Boldare

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Director of Engineering at Kaspien, Inc., a premier third-party seller and marketplace services agency. 

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

We hired Boldare to provide product strategy, design and custom cloud development in collaboration with our internal product and development teams. Our goal was to refine our product vision and growth strategy, and to rebuild a key software application that was critical to our business.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Our company had a previous relationship with Boldare from an earlier successful project.

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

Boldare held in depth discovery sessions with our business leads to understand our business model, goals and priorities. They then laid out several options and recommendations and worked with us to select the ideal option that met our business objectives.

They set up an agile scrum team that worked in tandem with other existing scrum teams. They brought in top skilled staff that worked with our internal employees, laid out a backlog, and began demonstrating and delivering work to our stakeholders.

This project was based on Typescript and React JS and was built on an AWS serverless lambda architecture.

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

The Boldare team included an architect, a number of product strategists, a scrum master, a designer, 4 software developers and an automated test developer.

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

The application Boldare built with us met all of our requirements, was built on a cutting edge architecture, and exceeded all of our performance and security goals. 

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

The project was conducted as an agile scrum project with 2 week sprints and the full scrum experience. The project lasted 3 quarters from Initial discovery and visioning to project completion. Boldare used Jira to manage the work and roadmaps, Teams for communication, and Mural for collaboration sessions. 

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

What is amazing about Boldare is the combination of their experience, expertize and amazing personalities. They were excellent to work with, they introduced new cutting edge processes and tools, and they delivered world class results for us in both process, code and automated testing. 

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

I can't think of anything the Boldare team could have done better than what we experienced. I can't wait for the next opportunity to work with them. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO and co-founder of Museum TUI Group, a travel company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Boldare?

Our company was focusing on merging two different companies, and we needed their team to bring one of our new user products to life.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Boldare has developed a custom web-based system to automate our internal processes. They've developed its frontend, and our team has taken over the UI/UX design pipeline. Additionally, Boldare has devised functionalities that allow our sales representatives to promote our offerings among potential customers.

We've recently launched the product, and Bodare's team continues to ensure its efficacy through bug fixes and update implementation.

What is the team composition?

We've worked with about 10 resources from their team.

How did you come to work with Boldare?

I attended some of the conferences that Boldare previously organized, and I wasn't a stranger to the high-quality work they produced. I made a mental note to approach them if we ever had development needs, so I didn't hesitate to contact their CEO when this project was finalized.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $500,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement started in September 2020.

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

We continue to receive positive feedback for Boldare's high-quality deliverables. They've produced a robust system that has significantly improved our processes, and we're looking forward to achieving more milestones through this platform.

How did Boldare perform from a project management standpoint?

Our internal team is in charge of project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Boldare delivers results that meet our standards and expectations.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there’s nothing I’ll have them improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Don't hesitate to entrust your end-to-end development needs to Boldare's team.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are one of the biggest cloud communication services providers in Mena and we support our customers to get the Omnichannel experience to rich their communications with their end customers.

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

We hired Boldare to extend our engineering capabilities and support us drive values quicker to our market. Boldare engineers are some of the top-notch engineers I worked with. they are professional and you would learn a lot from them.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We searched online for the best vendors to work with, Shortlisted 5 of them then chose Boldare based after we interviewed the engineers as they were much experienced and closer to what we are looking for.

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

We had a kick-off meeting to walk through our objectives. then we merged Boldare's engineers with our engineers and we worked as multiple teams to deliver fast our objectives.

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

10-25 Engineers for a couple of years. Back-end, Front-end, DevOps, QA, and Scrum masters.

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

We revamped one of our core products, Redesigned multiple other products.

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

Boldare is an agile company. Usually Scrum-based projects.

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

They cared about our end customers. which is hard to find worldwide.

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

increase the talent pool and improve the time to Hire. On some occasions it took more than 2 months to find resources based on our profiles. to be honest our profiles were a bit different than Normal as we were considering only Senior engineers

Please describe your company and your position there.

Company is providing service (Both digital and non digital) to the Food Industry. I'm the CTO of the company.

For what projects/services did your company hire Boldare?

Product Prototyping for a web application.

What were your goals for this project?

Explore the functionalities and design of a potential new feature of an existing SaaS Solution and validate the proposed solution internally.

How did you select Boldare?

We discussed with multiple companies including Boldare which shared with us a meaninful, pragmatic and focused on adding value process for our project.

Describe the project in detail.

The projet was about investigating brand new features in our Saas solution. I brought the basic concepts, domain understanding and main primary objectives as an input. Boldare challenged the various proposals and ideas while onboarding more of our company teammates in order to focus the prototyping process on identifying the added value for the costumers and proposing adapted UX solution. The final delivrable was a clicable prototype.

What was the team composition?

On the Boldare team, two product designers and a scrum master participated to the project. This option was really appreciated because it helped the whole team identify 'the best options' for many scenarios.

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

I can mention two main outcomes which are lead generation and move from prototyping to real implementation.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was really effective with constant communication, well driven and focused meetings and capacity to communicate with a wide variety of profiles (from technical to market)

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We were impressed with their capacity to embrace an unknown domain and challenging the strong assumptions presented. Also, variety of UI/UX proposal and capacity to incorporate new details during the journey was really a plus.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I see nothing that could have been done differently. Relationship, involvment in the project, focus on what matters made the process a success.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are developing a stealth mode MVP in a very competitive markertplace and I am the Director of Digital Projects.

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

We hired Boldare to help us develop the MVP software and to test the market to see if our hypothesis of the painpoint we saw & the way we thought to best address it is accurate.

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

Boldare was incredible from product workshop discovery to final deliverable. They are thoughtful in everything they create, not only in resource usage but especially in making sure that each element of the software aligns with the business goals.

We got a full team working on the project with a scrum master, two product designers, a front end React developer, a back end python developer, and a dev ops engineer.

We were able to build the full MVP in only 1 month with 4 sprints and I felt very lucky to be able to have daily touch bases with the team and weekly scrum events despite our 6 hour time difference.

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

see above.

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

Being able to have the product designers working in sketch with the prototype really helped us finalize the look& feel as well as workflow and not waste engineering/development hours.

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

They are incredibly prompt and use slack for transparent and clear communications. Additionally using Jira to project manage the sprints. The meeting schedule paired with the technology tools make a huge difference.

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

Their passion. Their passion to learn our business and business goals plus their passion for their specialty really makes the experience special and fun to be a part of.

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

Nothing. I can't wait to work with them again.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Interstate Data, which offers a mobile navigation app.

What challenge were you trying to address with Boldare?

We needed a partner to develop our mobile app.

What was the scope of their involvement?

From the ground up, they built our mobile app for iOS. While another agency provided the designs, Boldaire completely developed the platform based on our vision. 

What is the team composition?

We've worked with 15–20 people over the last five years.

How did you come to work with Boldare?

As we're entrepreneurs, we don't have a large and wanted to outsource as much work as possible. The company that created the designs suggested that we interview Boldare. Out of five companies, we selected Boldare.

How much have you invested in them?

We’ve spent between $1 million–$5 million on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've worked with them since May 2015, and it’s an ongoing partnership. We launched the app in December 2019. 

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

Their team built a complex product, which brought innovation to this space. This was unchartered waters. There wasn’t a manual or a competitor to guide them.

While it took some time to build, we're happy with the result. They helped us to bring innovative aspects to the market.

How did Boldare perform from a project management standpoint?

We usually communicate through email. In the last year, we began to use Zoom more than any other channel.

Boldare manages their responsibilities well, and we’re very happy with them. Their ability to meet deadlines is top-notch. They could, however, provide better estimates.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Boldare's creativity stands out. They don’t just build a product; their team adds value throughout the whole process. They believe in what we’re building, which helps.

On the corporate level, it’s been a great work experience. There have been times when they went the extra mile for us and times when we went the extra mile for them. We have a great partnership.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not really. They aren’t perfect and neither are we. Every developer could probably provide better estimates. However, it's likely that most projects will exceed the budget or deadline. That is the world in which we live.

This isn't a criticism, just an anecdote. When they provide us with mock-ups, their team occasionally uses language that we don't use.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

We've worked with 15–20 people from Boldare over the course of five years. It's always nice to change the team composition every now and then to keep the focus sharp. That's true with any development team. Also, it's helpful to work with them on project estimations.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder of a small startup.

What challenge were you trying to address with Boldare?

I was looking for a development house to design a prototype for my business. We wanted to develop a limited functionality prototype. 

The idea behind that was to use a prototype to pitch the idea to potential clients and gauge the feedback from the clients.

What was the scope of their involvement?

In the beginning, we set up two full days for a project discovery workshop where Boldare challenged my ideas, and we designed the whole process flow, user journey, and features that should be included in the prototype phase. 

They used an online development platform called Figma which is quite advanced and eye-catching. They also used an online software called MURAL which is basically like a window where you can put sticky notes.

The prototype is mainly designing and not building the actual software. Initially, they were there to understand the idea and design the concept, and then they handed it over to the designer.

What is the team composition?

In the project discovery phase, there were five teammates from their side. Once they grasped the idea and we moved into the development phase, it went down to three teammates.

How did you come to work with Boldare?

I googled the top 50 developers in the world. Boldare was among the top for building prototypes and MVPs especially for entrepreneurs who wanted to test out an idea which is exactly what I needed.

I wanted to work with a team that understood my situation and understood the startup founder’s mentality, and how to meet their needs. In the first interaction with them, I just knew that they were the ones. Although I got a couple of proposals from different companies in Poland, Boldare was one of the best.

Their proposal and timeline were very competitive, and in terms of the financials, no one beat them. They were also quite responsive when I first reached out and made sure to accommodate all my comments. 

How much have you invested in them?

We spent around $10,000 USD.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from July–August 2020.

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

They delivered the prototype on time. The way I measured the success of the project was when I used their prototype in meetings with potential clients. The feedback I received determined whether the prototype was a success or not. 

9 out of 10 clients just jumped out of their seats, and I am not exaggerating. Boldare did an exceptional job. They were quite familiar with the region and they know we have a large youth population, so they designed the prototype to cater to millennials and younger generations.

How did Boldare perform from a project management standpoint?

Their process was well-laid-out. They adopted a very structured approach using the scrum master approach, and they did a phenomenal job. MURAL helped me when I went back to it a few days or a week later to see what we thought about a certain functionality. It was properly laid out and it was easily accessible to the whole team.  

We had a smaller team and they were quite efficient. The scrum master organized all the meetings and if I had any technical questions, I could just approach the developer right away. It was a flat hierarchy and we are all in the same boat; we are one team. They were quite responsive and incorporated my comments right away. 

We divided all the tasks into subtasks and the subtasks were divided into sprints. Each sprint included a full week of subtasks that needed to be delivered and we met every other day for 15 minutes just to provide feedback. 

By the end of the week, we would have another hour-long call just to review what had been done during that week. We reviewed the deliverables, added our comments, approved the tasks, and then planned for the next subtasks for the following week.

We kept doing this continuously to make sure that we optimized our time and were as efficient as possible. I would see the improvement by the next meeting.

Sometimes we would meet every day or every other day, and by the time we met again, they showed me how they incorporated my comments. They have a quick turnaround period and I really appreciated that because time is money.

I had back-to-back meetings with clients and Boldare was on top of things the whole time. They had a great, solid team, and they listened very carefully to all the comments I had.

We used Slack for comments or questions, or if someone wanted to share a couple of design inspirations. Although they are in Poland and I am in the Middle East, it was almost like we were working at the same table.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Boldare had a good sense of humor, which I liked. Whenever I met with them it didn’t feel like we were doing work. It felt like we were one team, we got things done, and we enjoyed it at the same time. That makes a big difference when working with another team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I have no suggestions. They should continue doing what they are doing.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Understand what you want otherwise it will take Boldare a longer time, but it's not because they lack structure or different thoughts. It’s important to save them time by telling them exactly what you want. If you tell them to think about it, draft some ideas and get back to you, it will extend the submission period.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the business development manager for Blu5 Labs Ltd. We’re a security solutions company in the telecommunications industry.

What challenge were you trying to address with Boldare?

We needed to increase our development resources and decided to outsource non-sensitive components of development projects

What was the scope of their involvement?

Boldare designed a custom file manager for our proprietary platform. We plan to integrate the product into our security solution to establish a secure file manager.

What is the team composition?

We communicated with a scrum master, a team of developers, and a few managers.

How did you come to work with Boldare?

A colleague found Boldare, which was known as a capable software development company.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $15,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We collaborated on this project between June–August 2020.

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

The quality of Boldare’s work was superior to that of past vendors. I’m very satisfied.

How did Boldare perform from a project management standpoint?

We had four, 1-week sprints, and the outcome was positive. Their team followed procedures and came with 15 years of experience with a scrum methodology. The project went well.

Their team cared about our project and collaborated with us beyond their scope of work. It was nice to get suggestions from them on how to further improve the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their professionalism stood out to us. From graphic and code perspectives, the quality of Boldare’s work was great. They held themselves to high standards. I was amazed by how their developers felt a part of our team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The scrum methodology works well for certain projects and not for others. I’d reduce the number of scrum events. We spent 4–5 hours per week on scrum events, which was a lot.  

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust them.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We have a real estate marketplace/platform focused on a particular service category. During development I was Product Owner and my role within our business is to oversee all aspects of our product and technology.

For what projects/services did your company hire Boldare?

We came to Boldare with a vision and business plan but lacked a clear and scoped out path for development. We brought with us an extremely simple proof of concept website and the next iteration of that — a poorly planned and partially developed MVP.

What were your goals for this project?

We found and hired the Boldare team after realizing our previous consulting/development firm was not covering enough ground with our budget.

How did you select this vendor?

We decided to go with Boldare after interviewing a handful of agencies, most of which we found on Clutch. Boldare's initial meetings and subsequent project proposal made the engagement very clear. The communication and effort they put into our engagement in the beginning increased our optimism about the project tremendously.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The Boldare team extensively work-shopped our vision with us and ultimately helped us peel back the layers on exactly what we needed to have within our MVP. Candidly speaking, it felt like "startup bootcamp" but it was a necessary evil and provided what ended up being a clear roadmap for the product.

What was the team composition?

We had a Scrum Master, two Full-stack Developers and a QA on the project from start to finish. We also had two UI/UX Designers from their team involved for a couple weeks.

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

The Boldare team brings an impressive amount of process and experience to the table. They can help you unpack your vision and execute — arguably the one thing even more important than your idea alone. As for impact on our business, they helped us get to a place at which we are ready for launch and very proud of what we have built together.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

As Product Owner I was engaged quite actively with the Scrum Master and the Developers multiple times each week. The process was sometimes time-intensive but that is to be expected. By making myself available I felt I was able to unblock their team and allow them to do what they do best — build digital products.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their team is by far their greatest asset. They might be across the world (from us) but the energy and collaboration we experienced was outstanding. Clear communication is another area Boldare excel's in. Whether it was a discussion about a feature that is too large for our budget or a bug they are working on, the frequent and clear communication was refreshing.

Are there any areas for improvement?

This question is challenging to answer because we had such a great experience. The main and possibly only notable pain point we experienced was timing between UI design assets and actual development. I would suggest for Boldare to require more clear assets from clients before starting development to keep roadblocks at a minimum. Luckily, their team and agile process helped us navigate through the timing issues so it wasn't all that painful in the end.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of a company called Chartipedia.  

What challenge were you trying to address with Boldare?

We’re trying to develop a data visualization and content sharing platform. It would be an MVP for our startup.

What was the scope of their involvement?

It includes everything, including UX/UI design, front- and backend design. It’s just a web platform right now. They used Node.js for the backend and the frontend is Angular. We met them in person and had a two-day workshop to go over our vision, our goals of the MVP, so they can define the goals of the product. This helped them understand what we truly wanted.

What is the team composition?

The team is comprised of a project manager, a designer, a frontend developer, a backend developer, and one customer service manager.

How did you come to work with Boldare?

We found them through a Google search and saw them on Clutch. We talked to a few companies in eastern Europe, but we chose them for them: their experience on their chat record and their reviews on Clutch. We saw that they have great UX/UI design, and because they’ve done similar work before related to data visualization,

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about €42,000 (approximately $46,000 USD)

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked from January–March 2020.

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

They’ve been very helpful for us and we’re pleased with the quality of their work. Through our workshop, they had a great understanding of what we wanted to get out of our product, and they delivered.

How did Boldare perform from a project management standpoint?

They divided the department into different sprints and what they wanted to get done each week.

The team also used Jira to list all the tasks they were going to work on and the expected time. Their time management is great as well. It took about two months to complete the MVP, which was very timely. A few other agencies proposed a 3–4 month timeline, so they finished it very quickly in comparison. Communication is very important and they’re very responsive over Slack.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their time management, because that is so crucial for a startup like us. I was impressed by the team’s willingness to do something extra to exceed our initial targets. Near the end of development, they proposed to create an interactive landing page for our MVP department. It was a good idea, and they wanted to help us grow.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Although we included a lot of details in the scope at the beginning of the project, somehow, it’s still quite difficult to have a very accurate picture of their perspective. It’s our first time working with a software company, and it’s difficult to get a concrete picture of what features will look like. They might think differently than we do. We’ve also added features, so our budget has increased.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

They’re willing to go the extra mile and they have a very diverse portfolio, so they have experience in multiple industries. Whatever you want, they can get it done for you.