Discover

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and co-founder at Giants Technology, which is an online community SaaS. We manage the online communities of the world’s leading brands allowing them to interact on message boards with their customers and ensure they get all the information they need.

What challenge were you trying to address with Discover?

Most of the time, when people searched on the internet, they could find information in an online community where everyone could communicate about specific themes. The software serves as a message board, which has been used since the dawn of the internet. We needed help with the design and functionality of our message boards.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Discover made available a foreign technology within Unity, which is a platform to create computer games. They redesigned the message boards, updated features and functionalities, and created wireframes and animations. It was all about the interaction design based on the customer's needs.

What is the team composition?

We had about 3–4 people working on the project, including Habib (Founder & Creative Director).

How did you come to work with Discover?

Habib’s background and work made me realize that his company knew design very well. They were very helpful with the first workshops they did for us and Habib also was a good person to talk to. The relationship developed from there.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent £20,000 (approximately $29,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

It was a three-month period of work that ran from March–May 2020.

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

I don't have any metrics because we didn’t sell our software. However, Discover made the software available online using Unity, which no one was able to do for us before.

How did Discover perform from a project management standpoint?

Discover always delivered the work on time and within budget. Communication was always good — their communication with our third-party developers was enormous and went well. 

We didn’t do everything internally, so we had different development houses and the Discover team took a lot of the responsibility to communicate and work with them on missing details or clarifications. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Discover was professional in delivering their work. I trusted their team to deliver what they said.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They weren’t the cheapest company, but the work they delivered was high quality — we got what we paid for.

Any advice for potential customers?

Be very clear about what you want. The clearer you are about the direction that you want to go in, the better. Don’t be afraid to let Discover know the direction they’re going in. It gives their team more freedom in their design work, and it guides the design process.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the three co-founding directors of a software consultancy called Xerini. We work with some fairly major civil engineering and construction projects here in the UK. We specialize in data integration, and getting value from that data using data analysis and machine learning techniques.

What challenge were you trying to address with Discover?

We needed someone to help us with our brand, website, and general marketing to improve our client acquisition.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Discover provides us with ongoing web development and social media marketing. They‘re giving our brand a better image through our website, and that enables us to improve our marketing efforts on social media — all our paid advertising and networking point back to the website that Discover is helping us build.

We had a preexisting website that we didn’t really use much. We took a little bit of material from it such as basic bios, a few articles, and so forth. However, for all intents and purposes, they started building and designing our website from scratch.

What is the team composition?

Habib (Founder & Creative Director) is our main point of contact, but I think they have 2–3 people from his team working on this project.

How did you come to work with Discover?

We’re part of the same business incubator, so we got in touch through a co-working space in London. We put a notice out on the community boards and Habib was one of the people who responded. Habib came across as probably the most professional, and he gave us the most confidence that he’ll be able to do a good job.

How much have you invested with them?

I don’t have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it’s probably about ￡20,000 (approximately $27,300 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in July 2020, and we still have an ongoing relationship. They provide us with small updates to the website and help us with branding and product ideas that we might have. We probably speak to them on a monthly basis — sometimes a bit more frequent, and sometimes there would be a little bit of a gap depending on the business.

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

It’s difficult to say at the moment as it is quite early to tell. However, we’re currently speaking to three clients that we haven’t spoken to before the website was done. It’s difficult to attribute that directly to the website, but having the new site gives us the confidence to reach out to people and speak about our business.

I could also point out the stats the website is getting, but we weren’t really tracking that before, so it’s difficult to notice if there are any changes that happened.

How did Discover perform from a project management standpoint?

During the project engagement, we had regular calls originally through Skype, but we decided to change since then. We communicated at least weekly, if not fortnightly, depending on the progress of the project. We have regular feedback in terms of what they’re working on, and where we are with the design.

We initially started with workshops, which we found incredibly engaging and informative. We learned a lot about ourselves and the company during that time. Later on, during the field phase, we had regular catchups with the web developer in terms of the website build. The engagement with the team became more regular after that.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We were impressed with how they took the time to understand us and our business. I think it resulted in a better outcome in terms of what they produced for our website. Other companies wouldn’t have been competent to do a similar design. I think Discover went above and beyond to understand the core of our business and who we were.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Maybe they can use a bit of a data-driven approach, so that we can run some experiments to see if a piece of copy or design works. Maybe it could be done through metrics, data, or looking at engagements. That could’ve been useful and it may still be something we can do in the future.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Preparation. Take the time to consider your culture, who you are, and what you want. I think Discover is very good at extracting information, but a little bit of homework will probably help in that regard.