Cheesecake Labs

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Bem Mais Health, a digital health platform in Brazil.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

We were trying to build our digital platform, so we contracted Cheesecake Labs to do the initial platform modeling in order to identify customer journeys and the features that should be developed.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs worked with me to clarify to ideate my company's digital platform. During this discovery phase, we determined the main features and structure needed to build the platform. Moreover, the team created a document that specified all the features that should be built on the platform. They also helped us with UX/UI design using Figma.

What is the team composition?

We had 4–5 people working with me, including a QA person, a project manager, two analysts that worked on defining customer journeys, and Marcelo, Cheesecake Lab's CEO.

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

I found them through a friend with a startup that also worked with Cheesecake Labs. This friend referred them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $12,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from November–December 2024.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Cheesecake Labs successfully delivered a very detailed report about all the features the platform should have. This will be the base point from which we’ll build the platform later with the development team. The team's documentation was a crucial element for our development.

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

Cheesecake Labs' project management was very good. They were very supportive and on time, and the deliveries were made according to the agreed-upon schedule. We communicated using Slack and Google Meet. I was super happy with this.

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

Marcelo was very supportive, always available, and willing to listen to his clients. Besides, Ohana, the project manager, was very positive about her job.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Cheesecake Labs worked very fast. I didn’t have to push them at any part of the job. They were always swift, responsive, and committed to the delivery dates. Overall, the whole team was great.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there wasn’t anything they could improve.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Given my good experience, I would tell anyone to go for it. Cheesecake Labs is a great company.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and founder of an educational company. We have a personal development program for teenagers.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

I needed a mobile app developer. I teach young people and want to give them the tools they need to live the life they want, so I had the idea to create an app that underlined my teachings.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs helped me ideate a mobile app. The team did the discovery phase of this project; a morning routine app that could help my students. We discussed my idea and concept and challenged it to develop more practical ideas. The app was for both iOS and Android. Moreover, the team also designed and built a website for the app.

What is the team composition?

I was in contact with 8–9 teammates from Cheesecake Labs. I had two main points of contact: one for the technical part and another for the administrative part.

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

I found Cheesecake Labs through Clutch. I did some research on ChatGPT and Google and validated the information I found. I chose Cheesecake Labs based on their reviews, spending information, and Clutch profile.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $14,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from December 2024 to January 2025.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Cheesecake Labs did a great job of scrutinizing my idea and concept. For me, the success of the project was the documentation I received from the discovery phase, which I could present to investors.

Overall, the team brought my ideas in a very structured way. The team definitely did a good job.

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

Cheesecake Labs delivered on time and stayed on budget. The team adapted to my time zone and always managed to schedule meetings at a time that was great for me. They made a clear plan of what was happening and stuck to it from beginning to end. We also communicated via email, Slack, and Google Meet.

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

I want to give a shout-out to Yago, the product designer. He stood out.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I liked how Cheesecake Labs committed to my project. They were enthusiastic and excited about it. The team contributed all their experience and provided clear and honest communication. I found all their teammates brilliant. This performance motivated me to select them for mobile app development.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I didn't like using Slack; I found it too challenging. I'd rather communicate using another tool. Apart from this, Cheesecake Labs had nothing to improve. I could trust their word.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Put everything on the table in the beginning. Give them all the information and communicate your worries and expectations. If you're clear with Cheesecake Labs about how you want the process to be, they will be honest and positively critical. Trust them; communication is the key.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the head of product at Vibrant, a subsidiary of the Stellar Development Foundation. We’re a digital wallet that helps people hold digital dollars. Most of our users are in Argentina and Brazil.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

We were looking for engineering talent to help us build our wallet.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs has helped us build our mobile app. We have our own in-house design team, so they haven't been involved in the UI design. However, they’ve been responsible for the API development and technical architecture. We've mainly had help on our backend, which is written in Go. The team has also been familiar with Go, AWS, microservices and with the Stellar blockchain.
We've also had a team member that has done React Native development for us, he's been building our iOS and Android apps in React Native. 

We've worked with them on several projects. One of them has been related to virtual US bank accounts. We wanted to offer a virtual US bank account in our app. The team has first built the backend and then the frontend.

We've also worked with them on the Vibrant Campaign Manager. We wanted a way to easily configure and change in-app marketing based on the user's activity in the app and reward them for certain types of actions, like spending money on some specific item or adding funds to the app. We've had two team members on the backend building that out.
Then the last, we've had someone who's part-time who does DevOps for our team because we were short on DevOps.

What is the team composition?

We've had a rotating cast of people. We currently work with two backend developers, a part-time DevOps engineer, and a frontend mobile engineer.

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

We were looking for a team in Brazil, and Cheesecake Labs was there. We decided to work with them because they had the talent we needed.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent over $500,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in May 2022, and our relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They’ve been able to build the app quickly, and we’ve seen great results. They’ve been very quick and adept at taking on the challenges. We've been very impressed with their work.

They’ve also been able to improve the app's performance. I've been underwhelmed with the app's loading time and responsiveness. However, once we brought on the Cheesecake Labs team, they have gone hands-deep into improving a lot of that for us. I don't have concrete metrics around app performance, but they’ve definitely made it a lot better.

Moreover, they’ve been very instrumental in increasing our transaction volume. One of the projects they’ve launched has accounted for 30% of our total app volume for the quarter. Transaction volume is a very important metric for a financial app.

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

The team is extremely proactive. They're very communicative about what they think they can take on in the sprints that we have. We run a regular agile process of allocating more tasks for the team every three weeks.

They’re always very communicative and upfront about what they can do. If anything needs to slide, they're very direct and transparent with me. I've been extremely impressed with how they're able to move projects along. I don't need to be super involved with them; they’re very self-starters.

We use Slack for communication, Google Meet for regular meetings, Google Calendar and Google Workspace, and Notion for documentation. The team has been very involved in adding technical documentation for us. We also use GitHub for monitoring errors and PagerDuty for on-call. They offer an additional on-call service, which has been helpful for us because we don't have that many backend engineers. Asana has also been involved, but we've recently moved to Linear.

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

I want to give a shout-out to Caio, Gabe, Alan, and other team members, they have all been absolutely fabulous. We've been so grateful for their help. They've done an amazing job.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The speed at which they crank out high-quality features is very impressive. They have very few bugs, and they’re extremely easy to work with. They have a very can-do attitude, are proactive, and are very eager to help out. We've been pleased with those aspects of them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It would be awesome if they could get a staff that could also speak Spanish. However, that’s not a hard requirement on our side. They’ve always provided us with extremely high-quality people.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I highly recommend working with them because their team is awesome, and I’ve only had great experiences.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of innovation and new business for a large university in South Brazil. We have 30,000 students in many knowledge areas.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

We were focusing on improving the customer experience for our students.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs developed an application. They created a student journey map with their experiences, needs, and expectations. We initially provided official documentation about the institution, research about the students, and market research about our competitors.

What is the team composition?

We worked with five people, including a tech lead, a customer success manager, and a project management officer (PMO).

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

We used a hybrid system. We mainly searched online, but we also had two meetings here.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $18,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from February–May 2024.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We had the opportunity to map the gaps in the student journey and improve some technologies and solutions for them.

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

Cheesecake Labs always respected the time and budget. They provided many status reports about the research and work schedule.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their work was excellent and very affordable.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, everything was okay.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

No, I don’t have any advice for them.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a senior engineering manager at a blockchain nonprofit. My team has built some products, including an anchor platform and a disbursement platform, which is part of our aid-assist project.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

We needed help with custom software development. We partnered with the UN in a project to use our disbursement platform to send aid to Ukrainians.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs has built our disbursement platform, which is used for global humanitarian aid to send disbursements or bulk payments to refugees and other beneficiaries. We initially provided them with technical resources, such as our corporate laptops, to handle secure connections. We also had meetings to help them understand how to use the tools. Additionally, we gave them some documentation and initial tasks to start working on the project. We then paired with them to help them ramp up.

The project primarily uses Go. We also use infrastructure as code like Terraform, CI/CD tooling and technology for deployment, and other infrastructure services like Apache Kafka. Cheesecake Labs has built some of our modules for this project, like authorization and event management for events being sent between different microservices. They work on a wide variety of backend and frontend engineering tasks.

What is the team composition?

We work with two senior engineers.

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

They were a referral. Cheesecake Labs had worked with other departments and companies related to our work.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in July 2022, and our engagement is ongoing. We’ve just released the major version and are now focusing on improvements.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Cheesecake Labs has helped us save time because we had a very tight delivery schedule. They’ve been responsible for some major features, so they’ve helped us get our deliverables out on time, which has resulted in getting aid to beneficiaries. We’ve delivered over $2.2 million in assistance since the product has been in production.

Additionally, our product has received multiple awards. We got the Best Impact Blockchain award in 2023 and recently won the People’s Choice Award for best use of Web3 technology. Cheesecake Labs was pivotal in helping us reach those milestones. Working with them is always a pleasure; they feel like an extension of our team.

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

Cheesecake Labs reaches out when they’re blocked and really contributes to the project. Moreover, they’re available, proactive, and transparent about their work. They deliver on time and often take on more tasks because they finish their work ahead of schedule. We use an agile methodology, sprints, story points, and backlog grooming for project management.

The team is super productive and great to work with. We have clear, regular communication through Slack, design docs, and one-on-one meetings, including stand-up meetings twice a week. Overall, Cheesecake Labs works into our flow and helps us scope tasks, define stories, plan sprints, and execute those sprints.

Are there any employees from the service provider's team that you would like to give a shout-out to in this review?

Caio (Software Engineer) has stood out; he’s been on the project the longest. The project has undergone multiple phases; the initial version was on Python, and then we rewrote it in Go. In the initial version, Caio worked on some backend infrastructure components, and then he helped us write the core product for the second version.

Overall, he’s an amazing engineer. I definitely want to give him a shout-out.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They provide high-quality code and pay attention to unit and integration tests. Moreover, they’re good at handling ambiguity. If a task isn’t clearly defined, they’re very engaging and dedicated to flushing out all the details to use their problem-solving skills and develop a creative solution.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Cheesecake Labs consistently meets and often exceeds expectations; it’s hard to pinpoint any improvement areas.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Have a clear definition of your project goals, what skills and programming languages you need, and what the role of Cheesecake Labs’ engineers will be. You should set up for success by having a good onboarding plan and a good plan for managing and executing remote work, which includes regular communication, engagement, and solid engineering best practices.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Product Manager of (a/an) Consumer Products

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Consumer products manufacturer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Cheesecake Labs to accomplish?

• Create the app for an app-enabled consumer product

SOLUTION

How did you find Cheesecake Labs?

Online Search

Why did you select Cheesecake Labs over others?

• High ratings
• Other

What was the size of Cheesecake Labs’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Review product specifications and confirm app communication protocols needed to control the product. Design and develop a UX that is best in class for the product category. Integrate with our existing systems and databases for a seamless customer experience. Provide ongoing support for bug fixes and app update launches. Advise on future hardware improvements based on technology trends and experience.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Functional app on iOS and Android
• Stable connection with the product
• Intuitive UX based on product testers' ability to understand

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

They met initial timelines and advised an any changes of scope found during discovery. They were proactive in their communication and reacted with urgency when issues were raised.

What was your primary form of communication with Cheesecake Labs?

Virtual Meeting

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

They understood our goals and provided an app design that met our needs with a clear UI/UX design expertise. They provided us with the resources to showcase this expertise during the bidding processes, making vendor selection and approval clear and easy for our internal stakeholders.

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

We had some initial lack of clarity of what we could provide to accelerate and facilitate our discovery phase. Communication could have been more proactive to identify this need before it affected our initial design timeline.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the VP of Product and Engineering for a Layer 1 blockchain. We develop open source products, platforms, and web3 applications. Our platform is focused on financial services use cases- mobile wallets, payments, digital assets, and cash disbursement platforms.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

I hired Cheesecake Labs to augment for multiple engineering projects, both client and server side. Cheesecake both served as staff augmentation for existing projects, and in the case of our digital assets business, they were the sole engineering team handling a variety of prototypes, proof of concepts, and new software development- working in conjunction with some of the largest financial institutions in Brazil and Latin America.

SOLUTION

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

Cheesecake was recommended to me by a colleague who had worked with them before. They demonstrated a high aptitude in working independently, being dynamic and flexible around staffing needs, and provided a good bench of engineers who had excellent communication, architectural and software development skills. They were able to spin up a blockchain vertical within their organization rapidly, and picked up core blockchain development practices around the Stellar network with ease. Also, their location in Brazil worked well with our timezones in PST and EST.

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

Stellar Aid Cheesecake provided an architect and principle engineer to help develop a cash out reconciliation and reporting feature in a piece of software we had customers run on-site. This feature included postgres schema development, financial transaction consistency modeling, and development in Go within a mature code base. The feature was delivered on-time, and was mission critical for our release.

Tier 1 Assets Cheesecake acted as the engineering vertical for a digital assets business in SDF. They worked closely with product managers and business development representatives to create new software products, digital asset securitization models, and asset issuance platforms. They also represented engineering in multiple CBDC challenges with major banks in Latin America.

They provided a full stack delivery model with a Stellar Architect, engineering, and product/project representatives Vibrant Engineering Vibrant is a mobile wallet developed in react native and GO.

We used CKL as staff augmentation to cover the GO backend, which was a piece of middleware that had an API layer and postgres database to store customer information, implement microservices like multisig, and integrated with our crypto payments protocols. Bridge UI CKL built a web3 front end for asset swaps using a bridging design that allowed for trustless, escrowed value exchange across different blockchains. This particular implementation interacted with an ETH smart contract into Stellar

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

There were 10-12 engineers. I primarily worked with the CEO and the Stellar achitect

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

CKL delivered projects on time, with a great deal of independence and creativity. They were able to look for reusable components in the services they built, and provide valuable architecture and software suggestions that helped with the overall technical strategy at SDF. The products they built were mission critical, and helped advance the business needs of the org.

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

We had weekly project management meetings, and projects always had a project manager assigned to review goals, dates, and status. Resourcing was well documented within spreadsheets, and it was clear how headcount was allocated, and what they were working on

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

I am impressed at the enthusiasm, genuine care for the customer, and strategic thinking of the team. CKL is not your typical offshoring agency, in that they provide much value added services above and beyond delivering code. They were very helpful with providing insight, feedback, and a customer perspective on the products they were developing

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

None!

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of operations at FINN, an auto subscription company. We subscribe vehicles to customers based in Munich, Germany and New York City.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

We were looking to scale up our engineering team with a provider based in the same time zone as the US’s East Coast. The goal was to scale our US operations as quickly as possible.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs provides us with development services, mainly for our backend. They’ve helped us with internal tooling and database building. Most of the projects we’ve done with them have been built from scratch. The team uses TypeScript, though they’ve also used no-code tools like Integromat and Retool for a sizable portion of their work. 

The team has built a compound integration that allows a compound partner to relay us data live. From there, we ingest that data and make business decisions. Cheesecake Labs has also built our customer care tooling, which allows our customer care team to make changes to orders and deliveries. The Cheesecake Labs team has also rolled out our internal customer portal, enabling customers to make changes to their payment method or delivery address without calling in. 

What is the team composition?

My team has interacted with around 10 Cheesecake Labs teammates throughout the engagement. Currently, we’re working with five team members. 

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

My CTO found them; I believe they canvassed various potential partners before finding Cheesecake Labs. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $1.1 million. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in March 2022, and the engagement is ongoing. The project’s end date is in March 2023. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We wouldn't be able to operate as efficiently as we do without Cheesecake Labs. From a business perspective, one of our metrics is transactions processed per full-time equivalent (FTE), which refers to headcount per transaction. Thanks to Cheesecake Labs, we're scaling our team much more efficiently in the US than in our Germany office. Additionally, the customer care tooling they've built enables our customer care team to do their job more efficiently. 

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

I would give them a high score for project management. We use Slack and Jira for communication and project management. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Cheesecake Labs operates very well within their abilities and ultimately delivers what we're looking for.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There's variability in the quality of Cheesecake Labs' engineers, just like with any other company. Certain engineers have been better at English or specific coding languages. However, this has never been an inhibitor to getting work done. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the co-founders of an NFT marketplace. We’re a ten-person team in New York City.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Cheesecake Labs?

We needed additional support to develop the frontend of our web application.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Cheesecake Labs primarily focused on frontend development for our React, Next.js, and Typescript application. They worked on revamping the new pages to a real-time data flow. They took those things from end to end on the frontend side.

What is the team composition?

We worked with around five people. For the most part, we were in contact with a product owner, a tech lead, two engineers, and someone on QA.

How did you come to work with Cheesecake Labs?

We found them online.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $150,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We brought them in for four months, from May–September 2022.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The completion was our success metric. We still have 1–2 more items left, but Cheesecake Labs has delivered their part.

How did Cheesecake Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

We met every morning at 11:00 a.m. and were connected on a Slack channel. Also, we used Jira for project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their range of expertise and ability to come up with solutions for each problem were outstanding. When we were onboarding, they brought in a technical person to address how they’d come up with solutions and fully disclosed each team member's background. Also, the cost was reasonable considering the people they provide.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I can’t think of anything. We had a great experience.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Communication is essential. You should understand where things are going and give them a heads-up so they can plan accordingly.