DevStark

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO 

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Since 2018, an award-winning Nordic company has fostered an agile culture that houses a team of world-leading digital professionals, offering best-in-class digital performance marketing strategies and services. Our company helps businesses optimize ad spending against real business value all in one tool. We are the enterprise e-commerce data platform that calculates per-order business value in real-time.

What specific goals or objectives did you hire DevStark to accomplish?

• Develop a highly scalable and reliable profit optimisation platform

How did you find DevStark?

Referral

Why did you select DevStark over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

What was the size of DevStark’s team?

2-5 Employees

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

DevStark was involved in the Kuvio project from the very beginning. They developed everything you can and can’t see, from our software’s architecture to the website’s button animations. Our project was built with Vue.js on the front and Node.js on the back. They also did some thorough work with AWS, including:

• AWS ECS
• AWS EC2
• AWS IAM
• AWS Systems Manager
• AWS Batch
• AWS Athena
• AWS RDS (PostgreSQL)
• AWS Kinesis
• AWS Kinesis Firehose
• Amazon AppFlow
• Amazon SQS
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon S3
• Amazon EventBridge

The project APIs were GraphQl and REST.

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

• a stable and high-load-ready service that tracks orders from e-commerces in real time;
• a scalable data warehouse that can store billions of orders and query different subsets fast using a variety of parameters;
• tools for importing millions of orders for past years and quickly performing calculations on them to provide a retrospective analysis;

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

Their team was proactive and always ready to help when you needed them. Transparent communication makes working with DevStark easy and painless. Despite their team being fully remote, all the upcoming issues are solved quickly in our shared Slack workspace or face-to-face meetings via Google Meets.

What was your primary form of communication with DevStark?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email
• Messaging App

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

The people are great to work with, and the vast majority of times minimal explanation of use cases is required and the developers understand what any given feature is required for and can proactively offer different solutions for us to achieve our business goals.

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

Some tasks have taken longer than expected, perhaps there could have been opportunities to take in some outside resource who knows aws better in order to avoid some of the pitfalls?

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the manager of Sales — essentially the do-it-all guy — at Kumpan, which is now a frontend development agency.

What challenge were you trying to address with Devstark?

Devstark serves as an offshore development agency that handles backend development for the projects we take on. In some cases, they even help us with frontend development.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Depending on our client’s requirements, we outsource both front- and backend work to buttress our inhouse development. In one project, they used PHP to help us build a medical journal CRM.

Their tech stack also includes but isn’t limited to Javascript, Vue.js, and Node.js. They typically adapt to the client’s needs — they’ve assisted in pure web projects, as well. The team partakes in our internal standups and meetings.

What is the team composition?

We work with around 3–5 people. Their team is scalable.

How did you come to work with Devstark?

We found them through an outsourcing or freelancing platform.

How much have you invested with them?

Somewhere in the ballpark of $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in 2015, and it’s an ongoing partnership.

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

Their support has enabled us to execute projects smoothly. They’ve often had to push the development forward since our own backlog can delay them. They keep us on our toes and force us to be better, so they’ve served as a real consultancy in that sense.

How did Devstark perform from a project management standpoint?

We utilize Jira for project management. We’ve dabbled with Kanban and scrum standups too. They’ve mostly been effective. There is admittedly a language barrier with developers that both or our teams had to adapt to.

There’s an onboarding process of learning each other’s accents to ensure effective communication, and we’ve worked around it over time. Most of our tickets are written and their project managers are fluent, so this doesn’t impact our project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their proactivity is stellar. It’s one of the main reasons we’ve maintained our relationship; they continue to push us and provide us with suggestions for product improvements. Their business and tech competency have both made the engagement a great one.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not really.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Give them the tools and the confidence to succeed, and the cooperation will be effective.