Groksmith

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm Snr. Managing Director in a private equity commercial real estate firm

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Our goal was to build a low-cost investor management product specialized for the real estate market with potential in web3 space. We hired Groksmith for initial prototyping and eventually hired them to build and iterate the product.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We chose vendor by interviewing and viewing prior projects in production. Key critieria were: - references by trusted 3rd parties in Armenia - expertise in blockchain technology (Ripple) - experience building high-security financial applications

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

• Phase 1 : Production of prototypes and demo software to test concept. Technologies used were solidity, node.js, JS frontend framework (I can't recall)
• Phase 2: Iteration and initial production. Deliverable limited functionality full stack software. Technologies: SQL database (PostgreSQL), node.js, vue.js, other 3rd party services such as sendgrid etc.
• Phase 3: Production software for live customers. Deliverable refactored backend, streamlined devops capability. Technologies: AWS, python, SQL database.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

2 - 5 people depending on timing. product manager, designer, tech lead/CTO, front end dev, back end dev

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to launch the product and were able onboard 8 customers. Thus far we have had 0 churn of customers, and less than 10 bugs reported by customers, which is an absurdly low number.

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

Project management uses Jira, Confluence and Slack. We organized into 2-week sprints with standard sprint reporting such as burndown charts as well as sprint retrospectives. Style-wise I would say historically we have traded flexibility for timeliness.

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

Ability to pragmatically solve challenges with schedule and functionality. This team works with you to meet our business goals. We have a very high level of trust in them and their integrity. I don't feel like they are different company most of the time. They also exhibit creativity when confronted with business challenges, and showed strong interest in learning the real estate business. I feel they are very will versed in the industry and have become a valuable partner. We have pursued other project together as a result of their understanding of the industry.

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

When we first started working together we had a hard time sticking to our deadlines -- it was difficult to get a good read on how long things were going to take and how much effort. Over time this has improved substantially. I also wish we had foreseen significant performance issues that led to our backend rewrite. A part of that was certainly due to changing requirements and need for expediency. However I would have loved if a senior technical review of our architectural decisions would have saved us time and money.