DeveloperTown

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a member-based organization focused on assisting leaders to become their best self. Our organization is centered around three pillars: growth and personal development, connecting within the community, and acting as local and global servants. I am the Vice President of Learning and Development.

What challenge were you trying to address with DeveloperTown?

We were looking to bring our online portal to the next level so that it could evolve with the sophisticated needs of our clients.

What was the scope of their involvement?

DeveloperTown is one of the 50 companies that are a part of our organization. They helped us with everything including the UI design, mobile accessibility, and user experience. They also showed us a new way to upload content that allows us to be an online community instead of just a resource repository.

At this point, we are awaiting the overall scope, budget, and timeline from them. When we agreed to do the design process with DeveloperTown, we had a shift in our budget that prevented us from starting the new development on the product. They are taking that shift into consideration and are working on a plan that will be more feasible for us to begin development next year.

How did you come to work with DeveloperTown?

We went through an RFP [request for proposal] process. Upon discovering DeveloperTown, we were won over by the whole team. They did a fantastic job on explaining how an investment in their technology services would be a paradigm shift for our organization. DeveloperTown really opened our eyes to the value of making such an investment, despite it seeming large at first. Their ongoing support has been really wonderful. They make us feel as if our success is just as important as theirs.

How much have you invested with DeveloperTown?

The project cost range is between $10,000 to $50,000. We were very skeptical about making that investment knowing we were going to have a much bigger number later. At the end of the day, if we can’t afford their processes, we can at least come up with an accommodation plan.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement with DeveloperTown is ongoing. We started in February.

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

The design process was great. The team members at DeveloperTown are very graceful when giving feedback. They made us ask tough questions about our business, which sparked a lot of innovation within our team about how we want to be branded and focused. They allowed us to disagree with their ideas too. I have yet to work with someone I don’t like at DeveloperTown.

What did you find most impressive about DeveloperTown?

The quality of their design samples really won us over compared to the other vendors we were looking at.

Are there any areas DeveloperTown could improve?

There isn’t really anything DeveloperTown could have done differently. We’re very fortunate to have them as ambassadors for our company. We appreciate their thought leadership.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

College Students Care is a tech startup working as a benefit corporation. There is a mission for social good behind what our company does. Although we're aiming to make a living, like everyone else, we have socially-driven components.

I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with DeveloperTown?

I needed help on the tech side of development. I had not been involved in the coding world before, even though I've started other companies in the past.

What was the scope of their involvement?

DeveloperTown worked on initial coding for me, building a basic WordPress frame. As it became more complex, it was taken off of that platform and recoded. My goal was to launch the registration portal and provide a way for people to sign up for our newsletter and stay connected to us.

A designer from DeveloperTown also created a logo for my company based on my ideas, which is fantastic.

How did you come to work with DeveloperTown?

I'd known one of the developers from DeveloperTown for some time. I ran into him at an entrepreneur event. He offered to sit down with me and provide some coaching, as well as develop a bone-dry version of our website pro bono. He explained that he and his partners believe that it's important to provide this kind of coaching to clients in the startup phase that could not otherwise afford it. This cultivates relationships, while also providing education, which DeveloperTown felt was part of their role in the community.

I received coaching every week for an hour on everything from building a website and talking to developers about wireframes and everything else. DeveloperTown has also connected me with entrepreneurs in the community. They run workshops, classes, and collaborate with local universities, bringing in students who are interested in partnering up for startups. I was able to setup a team of students for a completely different project as a result. DeveloperTown is collaborative with many community groups and higher education centers, bringing them into the working facility.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with DeveloperTown one year ago. Going forward will depend on what my needs are, and the amount of funding that I'll be able to gather.

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

Because of what I've learned during the coaching sessions, I have been able to go out on my own and find a boutique firm abroad which is currently building my phase-one site, for a fraction of the prices asked by major development firms here in Indianapolis. Even though this didn't help DeveloperTown, I didn't have the budget for working with them and I needed to show traction on my site. Because of the coaching that I received, I knew how to talk to developers and how to describe what I needed for getting a site off the ground.

Once I've received the funding that I need to fully develop my site, I intend to go back to DeveloperTown. They've been terrific to me.

What did you find most impressive about DeveloperTown?

DeveloperTown's bottom line is more than just making money. They want to be active participants and to make a meaningful impact in their community. Their clients are very loyal to them because of this. DeveloperTown aims to bring entrepreneurs to the Indianapolis community, in order to keep them here and help the economy.

Are there any areas DeveloperTown could improve?

Developing a program through which startups like mine could offer equity as a form of compensation would expand the pro bono approach that DeveloperTown takes. I would have liked not to have to search for cheaper vendors, and get my site up-and-running using DeveloperTown.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are BrandAmper, a technology that captures employees’ stories for companies and turns those stories into insights and content that companies can use to recruit more efficiently. I’m a co-founder.

What challenge were you trying to address with DeveloperTown?

There’s a mismatch between the way companies communicate to the market and the way that the perceptive employees communicate to the market. We’re coming from a world where companies are accustomed to broadcasting messages of who they are, what they are, and why people should want to work there.

Most companies’ first foray into communicating who and what they are typically looks a lot like how they market everything else, one broadcast one to many. At the same time, buyers or job candidates don’t want to interact with content that way. They don’t want to be told. They’re accustomed to Glassdoor, which has true and individual reviews. They’re used to looking people up on LinkedIn to find out exactly who works at a company and what those people are like. That led to pure unadulterated insight in all walks of life. It’s the same group that uses Trip Advisor and Yelp to figure out where they want to go on vacation or eat dinner.

Our product helps companies bring themselves up to the times by bringing their employees forward so the job candidates aren’t just hearing from the company, but they’re hearing from the employees the same way they would on a review site, with the added benefit that the company can still be comfortable with it because employees are telling their story. They’re telling a story that any company would be comfortable with an employee telling because it’s the story of what that employee does. We hit that sweet spot of being in the companies’ comfort zone. The employees want to do it because it makes them look good, and the market likes it because that’s how they want to hear the information. They want to hear it from individuals with whom they can interact.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had an internal prototype. We were challenged by our clients to scale. So we initially approached DeveloperTown just to help us understand what life would be like as a tech startup trying to scale and how to make sure that we were doing a few things. The first, structuring our business correctly, and the second, planning for our technology development appropriately. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were already in a place where we knew we needed to rebuild the prototype. We were becoming aware of some of the dangers of not thinking ahead. DeveloperTown had a package for working with folks like us and understanding those types of issues. As we were launching with them, we pulled away from our developer. We ended up going to DeveloperTown, not only for consulting, but we also needed them to reengineer our prototype and rebuild it from scratch in six weeks.

How did you come to work with DeveloperTown?

We had a company that we’d been working with and we liked them. We had been talking with other firms regularly to make sure we weren’t missing anything. It was a lot of word of mouth. We came across DeveloperTown through a connection of mine. Someone who I know personally went to work there. He reached out and we were really impressed right away. We were able to validate that they were the real deal. It wasn’t critical but when I knew they could help us with the app, we moved forward. As we got to know them and heard other comments about them, it gave us confidence that they could do the job.

How much have you invested with DeveloperTown?

Our project was worth $250,000.

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

When they put the product together, we were immediately named one of six awesome new startups at the 2014 Human Resource Technology Conference. Not a bad way to get onto the map.

What did you find most impressive about DeveloperTown?

They’re fantastic partners. DeveloperTown is fun to work with and they’re highly confident. They’re smart and they know their stuff. DeveloperTown looks at our business from a technical perspective as opposed to just looking at the technology of our business. It makes a difference. It means that when they come up with a solution, it’s not only good technically but there’s a long view to it. Sometimes the most elegant technical solution is no longer the most elegant technical solution when you put it into that business context. There’s a few decisions that have been made that we were pleasantly surprised about. They knew things that needed fixing and fixed it. That’s rare. They’re very transparent and forthcoming in their communications. That meant we never had any bad surprises.

Are there any areas DeveloperTown could improve?

When you have a company that has open communication, you take care of stuff as it comes up. They’re a growing company. Just about everybody we worked with was top notch perfect. If anybody was on the project who wasn’t as good a fit, we would have that conversation and they would roll off and somebody else would roll on. It was never a problem. I want to tell more of what’s true about them to the world. I think they’re underselling themselves on the marketing side of things. I think they have incredible strengths that they’re not capitalizing on fully.