GenuineBee

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work for a consulting and tax services company, leading the operations portion of our creative team. My title is Creative Operations Director, and I manage vendor relationships, technology budget, and other things in those areas.

What challenge were you trying to address with GenuineBee?

We don’t have internal web development resources, so we needed a partner to help us out with some of the more complex issues that we faced in that regard.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Their team handles anything from building out custom tools and graphics on our website, such as maps and surveys, to building interfaces for our customers to interact with our services. They are able to customize anything to our specific needs, and primarily deliver those services across a range of deliverables for both internal and external use.

I’m not familiar with the exact tech stack that they use, but they are very familiar with our company’s infrastructure and tools, so I trust them to make the right decisions when it comes to any specific technology choices.

What is the team composition?

We have a few main points of contact, but they use a range of developers on our projects depending on the specific needs of the work we are doing at the time.

How did you come to work with GenuineBee?

I had an existing relationship with a couple people who worked there and had good experiences with them in the past. When I heard they were with this company now, I reached out to see if they would be able to work with us, and we moved forward from there.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent about $1 million in total.

What is the status of this engagement?

The partnership started about three years ago, around August 2017, and we’ve continued to work on a variety of short- and long-term projects since then.

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

We definitely track the level of engagement that we see with our customers coming to the site both before and after the various projects we implement with them. I don’t have the exact numbers on those, but I know we’ve considered everything they’ve done to be very successful in that regard.

In terms of some of the other internal tools that they’ve built, such as the digital asset management system, we look at it as money saved from not using a vendor product that wouldn’t have been as compatible with our systems. Those year-over-year metrics also show a lot of improvement that we’ve been happy to see.

How did GenuineBee perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve always done a great job of managing the project.  We have project managers on our side that liaise with their team, and they were quick to learn our workflow project management system. The developers provide daily updates and are always extremely responsive and agile in responding to our asks no matter what the specific need is.

What did you find most impressive about them?

From a technology perspective, they really seem to know how to do more than any other vendor we’ve come across. There was one time in which they didn’t have the skill set we needed, and they were very upfront about it with us about it. I would say there are very few ways in which they are limited as a team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only thing I think they could improve is their online portfolio to help market their services to other potential customers. People should know what they’re capable of.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The biggest consistent issue we face is having a good sense of what we’re looking for. Often, if you don’t have your requirements set and understand what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s hard for them to propose something that’s going to meet those needs. The more specifics you have, the more easily they’re going to be able to come up with a great idea for you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am an operations manager on the creative team of a large professional services company.

What challenge were you trying to address with GenuineBee?

We needed outsourced providers to help us with production of various website assets for our company.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The scope of work that I work with them on really tends to be operation focused. That includes things from monitoring our blog servers and other web properties for down time so that we can catch and fix any issues before they impact our end-users. They set up everything from helping us decide what technologies to use to the actual build of each new system we add to our infrastructure.

A lot of the work we’ve done also centers around Metabase, our operational system that acts as a centralized API and business intelligence tool so that we can stay on top of our inventory and other assets. Their team has been crucial in keeping that up and running, as well as understanding all of that data and information that we collect as a result.

What is the team composition?

There have been anywhere from 5–10 individuals from their team working with us at any time.

How did you come to work with GenuineBee?

Diego (Owner) was previously a site director in South America for our company, so I’ve known him for close to 15 years. When we started outsourcing some of our website production work, I touched base with him and his branch of our company started supporting the US firms. A few years after that, he broke off to start GenuineBee, and we’ve maintained the relationship ever since.

How much have you invested with them?

For the most recent project, we spent around $100,00 with them, but our overall investment in their team has been significantly higher than that.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked with them for a little over three years, starting in May 2017 and continuing to tweak and improve the product since then.

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

Everything is tracked through the operational system and we’ve run into significantly fewer issues than we would on average before our engagement with them. I don’t have too many specific metrics, but I know that my day is a lot less hectic because of the tools they have given us to help automate problem solving and monitoring processes.

How did GenuineBee perform from a project management standpoint?

Their strongest quality is that they are extremely agile as a team. They’re able to shift direction in the middle of a project and have done so several times. We’ve even been calls with them where we thought through a problem only to find out that the goal had completely changed when we finished, and they’ve never had a problem hopping right back on the horse to help us keep making progress.

That agility is crucial to being able to stay on top of all of our project goals and timelines for those goals. It’s always clear that they put our budget and deadlines over any of their teams needs, and that has helped us to maintain an incredibly strong relationship over the years.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Diego always keeps the big picture of our business in mind. Even just this morning, I was asking about the best ways to document things in GitHub, and he helped me to step back from the technical details and make sure that they answer we came up with kept the business question at the center of the solution. That has really been an invaluable piece of the work his company has done for us.

On top of that, you really can’t overestimate just how honest they are. There have been several times where, in a meeting, the decision or recommendation he makes is clearly not in his best interests but is in ours, and we’ve really appreciated that level of dedication and commitment to making the right decisions for us.

There’s one person in particular who has stood out on their dev ops team, and that has made the administration of the project infinitely easier for us. In general, they have people who are good at most aspects of the work they do, but they also have experts in each category so you always know that there’s someone you can go to who will be able to give you an answer no matter what the question is.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not all of their teammates speak English, but they do a good job of making sure that all of their input is covered through others who can. It hasn’t caused us any real problems but is something that they are continuing to work on as they go forward.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It has been such an enjoyable experience that it really sells itself. I don’t think there’s anything in particular that you need to do in order to be successful with them. As long as you know what you want, they will be able to provide it for you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of ZofToken, a security company startup. Our solution has two components. One component handles the server and authentication. The other component is a smart phone application which is where the software token resides and where the user interacts with the token.

What challenge were you trying to address with GenuineBee?

We needed a company to develop a mobile app for both iOS and Android.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They developed our iOS and Android app in a way that would interact with the APIs that we have on the server. It complied with all the security requirements that we had in place. They built the apps from scratch. They used Xamarin.

The important part for us was that the UX was clean and simple to make the tool easy for users with very low technical skills. The app was launched in February 2020. We have an ongoing arrangement for improvements and things that we may need to change or adapt.

What is the team composition?

There were 1-2 designers involved with the UX and two developers.

How did you come to work with GenuineBee?

Their CEO and I were colleagues in the past.

How much have you invested with them?

In total, the project cost about $70,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from September 2019–February 2020.

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

We had a series of events that were lined up here to present our solution. We needed the solution to be read for that. They delivered in time without any problems. They understood our requirements in terms of both the complexity of the UX and the API and security requirements that we had.

They needed to prepare a connection for an API that wasn’t entirely traditional. They had several cryptographic protocols to implement so that the app would interact correctly with our solution. It was a really good experience.

How did GenuineBee perform from a project management standpoint?

They met the deadlines and stayed within our budget. We were in constant contact with them to see how the progress was going and to answer any technical requests. It was a very straightforward experience working with them. We had no issues with project management.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They combination of technical expertise and capability of developing a really clean, modern, and simple user experience is impressive.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, it was a really good experience and enabled us to have the product we needed to launch on time.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Go ahead and work with them. I’ve known the CEO for a long time, and he has always been very dependable.