Cafeto Software

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CEO of Cropswap, a farm-to-door marketplace.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Cafeto helped in developing the Cropswap App. We set out to create a customer facing app that allows consumers to buy directly from local growers.

SOLUTION

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

Cafeto was recommended by one of our key advisors, Rob Reiner. We were looking for a full-staffed development team to roll out the app from top to bottom.

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

Starting with mockups to wireframes then prototyping the UXUI and finally a fully functional app, Cafeto helped create the Cropswap app and all it's internal systems.

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

A project manager worked closely with us throughout the process. We had on average 2 backend, 1 frontend, 1 UXUI, 1 Devops, 1 Website, and 1 Support person.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

To date, the app works as it should and provides a platform for several farmers to sell direct to consumer.

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

We used Slack to coordinate and had weekly updates to track the success of the team.

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

The team is very responsive and adaptable. Any change in features or bugs in the app were quickly acknowledged and corrected.

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

Perhaps a more in depth understanding of the day to day for the Dev team. We had several delays in the past so more transparency would help.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a VP of Marketing for a B2B tech company with CRM and BI software.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Cafeto Software?

I hired a Cafeto contractor to be our team's part-time graphic designer. We pay for 50 hours per month.

SOLUTION

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

I worked with Cafeto at a previous B2B software company. We used Cafeto contractors for marketing automation, marketing database, and graphic design support. With years of positive experience working with Cafeto, when I needed graphic design support, I reached out to Cafeto.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

This contractor helps with all graphic design projects, including a rebranding project where he created new brand templates, laying out of our content, and social media graphics. He is our on-call graphic designer, so we email him with our graphic design requests as needed.

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

Today: one graphic designer that is available up to 50 hours /month.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our marketing team doesn't need to spend time with graphic design and our contractor can tackle all design needs. We have new brand templates and a designer available to provide design feedback and design services.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Our designer is responsive and helps our marketing team as needed. It's been great.

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

Cafeto recruits their contractors based on our job needs. They are diligent about customer satisfaction and regularly check in on the performance of their contractors.

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

It would be great if Cafeto offered contractors at an hourly rate, instead of a monthly rate. For example, if my 50 hr/month design contractor only works 20 hours that month, I still pay 20 hours. I work with other marketing contractors that do charge only for the hours they work, though those hourly rates are more expensive. It balances out.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a software development manager at PROS, a B2B software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cafeto Software?

We needed someone with experience in Microsoft Dynamics to help develop custom software.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided documentation regarding the project and the problem we needed to solve with the software. Cafeto was responsible for development, testing, and integration of custom software, using Microsoft Dynamics. They are working in collaboration with our team to learn and implement these technologies.

What is the team composition?

We are working with two developers from their team.

How did you come to work with Cafeto Software?

We had worked with them in the past. There was another company bidding on this project, but we felt comfortable with this team. They were able to offer the right resources to do the job.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $100,000–$250,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in October 2018, and our work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Their completion rate within sprints is roughly 80%, which is good. In terms of business, their contributions have helped increase customer onboarding in Dynamics by approximately 30%.

How did Cafeto Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We are handling project management on our side. They manage their own tasks well. We use Jira for task management, planning, pre-planning, etc. Communication is done by email, phone, Zoom calls, and Teams. They are quite responsive.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re experienced, technically skilled, and communicate well. I like that they are close in time zone with us, as well.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Their client interaction is standard, not above and beyond.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Do your due diligence when hiring any contractor, especially offshore. Cafeto Software has a good reputation.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a corporation called PROS and we sell software that businesses use to better price and target customer needs. I’m the product manager for the company’s customer portal. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cafeto Software?

When I came into my current position, Cafeto Software already has long-term developers assigned to maintain our customer portal site. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have three software developers working directly for our organization. Every day we meet and I tell them my requirements and timeline for creating a new release for the website. Moreover, we also collaborate in planning and designing the features that we want. They create custom development using open-source code. 

The team has helped plan and execute specific projects internally, but their main goal is to keep our site up and running. They also ensure that we can add features once they’re needed.

What is the team composition?

We're working with three developers. We used to have a QA engineer from Cafeto Software but he’s no longer with the team. 

How did you come to work with Cafeto Software?

The website that I manage has been using Cafeto Software developers for a lot of years. There were two individuals who managed the team before me, so I can’t speak to why PROS wanted to engage with the team.

However, what I could say is that we have continued to partner with them because the team has been dedicated to completing their work. Their management is also communicative and they make it easy to work with the contract team.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with Cafeto Software in July 2014, and we continue to collaborate.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Since the site was launched, we’ve essentially doubled in size, in terms of customer base and website traffic. The team has been able to maintain quality services, maintain the site, and ensure that everything keeps running. 

How did Cafeto Software perform from a project management standpoint?

Our team does the project management side, and Cafeto Software focuses on execution. We have video conference meetings and we use Agile development. We also have a Jira sprint board to track progress. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Cafeto Software is particularly genuine. They are a relatively small contract company, but they’ve always been very upfront with us with who they have available. Cafeto Software honestly tells us what they can provide, and they are dedicated to providing the best service possible.

Are there any areas they could improve?

For whatever reason, whenever there is someone on their side who leaves a position, the backfill process is a bit slow. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

You can tell them what you’re looking for in great detail, and Cafeto Software will do its best to provide what you need. Moreover, you can also trust their judgment, and if you give them a little bit of independence, they can take control.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are based in Australia. We have a web-based application that helps people easily create advance care planning documents, which are clinical documents that help people communicate their healthcare preferences. I’m one of the co-founders and I deal a lot with the product manager, work with technology and deal with developers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cafeto Software?

We needed developers to create the application because we had no app and we were paper-based. We also needed somebody that could do it quickly, in a fairly agile way when at the time we were still new to the industry.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They developed a website that basically functions as a unique online card sorting process that helps people reflect on their values and it captures in slots a person’s own words through a series of questions and answers. We've also had integrations with a few other features we use. Moreover, we’ve helped in a few other things that were integrated, and collect payments from there. Then, the PDF output documents can be used in science and in a clinical setting. 

It’s built on AWS, and it has a multi-account infrastructure. We also use Angular. We set up a maintenance contract within our initial build. Once we built that, we would’ve done the rest in pieces as we’ve gone through, which was part of the attractiveness of it. We built the piece that was most important to our customers. As we learned more, we built more — we’ve done several builds, but we’re also in the background so that everything runs smoothly and remotely. 

What is the team composition?

There’s a combination of people that work with us. They have contact with a local company in Australia, but they also have work with developers offshore.

How did you come to work with Cafeto Software?

We heard of them through mutual colleagues that they’re involved in an innovation challenge that we were part of at the time. We chose them because of their offered cost and they were flexible in how they worked with it. In addition, they were really honest. We watched who they were as people, so we felt like we could work with them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $100,000 AUD (approximately $77,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

Our initial build happened in June 2018, and we’re still working with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

As a growing company, one of the things that have been important to us was to have something to show the stakeholders what mattered to them at the right time. With Cafeto Software, we've always built what was important for our stakeholders and they did it when we needed it quickly during the early days. They've helped us show something to our stakeholders in order to get investment and to get the company up and running. They also created different features that became important to customers. We’ve been getting feedback from customers that quickly respond to what they’ve developed.

How did Cafeto Software perform from a project management standpoint?

We communicate a lot using JIRA. Our project management has evolved over time. In the early days, someone helped us with communicating with developers. They have a team member on their side who works directly with us in the early stages when we had no wireframes, and we just started to build out what we required. It was a very back and forth process. However, in the recent builds, that process takes a little bit to give us a bit more flexibility internally where we can have UX designs ready to go and to give them more specific requirements for the back and forth process. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I think they care about us succeeding. It feels like they’re part of the team, and we work together very well. For example, when we have people that we bring onto our team internally, their team will take time to work through aspects of what they do, which is something that we feel is already above and beyond the project's scope. We really appreciate it because it helps us in our internal processes a lot and it helps us to get a good outcome. That mentality of ‘doing what needs to be done’ to see success and working together impress us. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing I can’t think of on areas they could improve. I always call them and give them constructive feedback on how they can do things better. We’ve got a pretty good relationship where we can ring and just say that. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Utilize their skills to help. If what you have is s a growing business, they can offer a lot of value. When you first start out, sometimes you have in mind a huge product that’s quite a big deal — in connection with that, being able to work with them and listen to them on what might be the most important things even if it’s just wireframing or showing wireframes can be really helpful. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the professional services manager of a computer software company. I work closely with our clients. Within the organization, I work primarily with our contracting teams and technical experts globally. A lot of times, I’ll utilize my contractors in a customer-facing role and a background technical role.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cafeto Software?

Our work with Cafeto is trying to accomplish two different goals. The first goal is to bring on needed technical skills. Sometimes, it’s very cost-effective for us to find gaps and fill in those gaps using contractors. The second goal is to find resources who can go into a customer-facing role and implement our solutions for our customers, and then deliver those solutions so our customers can receive value quickly.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The scope of work changes from client-to-client or customer-to-customer. Cafeto works with any number of customers at any given point in time because they fulfill a customer-facing role. In essence, they work on technical solutions and integrate with our full-time employee teams in a project management sense.

The Cafeto team fulfills three primary roles for us. The first and second roles deal with implementation consulting. They’ve provided us resources in delivering both our quoting tool and pricing tool to our customers. The third role is a product we use to integrate data across both of those previous solutions. The integrate team works inside Azure and is working directly with a different set of technologies.

Cafeto has provided us resources to help with those implementation efforts through a different product and set of technical skills we look for.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with six different individuals filling the primary roles.

How did you come to work with Cafeto Software?

We work with a set of contracting companies and vendors. Cafeto is one of them, and I was introduced to them. They already had an existing relationship with my company. The department I work in wanted to utilize them because we realized they could provide value on the implementations we do.

How much have you invested with them?

We invest around $100,000 a year.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our ongoing engagement started in September 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our Cafeto resources have been very successful at integrating into our project management teams as implementors of our solutions. They provide advanced technical solutions alongside our implementation teams and have specifically delivered value to some high-profile clients we have within our organization.

We measure success in a couple of different ways. First, we look at if it’s delivered on time and within budget. Second, we look to see if the solution provides long-term value to our customers. Of all my contracting vendors, Cafeto’s resources consistently score the highest marks across the board in our peer review performance evaluations.

How did Cafeto Software perform from a project management standpoint?

Their communication is excellent. The resources do a great job of communicating their own personal needs or anything that comes up that might affect projects. They speak English well, and I receive great feedback from customers about that. The Cafeto team has good technical knowledge and proactivity. The management team sends me information on a weekly basis and keeps me up-to-date. Their proactive communication strategies help us deal with issues as they come up.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It's the quality of their resources. The skill and quality of people Cafeto sources and sends our way is second to none. Cafeto finds resources who match our profiles very closely. The best part about working with them is finding quality resources we can use quickly.

Are there any areas they could improve?

At this point in time, I haven’t found anything. They do a great job and are flexible to work with.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Set clear expectations on what you’re looking for. That’ll help Cafeto find you the right type of resource. Make sure to be clear and concise about your upfront requirements. They’ll be successful in finding you the resources from their talent pool that’ll help you quickly engage and deliver whatever resource you need.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of Aloa. We offer software development outsourcing to startups through the help of our partner development firms located overseas.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cafeto Software?

We assign development works to them. With our various projects, they either provide staff augmentation or staff supplementation. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cafeto Software supports development projects involving websites, internal software, mobile apps, and web apps. In relation to that, they sometimes develop solutions from scratch or rebuild existing systems.

Our current project involves the creation of an iOS app. They are also crafting a web app using PHP Laravel.

We have other work lined up for them, but we have to wait to hear back from the client about the requirements.

What is the team composition?

I work closely with their CEO. He serves as a project manager for some of our projects. I also interact with at least five other team members and 4–6 developers.

How did you come to work with Cafeto Software?

We underwent an extensive vetting process and screened thousands of firms from around the world. Then, we were referred to Cafeto Software. We were told about their excellent development process and leadership training, prompting us to speak to them. When we added them to the list of companies we were evaluating, they passed with flying colors.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2020, and the collaboration is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Every two weeks, we conduct an audit on our active projects, and we present that to our partner firm. Since the beginning, Cafeto Software has been continuously doing good work and improving with every audit. They are one of our trusted partners.

How did Cafeto Software perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re absolutely incredible when it comes to project management. We also have our own management tool to manage and track all of our projects with them.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their dedication to putting their client’s interests first is remarkable. Their diligence and organizational structure are also great.

The team’s structure is built not around profitability but project success, specifically on rearranging their budgetary barriers internally. Additionally, if they’re ahead of schedule and they have a budget surplus, they reinvest that to speed up the project. Basically, our third-party client doesn’t have to spend more, and the team allows them to achieve even greater efficiency. Overall, the way they operate is just impressive.  

Are there any areas they could improve?

I really don’t have anything in mind. They’re new to our network, and we’ve been continuing to increase the work we give them. So far, we’ve been very pleased and happy with their work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The great thing about Cafeto Software is that you’re always going to get the most out of their work. They have a good organizational process which allows them to work efficiently.

Take advantage of their communication skills when you work with them. Ask them questions and explain all of your concepts and processes. Doing so will just increase the value of your relationship and lead to more transparency.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a product development manager at PROS, which is a software company in Houston. I manage two products and have a team of 17 developers and testers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cafeto Software?

Working with Cafeto has allowed me to supplement my team with high quality developers who integrate and work well with my core team.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They’re doing development using Java. The project they’re currently working on is backend development for a web application. They also provide QA services. The contractors we have from Cafeto are integrated as team members. We don't just spawn off work for them to do. They work hand in hand daily with the core team, participating in daily scrums, meeting and designs. 

What is the team composition?

I have one main point of contact who manages a team of developers. 

How did you come to work with Cafeto Software?

I wasn’t involved in the hiring process, so I’m not sure. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spend about $100,000–$200,000 annually. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in 2010, and our relationship with them is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They do great work and have high-quality engineers. 

How did Cafeto Software perform from a project management standpoint?

I’m not sure what tools they use on their end, but when we work together, they use our team’s go-to project management tools including Confluence. Project management has been good because they’re accommodating to following our processes. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They go out of their way to make sure they’re meeting our needs. They always ask what they can do to improve our relationship. There was a point where we experienced a series of turnovers, but they recognized the impact that had and were proactive in addressing it. Anytime I voice an issue, they respond well and put a solution into action. 

They also offer internal English language classes to their employees since their native language is Spanish. That’s been really helpful in ensuring clear communication. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

My only complaint is that because they’re so good, sometimes we lose their engineers to other opportunities. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Establish good communication and provide feedback when necessary.