Bitscorp

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a co-founder and the head of a French company developing software for medical doctors, clinics, and hospitals. We have a 10-person team based in Paris.

What challenge were you trying to address with Bitscorp?

My co-founding team developed the first bricks of software in-house. I was personally in charge of coding the first version of the platform. At one point, we became too busy to deliver new features that our customers were asking for as quickly as we wanted. We partly outsourced development to Bitscorp, and we’ve been working with them for almost two years.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Bitscorp provides backend Ruby on Rails development and some frontend integration. We’re developing a B2B SaaS, so we don’t have huge frontend requirements. Our software helps doctors communicate with patients across their medical journeys — after surgery, for instance.

We’ve developed different features with Bitscorp, including the ability to contact patients via SMS and create custom surveys for patients.

What is the team composition?

Alexander (Business Manager) was our initial contact. He runs the company. We started working with them for a few hours per week. As our needs grew, we onboarded a few more developers. We have the equivalent of 1.5 full-time resources split between 2–4 people; this depends on the resource’s availability inside Bitscorp, which we’re not totally aware of.

How did you come to work with Bitscorp?

We’d come to realize that we couldn’t deliver as fast as we wanted. Hiring employees in France wasn’t possible due to financial reasons, and because we didn’t have enough resources to commit to recruitment. 

I found Alexander on Upwork. We had an interview, and I gave his team a small project. We were happy with the work and decided to work together directly, outside of Upwork.

How much have you invested with them?

We have invested approximately €30,000 (approximately $37,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Bitscorp in April or May 2019, and it’s ongoing.

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

We’re happy with their work, and they provide good value for money. The hourly cost is one-third of what we would’ve paid in France for people with the same level of experience as Alexander and his team. 

How did Bitscorp perform from a project management standpoint?

Alexander has good skills for working remotely, his English is good, and he’s always available when we have an urgent problem. Their reactiveness is appreciated; we can really rely on them.

There’s not a lot of project management on their side. We have in-house project managers who handle scheduling and customer management, and we provide Bitscorp with sufficient specifications. We use Slack and Google Meet for communication, and they record their screens while working by using Loom. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re direct and straightforward when discussing prices and other topics. They’ll complain about certain things, but we appreciate that. I like the communication with Bitscorp — they’re frank and honest. I’ve had previous experiences outsourcing to Northern Africa or India, and the communication wasn’t as smooth. It was always difficult to know if they really understood our expectations.

Bitscorp is located in Eastern Europe. They’re really good technically, and they deliver when they say they will. If they don’t understand something, they’ll tell us instead of pretending they do.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s been smooth so far. As Bitscorp grows and Alexander recruits new people, I can see it impacting our collaboration. He needs to organize his team internally to know who’s available and for what project.  

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Doing project management ourselves has been a plus. Most of Bitscorp’s team is technical, so communication can become more challenging if the client doesn’t have technical people on their team who are sufficiently organized and skilled at project management. The people on the client-side don’t have to be developers necessarily. However, they need to understand the software environment and communicate as technically as possible with the developers.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I have a number of start-ups where I serve as the director and CEO. I have interacted with Bitscorp on a music discovery app, and I had a real estate crowdfunding platform. Currently, I’m working on a health documents e-commerce website.

What challenge were you trying to address with Bitscorp?

I needed to build an application.

What was the scope of their involvement?

For the first project, they created a ranking algorithm for a music discovery app, and were responsible for backend development. They worked on it years ago before Spotify had their discovery platform working very well. We were basically integrating with Facebook social graph, surfacing trending music, and also indexing music posts by various artists and user pages.

When you log into the app using Facebook, you’d get a feed of music that was developed by Alex (Software Developer) and his team. The algorithm would index all of those music pages using Facebook likes. 

As a user, you log on to Facebook, and it would index likes from your own page for any artist that you like. It would then index all of the posts from those pages, as well as your own music posts for your own page — initially, it would also index all of your friend’s posts as well. It was a bit of a moving target with the Facebook API, but those guys did a great job of developing the algorithm, the database, and the backend for the iOS app — I had a UX designer and iOS app developer working on the backend of that project.

Alex gave his feedback on things like marketing and strategy, and his feedback was definitely taken into account, but I wasn’t paying him for those services. The technology recommended by them was Ruby on Rails, and I can’t recall if they used React as well. I think they did some kind of web interface to their backend, but it was basically a test and not part of the production environment.

What is the team composition?

I believe there were three. Alex was the project lead and the account manager, and I believe there were two or three other developers from his team. However, I didn’t interact with them very much as Alex was my main point of communication.

How did you come to work with Bitscorp?

I came across Alex while doing some web research if I recall — I found one of his GitHub projects on GitHub which I liked. Initially, I asked if he could repurpose an open-source project, which he offered to do and expand, and that is how we started working together.

How much have you invested in them?

We invested about $50,000 USD.

What is the status of this engagement?

I believe we started in December 2012, and we’re still working together.

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

The user numbers were very good, but I really can’t share the information because we sold the technology to another company — it was covered by an NDA, so I really can’t discuss user metrics. However, we did have very positive feedback for both the user interface and the functionality. We did quite a bit of testing and there were some bugs, but they were dealt with pretty well by Alex’s team — we had a pretty good system in place for tracking bugs during the beta testing.

How did Bitscorp perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very good, and it is definitely a strong point. They’re using a pretty robust bug tracking platform which Alex suggested when we were using Trello initially. 

We communicate in a number of ways. Back then, we might have used Skype as a messaging platform, but we also used Slack and then the bug tracking platform itself.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I would say that Alex and his team are very proactive in terms of providing support and making sure that we’re happy customers. Other companies would not go the extra mile, but I would say that Bitscorp really went above and beyond to deliver exactly what I was looking for. One time, there was a feature creep, and I would say they were pretty good at managing that in both directions, and pushed back on me to make sure that we were working on the MVP— but were also providing the functionality that was critical for the MVP.

Are there any areas they could improve?

That particular project was quite a long time ago, and I think they have a more robust organization than they did back then — which was more ad hoc. Alex had hired a couple of part-time developers, and I think they have a more robust team right now, which is what I have experienced lately so I don’t really have any critical feedback right now.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would give the same advice to anyone contemplating any project. In my experience with that particular startup project, I would say to make sure that you very clearly define your MVP ahead of time before starting development. Keeping up with Facebook API made it difficult for us, so it’s very important if you are working on any project that relies on an API, that you have a good understanding of what the roadmap is for that company.

 It is quite difficult to anticipate Facebook’s plans and with the new privacy restrictions, it became more important for them and harder to work with that particular platform — that is more of an application challenge.

More important advice for any startup, or anyone contemplating a complex web project or iOS project, would be to do some user testing to make sure that the use cases are accurate as possible. One thing that we didn’t do enough of, is making sure that the use cases held up to what people want to do, and the various ways of doing that kind of testing — but that wasn’t Bitcorp’s remit, it is the entrepreneur’s job.