COING

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder of Pumble, a company focused on B2C products, specifically software for PR professionals. An acquaintance of mine had an idea and I invested in it, then after I obtained funding, the organization grew to 10 people aside from COING’s team.

What challenge were you trying to address with COING?

We needed to build a fast frontend application that would be easy to use and could handle the large number of input URLs that would be parsed into the system.

What was the scope of their involvement?

COING developed a parsing system in the form of a web application which scraped all the URLs we had, extracted data from them, and inputted that into a database for processing in the later stages.

The core of the system was built on Java Spring framework. In terms of paradigms, they used a domain-driven design. The whole system was built as a service-oriented API with a single-page frontend app talking to it.

I have worked with more than 10 people from COING’s team over time, including two main technical contacts, Ljubomir Simin and Jozef Selesi [Technical Directors, COING].

How did you come to work with COING?

I’ve become good at comparing relative services because I’ve worked with a couple of firms before. There were a variety of reasons for going to COING. At times, I felt I wasn’t getting the right service, but their team offered me a better deal when it came to pricing, which was my main concern. I didn’t want to go further East, so their Serbian team offered a combination which seemed to be right.

Some other people in Silicon Valley recommended COING’s owner to me. I met him a few times and had a good feeling about him, so I decided to give it a shot.

How much have you invested with COING?

The cost of their work has exceeded $500,000 overall.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with COING in November 2013. The work is ongoing, though on a smaller scale than before.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I wouldn’t be able to provide direct results of their work, since everything was developed over time. According to user comments, the interface is incredibly fast, so COING did a good job in this regard.

How did COING perform from a project management standpoint?

The precision of their communication and their transparent process are great. I can inspect everything without having to ask just by going to the repository and looking at the details regarding all of the coding.

What did you find most impressive about COING?

Their priorities are to keep the customer happy and to nurture a healthy, long-term relationship.

Are there any areas COING could improve?

Not at this point. There were some small things we needed to adjust when starting the relationship, but I’m happy with everything currently. Whenever I have feedback and expect adjustments, they oblige. COING is a good partner now.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I was the founder of Iqdemic. My aim was to help students apply to challenging universities by connecting them with alumni or students who could share their experiences and help with the application process.

What challenge were you trying to address with COING?

I had an idea that I thought might work, but I had no experience with software development at all. I didn’t know where to begin, or how an online business could be setup, so I reached out to COING.

What was the scope of their involvement?

COING explained the basics of software development to me, and how my idea could be realized. They led me step-by-step through the requirements-gathering process and were able to understand exactly what it was I wanted to build, what problem I wanted to solve, and what the market for it was. They basically built what I imagined, and I was happy with the results.

The app was a single-page AngularJS application with a Java Spring Boot backend. It was optimized for both desktop and mobile devices. The platform was hosted on Amazon Web Services.

My primary points of contact were Nenad Milanovic, their CEO, and Jozef Selesi, their technical director. Josef handled all the technical aspects of the product, while Nenad was in charge of the business side. The development team was rather small because I didn’t want to invest too much in the product before I had market validation for my idea. We had a team of three developers and two designers.

How did you come to work with COING?

I had heard about them from some acquaintances. COING is based in my home city in Serbia. I had received good feedback for the company from some people whom I know and trust, so I decided to approach them. I made the choice based on what felt right. I don’t come from a software development background, but COING’s team instilled confidence, and I thought that they would really understand what I needed. The references they were able to provide were positive, as was the feedback I got from my contacts.

How much have you invested with COING?

I invested more than $500,000 in their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

I worked with COING from October 2015 until December 2016. After the product was launched, the sales didn’t work out as planned, so I stopped funding it.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Product-wise, I kept metrics for the application, which were both technical items like response times and various traffic profiles, but also business-related data like the number of customers signing up and the amount of time they spent interacting with the app.

A part of the software development process at COING involves an effort to allow founders to objectively measure the success of the product, so they built as many metrics as they thought would make sense. I was consulted on what I thought would be relevant metrics from a business point of view. I had access to various dashboards and visualizations which I could interact with to see the data I was interested in and gauge the success of the product.

How did COING perform from a project management standpoint?

We used Trello to organize the work. It acted like a virtual board with cards. Each one represented one requirement and was broken down into various stages, like development, quality assurance and so on. I was able to track the stages of our various requirements in real-time.

It was an iterative Agile process. We described the simplest possible requirements at first, like registering, logging in and out, and so on, and built each requirement as the previous ones were demonstrated to me. I also had the chance to interact with the developers. For a small team like the one on my project, there was no managerial barrier between the coders and myself. If they had questions about the specs, they could ask me directly, and I was happy to clarify the issue.

COING was completely transparent with what was being done. I always knew about the good and the bad, and they didn’t try to hide when something didn’t work out, or when an item required additional time. Having an understanding of this helped with the overall project management.

What did you find most impressive about COING?

Their transparency and the overall team are what set them apart. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and I had the sense that I was working with senior, experienced people. The communication was absolutely great from start to finish. COING eventually delivered what they said they would.

Are there any areas COING could improve?

There isn’t really a single area which I would be able to mention. From the very beginning, we agreed that both sides would be honest about any issues we had and that we’d work together to resolve them.