DPL

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of The Miracle Morning, a global community of over 4.5 million people in over 200 countries. Our book has been translated into over 40 different languages.

What challenge were you trying to address with DPL?

We got to a place where we wanted to build a mobile application based on our community's demands. Additionally, we wanted to build a strategy around the launch of this app so that it would be already profitable within the first 30 days of launching it.

What was the scope of their involvement?

DPL has helped us develop our app. We had a very lean approach to the app’s MVP that we wanted to bring to market, so we first came to DPL with our vision. We also had our design team work with their team to ensure that this was the direction we wanted to go. They were very supportive during the onboarding process, explaining how the entire development process would go before jumping into it.

They’ve built the app using React Native, and it is already available for iOS and Android. Its functionality includes a user onboarding flow and a challenge connected to the backend. The challenge feature plays daily videos, sends notifications, and has accountability on whether the user completed the daily challenge or not. Additionally, it is connected to an email CRM to manage users’ login information. Its features also work across different devices. For example, if users have an iPhone and an Android tablet, their app syncs with both devices regardless of the operating system.

Originally, we released it as a paid app, which was not traditional for how new apps go to market. However, our plan was to launch it for our community and generate revenue so that we could use that revenue to launch the app’s next version. We want to move from a paid model to a free model and then to a freemium subscription model, so DPL is now building an entire subscription model around our plan.

For the next version, a lot of the features and content that users had to pay to see will be free, and we’re going to add more free features and pieces of content in audio and video formats. Additionally, we’re going to add a journal and a “create your own affirmation” builder.

In addition to mobile app development, DPL has helped us design the screenshots for the App Store and Google Play Store listings.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with the product owner, a frontend developer, a backend developer, their billing department, a business development person, and their partnerships team. They’ve also brought other team members with different specialties for the different features that we’ve wanted to add to the app.

How did you come to work with DPL?

I was working as a consultant on another project for another company that hired DPL. From working with them, I noticed that they had a lot of expertise in making mobile apps and launching them to market.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $26,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2021, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

Within the first 30 days of launching the app, we got over 12,000 paying users. Their feedback has been great, just as we expected it to be. New members of our community who have just read the book are looking for tools and resources. When they find our app, they really love and appreciate it. Thanks to it, we’re on the right track to pleasing our users and getting our ratings up.

How did DPL perform from a project management standpoint?

DPL’s project management has been very good. We’ve seen how well they work together, and when they don’t know how to do something, they utilize their internal resources to support the project. We communicate via phone calls, text messages, voice chats, and Zoom calls, and we use a project management board.

What did you find most impressive about them?

DPL is extremely thoughtful and pays great attention to detail. They’re also proactive in thinking about things that I might not be thinking about, which is amazing. Their team is very authentic and has great integrity. Additionally, their English level and their ability to translate my ideas into reality have been incredible.

In addition to those qualities, DPL is extremely responsive, attending last-minute calls and fixing bugs very quickly. They’ve also responded very well to our rapid growth, and they’ve sometimes needed to work late at night and on the weekends to solve issues; they’ve been a blessing. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I love powerful questions, and I believe that they help shape the world. It would be great if DPL took the freedom to ask questions based on their expertise to challenge ideas.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Take the time to flesh out your idea and try to build a design prototype so that you can have a better idea of how your app will look and how the different screens will interact. This will help you save time and money, and you won’t have any surprises when a partner develops your app because you would have already seen it before.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and chief product officer of an enterprise-level smart homes solution. We specifically cater to apartments and the multifamily industry.

What challenge were you trying to address with DPL?

We were looking to build a team quickly and release a product to market in record time, so we brought in DPL.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have a cloud infrastructure on AWS IoT, and DPL has handled everything on it. They’ve architected and set up the backend. 

The team has also developed our web portal and mobile app, which are multilayered. Since our products are enterprise-level, the core features and functionalities encompass the management of both the users and the actual physical devices on the field. DPL has built it such that different types of users —  on-site leasing staff, maintenance staff, installation crew, and residents — are able to use the web and mobile apps to control the devices. They’ve used React, C#, and a JavaScript framework similar to React. 

We go through routine white hat and black hat audits with DPL. They’ve recently taken over the development of our firmware and hardware, which used to be overseen by a different provider. They’ve helped a bit with the UI, but we’ve leveraged another team to oversee that particular aspect of the development. 

What is the team composition?

We started with around 7–8 people and are now working with 18 members. We’re looking to have 30 people with us in the next few months. We have two main points of contact: one of the partners who acts as an account manager and the product owner who oversees day-to-day operations.

How did you come to work with DPL?

We found DPL through a strong recommendation. Our CTO used them in his previous company where he scaled over 100 people and had a successful exit.

How much have you invested with them?

I would say we've invested over a million dollars now. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We officially kicked off in March 2019. The work is ongoing.

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

The impact of DPL’s work has been significant. We’ve been able to stand up a team from one week to the next while having another team that’s already deep into MVP development. Establishing this would have taken us months and months.

Additionally, we’re able to have a much larger pool of resources with DPL since they are an offshore team. We've been able to do a lot more. DPL Has been extremely helpful where the other group that used to design and build our hardware wasn't, so we've decided to let them handle the development of our second-generation hardware.

How did DPL perform from a project management standpoint?

They're very good to work with. We use an Agile Scrum methodology and do two-week sprints, by the end of which we measure output and iterate from there. DPL has helped us significantly increase our output without just adding on people to it. 

We use Jira for project management and Slack for communication. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I've never been a fan of outsourcing groups until I worked with DPL. The quality of the people they’ve hired has been absolutely top-notch. They exhibit great communication skills and are willing to go the extra mile.

 They are based in Pakistan where, culture-wise, there’s a collective difference to someone who’s older or in a higher leadership position. In software development, this could mean that we might not get the best product. However, they break that practice especially with new employees. What that ultimately means is that they’ve been able to contribute in a much greater fashion than what we’d expected.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The team can just continue upholding great communication and continue hiring the right people. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Like me, not everyone is comfortable sending work offshore, but I always tell the people to whom I’ve referred DPL to start small. Feel free to bring in just a couple of resources to try it out, then you’ll see how easy it is to stand up an entire team and have theirs work with yours pretty seamlessly. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the former campaign director for an education non-profit. At the time, we were running a campaign to create a level of awareness and discourse around education. I was in charge of managing the campaign team, producing campaign deliverables, and managing the relationships between the campaign, government, and civil society. 

I also oversaw the process of hiring vendors for various technology needs.

What challenge were you trying to address with DPL?

We needed to both refurbish our website and create an application.

The goal of the app was to engage youth in conversation about quality education, and it would include a CMS to source content directly from users onto our site through an editorial process.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked closely with DPL through the project. They were responsible for the development of both the website and the mobile app, which is compatible with both iOS and Android. 

Our teams would discuss our goals, and DPL, in turn, would translate our conversation into the product. Throughout the project, they incorporated our reviews and feedback into each iteration of their UI/UX mock-ups. For testing and quality assurance, they provided us with links for test-run apps. 

What is the team composition?

I engaged primarily with the CEO, lead designer, and lead engineer. There were a couple of other people involved throughout the project as well.

How did you come to work with DPL?

We placed an ad online and in the newspaper. DPL responded along with several other companies, whom we accepted proposals and bids from. Ultimately, we decided to partner with DPL. 

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $50,000-$200,000 on this project.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from November 2017-August 2018.

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

Qualitatively, the app’s user interface was phenomenal. It worked exactly as we’d envisioned. In total, we’ve had roughly 50,000 downloads on Google Play and 15,000 on the Apple store.

How did DPL perform from a project management standpoint?

Overall, DPL provided a great, multi-dimensional team that worked cohesively with ours. It was clear throughout the engagement that they knew how to communicate expectations clearly. 

They used Primavera as one of their main project management tools.

What did you find most impressive about them?

DPL was highly professional and focused on consistently meeting deadlines. They were patient with our hyper-focused team, providing positive, engaging, and warm energy. 

We gave them very time-sensitive, specific challenges, and DPL met each of them.

Are there any areas they could improve? 

They could benefit from being more aggressive at times, rather than waiting for the client.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be clear in your communication and respond to their queries with clarity in a timely manner. DPL will do the same.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Marq Millions, trading as Arro Money. We offer prepaid debit cards to our customers.

What challenge were you trying to address with DPL?

We were looking for a development partner. A full-time development team sounded quite expensive to us, but we didn’t have any tech expertise on our board.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started with them on a consultancy basis, but the contract grew to include end-to-end development. They built a mobile-first design, with everything web-based. The technologies used include Java and C++, while all the scoping and frontend wireframe work was done by our team and other local companies. We handed those elements over to DPL for the backend development.

The system offers end-to-end connectivity with multiple partners, such as card processors and major manufacturers. They built a customer onboarding portal, a customer statement portal, and a backend admin portal.

What is the team composition?

They initially assigned a team of five people, which went up to 22 people split across three different teams. After the application was completed, we reduced it to a team of 11. We always had a project manager as the main point of contact, who discussed all our requirements with us and made sure sprints were done on time. We had two calls a week to coordinate sprints and changes.

How did you come to work with DPL?

They have a good reputation in Pakistan. After engaging them for a one-person consultancy, we slowly built up with them and they gained our trust over time.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve easily spent more than $1 million on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them around June 2015 and the product was first launched in June 2017.

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

The quality of the work is quite high and up to the standards of security that we expect. DPL was quite thorough throughout, but that did delay the launch of our functionalities.

How did DPL perform from a project management standpoint?

I’d rate them as average. We’ve had to minutely manage the project on our end too, which took more and more time.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their thorough research and work impressed me, as well as the highly professional, tested, and bug-free deliverable. It’s rare for them to miss something and leave an issue in the product launch.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could improve the project management a bit, in terms of deliverables. They should deliver more quickly or make the client aware that a bigger team is needed.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

They’re a professional firm with high standards of staff available and a very healthy working environment. I’ve been to their office myself—engaging with them means working in a friendly and collaborative environment. That’s why I’d advise clients to engage with them. However, make sure there’s a full-time senior person overseeing the team, getting to know what’s happening, and getting back to them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm one of the directors at Omnisec Technologies Limited.  We create technologies to help organizations with their various compliance requirements.

What challenge were you trying to address with DPL?

We engaged DPL to put a system together to help organizations fulfill a certain aspect of their compliance requirements.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We built a web-based SaaS solution, and it's all been built in AWS Cloud. There will be a mobile component coming soon, but for now, it can be used on laptops and tablets. The tool manages the whole lifecycle management process for payment devices. It allows organizations to mimic their hierarchy, to smoothly and efficiently be able to upload their users, to configure the devices, assign devices to various groups and individuals, be able to monitor these devices, track who they've been assigned to, and where they're located.

There's also a lot of reporting capabilities, and logistic supporting capabilities. If you're moving these devices from site A to site B, there are some rules around how you have to do that. It's an end-to-end product, that they built using an agile methodology. We would spend two weeks refining our requirements, and whatever we refined would go into a two-week development window. While those requirements were being developed, we were refining the next set of requirements.

Currently, we've finished the MVP, and now we're in the process of using what we've built so far to a customer base. We'll be convening with DPL to complete the product.  I see them as my development partner for the foreseeable future if everything is successful.

What is the team composition?

We didn't work with an extensive full-time team, but we worked with one product manager and two full-time developers. If we needed some additional design work during the project, the test team and the QA team would get involved to fill a role when necessary. My main point of contact was the product owner.

How did you come to work with DPL?

I came across a product that they were involved with, which was nominated for a number of awards at a ceremony I attended. I got to know that DPL was an organization that they had worked with in terms of the development of their products. They spoke highly of DPL, so I looked into their services and that's how I got engaged with them. It was very much an encounter by chance. 

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $49,000 thus far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in May 2018, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

They were professional, and on the whole, it was quite a smooth process. We were regularly creating content, and testing it. Because they were so good at managing their sprints and their agile methodology, it actually meant that the estimated cost that we put together was spot-on. Everyone I've shown the product to have followed the marketing exercise that we've been doing. They really like it and see a lot of potential in it. Naturally, it's the first version, so there's always room for improvement. The idea, thinking, and way the application is set up, have really impressed our prospective clients as well. Overall, we've definitely seen the feedback as positive.

How did perform from a project management standpoint?

We had a good relationship, and if there were escalations, everyone came to the table and things got addressed professionally and efficiently. They were fully engaged and once they started to get their heads around the complex idea we were trying to achieve, our collaboration really took off. We used Microsoft Teams, Skype, and met every two weeks to discuss the ideas in a large conference call.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to work very tightly to a timescale was phenomenal.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There's always room for improvement, but I think they were good at what they were familiar with. Aside from that, on the topics they weren't skilled in, the ability to do something in those areas wasn't with them. To be fair, there are infinite topics in IT, so for them to be skilled in everything is impossible. Additionally, in terms of pricing, it could always be lower. I could've gone somewhere else and had it done for a far cheaper cost, but I knew I wanted to go with an organization that I could go with in the long run. That's what I found in them, that the way they've established and the number of employees they had gave me the confidence to work with them. Finally, they could've gotten the engagement going a lot quicker than they did.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice to anyone would be, "you get what you put in". While they were good at what they did, at the end of the day with development, it has to be collaborative.

Please describe your company and your position there.

AgeEnvy is the most trusted aesthetics and anti-aging online community, offering non-biased information on various treatment options that address aging concerns. We empower users to make an informed decision before initiating a patient-physician relationship. From aesthetic treatments to regenerative medicine, our platform is built for individuals to learn about non-surgical procedures that increase confidence and overall health and wellness. Founder / President

For what projects/services did your company hire DPL, and what were your goals?

DPL was hired to develop the AgeEnvy platform, with four important goals;

1. Offer a positive user experience for our users and medical providers
2. Develop a world-class infrastructure
3. Protect our data with multilayered security
4. Offer scalable solutions for data warehouses, analytics, and AI and machine learning.

How did you select DPL and what were the deciding factors?

• Professionalism 
• Quality development 
• Timely deliverables 
• Affordable 

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Deliverables:

• Advanced Infrastructure
• Content Management System
• High-Performance CDN
• Intelligent Search
• AI Bot
• Geo Detection
• Data Analytics Integration
• Data Warehouse
• Security
• Payment Gateway
• Maps Platform
• UGC & UGC Moderation (AI)

Technology Used:

• Google Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

• The project is currently in Beta (MVP), and live online for users and medical providers to create free profiles. I'm extremely proud of what's been delivered and encourage everyone to VISIT AgeEnvy.com and decide for yourself. 

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timelines.

• DPLs Agile methodology offers complete transparency and visibility into team progress
• DPL adopts the communication tools preferred by the client. The team is well versed in the most common communication tools of the trade. 

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

• Most impressed with the leadership team

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

• Every technology project brings unique challenges, as well as opportunities to learn. And there are always areas for improvement in any organization; otherwise, I'd consider them not growing. Therefore, there's nothing worth calling out that should have been done differently.