities to their Membrane platform for VoIP

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Updates to Membrane that enable our use case of dialing out from a Membrane conference to a traditional phone via SIP

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They delivered on time, everything went super smoothly, little to no supervision required from our end. They were very diligent in making sure everything was working for us.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Very deep expertise in Elixir, VoIP, various real-time media technologies. Extremely reliable delivery.

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

This was a perfect vendor experience - nothing I can see needing to be improved.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of HausMart

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

App for storefront solutions, anything from independent sellers to enterprises.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• Lead development on enterprise-grade platform for social selling

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

Referral

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

• Good value for cost
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Ongoing project that spans a few years. Starting from scratch, building an enterprise-scale platform with several integrated web and mobile applications, all the way from AWS in backend to Netlify and Mobile apps in frontend - from intensive development phases to opperation support and maintenance.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Steady flow of new releases. They are always going beyond expectations and delivering faster than anticipated, all while ensuring quality in the devops process and good availability for support.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

More often than not they delivered beyond the scope of release. Quick turn-around on fixes and minor updates resulted in good relationship with endusers and endclients.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Looks like a fun place to work. The retention of talent and knowledge - ability to support in the long run and onboard less expensive resources after heavy development periods with senior developers.

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

No, not that I can think of.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Sr Eng Manger of Universal Navigation

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We build a leading decentralized crypto exchange and products that support it.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• Build Android app
• Performance profiling
• General app maintenance & feature work

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Did full app performance profiling work, helped build a large portion of our Android mobile app, and did general feature and testing work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Shipping the app and assigned features.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Most everything was done well and on time.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

They have great communication and technical expertise.

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

Nope they're great

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the CTO of an education company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We help international students, student recruitment agencies, and university recruitment departments.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• Mobile and Web Software Development

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

Online Search

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Software Mansion was able to translate our application specifications into a platform delivered as Web, Android and iOS apps. Extending beyond building the software, they also supported the operation of it in production.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The product was delivered to market and has been in operation for over a year.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They work with us in an agile development process. They consistently meet deadlines we agree upon.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

High quality software, high functioning team.

Are there any areas for improvement or something {provider_name} could have done differently?

They are a trusted partner and we are constantly working together to improve.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

 I am the EA of a media company 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Streaming/social media platform dedicated for Vtubers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Software Mansion to accomplish?

• We needed a partner to help us build a custom media processing pipeline to handle both realtime and VOD content. We were new to the space so we needed an expert that could help us build as well as advise us on best practices. 

SOLUTION

How did you find Software Mansion?

Referral

Why did you select Software Mansion over others?

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Software Mansion were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Software Mansion helped us in setting up our streaming platform's video server/delivery systems from the start. They also helped us through working on bugs that arose whenever needed.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We were able to successfully launch a live streaming and video hosting application (vstream.com) with SWMs help. The site successfully ran thousands of livestreams for tens of thousands of users.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They were very professional and transparent with their projects and they always keep us in the loop with whatever they've been working on. SWM was an amazing job with PMing. They were very punctual and reported progress every week. We always felt like they were true partners throughout the entire engagement.

What was your primary form of communication with Software Mansion?

Virtual Meeting

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

Talent, transparency, culture, and professional attitude.

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

n/a