Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?
They’ve been great. The greatest feature that they set up for us was Google Analytics. They set up the pages to be easy to read, and in terms of that, they’ve been great. We see about 4,000 visitors to the site, but that number increases monthly. Theoretically, every patient is looking on our site an average of every four days. That’s exciting for us; we’re getting a lot of exposure. We get a lot of members to the site partly because we’re one of the biggest dispensaries in Massachusetts, but we’re also really active with our marketing and everything. I think Big Drop has been a big part of that. They’ve made our site straightforward and easy.
How did BigDrop perform from a project management standpoint?
They’re really hard-working. I don’t know if they do this for everyone, but they’ve been extremely helpful for us in emergency situations. Garry was so kind. He gave me his personal cell phone number and said, “If you need anything, give us a call.” I had his team working on the weekend one time.
They just go above and beyond your average development company. Sometimes it’s hard because they work kind of quirky hours, so if we don’t get a request in super early it can be a bummer, but they’ve also been great about emergency situations. Somehow he always finds someone to help us out. Danil, our project manager has been super responsive. He will answer every single email right away. He always wants to set up Zoom meetings to make sure that our visions are on the same page. Work with Danil has been awesome. He has his act together and he’s super organized. Boris, the other manager, is really proactive about making sure things are okay with us.
What did you find most impressive about Big Drop?
I can’t speak highly enough of their ethic and their project managers. Garry’s an awesome dude to work with. They’ve continued to produce work that we’re really happy with. They make sure it looks good on every platform. We can be really particular about that. We’ll say, “It doesn’t look good on a 2014 MacBook Air,” and they’ll dive in and make sure it’s a quality site on that platform in particular.
Are there any areas Big Drop could improve?
I’m not going to lie: in the beginning, we went through several project managers, and they’re no longer with the company. We can have a lot of requests and sometimes we’ve really pushed them to work hard, and in the beginning, the work just wasn’t being produced. Now it’s a complete turnaround. I’ve been so pleased working with our latest project manager. Other than that, the only thing is they typically work from 4 AM to noon, which is fine unless the site crashes later in the day.
That’s when I have to find Garry and he has to scramble to find somebody. It would be better if they had a local developer who could work different hours, or an on-call person for the weekends. But that’s special treatment stuff; I don’t think it’s a huge detriment to their organization. It would just be convenient.
As soon as the site was launched, the number of sales quadrupled, while the new checkout system enables customers to easily build their own product. Highly professional and responsive, they went above and beyond to understand the business and delivered a top-notch product.