Blue Rocket

BACKGROUND

Please provide a description of your company. 

Soulsend is a new social network platform focused on families sharing and narrating their memories together. It is the mission of Soulsend to provide a secure service for families to capture and preserve the exciting moments of their children so their children can always have a personal timeline to look back at their development through the years.

What is your role at the company?

I'm the founder, so I guess you could say I'm responsible for everything.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was the challenge that you were trying to address when you approached Blue Rocket?

From the beginning, it was a personal challenge. I had become fed up with trying, through several formats, to be able to collect memories and to narrate those memories into stories that could easily be passed along to my young daughter. I wanted a way to be able to send messages to her in the future, so if anything should ever happen to me that I couldn't communicate things to her, so that she would always have something from me to look back on.

What was the scope of the project, and can you describe the specific services provided by Blue Rocket?

When I finally approached Blue Rocket with my thoughts and ideas for Soulsend (called mySoul originally) it was really a simple idea at first. Just a one-to-one (parent-to-kid) solution. But, from the very first associate at Blue Rocket, and especially with the core development team there, the solution kept growing into a beautiful tool for families to be excited to embrace it.

SOLUTION

What was your process for selecting them to work with? How did you find them, and why did you pick them?

Well, there are so many app developers out there. Obviously, there's many to choose from in California alone. But, I started initially with developers closer to my home in upstate New York. From a friend finishing his masters in computer science with just a couple apps under his belt, to some newer companies springing up in cities nearby. But, none of the local companies impressed me, and actually tried to force the core ideas for Soulsend into something I didn't necessarily care for. 

I approached a company in India who promised to deliver everything I had dreamed up for only a fraction of the other estimates I received, but the language barrier and unknowns regarding international laws and so on became too much for me to be feel safe working with them.

From the beginning, Blue Rocket made me feel incredibly comfortable. They asked great questions and offered fantastic insight into every aspect of the product. I could tell that they weren't interested in taking any shortcuts in order to deliver a strong and valuable tool.

Can you give us a general estimate of the size of the project in dollar terms or personnel work hours?

The total spent was around $100,000.

When did the project begin, and when was it completed?

The total build for the application, once physically started, was right at three months. There was a design and brainstorm period prior to development, including a three-day workshop at Blue Rocket's office in San Francisco.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How did they perform in terms of the quality of their work? Are there any relevant statistics or metrics you can share?

I really don't have any way to quantify the quality of their work tangibly. No numbers or stats to compare with anything else since this really is a new frontier for me, an industry I knew nothing about prior to my engagement with Blue Rocket. But, I can say that their entire staff showed very real excitement in the idea that I originally presented to them, and they helped incredibly to grow the idea for Soulsend into something much larger and more beautiful than anything I could have dreamed it to become. Because of this, I believe that Soulsend has a strong foundation for it to grow into a much greater resource.

When working with them, was there anything unique or special about them compared to other partners with which you may have worked?

Again, I haven't had experience with a company in this industry prior to approaching Blue Rocket. But, in my interactions with the several companies that I "interviewed" before hiring Blue Rocket I would say that the primary thing that set this company apart was their overall knowledge about how to approach the development for this platform. The Indian company I spoke with may have built my original idea exactly how I originally wanted it to be … but that quite realistically could have created more problems than they solved. Blue Rocket was the architect that confidently knew "how" to build Soulsend. They knew how any detail would work with any other detail, and how best to approach any specific scenario that a user would face along the way. They encouraged the development of a minimal viable product in order to analyze the usage patterns for users of Soulsend before going too gung-ho into building every little thing that we wanted to have in the very beginning. 

Looking back on the project, do you have any constructive criticism? Is there any area that they could improve or you would do differently?

Even though I feel like Blue Rocket offers more value to a client than many other companies in the same industry, to add even further value to their services they could look deeper into what a client will go through once their product goes "live." Things like making sure that they are listed on startup company databases, and what companies and blogs would be best to approach to ensure maximum exposure for the new app. They do some of that now, but it would be helpful if they did even more.