Achieve Internet

Could you please describe your organization?

I’m the CTO of a relatively small startup. It’s about a one-year-old startup that’s covering international sports. Think of it as the Hulu of international sports and broadcasting on the Internet.

What we do is work with international and domestic sports broadcasters that hold the rights to showcase sporting events. The premise of our service is to allow expatriated International customers to connect with broadcast rights holders. These customers definitely want to consume the content, but their respective broadcasters don’t offer the service outside of their country of origin. There’s a real need for a viable alternative.

Could you describe the business challenges you were attempting to address when you initiated the relationship with Achieve Internet?

We’re essentially trying to launch our first version of the website. Achieve is building it for us using a wide variety of integration partners that they’ve worked with before. Achieve has considerable expertise with the Drupal CMS [content management system], and we need that. We also need them to integrate with partners, such as video suppliers and satellite providers in order to interconnect with the backend infrastructure. That second part is extremely complex because we’re dealing with service providers of various sizes and types. There are a number of different systems involved in the process.     

Could you describe the scope of this project?

We conceived the idea, but they’ve really been involved in every aspect of the deployment. Achieve has helped us scope the project requirements and timeline in greater detail, and have provided strategic insight into how to effectively interoperate with various systems moving forward. They’ve helped us refine our visual design, including how the user should interact with the application. They’ve been responsible for the functional development behind the scenes, based on our specific goals and requirements. They’ve helped structure the way the data will be organized and how the user can interact with it. They’ve eventually be responsible for the soft launch of the website and continuous testing in order to hone the functionality.

How did you select Achieve Internet as your solution partner for this endeavor?

I was originally introduced to Achieve when I worked in New York as CTO of Oxygen, which was sold to NBC. When I moved to San Francisco about five or six years ago, I used them at a startup called Bella Pictures, which was a national wedding photography and videography provider, and I brought them in for a number of projects. I have a lot of confidence in their abilities because they’ve been able to deliver in the past.            

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

The entire implementation will cost between $500,000 to $1 million in pure development. That price will increase as we expand the purview of the project beyond basic implementation.

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or anecdotal feedback that would demonstrate the effectiveness of the work they’ve delivered?

We really don’t have any statistics or figures at this point because we haven’t launched our site yet. The development process itself has gone very well, though. They produce meticulous code with great efficiency.

When working with Achieve Internet, is there anything you would consider unique or special about their approach, methodology or services that differentiates them from other vendors you’ve worked with?

They have deep expertise when it comes to both technology and media. Their location for us is also a huge factor. Their ability to engage in agile development is quite impressive, and is definitely the reason for their high quality code. They also have a great track record with third-party integrations of various sizes and complexities. These factors combined make them an excellent technology partner for our endeavor.

In retrospect, are there areas you think that they could improve upon, or are there certain things you might do differently as the client before initiating this type of project?

I think the only thing that they could ever improve upon is just their ability to scale up and down with changing requirements and priorities. I’ve had challenges with them in that area, but I don’t think it’s every significantly impacted the quality of work delivered, only the timing of the delivery itself. For a company as small and fragile as ours, having that rapid response and scalability is crucial. They’ve definitely improved in time though.