Aurora Solutions

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m Co-Founder and CEO to Capture (www.thecapture.club) and we are empowering individuals and businesses to track and reduce CO2 emissions of their daily life choices including and not limited to transport and food, using our app & dashboard.

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

Bringing our App to life was our main challenge as we were competing in an international accelerator program where we needed to build an MVP within 6-8 weeks and present it to investors along with our pitch.

The App required stellar performance of some complex deep-tech features, which usually require a lot more time than we had! We needed an organised and reliable team with dexterity in our preferred framework to pull this off.

How did you select Aurora Solutions and what were the deciding factors?

Research and recommendations helped my co-founder to suggested we move forward with Aurora Solutions for the task.

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

We needed the team to scope, plan and implement the solution for us from the beginning. This would include architecture, design, development, QA and App Store release all the way until the end. The incorporation of aforementioned features with great accuracy was essential and directly proportional to our success in the final round at the Accelerator program (specially on demo day!).

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

The team allotted to us included 1 Full Stack Developer, 2 Mobile App Developers and 1 Backend Developer.

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

The Capture App was a great success, delighting users and impressing investors and our judging committee. The accuracy of the features coupled with the concept itself brought us favourable attention from all the right elements which geared us up to take our project to the next level. We are now in full production mode with active customers and 40,000+ organic app downloads.

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

The team were ambitious, thorough and detail-oriented. The engineers took up the challenge of delivering the project within a very tight deadline but still made sure we didn’t cut any corners when it came to good design principles of good software architecture.

They were also quick to learn a few new technologies including real time location tracking and lots of firebase features that they were not used to before but had to implement in this project (e.g. detailed analytics tracking, crashlytics and automated testing).

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

They demonstrated ability in taking proposed designs and translating them into a fully functioning product quickly!

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

It would have been better if an in-house designer had also been available at the time, we would have preferred to have been able to use their services instead of having to look elsewhere for design and UX work on the app.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the product owner for Score. We work with digital sports networks, helping them be more commercial.

What challenge were you trying to address with Aurora Solutions?

We were looking for software development to be done more cost-effectively.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided the requirements, and features we wanted, as well as some of our design ideas. Aurora Solutions then developed the cross-platform software and did some of the design. They used React and Java.

What is the team composition?

We work with two developers and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Aurora Solutions?

They were recommended by a personal connection.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in January 2019, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

Feedback from customers has been good. They find the solution easy to understand and use.

How did Aurora Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

They have improved a lot from the beginning of the engagement. Overall, they do well with communication and meeting deadlines. They provide daily feedback.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The developers put themselves into the project, taking care of it as their own.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Transparency and speed of communication around updates could be a little better.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be involved in the process. Test the product to ensure it meets your expectations.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a former senior director of engineering for a billing platform in Java.

What challenge were you trying to address with Aurora Solutions?

We needed a team to help us extend our platform and support various clients.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had several features and integrations with other systems to add. They did both feature development and implementation work and were involved in the full length of the life cycle. We have more than one location, and each area had ownership in their own requirement gathering, design, implementation, tests, and the deployment and integration with customers. If we had a big deployment to a large customer, we had prompts to support those clients, so they helped with a few projects.

What is the team composition?

So we had a project manager and two team leads. Each team lead managed a team of two developers and a QA specialist. We interacted mostly with the project manager and the two leads.

How did you come to work with Aurora Solutions?

They started working with the company before I did.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $300,000–$400,000 a year on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from about March 2013–September 2018.

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

One of their leads managed a large customer for us, which represented about 25% of our revenue. They did the initial implementation, followed by a long set of improvements and enhancements and support.

How did Aurora Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

We had three project managers throughout our relationship. They were very professional, thorough, and proactive in identifying risks and matching customers. They had the right personality for our tougher customers and kept everyone happy. We used Jira for tracking issues and had a chart overlay with weekly status reports.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We could trust them to complete the tasks as we wanted them. They took control of the work but always came to us with any questions. They stayed on track and were much easier to manage than some of my other vendors.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t have any areas of improvement for them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

This is fairly generic, but make sure your projects are self-contained. Let them have ownership of their work; that will save you time.