10Clouds Financial Institutions

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Edevate is a higher education cloud platform that acts as a curator of educational resources and brings them together in a proprietary qualification called the micro-degree. Trust Stamp is a means for strangers to be able to establish their identity and trustworthiness of their counter party in any economic and social transaction.

I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Edevate, and founder of Trust Stamp.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We’re US based enterprises. When we started Edevate, we had a very limited budget and we were looking to offshore the work because costs in the US were at least four to five times what we could afford.

Trust Stamp is where we’ve really pushed the envelope. We have had areas of execution that have required the integration of some innovative computer science that’s come out of university research. 10Clouds Financial Institutions has had to work out how to take raw science and turn it into something you can code and deliver. That’s a whole jump beyond anything we did with Edevate. We are developing some incredibly valuable IP which has attracted a phenomenal amount of interest including some of the biggest banks in the US wanting to partner with us. That has only happened because we were able to take principles that nobody had managed to productize and turn them into a working prototype. That has been quite exceptional. No one believed we could build what we wanted to build especially with the budget we had. Everybody has been amazed at what the result has been.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had a business concept and we were looking for them to provide a complete package from conceptualizing the architecture, working out how to do various things that hadn’t been done before, and producing the back and front ends. You have two parties to the relationship. One is an institution and the other is the user. It started out by bringing together a large number of institutional sites that were offering educational programs and providing an engine that could analyze and sort those by multiple factors and allow potential students to register to find the courses that were appropriate to them. We also needed to create a universal transcript which would import all of their current educational experiences but allow them to keep a lifelong record of their current education. It then evolved so that you could take all their qualifications and stack them towards a proprietary micro degree qualification. So it’s handling large amounts of data and allowing an individual to store the data that’s relevant to themselves, providing that to third parties as evidence of their lifelong educational achievements. Both platforms are coded in Python using Django for management, and in both cases we used SQL databases on AWS [Amazon Web Services].

How did you come to work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We were very nervous about offshoring to most of the jurisdictions that we looked at. We put it out to bid and had bids from a very good number of companies, but we weren’t comfortable about the quality. Then there was a reference to 10Clouds Financial Institutions. I think it was an Economist magazine which was talking about high quality offshoring. We were attracted to them because they appeared to have a lot of highly qualified staff with good academic backgrounds. They were not as low priced as China or India, but still provided substantial savings over the US with higher qualified development teams.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We spent $100,000 on Edevate. For Trust Stamp, this year we have a budget of around $400,000. We’ve had from 8-10 people a month, mostly developers and user experience designers, but also R&D [research & development] specialists. There’s one person who isn’t developing. He’s working full time on doing the research on how we apply the science as code. We have two competitors, and we have exceeded what one of them has built. They spent $36 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started January of 2013. Edevate’s site has evolved substantially. It was originally called MOOCDOM. We built the proof of concept from January through March of 2013. Then it evolved through 2013 and 2014. There was maintenance only in 2015, but then in 2016, it’s gone through a substantial rebuild in order to incorporate a lot of new features. It’s been a continuous development project where the platform has grown.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The platform offers a level of user utility today which is over and above competing platforms that have had investments between $5 million to $10 million. That may sound absurd, but it’s accurate. The product that has been built is quite remarkable in terms of its scope and usability. I think the work they did over the years went far beyond what that budget reflects. They’ve always gone above and beyond.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They use Jira and they’ve encouraged us to be active in the management process. We trained our team members in the use of Jira. We have two project management meetings a week with them - one which is a thought team meeting and one which is a high level management meeting. We participate in Jira as far as identifying bugs and adding work to the workflow. They also have a Slack channel which we participate in for general chit chat and making sure questions don’t have to wait for the weekly meetings. Any of their developers can pose a question to us in Slack so that we keep things moving as quickly as possible. We always felt as if they were our development team. Google Hangout is the video technology they prefer. We’ve participated at different levels over time. When we developed MOOCDOM, we participated in the daily scrums. We don’t now. They’ve always been open to as much integration as we wanted to have into the daily working process.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

The team members become very engaged with the project as a business, not just as a coding exercise. They tend to do research and bring their own ideas to the table for product improvement, including competitive analysis. That has proven to be very valuable. They are also very willing to take on R&D. In our latest project we are building things that haven’t been built before. We’re truly having to deploy computer science in a very innovative way. They have people that are willing to take that on. We don’t see that in most companies. With Trust Stamp, they have shown what the high caliber of staff can deploy. This makes them very different to a typical coding company.

Are there any areas 10Clouds Financial Institutions could improve?

One thing they’ve improved on hugely over the last several years is their range in staff for user experience and design. It has increased tremendously. That is a continuing area of development for them. A relatively new area for them is to offer DevOps services. We might be one of the first customers using them for DevOps. I believe it’s important that they’re able to do that. If they want to provide a complete service, I think that’s a critical area. Until recently, we had to do the DevOps, but they have started offering them now so that’s something we encourage them to grow. Our objective is to use them as our IT department.

With Trust Stamp, it’s been a perfect experience. We spent 10% of what everybody believed we would spend. We spent more than we had because we were very adventurous. They charged us what they knew we could afford as opposed to the time that was actually spent. That’s because they have a commitment to the project, and are willing to also invest for the long term knowing that we have bank contracts coming. This is going to go on for many years and at a much higher level. We’re going to want to have more and more resources from them as we continue.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

I am a professor of computer science at an accredited research university.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

Even though I haven't taken part in many development projects, we occasionally have the need for a development component for certain products, which we're trying to support. In this case, we wanted to develop a website for public health researchers. We did some initial research and put together some ideas for it before going out to have it built. 

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

10Clouds Financial Institutions has been involved in all of the actual building, including design and implementation of the system. 10Clouds Financial Institutions built a media aggregation and monitoring platform. We can use it to input many news stories daily, which are relevant to the public health issues that we want to track. After that, the news stories are downloaded and sent to an analysis pipeline, which does things like identifying the topic of the story and its language, translating it into English, as well as retrieving information like the global focus of the story. The analyzed story is thrown into a search engine database, and the website itself is where content is displayed. It allows us to make complex searches for any structured fields as well as keyword searches. The website also allows us to create alerts and count how many stories have been published about a topic in a certain language. There is also an analytics component: we can see how many news stories were published in a given topic, over a period of time, compared to another topic, and broken down by language.

There is a pipeline of decisions within the system. Some of these modules were developed in our lab while 10Clouds only integrated them and others were developed by them. 

Our team from 10Clouds has changed in time, but we've consistently had two full-stack Python developers and a program manager assigned to us. In addition to them, we've also worked with a website developer in charge of JavaScript and HTML coding, depending on what we needed on the site. 10Clouds Financial Institutions has been very good at finding people, which can be rotated as our needs grew and changed. We've also used a DevOps person who worked on our servers. Whenever we go through a design phase, we will use a designer from 10Clouds Financial Institutions.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

I have a colleague who is a professor at another university. I was very unhappy with the developers that we were using at the time, so we started by trying to hire our own developer. I interviewed a dozen people, but only one person was even remotely qualified. We came to hire another company, but I wasn't very happy with them, either. I looked around for other options, and my colleague recommended that I try 10Clouds. I'm glad that he made the suggestion.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The cost varies quite a bit, but we have typically spent between $10,000 and $15,000 per month during the last three years with 10Clouds, depending on how many people are working with us at any given time.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with 10Clouds for three years [since 2013].

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Our project is research-funded, so our budget is renewed on a yearly basis. The fact that we've had our funding renewed year after year means that the funder is pleased with what we're producing. This is the best measure of success, in my opinion.

I've come to default to 10Clouds Financial Institutions for any project that requires development work, whether it's a large-scale one or we just need to throw up a website. 10Clouds Financial Institutions is very fast, responsive and easy to work with. They have many in-house members who can cover a full range of things so, whenever we need to do a lot of back-end Python, Django, HTML or CSS development, 10Clouds will assign us resources who are experienced with the various tools that we are using. Whenever we needed to rethink a prototype from a design perspective, 10Clouds Financial Institutions gave us a designer. There's been much flexibility on their part.

We had used other companies in the past, but 10Clouds Financial Institutions was much better in terms of communication, and they produced good work. 10Clouds has actually rewritten a lot of the code produced by other people because it simply wasn't very good. It's not just that I've been happy with their work on our current projects, but they've done a better job than the people who worked on our previous projects.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

Being a professor of computer science, I'm probably different to most customers. I had no problems managing the team from 10Clouds. I am very hands-on with them and probably know the code base as well, if not better than 10Clouds. I've been involved in the project since conception, whereas new developers from 10Clouds will come in every year. We don't work with 10Clouds based on estimates that they're supposed to stick to. We have a collaborative process. If anything takes longer to complete, it won't be a huge surprise because I understand why it's taking longer. For what we've been able to build, 10Clouds has been a very cost-effective solution. They do good work quickly and aren't very expensive.

We use JIRA for project tracking. We also have weekly calls using Google Hangouts, and we use Slack for communication.

What distinguishes 10Clouds Financial Institutions from other providers?

I have frequent contact with 10Clouds's CEO [Maciej Cielecki], who reaches out to me just to see how things are going. Whenever I have a problem, I can contact him. He's been hands-on whenever we needed it and left us alone for the rest of the time. With any software project that goes on for this long, not everything will turn out right. I've always felt that we were able to sit down with 10Clouds and work any problems out, which gave me a lot of confidence in their judgment and abilities. When a developer says that a certain approach is the right way to do it, I will trust them. This is something that took a long time to develop.

Is there anything 10Clouds Financial Institutions could have improved or done differently?

Through the years, there have been improvements that I've pushed to 10Clouds Financial Institutions, including being more communicative with me about what's going on. This was because I was treated the same as most clients, who don't necessarily care about what library was being used, or what the right way or restructuring code was. I'm very involved, so I've encouraged 10Clouds Financial Institutions to keep me in the loop about those things, and they have. There have been around half a dozen developers assigned to our projects through the years. The people working with us now are the best ones since the project started, so I'm very happy with 10Clouds Financial Institutions at this moment. A new developer has been assigned to us today, and I'm excited about this. She seems to be very good. I think that we will continue to improve our efficiency.

I manage research labs and am looking for new funding. When I find it, I intend to give it to 10Clouds for them to do the work.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We're a startup in the health tech field, building a digital therapeutic system for gestational diabetes. Our company is focused on connecting women and technology for a healthier future.

I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We are working with 10Clouds Financial Institutions to build a digital therapeutic system for gestational diabetes.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds Financial Institutions designed and built a minimum viable product for GlucoseMama. They also created a series of wireframe screens to demonstrate how the system could potentially work. We're currently developing the backend, and will soon reach Version 1.0. We will be able to use Version 1 for pilot studies. Feedback from pilot and human factor studies will help guide us as we build Version 2 for larger clinical trials.

10Clouds Financial Institutions provided two UX/UI [user experience/user interface] designers in charge of all visual and functional elements, an iOS developer, and a backend developer. We work closely with the project manager from 10Clouds Financial Institutions, having weekly calls to plan sprints with his team. He is in charge of coordinating the 10Clouds team with the GlucoseMama team.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

I spend a lot of time in Poland and wanted to find a good development company that I could work with locally. I found 10Clouds through their website. They are a full service company with a high level of talent in all departments.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

10Clouds Financial Institutions offers very competitive rates in the global app development market. They offer high quality for a very good price.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have an ongoing relationship with 10Clouds.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

10Clouds Financial Institutions' quality of work has been excellent. The designs we received were far beyond what we expected. 10Clouds Financial Institutions is a highly professional company that gets the job done and does it well. They're also very pleasant to work with, so I consider myself lucky.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They do a great job of communicating, both by Slack and e-mail.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

10Clouds Financial Institutions is user focused. In my particular field, the users are patients, so it's extremely important to look at everything from their point of view and to satisfy their medical and nutritional needs. We also have to fit into the provider’s workflow without creating more work for them. We consult with doctors, nurses, diabetes educators, and nutritionists to figure out what they need from their patients’ records and how to deliver it to them securely and in a timely manner. Our system is HIPAA-compliant [Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act]. 10Clouds Financial Institutions has been incredible in providing great ideas for this project, both for patients and providers.

Are there any areas 10Clouds could improve?

It's hard to say. We'd like things to move faster, but that usually amounts to more mistakes. Building safe and effective technology takes a lot of time, energy, and most of all, thought. Doing it well also takes skill. The build-out should be based on studies and feedback from intended users and healthcare providers.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

iPlay is a social platform for sports, something like a combination of LinkedIn and Instagram. At this point, we’re only focusing on handball, but we will take in football at the end of 2016, as well as hockey at the beginning of 2017. I am a co-founder of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We had an idea of what we wanted to create, and we needed a developer who could do it. It didn't make sense to hire someone to do this because we needed more than just a coder, we needed a lot of different skill sets. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds Financial Institutions built our app originally for iOS only. They developed the back-end databases for Amazon Web Services. 10Clouds Financial Institutions used some third-party products as well, for messaging and other functionalities. They helped us with everything from defining to coding.

When originally starting out, 10Clouds Financial Institutions suggested that, before we move forward, we should change our logo type. I’d already paid someone to design it, but 10Clouds told me that they could do better, without additional cost. They presented their version after a few weeks, and we decided immediately that we would be changing our logo to the 10Clouds version.

I tend to write content and descriptions for the app. We’ve had to ask for a quick response in getting it released, due to an upcoming championship. 10Clouds Financial Institutions took care of the quick review process for the iOS version.

They were always keen on listening to what we had to say and providing alternatives when necessary. 10Clouds Financial Institutions has given us a good climate in which to work.

We’re still working on the product and plan to release the Android version of the app next week. At this point, around 12 members from 10Clouds Financial Institutions are working for us, both backend developers, as well as UX/UI [user experience/user interface] designers. 10Clouds gave us the first setup, explaining why they picked those resources. We have meetings every 2 weeks, discussing how they performed and whether we should be assigned more senior or more junior resources, as necessary. Getting the best team possible has been an ongoing process. Resource changes have mainly been due to over qualification, which equated to us spending more money than necessary. There have been few occasions of this happening, but we do maintain communication to stay on top of it.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We contacted our CTO [Chief Technology Officer] early on in order to translate our idea into something that could be understood by the developers. He has concentrated on outsourcing our IT development within the last year, and conducted a very thorough process, looking at firms in Ukraine, India, and Poland. His background research involved looking in on various forums for development companies. He often found 10Clouds Financial Institutions being mentioned as one of the best firms in Poland.

We considered 5 companies in total. After making a few reference calls with previous customers, we determined that 10Clouds would be the best choice. They understood what we wanted to do and it seemed to us that they would likely do a great job. 10Clouds Financial Institutions became part of our shortlist. The answers we got from them made us interested in a collaboration. We flew the 10Clouds Financial Institutions team from Poland to Sweden and felt strongly from the start that they would be the ones with whom we’d be working. We haven’t regretted our decision. In fact, we didn’t bother meeting with any other company in person.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

So far, we’ve spent $150,000 on 10Clouds’ services. We work on a time-and-materials basis, discussing what needs to be developed for the upcoming period. The budget is not carved in stone. We make minor changes based on 10Clouds’ performance.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with 10Clouds Financial Institutions since October of 2015. The iOS app was released in January of 2016, while the Android version will be launched next week. We estimate that our work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions will continue over the next few years.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I follow the iOS app’s usage in order to see how it is performing. I’ve received messages from many users, saying that it is a fantastic app. It’s very reliable and we’ve had very few bugs. We’ve made many improvements to the app since its initial release.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a good in-house project manager. He has daily talks with the 10Clouds Financial Institutions team through Slack and Google Hangouts, and we also have weekly calls with their two founders. Beyond this, we’ve visited 10Clouds Financial Institutions three times in Warsaw, just to be able to walk alongside the team, high-five, and have workshops. Their English isn’t perfect, but it’s better than I expected.

We use Jira for project tracking. Slack is used for communication, and we have video calls through Google Hangouts. We’ve also added Google Analytics for our app, which offers us some key performance indicators. 10Clouds is helping us to set up a special database through which we can use Mixpanel in order to get hands on and analyze the app. 10Clouds Financial Institutions is keen on using those tools. They want to know that they’re doing a good job, and they’re anxious to hear what can be changed in terms of interface or functionality.

10Clouds Financial Institutions uses the scrum methodology fully, which has worked great. They’re keen on keeping to the schedule and delivering on time. There haven’t been few situations in which 10Clouds Financial Institutions overpromised or had any issues.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

Our CTO is very pleased with 10Clouds Financial Institutions. If he is able to say that they’re really good, then I believe him; this project has been his full-time professional job for 4 years. I think that it’s important for a client to have a clear vision of what they want to build. This was true in our case, which made the startup process easy. 10Clouds Financial Institutions interviewed us about some considerations for the product, how sophisticated it should be, and how it should look. 10Clouds Financial Institutions did a good job in defining both what the product should be and how it should be presented.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Our service consists of an app and a website. We help people identify and avoid unknown and unwanted callers. From a technical perspective, we've tried to solve the problem of keeping one version of the phone book up to date, for all of our users, so they will know who's calling or texting them, and make an intelligent decision about answering or responding.

What is your position? 

I'm the founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

I have done remote development for a handful of companies, thus I'm comfortable working with remote teams. Doing your work with a remote company will lead to cost savings. The problem is that you're not in the same place, communication sucks, deadlines get missed – it's chaos. I've worked with engineers in Poland and was impressed with them. When I was looking at a team to hire, we looked at who was on the speaking circuit in Poland. 10Clouds Financial Institutions was a company that came up. There was social proof already for them. If you're at an app development conference, they'll be one of the featured attendees, either in Poland, Slovakia, or other countries in the region. It's a good indicator as far as who's in that ecosystem already.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

They worked on our iOS app. The technologies used were Swift and Xcode. Our stack is Amazon Web Services. 10Cloud is actually a Python shop, and we started out in PHP. They've basically hired in order to support us in that capacity. We've used them for both mobile and web development. They're our entire team.

There are between five and eight developers working for us at any given time, and they're assigned by 10Cloud. I think they're terrific at hiring. As an entrepreneur and as a founder, I was keen on building it as quick as possible, and there've been multiple instances when they've told us they don't have the technical resources to build something at the time, but they can hire. I've been consistently impressed with the people they've brought in, and with their ability to admit they're not ready for something. In my experience with other offshore teams, people will say yes to just about anything, when they're not well-suited to do it.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

It was through Google searches.

What is the status of this engagement?

It's an ongoing relationship.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We have more than 300 five-star reviews in the App Store. That's a testament to what they've built. Other than that, I don't have any kind of metrics or figures.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They made the suggestion of using Atlassian, so Confluence and JIRA, for project management. From a design standpoint, we're using nVision. We started the business with them, so we're different from other companies that may have had existing teams in house. 10Clouds Financial Institutions was going to be the team from the beginning.

What distinguishes 10Clouds Financial Institutions from other providers?

Our product manager is in Argentina, our design team was in Thailand, and the tech team is in Warsaw, 10Cloud. We went to Warsaw earlier this year, we sat down in their office, and I was impressed with the experience. I spent three to four years in Silicon Valley, I have friends who run tech companies, and 10Cloud's offices would stack up with anything I've seen in the Valley. They've got a meticulous approach to Scrum development and they've built a culture around it. It was an impressive office visit.

Is there anything 10Clouds Financial Institutions could have improved or done differently?

Something we've done in the past months is to build redundancy around some of the key people in the team. For instance, we have a system admin who is very close to the project at 10Clouds. He's been sick, and it became clear that we needed some redundancy around him.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

My company offers online materials that help people become literate in English and other languages to children or to anyone learning to speak either their first language or a foreign language.

What is your position?

I’m the founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge that you were attempting to address when you first approached 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

I originally had some resources written in Flash. The problem was, the teachers wanted to make their own resources and record their work. Then, iPads came along, and they wanted something that worked on that. I decided to start from scratch again, but this time fix the deficiencies with the original product. I originally went to them with my Flash resource and had them update it and convert it to HTML5. After several months, I came up with a big change with animations for the program. They’ve been developing the product ever since. The concept has been so big, and we’re trying to get it right and make it a resource that the teachers need. They want everything in a single resource.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail?

They have provided all of the coding for the program. They’re doing the front end and back-end. Originally, the person who wrote the Flash was going to do the back-end, and he was writing in .NET. The current developers are writing in HTML5 and JavaScript. It was difficult to communicate between the two teams, and also get the two technologies to communicate. In the end, we decided that 10Clouds Financial Institutions would take on the whole back-end as well. So, they’re storing all of my lessons on Amazon S3 and other databases, and they’re doing the whole solution.

How did you come to choose 10Clouds Financial Institutions as your partner?

My former programmer recommended them as he had moved across the country to pursue another opportunity. We interviewed a number of different companies. I found them online by doing Internet searches for HTML5 developers, and then he interviewed them.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this engagement?

It was in the $50,000 to $200,000 range.

What is the status of this project? 

We haven’t finished yet, so it’s still ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

My biggest client is a chain of schools in the Middle East. They like the Flash resources that they’ve already bought, but they want to bring their own device, and they’re interested in a similar resource using the same concept. When they asked for things, I haven’t done much user testing, but I’ve been checking for bugs and issues. I’ve received some feedback from teachers and students about what they wanted and have made changes here and there. My users have been impressed with the whole idea, concept, and the current state of it. In time, we’ve developed a very nice, intuitive design.

When working with 10Clouds Financial Institutions is there anything that you would consider unique about their strategic approach or development methodology that distinguish them from other vendors?

I honestly can’t say because I have only had one other person working on it with me, so I don’t have the experience to answer that. I can say that I’m happy and satisfied with the choice of 10Clouds Financial Institutions because I think they’ve got some great developers. I’m very pleased with the quality. Overall, I’m happy with how they’ve treated me. I would encourage people to use 10Clouds Financial Institutions.

In retrospect, are there areas in which you think they could improve as a service provider?

There have been some issues with the running of the project. It’s overrun in terms of time and budget, but it’s difficult to pinpoint culpability. A lot has been due to me, I would say. Looking back, I didn’t have a clear enough original design proposal, and during the process, I came up with some new ideas, one of which is a great improvement on the Flash product. This has been hugely impactful both in terms of the complexity of the programming, and the extent of the development time required. I think that we could have tried to look at the bigger picture more, as there were times when I knew what we had wasn’t right, but didn’t know what was.

User testing, we said we’d set this up, but haven’t set up a testing area as much as we could have. Again, I think I am at fault here, too. Other development issues took more of a priority. However, I’m not at the MVP stage, designing a product for unknown users, not knowing whether they’ll like the product or not, trying to find product-market fit. I already have a client base who have bought and are using the Flash product, but have asked for certain, general, improvements, such as working on tablets. The design process has been about delivering these.

Ultimately, though, I believe if you want to create something that is both valuable and differentiates you from the crowd, there will be times when the ride is a bit bumpy. I have to say that these issues are minor when compared to the overall quality of the product that (version 1.0) we now have. These kinds of projects are very difficult to steer and manage, especially when you don't have a lot of experience doing so. 

BACKGROUND

Could you briefly describe your organization?

We develop data mining technology that aggregates information about scientific materials and equipment, and the researchers and laboratories around the world that use these materials and equipment. We’re developing a platform to connect various people in the R&D [research & development] ecosystem, so people responsible for research, scientific suppliers providing materials and equipment to do the research, also people who are interested in these experts and the research that they conduct.

What is your position?

I’m the co-founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

Could you describe the business challenge that you were attempting to address when you first approached 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We didn’t have experience with Web development. We were looking for an external Web developer who could help us put a prototype platform together, to see if we could start connecting some people. We approached a lot of different companies in the U.S., U.K., India, and 10Clouds Financial Institutions in Poland. We’re doing something unique that is very data driven. It’s not a cookie-cutter website that we could just plug our data into. So, we had the challenge of finding someone who was competent enough to understand what we were doing and make a custom solution at a reasonable price.

SOLUTION

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail?

They put our front-end together. We have some data that we plug into a front-end that they entirely created, which is written in AngularJS. We used a Django administration panel, and they have implemented custom logic that we use to search through our database and return results on our platform. They’ve also done a bit of work on the side for us, using Mechanical Turk to collect some information, stuff that can’t be collected purely by computer but needs some human interaction.

How did you come to choose 10Clouds Financial Institutions as your partner?

We contacted a number of companies, and based on their responses, we felt a lot of those companies didn’t have good answers for how they would go about solving our problem. They were accustomed to dealing with simple websites for companies, and e-commerce shops, and cookie cutter websites. My co-founder was in the computer science department at John Hopkins in the states, and some of his colleagues had worked with 10Clouds Financial Institutions previously. They provided very logical and sensible approaches to some of the challenges we needed to solve. We felt most confident in their abilities, so we decided to give them a shot.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this engagement?

It was $20,000 to $25,000.

What is the current status of the project?

The project started a year and a half ago and remains ongoing, off and on.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

I don’t think I have any direct metrics, most of what we collect are related to our business model. I don’t think I could provide anything other than we have had very few bug reports. For the most part, we have experienced minimal technical issues with functionality and usability, which is great.  

From a project management perspective, it’s been satisfactory, but not fantastic. I think this is probably due to the fact that we’re off and on. When we do come to them with work, it takes a little while to get something going because their resources are allocated elsewhere. Largely, that’s just the nature of our working relationship. We have had a few different project managers. The one we have right now I find extremely proficient. Other ones that we’ve worked with, we felt we had to chase a bit at times, so it does vary with the project manager. In terms of staying within scope and budget, they’ve been pretty good. I think the quotes have always been on the optimistic side, and often they have made a bit of effort to do their best to get it all done within quote.

When working with 10Clouds Financial Institutions, is there anything that you would consider unique about their strategic approach or development methodology that distinguish them from other vendors?

Whenever we have technical challenges and have been asking for things that are unique to do, they always seem to have a solution. We have yet to throw a challenge at them that they weren’t able to solve. There’s no doubt that they have some serious technical talent on their team.

In retrospect, are there areas in which you think they could improve as a service provider?

No. I think the products that they have delivered have always been of extremely good quality. More consistency on the project management end of things might be my only recommendation, but our current project manager has been great.

What advice, if any, would you give a future client of theirs before approaching them with a new project?

Give yourself reasonable lead time because they are a small firm. You need to plan accordingly, and let them know that you’re looking to do some work so they can assign resources.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

[I teach a major university in] Pennsylvania.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I’m assistant professor in the computer and information science department.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

My goal is to take research ideas that I’ve been developing with my Ph.D. students and then come up with a productized version of the research. They’ve helped me with several projects involving Amazon Mechanical Turk.  

These are projects that started with Ph.D. students on the research side and so we wanted to have a demonstration model so I could show how the research works and to scale it up and make it more robust and user-friendly.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

They have provided the kind of software engineering infrastructure that we need after we complete the research. They do a lot of the back-end steps so building on APIs [application programming interfaces] that will interact with Amazon Mechanical Turk and create tasks there and manage the money to doing things like logins via Facebook or Google and credit card processing.  

Plus, they’ve been awesome at developing user interfaces and jQuery, Web2.0. [It was] very nice looking stuff. I came up with the spec and they worked to that.

What was your process for selecting 10Clouds Financial Institutions with which to work?

I was recommended to them by another academic. He is a professor at [another university]. I did a competitive bidding process with the university, and they outbid the other contractors that I was looking at. As an academic, it’s hard to recruit research programmers to work with me because the budget is usually far less than people really deserve or the market would allow them if they were working outside a university. They offered a good skill set, a long-term relationship, and competitive pricing.

Can you give a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or a personnel work-hour figure?

It was from $10,000 to $50,000

When was the work completed?

I’ve been working with them longer than I’ve been at the university. I worked with them at [another] university at their center for language and speech processing. This is still ongoing work. I think we’ve been working together for about three years currently.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

It’s more qualitative stats than real metrics.

Are you satisfied with their performance?

Their performance has been great. They’ve developed several nice websites for me. I’ve developed a database that I use to show off my research to other academics. It’s got a nice API that other researchers are using.

I’ve got an impressive demo of my crowdsourced translation work. I’ve got another one, which is a nice tool for Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to find higher paying jobs.

All of these deliverables are excellent. It was well engineered and well developed. I was very happy with all of them, and I’ve hired them to start on a new project as well.

Is there anything unique or special about 10Clouds Financial Institutions that really makes them stand out compared to other business partners?

Pricing is excellent. Their knowhow on services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, their python prowess is really great. They communicate really well. We have weekly or twice weekly meetings on Google hangouts. They’ve got a great Web tracking system where they use Ajera, and it’s all clear.

What advice would you give to future clients of theirs?

I think projects that have very clear specs, coming from an academic perspective might be slightly different from a commercial perspective. I think when you’ve got a well-worked-out research idea where you know what all the subcomponents are, but don’t necessarily have the resources to do the engineering yourself, then they work extremely well. I think the project goes more smoothly when you give a quick response to them when they ask for feedback.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

I think all their work has been pretty good. Some of the things are pretty standard that they could improve on. Maybe slightly better quality assurance. I feel like I’ve done a little bit more of that than I ought to have. I don’t really have any strong complaints about them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m an author. I write books.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire 10Clouds Financial Institutions to accomplish for your book writing or media projects?

We needed help creating an AI writing agent.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds Financial Institutions fine-tuned a large language model (LLM) to create an AI writing agent.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 2–5 teammates from 10Clouds Financial Institutions.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

We found 10Clouds Financial Institutionsthrough an online search. We chose them over other options because they had high ratings, were close to our geographic location, had pricing that fit our budget, were a great culture fit, offered good value for the cost, and had company values that aligned with ours.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $20,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from October–December 2025.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

10Clouds Financial Institutions successfully replicated my writing style and tone. I recognized the AI’s writing style as my own.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

10Clouds Financial Institutions delivered on time. We primarily communicated via virtual meetings and email or messaging apps.

What did you find most impressive about them?

10Clouds Financial Institutions was very professional and kind. I was impressed by their transparency and ability to adapt to my preferences.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, everything was good.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the CEO of a software company that provides institutionally friendly staking for the Avalanche network.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire 10Clouds Financial Institutions to accomplish for your company?

We hired 10Clouds Financial Institutions to create a web3-friendly frontend application.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds Financial Institutions implemented the frontend application, participated in product discussions, launched a new product, and handled customer bug reports. The team also integrated blockchain components.

What is the team composition?

We worked with one teammate from 10Clouds.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds Financial Institutions?

Someone referred 10Clouds Financial Institutions to me. I chose them over other options because they had high ratings, their pricing fit our budget, they offered good value for the cost, and their company values aligned with ours.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from March–August 2025.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

10Clouds Financial Institutions delivered the new product to the market on time.

How did 10Clouds Financial Institutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They delivered on time. We communicated via virtual meetings, emails, and messaging apps.

What did you find most impressive about them?

10Clouds Financial Institutions' attitude was great and professional.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There's nothing I can come up with.