Datacrafts.io

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the managing director of a startup hotel management software company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Datacrafts.io?

We needed skilled full-stack Ruby on Rails engineers that we could ramp up pretty quickly in a remote working environment.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Their team helped us to develop a component of a larger project that we were working on. They started by working with us to develop the development plan and home in on the functionalities that we wanted to develop.

The product overall serves as a research tool for hotels to analyze various data, including popular events and competitor pricing information. The component Datacrafts worked on manages and analyzes reviews for hotels posted on online travel agencies, gathering them in one product where they can be sorted by scores and trends over time. They also made it possible to respond to the reviews directly from our system.

The focus was in Ruby on Rails, but they also worked with Vue.JS for the frontend. Another part of the project involved natural language processing, and while Datacrafts.io didn’t develop the AI itself, they integrated it into the function that they created.

What was the team composition?

There are a couple of people on their team who act as points of contact, and we interact with them regularly as well as with the developers directly for more one-off requests and progress updates.

How did you come to work with Datacrafts.io?

We partner with a wide variety of agencies, but none of them were able to provide the Ruby resources we needed on our schedule. Earlier on, an engineer from one of those teams had moved to Datacrafts, so we decided to reach out to them.

How much have you invested with them?

The total cost has been around $450,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our work with them lasted from around January 2019–­May 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

It is difficult to pinpoint exact success metrics for engineers contributing to a larger product, but we have heard from some of our clients that they decided to use the product because of the specific review analysis functionality that Datacrafts developed for us.

How did Datacrafts.io perform from a project management standpoint?

All of our communications took place on Slack or video conference, which worked very well. Our PM would have a daily meeting with their team to discuss progress, provide feedback, and clarify questions that they had. They also introduced us to a Russian project management software that we liked and now use on our other projects as well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their flexibility and responsiveness were far superior to that of other teams we worked with. Since our specifications were not fixed at the beginning, that was very important for us. They were willing to work over the weekend and responded to messages at night when we needed them to, which demonstrated an impressive level of commitment to our product.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I really don’t have anything that I think they could be doing differently or better.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am one of the founders of Make AS. We build email marketing software.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Datacrafts.io?

We were looking for developers to help us with our platform.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We are based in Norway and we send out millions of emails for our clients. Our product is basically an email marketing tool that our customers use to build and send out their campaigns.

Datacrafts have helped us migrate out of all the Microsoft technology on our old system and build a completely new platform on Ruby on Rails, cooperating with our developers to help us develop this new software. They basically help us with the architecture, database management; it was Ruby on Rails development, mostly on the backend. The work has included everything from payment gateways to architecture for subscribers.

What is the team composition?

At the moment, we are working with two developers full-time, but we have had a total of four people involved over the last three years.

How did you come to work with Datacrafts.io?

A friend of mine had used them before and recommended them. Before deciding to go with them, we ran several small projects. Over the years, three of the developers have visited us in Norway and sat in our offices here for a couple of months.

What is the status of this engagement?

They have been working with us for three and a half years now. The first proposals and tests we did were in February 2014, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I think they provide high-quality work. When you develop software, you need to research quite a bit and find solutions, and they are good in that way. They’re also good at working by themselves; you don’t have to monitor them from day to day.

How did Datacrafts.io perform from a project management standpoint?

I think they perform really well. We have been using them for over three years and have spent a lot of money; it has been working great. We use Slack a lot for day to day communication, and we use Skype to have weekly meetings with the developers to coordinate everything. We also use GitHub for code reviews.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We haven’t tried many other developers other but those we did work with didn’t work out. These developers think the same way as us, though. They don’t just answer yes when they really mean no, which is something that we’ve experienced a lot.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not that I can think of right now.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Run a test project first to see if they are a good fit. I think that’s the key when working with developers. See if they fit your business model and your expectations. Be clear about your budget and know how advanced or how simple the project is.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the development team lead for Metroengines. We provide services for hotels, such as revenue management systems with price predictions for increasing and decreasing prices. We’re now expanding to car rentals and express buses.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Datacrafts.io?

We don’t have many engineers in the company, so we mostly outsource that work to Datacrafts.io.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

For each project, we discuss the features we want to build with Datacrafts.io, and they suggest any improvements they might have. They mostly provide Ruby on Rails and Vue.js development services for all of our web application projects. They not only create new features but also include some testing efforts.

What is the team composition?

I’ve worked with 6–8 people from Datacrafts.io on my projects, including a project manager. We’ve reduced manpower because of the current COVID-19 situation so we’re working with around 4 people now.

How did you come to work with Datacrafts.io?

We found them on Upwork. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Datacrafts in November 2018, and our engagement is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We don’t currently have engineers in our company, so Datacrafts.io’s responsibility is quite high in this sense.  We’ve been overall happy with the quality of their work. They manage to finish before deadlines, which is very good. 

How did Datacrafts.io perform from a project management standpoint?

Since I can’t manage project management full time, there’s a project manager from Datacrafts.io helping me create tasks and assign them to engineers, and to manage cards. We’re using a Russian project management software, and Slack for communication. Since we’re based in Japan, there’s a time lag, so a project manager on their side controls engineers.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their engineers are professional in terms of coding. Also, many providers out there just create the features, without tests, so it’s great Datacrafts.io does both. They have a rule to write tests for every function they make, which is great because it saves time on testing and it reduces bugs. We don’t have to worry about whether or not anything is possible because everything is possible for them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I’m quite happy with them.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Datacrafts has really good engineers, and they can build any functionality that the client requests.  

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We provide AI-based SaaS to companies in various industries like hotels, car rentals and real estates. Founded in 2016, we have almost 50 employees. I am the Chief Operating Officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Datacrafts.io?

We were going to develop web application for a real estate company. The application suggests optimal rent fee based on input data such as address, building structure, room size, etc. We designed the application, but had the team to build all of them from scratch.

What were your goals for this project?

The goal was to build the application with required stability and speed. We are provided 6 months to develop it, which was not very long period to build such a complicated app.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We had worked with the CEO of the company, and knew she was reliable.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They designed system architecture of AWS, developed, and launched the application. We had weekly meetings to share the development progress and discuss how we could respond to customer's new requests. Instead of just developing on our direction, they made their own suggestion from an engineering perspective.

What was the team composition?

The project team had about 6 people, including PM, designer, front-end engineer, back-end enginner, and QA.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The project was the biggest contract development for us while we usually provide SaaS. Fixing all specifications and schedule first was challenging approach, but thanks to their support it went successful.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The team worked collaboratively under the PM. It was transparent what was going on and what was problem. They were diligent enough to report daily working progress with details to us.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Their solving skills was most impressive. Though we had some technical issues since we were using AI and lots of external data, they solved them with their logical approach and expertise.

Are there any areas for improvement?

If they had had knowledge about AI more, it would have been a bit better.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder and CEO of Lipscore.com

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Datacrafts.io?

Datacrafts has developed our entire software platform from the very first lines of code to the enterprise saas ratings and reviews platform it is today

What were your goals for this project?

My goal when starting Lipscore.com was to solve the problem of "Be the first to review this product", and create the worlds most efficient software for collecting ratings and reviews. It would have to be done with a state of the art software stack and have wild performance because of the sheer traffic volumes.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We selected Datacrafts when they first started, but Mikhail who is one of the partners and our lead developer at the time was carefully chosen based on experience and skillset in the technology we were looking for. It was a good choice :)

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Datacrafts has developed our software platform from the ground up using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and Fastly as the primary technologies. The project has been ongoing for over 6 years and I can't possibly describe everything in detail :)

What was the team composition?

We have been using quite a few of their people over the years, but primarily junior and senior developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Datacrafts has developed the most efficient ratings and reviews platform in the world. It is now the serving as a ratings and reviews platform for several of the biggest ecommerce companies in Europe and we have had zero (0) downtime in the last 2 years. Id's say it works quite well.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We have been responsible for the project management, but occasionally there has been need for more or less resources from them and this is usually not a problem. They make adjustments very fast and are generally responsive to changing needs.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Even when they started and were very small they were always very focused on code quality, and they are very disciplined in always doing code reviews for each other and following a very strict development framework. This might be more time consuming when doing new development, but the result is a VERY robust codebase and also an impressive agility in the software. Implementing changes is usually very fast.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There are always small areas of improvement but we have found a way of working together that suits us very well. It is slightly annoying that our lead developer from Datacrafts doesn't have more time to work with us, and I would also prefer if there were more ideas and initiatives from their developers as they are far better qualified than anyone else to spot issues and potential pitfalls, etc. They do absolutely make suggestions, but I would prefer if they were more proactive (or possibly just better at communication their "proactiveness" with me).

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a U.S. company developing big data analytics software for enterprise social collaboration software. I am the Chief Technology Officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Datacrafts.io?

We hired Datacrafts.io for developing new features and maintaining our existing product. We were also having problems that required refactoring portions of the code to use modern libraries and approaches and worked with Datacrafts.io to solve these problems.

What were your goals for this project?

Besides maintaining the existing product, bugfixing, improving functionality and updating the APIs according to the data providers' changes, our main goal was to switch from Angular to React for the front-end interface.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I worked with Datacrafts.io developers in the past in other companies and other projects and had extremely positive experience with them. Having a need for the software development professionals to solve our IT problems, we were looking for developers we knew for reliability and high quality of work and Datacrafts.io was our first choice.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

We're using a lightweight Agile process (though not Scrum or Kanban) with minimum meetings, no micromanagement and this process requires a lot of trust in the development team. Datacrafts.io developers were provided with the list of problems and supplied with the known information. They were doing the research, testing and provided the solution. The code was them reviewed and the solution was then tested by another team. A huge challenge for the developers was that they didn't have access to the client's data and were frequently developing the code in the blind. This is a very challenging task and they did great.

What was the team composition?

In this specific project we were working with 1-3 Datacrafts developers scaling the team based on our needs. The team was supervised by the CTO.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Datacrafts.io was working on our key product, so without their work we won't be a successful business. We managed to retain existing clients and find new ones with the product that was being maintained and developed by Datacrafts.io' developers.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

PM was provided on our side, Datacrafts.io was only providing the developers in this specific project. We were using lightweight Agile process (a lot lighter than Scrum and even Kanban). The "scrum master", PO and QA were also on our side.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

- They were resolving any issues immediately. All developers they provided were awesome, but in one situation two developers were just not the best fit for our type of project. Datacrafts.io replaced them immediately and quickly addressed all delays caused by this replacement - Everyone I worked with in Datacrafts.io were extremely professional. Their hiring process must be superb to achieve this level

Are there any areas for improvement?

I'm not sure if anyone could've performed better. Datacrafts.io developers worked in very difficult conditions with "blind" testing, frequently with insufficient information about the APIs they needed to develop for and frequent changes to the APIs. They did great in all these difficult situations.