AppTailors

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Vagus Health. We develop diagnostics and treatment for vagus nerve stimulation. We have a smartwatch and other medical device treatments.

What challenge were you trying to address with AppTailors?

We needed support developing our smartwatch.

What was the scope of their involvement?

AppTailors is helping us with the app for our smartwatch. They built the iOS version, and the team is about to start working on the next Android version.

What is the team composition?

We worked with two people from the team.

How did you come to work with AppTailors?

One of our team members put the project up on a couple of sites and asked for quotes. We got quotes from a number of different companies, and we initially partnered with a different company before moving on to AppTailors.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about £8,000 (approximately $10,000 USD) so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve been working together since April 2020.

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

The app is working very well. There are no bugs as a result of AppTailors’ work. 

How did AppTailors perform from a project management standpoint?

AppTailors has been very precise. They’ve consistently met our needs. Compared to others we’ve used, they’re the best. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

AppTailors does what they say they will. The solution is working as expected. Also, the team is very knowledgeable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We wanted to contract them for more work, but they didn’t have the time and resources at the moment. They could benefit from adding more personnel.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The team thinks independently quite well, so you don’t need to waste time explaining every detail of the specs.  

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of Rent Items Inc. Our company builds a peer to peer marketplace solution where the users can rent things, generating additional income, reducing waste as well as building better communities.

For what projects/services did your company hire AppTailors?

Rent Items iOS and Android mobile applications.

What were your goals for this project?

Create mobile apps to provide better user aexperience for users to rent items via their mobile devices directly.

How did you select this vendor?

Via an announcement and info posted on Angelist.

Describe the project in detail.

Once we signed the agreement with them, we worked together to refine the mockups and choose the technology. AppTaylors was able to debunk unknowns, propose better design and also suggested the technology. At their suggestion we looked into Flutter and we agreed.

It was the best tech for what we wanted to do because it allowed for building iOS and Android application with a single code base. We used Agile methodology to run our project and App Taylors was very skilled at that, suggesting even improvements and helping with the project management.

What was the team composition?

Team was composed from 2 mid level engineers, one senior and one architect/manager/team lead.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Within couple of months, the team got up to speed on Flutter and had the first version of the application functional on iOS and Android. They added a multitude of key feature in the application and within 3 months the application was live. It was very well received by the community with 4+ stars reviews.

The mobile application was now providing the same and better experience on mobile as the web application. The team continue to work on enhancing the application, providing additional features and continuously improving the user experience based on customers feedback.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We would have daily scrum meetings at first, but decided to reduce these to every other day because the team did so good following on tasks, providing updates in JIRA and asking questions and requesting design decisions when needed. We used all elements of Agile development.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The efficiency of the team and the capacity of proposing better solutions that we did not even think of at first. They have the experience, adaptability and fast learning capabilities necessary to succeed. The communication was just perfect as well.

Are there any areas for improvement?

We value quality vs quantity and even if the company would have been able to deliver the software sooner, we insisted on a tempo that will allow us to test and provide feedback. They were great on doing that and the quality was excellent.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO / co-founder of a company that provides the best error reporting and post-mortem debugging solution in the market with several industry leaders relying on us to improve software quality.

For what projects/services did your company hire AppTailors?

We required additional bandwidth to help deliver a high quality open-source library for error reporting on Mac OS / iOS / tvOS in order to minimize impact to existing high priority projects our core team at the time.

What were your goals for this project?

Provide high quality error reports reliably for highly popular applications. Needed to support Objective-C, Swift and Cocoapods easily.

How did you select this vendor?

Several vendors were considered. AppTailors came highly recommended from one of our leading engineers, after a series of interviews and close monitoring of early stages of the project, we decided to pursue a longer-term engagement for AppTailor's services.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Provide high quality error reports reliably for highly popular applications. Needed to support Objective-C, Swift and Cocoapods easily. AppTailors were given the following specification: "Design an error reporting library you would want to use as an Apple developer". From this, Marcin was able to develop an easy to understand specification and with minimal overhead was able to work through and solve very tough problems independently.

What was the team composition?

Product management, sales and marketing were involved on our side (team of four). I managed the project and worked with Marcin to ensure milestones were being delivered. The size of the team did not change.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

AppTailors work directly impacted our ability to ease integration of iOS and Mac applications into Backtrace using the Cocoapod ecosystem. An application you or your company use today is using it but unfortunately I cannot name the company.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Weekly check in and review of a deliverables document with clear milestones. Our team was available on Slack to help answer any product or technical questions AppTailors had.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their ability to deliver on time.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I am completely satisfied with their services.