Apiko

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the owner of Tradition Tours; We create tours for individuals and groups (churches) to Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, and Greece.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

Our old WordPress website was outdated, which was creating major issues for our customers and us. As the company evolved, we decided to outsource our web development. Apiko designed and completely overhauled our systems by creating a new site based on Strapi, a new content management system, and integrated our accounting and CRM.

By making this decision, we have automated and completely digitalized most of our daily office workflow, which will minimize costs considerably and increase the growth of our revenues substantially.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Apiko came highly recommended to us by a colleague in a different industry to ours, who has used their services and highly recommended them.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We had an initial meeting to discuss the goals and objectives of Tradition Tours; from there the team delivered mock-ups using Figma as well as creating a staging/testing environment for the new site. Apiko were very attentive to our needs and didn’t just do what we asked they gave their own input and truly got to understand the inner workings of the company (it’s been like working with family).

This has enabled us to come out the other side of this project with much greater expectations and results than originally expected. To name a few of the systems used: Strapi, Figma, Stripe, Xero, Aws, and much more.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Initially, our online meetings included a team of 5 people until everyone understood the needs of our company; from that point, we were in constant contact with our project managers with weekly calls and daily contact via slack. Our team consisted of Project managers, stack developers, and designers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

To date, we are receiving very positive feedback from our clients and the office workload has more than halved due to the work that has been done.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Multiple slack messages daily; being we were in different time zones, I was surprised to get responses from the team in the late hours of the night when I would have expected them not to be available. Messages were usually responded to within 15 minutes during regular working hours. The team excelled at communication. There were also hour-long online meetings once a week at the beginning of the project, which decreased over time as everyone got a clear scope of the project.

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

We were impressed with their mindset, always open to new ideas and thinking out of the box. Zero language barriers and our thought processes were in sync throughout the project.

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

I'm sure if I nitpick, I will be able to come up with a few very small issues, though overall we are very happy with the services rendered to date.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Product Manager at TREEUM HOLDINGS LIMITED. We have big fintech projects in Ukraine: minfin.com.ua and finance.ua. We build fintech products for millions of people and try to create simple useful services for them.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

We wanted to develop a mobile application for foreign exchange and crypto segments. Our goal, its create a simple application where a user can find exchange rates from banks, and financial companies and make orders in this. And second goal, its create a simple crypto function for buying and saving cryptocurrencies.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched for companies with expertise in mobile development and good expertise in UI/UX design. We made a shortlist with 10 companies by this criteria and after that, we interviewed companies from this list. After the interview, we make our choice of Apiko company, because they had a good portfolio with mobile applications, and they had design think practices. They were professionals in mobile development and they had a proactive position in membership for our project

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Firstly we had meetings for creating a scope of the project and requirements. After that, we had meetings with Business Analytics and Designers for creating documentation and mockups for our application. We had weekly checkup meetings, where we can see the progress of the project and details daily reports for this. After documentation and mockups, UI/UX designer started creating screens of applications and user flows. The second step is its mobile development. We had good communication with the team lead of the development team and the project manager.

We had roadmaps with segments of work, where we had cost, time for the work, and a queue of tasks. The third step is QA and implementation. We had the support of Apiko team in publish step, they consulted us with the rules of stores and we together published the first version of an application

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

• 1 Project Manager
• 1 Business Analytic
• 1 UI/UX Designer
• 1 Team lead
• 2-3 React Native Developers
• 1 QA

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Application have MAU around 80 000 and 100 000 downloads

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Easy in communication, win-to-win strategy, active used agile methods for project and they felt our problem and our needs

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

They were adaptive to feedback and showed fast design processes and good communication.

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

Quality of details in design and quality of UX. It's ok, but sometimes we insisted on prolongation this phase of work because the result did not suit.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm an executive at a talent-match company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Apiko?

We hired Apiko to build our MVP.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Apiko is building our MVP from scratch using React and Node.js.

What is the team composition?

I'm mostly in contact with a project manager from their team

How did you come to work with Apiko?

I found them through a Google search.

How much have you invested in them?

We've spent around $100,000 with them so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in August 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We measure the success by how they're delivering on time and according to our expectations.

How did Apiko perform from a project management standpoint?

I'm satisfied with their project management; we use Google Meet and Slack for communication and Jira and Confluence for project management.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could communicate better with their customers and be more transparent with costs.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you have a clear idea of the cost because it becomes very expensive otherwise.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CPO of Billy, headquartered in Copenhagen

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

We wanted to created a great mobile app loved by our users. Our old contractor had done a terrible job :-) Luckily we found Apiko and we never looked back.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched for vendors and they basically popped up.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We created a mobile app ground up. To start off, we copied the UX from the old app, but with new code. Afterwards we have improved UX and have kept developing it since. We use react native and rest api's.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

4 people. We have 1 tech lead and 2 developers. Additionally we have had good sparring with a project manager when needed.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We have 3-4000 users on the app, who are generally very happy with it. We've just started with reviews,, so let's see how it goes :-)

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We worked with Apiko like any internal developer team, with standups, grooming etc. We use Jira and slack, and it works great.

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

We simply love the team assigned to us. They provide great work and are very dedicated to our product development. Kudo's.

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

Basically things have worked out pretty fine. Nothing of importance.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the senior software engineer at Jetpack Shipping, a nutraceutical fulfillment company that integrates e-commerce clients into our fulfillment centers from various environments.  

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Apiko?

We hired Apiko to scale up the prototype we used to connect all of our customers’ e-commerce environments into a unified structure. The challenge was that every client may have their own type of shopping cart software platform, so the data varied for each of them. To fulfill their orders, we had to unify their platforms into a unified model.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve built the prototype of our software and passed the model to Apiko, which helps polish and scale it up as it connects to CRMs. The software has to unify several APIs and adapters into one environment that allows us to manage everything in a much smoother and cleaner way.

The team has built the platform to scale with custom environments, too. This lets us adapt to fluid environments, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, the platform opens more doors for us to bring new customers.

What is the team composition?

We currently work with 2–3 people from Apiko. We’ve cycled a few employees for various roles, but we’ve kept one backend developer throughout the engagement. Apiko has also added a few frontend developers to either help us scale or work on complementary projects so that they don’t interfere with the main one.

How did you come to work with Apiko?

We found Apiko through research. A few people from our team looked into various companies. Personally, I had positive experiences with developers from Ukraine; there was a different kind of coding culture there in terms of more modern apps. As a result, when we had the shortlist of different agencies, we ultimately decided to pick Apiko. Their cost was also suitable for us. 

How much have you invested with them?

The investment has scaled up and down, but we’ve spent somewhere between $100,000–$200,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Apiko in December 2019, and the engagement is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I’m truly happy with Apiko’s services so far. I’m looking forward to doing more work with them. 

How did Apiko perform from a project management standpoint?

For project management, we use tools like Jira. Apiko is concise and clear in their work, and any time we become busy, the team keeps up well with updates and tickets. I haven’t seen any issues here. We have daily standups and use Slack, email, and Skype to communicate. Our teams do calls 3–5 times per week, while product deployments are done weekly.

To be clear, we’re the ones doing the management. However, Apiko resources help us set up tickets. Whenever I haven’t set tickets up, the team sets them up themselves. In other words, the engagement has been truly collaborative. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Apiko’s work is clean and structured — I get what I ask for as long as I give them the details of what I want. Sometimes, they even give us more than what we expect. They’re considerate of the product, and it shows in their work. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

If they have people in our region or a US branch close to Ohio, then that’d be great.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Pick somebody that you’ll want to work with for the long term. Apiko is highly oriented toward building relationships for the long haul, so consider if you want to work with them across many projects. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the manager of the digital team. Our organisation serves people with eating disorders through innovative clinical treatment, research and policy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

Development of the mobile application companion to our existing online therapy platform for people with eating disorders.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Apiko spent a lot of time understanding what our features were while putting together their proposal

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We provided Apiko with access to our existing online therapy platform and a feature list, they then created a detailed Requirements doc and mobile designs. They then began development and eventually testing, and submitted the App to the App Store and Google Play.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had a core team of a project manager & client manager. Supporting them were developers and a designer, and a QA engineer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

App was developed in record time (around 10 weeks) with no major issues

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Extremely communicative, very detailed, have a great understanding of how much to involve the client vs. manage things themselves

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

A great team to work with, go above and beyond. When looking through our existing web eTherapy platform to make the mobile app version, they tracked the bugs that they noticed on the website and fixed them on the mobile version without being asked to, and handed us detailed bug reports about what they noticed on web.

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

Nope!

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a startup that helps writers create websites where they can publish their work and collect payment from readers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Apiko?

I'm an experienced product manager and was looking for professional, affordable developers to help turn specs into a functioning product.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Apiko serves as my primary web engineering team. At the beginning of the project, we provided them with detailed specs which they were able to turn into a well-functioning web app in a matter of months. We continue to work together to introduce new functionality to the platform.

The vendor has served as the primary engineering team for the company. They also have resources to help with design, quality assurance, and product planning. For our platform, their team has used Next.js on the frontend and Node.js on the backend. They've also successfully configured integrations with tools like Mailgun for email, Stripe for payments, and AWS for hosting.

What is the team composition?

Apiko is able to scale their resources according to our needs. We started with two engineers but now use three of their engineers, as well as a business analyst, a QA specialist, and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Apiko?

I was looking for offshore resources when I came across Apiko while checking out reviews on Upwork — they stood out because of their rare blend of professionalism, experience, and cost-effectiveness.

I interviewed a couple of other agencies but Apiko had a clear plan and did an excellent job communicating what their expectations were, how they worked, and how the projects would progress, so I ended up choosing them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent somewhere in the range of $300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing partnership started in June 2020 and we plan on being long-term partners.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our site is now live and operating according to our specs, thanks to Apiko. The product was delivered on time and since then, we’ve had very little downtime because of the solid structure.

As for the metrics, it’s still extremely early to tell, but we’ve had over a thousand users so we’re on track to have a great performance for the rest of the year.

How did Apiko perform from a project management standpoint?

We were able to seamlessly plug into their process, so the project management has been really great. They’re are willing to do pure staff augmentation but in our case we needed the additional support of a project manager and QA specialist so our in-house team can focus on other aspects of the business.

They manage our day-to-day engineering work on Jira and Confluence and track the hours through Hubstaff. Additionally, we typically communicate through Google Meet and Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’re very impressed with their professionalism and competitive pricing. On top of that, we also like their deep experience and how they have internal resources like DevOps specialists, who are able to jump in and solve complex engineering problems when they arise.

They’re also highly-proficient communicators, so nothing in the development gets lost in translation.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There were some issues with the schedule certain features were delivered by, but that was partly because the specs of the product evolved over time. Since then we’ve gotten better at predicting the releases.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I recommend having a clear and detailed specification of what you want to build, rather than coming into the partnership with just an idea with no real plan for implementing it. This will allow their engineers to get started a lot sooner instead of spending weeks developing a true spec.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of an Online Recruitment Company. We help companies hire faster for less money.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

Our software needed a complete rebuild as we had been operating with an MVP model for a number of years. We opted for a .Net core backend with React frontend.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

After reviewing many vendors Apiko stood out initially based on their excellent communication coupled with a strong portfolio of similar web projects.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

After our kick off meeting, our Project Manager help plan the sprints and the scope of work. Working closely with their BA we created user stories for all the features and kicked of the development. We used .Net core on the backend with react on the frontend.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

A project manager, business analyst, frontend developer, backend developer, QA, DevOps.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We are very happy with the software and recently launched. So far the feedback from clients has been excellent.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The Project Manager held daily standups some of which I attended. Including weekly bug review session and bi weekly sprint demos. We used Jira and Confluence to manage the project.

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

They were very professional and responsive with a keen sense of detail. If I asked for something to be done it got done first time.

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

Generally very happy, the software build time was longer than first expected but we did have certain changes to the scope so this is understandable.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the co-founder and COO of HireAction, an employee referrals platform that helps organizations supercharge their hiring by encouraging their employees to submit referrals.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

With all the product specifications and requirements in place, we needed a trusted partner to assist with the implementation.

SOLUTION

How did you select Apiko and what were the deciding factors?

We interviewed multiple software development companies and we found Apiko's plan and vision the most aligned with our vision and expectations.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Main technologies used - Nest.js, PostgesSQL (RDS). The initial scope of the development was to build an MVP (both backend and frontend). After the MVP was launched, the team continued to build the features outlined by the product team.

How many people from the Apiko team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had four team members in the core team - a full-stack engineering team lead, a frontend developer, a software tester, and a project manager.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The MVP development took 9 months and involved multiple integrations with third-party APIs such as Stripe and others.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Our project manager constantly keeps Jira up to date and communicates effectively about the status of the project.

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

The team is extremely professional. The quality of their work is high, and the team is a pleasure to work with.

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

We had a few hiccups with the quality assurance team, but the Apiko team was open to feedback and worked with us to improve things.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO & founder of Kadu. We develop custom software solutions for the hospitality industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Apiko, and what were your goals?

We wanted to develop an online platform and SaaS solution to sell touristic and mobility services. Build the backend system, integrate third party APIs, develop the UI.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We know them from a previous project.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

They designed the UI mockup and wrote the system&requirement document during concept development phase. The first development phase allowed to implement the MVP of the backend system. The tech stack used included node.js, graphql.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

There were 4 people in the team.

• 1 project manager
• 2 mid developers
• 1 designer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We were able to start a first test phase with a potential customer thanks to the quick development of the MVP.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

The project management was great and professional. We regularly had meet-ups to discuss project status. We communicated through Slack, Trello and GitHub.

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

We really like the professionality of the whole team, their organization and flexibility in setting up and carrying out a project. They have been very responsive during last-minute changes or requests. The developers we worked with were also very experienced and skilled.

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

Currently all good.