Alvin Systems

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of operations of a machinery company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Alvin Systems?

We needed help to reconstruct the website and mobile application for our business.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have an internal iPad-based app, and Alvin Systems helped us rewrite it into a new and modern language to integrate it better with our site and accounting system to work with the new Apple and Amazon services. 

What is the team composition?

We’ve been working directly with Yurii (Owner), and he then delegates to his partners.

How did you come to work with Alvin Systems?

They’re local, and they could work with our old app language — most of the other programmers wouldn’t work with our old language.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $40,000 with them so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2020, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I’ve been satisfied with the work they’ve done so far — the new app works as great as the old one, which was the main goal for us.

How did Alvin Systems perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re good at meeting deadlines.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve been easy to work with, and I’m also happy with their customer service — they managed to work with us even with the COVID-19 pandemic going on.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think there’s anything they can improve on. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of a tech startup where we’re building a social media app.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Alvin?

 We needed a vendor that could help us build our mobile app from scratch. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They primarily provided frontend development services for our iOS app. Their team also provided feedback on app designs and helped us simplify some of our features. The language they used was Swift. 

What is the team composition?

Our main point of contact was the founder of Alvin who is also a senior engineer. 

How did you come to work with Alvin?

We received a referral from a mutual friend. Alvin also had the relevant experience and skill set that we needed. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $25,000-$35,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement began in June 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We don’t have any specific evidence to support the impact of the engagement because we’re still an early-stage startup. The app launched a few months ago and we’re working on rolling out regular updates. 

How did Alvin perform from a project management standpoint?

We use Asana to manage the team. They do a great job following the workflow and delivering on time. One of their strong points is communication. They’re responsive and easy to get in touch with. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I found their level of communication to be very impressive. Their skillset and transparency are also important to us. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I’m overall very happy with their service. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers? 

It’s a good idea to pitch the idea to them and see if their experience fits your needs. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a software engineering manager for a hardware startup.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Alvin?

We needed help building a POS mobile application. We wanted to provide a simple way for consumers to make donations in our business ecosystem.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped us develop a POS iOS mobile application that collects donations using the PayPal SDK. We provided a proof of concept and led the design in house, and Alvin did all the development. 

The application allows users to select various organizations and choose a donation amount. The app charges the user through the PayPal Chip and Tap Reader. Users can either pay by using the Chip and Tap Reader, swiping a card, or utilizing a card with a chip.

Development challenges included authentication and ensuring the solution agreed with our business systems. The complexity came from all of the associated structures needed to make a deployable solution. Users have to perform a handshake function with the PayPal server. Since it’s a hardware device, it could also require updates from PayPal. 

What is the team composition?

There was one developer.

How did you come to work with Alvin?

We were looking for a semi-local company with iOS specific skills that had worked on transaction systems before. We identified the developer through LinkedIn. They’re about two hours away, and they had extensive iOS development experience. They understood authentication protocols really well.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested between $10,000–$25,000 with Alvin.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2019 and the engagement finished in May 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since we’re just now rolling out the software, we don’t have data about how many deployments there will be. However, we’re thinking we might deploy it in 100 places. 

We’re satisfied with the success of the project. The solution passed all the QA efforts, and we’ve handed it off to the customer-facing teams.

How did Alvin perform from a project management standpoint?

They had a smooth workflow. The synchronization between our business team and their project management team was perfect. Since we are a startup, we wanted to move fast. Even though the project had to be rewritten, Alvin finished it in time for our business teams to do their work. 

They participated in our Scrum process and delivered the solution according to our project management guidelines. We communicated via Zoom video conference, email, and the phone.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were responsive, especially regarding their ability to help find solutions during the QA process. Even though identifying update issues during QA was one of the trickier elements, they responded quickly to solve the issues.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could have leveraged a little bit more of our internal technologies. While they developed the project from scratch, there are some components we had developed that could have been reused instead of recreated. It was a different workflow because Alvin was an outside team.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Any guidance clients can provide is helpful, and they should make sure solution design is already in place. Also, clients should be very clear where Alvin has a free hand versus where they need to integrate technologies in a specific way. Alvin will move forward and do the work well. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the founder of Actiview. We create accessibility technology for the deaf, the blind, and foreign language speakers to enjoy movies and entertainment in theaters and in their own home.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Alvin?

We worked with them on the Android version of our application. We have the in-house capability to build iOS apps, but we had no Android experience. We had very specific requests for how we wanted it to look on the Android platform.

They also helped with the redesign of our website.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The most important part was making the app accessible to deaf and blind users. There's a specific way to make it accessible to those users and a way of speaking the interface to them. The Alvin team was really capable of making that happen. Our app uses specific audio synchronization technology that we designed in-house. That technology not only listens to the movie and figures out which movie you're watching, but it figures out where in the movie you are so it can synchronize your closed captions and audio tracks of different languages.

After we finished the Android app, we were looking to redesign our website. Alvin said they offered those services as well. They provided us with a quote, and we accepted it. That site is built using django CMS. The owner conducted the entire redesign himself. He provided us with drawn and digital wireframes with the HTML. He made it available on django CMS once we gave him access to our AWS server to load all the assets.

What is the team composition?

The owner was our main contact. Everything from billing to the development cycle went through him. In addition to doing the web development himself, we were in touch with the owner for most other projects. We also had an Android developer and a designer.

How did you come to work with Alvin?

We put a listing on LinkedIn looking for an Android developer, and Alvin’s owner messaged us to say he would have the capabilities to build it. We interviewed about five other individuals and firms. The cost was too high for some of the bigger firms. And I didn’t have enough faith in the individuals we met with to think that I would receive a finished and quality product. Alvin had the best documentation and price point, so they were selected.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $25,000 on all services.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our Android development spanned February through April 2018. The web project began right after in April and was completed in June 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The Android app is currently undergoing testing. We have some rigorous security requirements for the technology we create, especially around the Hollywood studios who distribute content through us. The app is going through testing with them, and by all regards so far, that's going well. From a website perspective, it needed to be accessible by blind users as well as be very consumable by anyone going to the site, and we've only had positive feedback from it so far. We're very happy with how it's all come together.

How did Alvin perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team was easily accessible for any specific problem. The owner was always online and offered quick responses. We held calls with the owner and the developer at times, as well as one-on-one calls with them depending on what we needed to be accomplished. We were always able to speak with the correct person whenever necessary. They clearly made us a priority.

We used Slack for quick communications, email for longer updates, and Dropbox for assets that needed to be shared back and forth.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They had an innate ability to look at problems, ask the right questions, and address them properly. I don't know many engineers who could do that as well as they did.

I feared that there might be language barriers because the Android developer worked overseas, but we had no such trouble. We had easy conversations. It was nothing short of fluent.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Everything was done on time, but having more day-to-day benchmarks would have been welcomed. That said, we weren’t lacking in communication in any way.

Any advice for potential customers?

They were people that could execute the ideas that I had, but they could also ideate with us. We found it valuable to trust them and let them be additive to the cycle of building a product.