AI Consulting for IT Company
-
AI Consulting
- Less than $10,000
- Apr. 2024 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 4.0
- Schedule
- 4.0
- Cost
- 3.0
- Willing to Refer
- 3.0
- Information technology
- Copenhagen, Denmark
- 1-10 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Stellarbase has been hired by an IT company to build a proof of concept for an AI-based internal tool. The goal is to explore how they can extract and structure market data using the solution.
Stellarbase has made progress in improving the project. They've been more mindful in asking for clarifications and maintaining better documentation to avoid misunderstandings and ensure transparency. Their more structured approach and improved listening allow for a productive workflow. This review is an update by the client company. The original content is located below the new review.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and position.
I am the CEO & Co-Founder of Partnerful Aps
Describe what your company does in a single sentence.
We're a SaaS product expanding our offering with genAI functionality. We primarily sale to mid-market companies, which prioritise compliance and stability.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What specific goals or objectives did you hire Stellarbase to accomplish?
- Create a PoC of a special project
- Explore how we can extract and structure market data
- We needed to move fast in order to learn if a potential pivot would be more lucrative, which also means we needed to give more autonomy to the contractor. This has led to some friction and unmet expectations, which undoubtedly have been a learning experience. We discussed the issue, and we have received some support to remedy the situation. At the same time, the genAI expectations from the customer can be higher and in part some of our disappointment is more reflective of the technology
SOLUTION
How did you find Stellarbase?
Referral
Why did you select Stellarbase over others?
Referred to me
How many teammates from Stellarbase were assigned to this project?
1 Employee
Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.
StellarBase was contracted to build a proof of concept we called Radar. Radar aimed at being an internal tool at Partneful, and potentially a stand-alone service to handle a very specific task: understand what a company does (what product or service they provide) by looking at their landing page.
They were given complete freedom to choose the stack, the services and to prioritise as needed as long as we work within the product owner's needs.
What's the status of this engagement?
We have made progress in improving the project.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
How did your relationship with your partner evolve?
It has moved from being dismissive and uncommunicative to being a bit more willing to ask questions and clarifications to avoid misunderstandings.
In what ways can they improve?
- More structure and better documentation (especially if one is aiming for a senior developer hourly rate)
- More transparency in what is actually being developed and what is used as off-the-shelf services.
- Improved listening to what the customer is looking for.
What advice do you have for clients with similar needs to yours?
To provide a clear list of tasks, to work together to estimate all of the tasks and ensure there is an agreement there. Especially if you're building in uncharted territory (as it is with the AI infra stuff) you can't have flexibility in the project breakdown.
Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?
N/A
What was your primary form of communication with Stellarbase?
Virtual Meeting
UPDATED REVIEW
Vlad Gidea
CEO & Co-Founder, Partnerful Aps
Copenhagen, Denmark
1-10 Employees
Apr 2024 - Jul 2024
Less than $10,000
Project summary
Stellarbase was hired by an IT company to create a proof of concept for an AI project. This involved building an ideal partner profile and applying NLP to the unstructured data gathered.
Feedback summary
Stellarbase failed to deliver the project on time, and the final work delivered was unusable and riddled with significant quality issues. The team's poor understanding of the project's scope and lack of transparency soured the engagement.
BACKGROUND
- Create a PoC of a special project
- Explore how we can extract and structure market data
SOLUTION
From the beginning we asked for:
- integrating an existing company firmographic data source (so we can first test the ability to deliver results when only taking into account company firmographic data)
- building an "Ideal Partner Profile" (which is a selection of search criteria to run the search periodically against)
- crawling and applying NLP to the unstructured data gathered, in order to build company profiles which can show us potential partnerships
- how would such a service work with partnerful's webapp
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What is even more infuriating was that we spent weeks explaining that this Ideal Partner Profile and the type of terminology used is not accidental and is a terminology used in our industry, only to keep seeing really a lack of comprehension and experience. Oh, we were charged for a "senior fullstack dev with AI skills" and we feel we barely got a bootcamp frontend guy with some free AI tools.
Suggestions for improvement would be to look a bit more carefully at what it means to work with clients in general. We know we're Stellarbase's second customer, but if this is the way forward, we will definitely be their last.
STAR RATINGS
Overall rating: 2
We will protect ourselves from such interactions in the future, lesson learned.
Joining meetings to demo from local machine even after asked repeatedly to push to the repo. Radio silence for weeks only to come back to "miunderstandings" which when working in an agile fashion with clearly described user stories should never ever be the case.
We were charged a senior rate, even when we met during a startup accelerator program in person. But we never received any work that a senior would deliver. The proof is first of all in how the documentation and explanations for various components just sound like a student.
Just 2 weeks ago we agreed to meet every friday for a short 30min to catchup, and the next week we got an email that the guy's travelling so we can't talk. No, we failed to meet with someone who is literally across the bridge in Sweden.
Stellarbase needs a lot of growing up to do.
RATINGS
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Quality
4.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
4.0On time / deadlines
-
Cost
3.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
3.0NPS