Gargoyle

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CTO of Mojo, a medical technology company in Lyon, France. We’re working on bringing novel technologies to the fertility world in order to essentially help people have healthier babies. As it stands now, most assisted reproductive technology (ART) has a 75% failure rate, and we’re looking to augment this through computer vision and robotics.

Our vision is to improve how the fertility world interacts with patients, in order to reduce the 75% failure rate that clinics have in treating them, to bring about healthier babies at a reduced cost to the patients.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gargoyle Agency?

We first worked with them in 2017 when we were getting our company off the ground. They helped us build the proof of concept for our first product: a system for performing semen analysis.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Gargoyle Agency designed an interface that showed videos of sperm along with analyses. They built the analysis software using the OpenCV computer vision library. I believe it used the YOLO framework. The software used neural networks to perform object recognition.

The biggest thing was the computer vision side of it. At the time, it was incredibly novel to show strongly performant computer vision applications in the fertility world. We worked with them on one other project, building a full UI for showing patient results. They did all the front- and backend development using JavaScript and Python.

What is the team composition?

I was speaking only with Andrew (CEO). I’m not sure how many people were involved.

How did you come to work with Gargoyle Agency?

My co-founder met with Andrew and set up a meeting. We spoke to him about what his agency’s strengths were, and decided it was a no-brainer to work together.

How much have you invested with them?

The initial project had a cost of $5,000–$10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We had our first project with Gargoyle between June–November 2017.

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

Through this project, we were able to demonstrate the feasibility of our company’s vision of bringing deep learning to the world of fertility. Such a thing had not been strongly demonstrated before, so this was a major step not only for us and the field of fertility research. We were able to create diagnoses of semen analysis that were comparable to actual laboratory results. That’s what we were trying to achieve, and we were able to demonstrate it to a good level.

How did Gargoyle Agency perform from a project management standpoint?

They stuck to the budgets and deadlines we set. It was very nice working with them. We did it a few more times after the initial project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

With respect to our first project, the most impressive thing is that Gargoyle had a strong grasp on deep learning and overall computer vision back in 2017. We searched for that quite a lot and struggled to find it at the time. I guess it’s more prominent now, but that just means that Gargoyle Agency has gotten even farther in the field.

Are there any areas they could improve?

With all the constraints we had on both sides of the project, I couldn’t have been happier with the results.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

It helps if the client clearly defines the project, either beforehand or with the agency they’re working with. It was great working with them, so I don’t have any specific advice for Gargoyle.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the general manager of Update Solutions, an IT company. We develop chatbots and mobile applications for local markets.

What challenge were you trying to address with Gargoyle Agency?

We needed help with chatbot development. Specifically, the team worked to resolve issues and institute tracking for the chatbot.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We receive projects. The local market supplies the framework. Then we describe how the project should work to Gargoyle Agency. We get feedback from them and then they work on the parts of the project that need to be corrected and coded using several different tools. Generally, they support us from A-Z for any projects regarding chatbots and AI. They don’t help with mobile applications.

What is the team composition?

My point of contact is David (Business Development Manager, Gargoyle Agency).

How did you come to work with Gargoyle Agency?

We found them through Upwork.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested $200-$300/month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2018 and the work is ongoing.

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

They deliver good work. We’ve very happy collaborating with them. We have ongoing projects that are completed quickly and smoothly. They have good knowledge of what’s going on.

We’re in a very remote location and don’t have good contact with innovation and what’s going on in the world. They’re up to date on the newest technologies and are providing us good support on the project. They’re also providing us knowledge on what is going on in the world.

How did Gargoyle Agency perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management is perfect. They’re extremely quick and respond quickly with any feedback.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re very close to our way of thinking and needs. This facilitates easier communication.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Everything is fine. There’s nothing they can improve on.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you have the same needs that I have and the same market I have, they're the best. I fully recommend them. 

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Founder & CEO of a marketing technology company that helps brands to place their marketing communication alongside highly relevant content without storing user personal & online cookie data and protects the brand’s reputation.

For what projects/services did your company hire Gargoyle Agency?

We have started our conversation back in 2017 working with Andrew working on a prototype of our product. We utilize visual recognition technology to identify the content & connect with eCommerce companies to monetize the visual content from the websites, blogs, etc. Later, we have moved into building more robust visual recognition models to cater to our own advertising tech platform, instant commerce features. Chatbot development & integration and more.

What were your goals for this project?

To build more robust Visual Recognition models, moving from MVP to scalable platform. Chatbot integration with multiple language support.

How did you select this vendor?

We have filtered and interviewed many agencies and freelancers through UpWork (Elance & oDesk earlier) and finally found Andrew with highly responsive, showing deeper interest in the project's requirements understanding, thinking beyond regular instructions, etc.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Design & development of idea staged concept. Further developing the MVP into a robust platform to cater to higher volumes. Backend development support. We have even utilized mobile developers to build a user-friendly app for visual commerce project.

What was the team composition?

Front end developers, Backend developers, Machine Learning Engineers, QA tester. In addition, we have even utilized Android developers on one of the projects.

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

Always product was developed on time and delivered with quality. Any issues faced by the team was well communicated by Andrew as a project management person to face the client-side.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management was very effective as Andrew always ensured the straightforward communication as and when required. Also, he was always available and responsive whenever requested for some information or knowledge transfer.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The team gets into an additional level of thinking about the project, they do not just follow the given instructions. Always responsive and communicative. The team speaks English which is sufficient enough to convey the project's scope of work so don't see a language barrier to work with them remotely.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Initially, we had some frequent negotiation about pricing, overall project estimation model (optimistic and pessimistic calculation) which we were not happy with. However, we have then started to discuss every single module and milestone and contract-based tasks to avoid pricing negotiation. Therefore, a better pricing model for startups would definitely help and Andrew has been supportive after rising this concern to fix this.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a data analytics company focused on local economic indicators in Europe. We collect large amounts of data and use models to generate indicators for our target industries.

For what projects/services did your company hire Gargoyle?

We needed to connect to new sources of unstructured data.

What were your goals for this project?

We want to obtain the information in an automated process in high quality. A main objective was that the infrastructure runs reliably.

How did you select this vendor?

We were in contact with several vendors and took decisions based on the offering and calls.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Based on our clear instructions, they have developed the required scripts to collect the unstructured data and have updated the scripts if needed.

What was the team composition?

We mainly collaborate with one developer.

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

We can not fully see the result yet, as it is still work in progress - but sofar we were pretty happy with the outcomes.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Project management and coordination was mainly done on our side, but overall coordination is smooth and easy.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are very eager to learn - so if something does not work, they will find a way to fix it.

Are there any areas for improvement?

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