Danavero Inc.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Danavero developed our website, handling optimization strategy along the way. Currently, the team is still on board to maintain the site. 

What is the team composition?

There were four or five people working with us, including a project manager.

How did you come to work with Danavero?

Danavero was referred to us by a friend.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $30,000 on the project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in January 2016, and the work is ongoing.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Danavero Inc. is providing PHP, mobile, and Java development services. They’ve also provided PHP development for Drupal, using the Symfony framework. Other web technologies include AngularJS, Node.js, React.js, and React Native. We have mobile expertise ourselves, but they have Android developers that we've occasionally requested staff augmentation for. 

We’ve also outsourced a couple of SEO projects to them, because we don’t have this expertise in-house. Danavero Inc. has their own project management and testing capabilities.

Over the years, we’ve given them complete projects to handle on their own. In one project, a startup customer requested iOS, Android, and web development. They were building a platform where people could sell their ideas to others. Danavero Inc. was responsible for both the mobile and web components, implementing all features including creating bids, sending requests, and so on. The backend was created using a blockchain approach, which Danavero Inc. has experience with.

Right now, we’re doing a Salesforce implementation for a customer with a product similar to other email marketing platforms. This includes marketing automation and email campaigns. The company also asked us to build a CRM part in PHP. We put Danavero Inc. in charge of it, and they assigned their own project manager, developers, and QA engineers.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with about 10–15 people from their team, including project managers. We scale the team up or down, depending on our needs. It’s very convenient for us to not have those resources on a permanent basis. I also work with Alexandr (Founder).

We’re working with approximately 15 people from their team at the moment, across 4–5 projects. They’re contributing to both complete projects and staff augmentation.

How did you come to work with Danavero Inc.?

We were located in the same office space as them. There are a large number of companies in Ukraine, so it’s really hard to figure out which one would be an effective partner. We tried multiple companies several years ago, and Danavero Inc. was one of those. After several projects, we realized that we had the best synergy with them so we decided to move forward with them specifically.

Even though we use other contractors from time to time, Danavero Inc. is the largest team we’re working with as of now. We’re not a very large company in general. We have around 800 people and are trying to grow our expertise in all complementary areas by ourselves. In the end, we decided not to replace Danavero Inc. with our own people.

How much have you invested with them?

We invest between $25,000–$40,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Danavero Inc. in November 2016, and the engagement is ongoing. We’re not planning to stop our partnership with them.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Danavero Inc. was pretty much our development team. We had frontend developers in the office that worked with them, but Danavero Inc. did the most demanding work on many projects. They have a solid background with different technologies such as PHP, the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP), and .NET. I worked with them on a lot of PHP projects, Drupal websites, and some mobile applications.

One project involved a website for an incubator that promotes young entrepreneurs trying to start a business. Those entrepreneurs would come and submit their ideas through the website. The incubator would then select 10 participants from all the entries. Those participants went to the incubator's office for three months, where they would work together to help entrepreneurs build their startup. The incubator then picked one winner at the end. 

It was a very challenging website because we had to integrate with the client’s learning system. We worked with Danavero Inc. on different approaches to the set-up and the plan for success. The client also wanted to be involved, so we built each feature in an agile way so we could show them as they were ready. This workflow gave our client confidence before we launched on a quick turnaround. Finally, the website involved a lot of different integrations. We ended up launching it as well—a sign of the project’s success.

The biggest project we ended up working on with Danavero Inc. was for St. Jude’s, a pediatric hospital. They came to us looking for a website to help fight pediatric cancer. We approached the project with the audience in mind and the desire to give users a journey. Danavero Inc. helped us come up with different ways to accomplish things. The team was involved in the whole approach—including a critical UX component that they understood well—and getting everything up to speed.

Our projects together covered a massive range of website types. Danavero Inc.’s team members were sharp, versatile, and had a broad skill set. However, if they didn’t necessarily have the skill on the team I was working with, they brought in other people. We appreciated their versatility.

What is the team composition?

Danavero Inc. initially set us up with a project manager. However, with the way we work as a team, we felt we didn’t need a project manager on their side. They were an extension of our team, and we worked with them directly.

How did you come to work with Danavero Inc.?

We started with a few different offshore companies with very mixed results. These firms often wanted to be very accommodating in order to get our business. As a result, they always said yes to our projects no matter how difficult the task was, so they often couldn't accomplish the job on time or on budget. We wouldn’t find out until the end when we couldn’t meet our client’s deadline. While that makes you feel good as a client, it isn’t good for business. 

We decided to look for a different company. Some people that I had previously collaborated with were familiar with Alex (CEO, Danavero Inc.), who’d worked with those people in the past. We started to work with Danavero Inc., and we immediately noticed an improvement in our results. They weren’t just an outsourcing company where we assigned them work and left them to do it. They integrated into our team, and we treated them as such. When I came to them with work, issues, and challenges, they analyzed the work and the goals I was trying to accomplish. If something I said didn’t make sense, they would come to me with different solutions. Their suggestions gave me so much confidence in their skills that I would invite them to some of our customer meetings. I didn’t do that with past vendors.

How much have you invested in them?

We spent around $500,000 during that time.

What is the status of this engagement?

I worked with them from 2016–2017.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

We initially started small with only one website. They did the website redesign as well as some SEO. They now cover five websites, helping with SEO and web design. They designed some of those websites from scratch. After that, we added the task of doing infrastructure support, such as server management and backend security.

We are also working with them on social media management. They look after all of our social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest across all the properties. 

Additionally, we are doing core development and building an analysis tool that can see any changes on a credit card.

Most of our websites are on WordPress. The frontend uses HTML and JavaScript. The backend uses Apache and MySQL databases. They know all SEO solutions such as Moz and SEMrush.

What is the team composition?

We have a project manager who oversees all the work as well as a dedicated web developer. They also have an SEO team, including junior SEO specialists. We have a head of infrastructure, a lead for social media, and people who help us purely with content. When we have multiple projects at the same time, there can be two project leads; one on the SEO side and one on the development side. The CEO is also engaged when we need his strategic perspective or when we want to talk about future opportunities.

How did you come to work with Danavero Inc.?

Someone from my social circle mentioned Danavero Inc. to me.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in March 2015 and it’s an ongoing relationship.