Boosty Labs

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder of the tech company Toki.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

They were hired to help build our MVP. They were two engineers on a team of ten. They were to take on certain areas of the platform and build with our tech stack.

SOLUTION

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

My former co-founder selected them after speaking with them. It seems he did so in a rush to find anyone he could without qualifying their technical abilities.

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

We worked on sprints and would meet once a week for a grooming session. The platform was a loyalty platform.

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

Two - one front end and one backend.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The outcome would have been do build the product by August. This was not accomplished. In October my cofounder was removed from his position for not making progress in the MVP. I found out after bringing in a new CTO that this was because Hakob and Georgi, members of the Boosty Labs team were not competent and able to complete the project.

I then let the Boosty team know on October 26th. They ignored all messages and told me that it much have been a management issue. We later reviewed the code and found massive, massive issues which rendered their work unusable. If we would not have caught this, it would have broken our entire product.

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

Not good communication. We use Slack internally. Every team member would write a daily update on what they worked on every day, except for Hakob and Georgi. They refused to do this.

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

Its honestly impressive how much they charge for such poor quality work. I can't believe they are still in business.

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

Basically everything. They could have vetted their devs. They could have listened to us when we told them this was poor quality work and that we didn't want to work together anymore. If their developers were bad, that's one thing. But the management team at Boosty is absolutely awful as well.

They wouldn't listen to us after we told them countless times this isn't working. They are now trying to charge us for zero work being done at all for December when I told them in October (and 5 times after that) that this was terrible, terrible work. I think their whole business might actually be a fraud.