IntelligentBee

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder of a startup.

What challenge were you trying to address with IntelligentBee?

I started the company five years ago and went through a lot of providers. I finally decided to have a discussion with Costi (Founder and CEO, IntelligentBee) in January 2018, and we agreed to work together.

What was the scope of their involvement?

IntelligentBee has provided development support and has also assigned a product manager to our project. I don’t have experience in development, but I’m trying to make the research necessary to learn how to connect with users and to better understand their behavior and such. I came to IntelligentBee with a project made by freelancers, but by having them on board, I gained the possibility of getting real investment in order to move ahead with this project.

We’re creating a social network/marketing tool for local brands and influencers. We saw a big problem in the market with influencers and brands. They want to work together, but there are agencies in between that get a chunk of commission from the influencers, making it very hard to work with them.

With the marketplace we’re creating with IntelligentBee, we’re automating everything. We connect the best local influencers with the local brands directly. For example, a client with a new gym has the possibility of putting up a schedule for big influencers in town so that they can come to the gym and start creating posts advertising that they’re there. We connect them and provide a kind of ROI through insights.

Our app also provides insights. Most Instagram influencer management agencies require a lot of back and forth, negotiation, and waiting to get posts. After getting a post, one usually has to reach out again to ask for some insights. With our tool, clients have direct access to insights into the content created by the influencers. We’re still working on the app, and fortunately, we don’t have any direct competition. It’s available on both Android and iOS apps, and the backend is written in Laravel PHP.

What is the team composition?

We have a nine-person team right now comprised of two Android and two iOS developers, one backend engineer, two QA people, and one product manager.

How did you come to work with IntelligentBee?

They had a good reputation in Romania. Someone told me they were working with one of the biggest companies here and that they’d been together since the beginning, so that motivated us to hire them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’re paying €18,500 per month (approximately $20,750). I’d need $50,000 a month to create this product with a team in San Francisco. Our plan is to validate the concept here and launch in Spain, and IntelligentBee has helped me a lot so far in this sense.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with IntelligentBee in January 2018 and we’re planning to sign the papers for the fifth round of development.

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

I’ve come so far because of IntelligentBee. We’ve grown our retention rate a lot and we’re still working on it. We’re a startup, and I don’t want to say we’ll be the best tomorrow, but we plan to stick with our customers and improve. I don’t want to push money on marketing without having good retention and virality.

We plan to launch the app this month and I’ll be able to provide some numbers then. We need some transactions between influencers and local brands to see their behaviors and whether we can give a return on investment. After that, we plan to use the model in Madrid because we have a big community there. We have a scalable model for brands, users, and so on.

I’ve spoken with a lot of users and brands to see exactly what they want. From 100 people, 90% told me the app’s flow was very good. IntelligentBee has delivered very good quality, but we need to stay close to the users in order to improve on the UX.

How did IntelligentBee perform from a project management standpoint?

I spoke with Costi in the beginning and he told me that he wanted to see a startup from our city succeed. We do calls every morning with the team, discussing what they’d done the previous day and what they’re going to do next. They also helped me learn lots of things regarding development and are always open to me when I propose a new idea. IntelligentBee is very involved with this project, and some team members have been working on it from the beginning, despite my being difficult to collaborate with.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I came to this company three years after I started the project, and their team people took my idea from zero to something tangible. They explained what kind of people I needed, what working in Kanban and in sprints means, and so on. If I had to repeat the experience, I’d work with them again.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No. They ask me for feedback on a monthly basis. I’m a very difficult client, and they’ve been like a safeguard for me. I don’t have anything bad to say about IntelligenBee. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I run the technical support team at an API integration platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with IntelligentBee?

We were looking to expand our support team in European countries for GDPR and other reasons.

What was the scope of their involvement?

IntelligentBee provides us with additional support within Europe. We brought their team lead out to the US for two weeks of training. After that, he trained the rest of the team. One of our engineers went to Romania in September to hold additional training at their office.

What is the team composition?

We engage with a team lead and four engineers. As business grows, the team might expand with more engineers. We’ve maintained this composition since our partnership began.

How did you come to work with IntelligentBee?

I received a recommendation from our former VP of Customer Success, who did work with them involving support functionality. We were working to become a 24/7 service in Europe. IntelligentBee had experience with running a global support team for another US company. Their team put together a thorough project plan that detailed a number of resources for us. They seemed to understand our needs truly.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend $15,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with IntelligentBee in April 2018, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

IntelligentBee was instrumental in us becoming a 24/7 support shop. Before, we performed as an on-call service that had some engineers work overnight. Now, that’s no longer needed, which is a success story in my book. Their engineers molded into our culture. IntelligentBee’s passionate for their customers, focusing on their experience and maintaining customer satisfaction. They’ve done an excellent job exuding what’s essential for our organization to our customers.

How did IntelligentBee perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team is extremely responsive. They’re passionate contributors that respond to emails and Slack messages quickly. I meet weekly with the team lead. They’re also excellent at getting responses out to customers.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I appreciate their flexibility. Their engineers can adapt to working overnight and switching shifts to gain data from our team. They volunteer to work nights to communicate and receive knowledge from us. IntelligentBee is enthusiastic about learning.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think I have a specific point. It did take longer to acquire the number of engineers we planned on, which in turn, took longer to get them up to speed. But there are a lot of factors, including employment requirements that were preventing some team members from starting sooner.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the vice president of operations for a cloud-based email infrastructure solutions company. We send 3% of the world’s legitimate email for companies like Uber and Spotify.  

What challenge were you trying to address with IntelligentBee?

We needed to extend our engineering productivity and bandwidth. We also wanted to expand our technical support services and divide the work between different time zones, serving customers around the clock.

What was the scope of their involvement?

IntelligentBee has created a marketing email solution that allows people to create content, add lists, and send their emails. That solution has been live for four years, and it generates a third of our revenue. It’s certainly a successful and scaled product.

They’ve also developed a Software-as-a-service solution aimed at marketing to direct channels, as well as resellers and partners. For each one of our retail integrations, IntelligentBee will code custom integrations.

IntelligentBee provides all levels of support, including L3, which is the highest, escalations level. They provide phone, chat and email support, including for sales engineers.

Our communication is streamlined, including a product manager in the US on our side who coordinates with IntelligentBee’s product manager for engineering. The support side uses the same model, with a local manager from our side interfacing once a week with IntelligentBee’s management. Each side runs operations independently and keeps one connection point.

How did you come to work with IntelligentBee?

We were attracted to IntelligentBee’s development skills, as shown in the online forums they were participating in, providing thought leadership around either a type of code or solution.

How much have you invested with IntelligentBee?

We have a substantial, ongoing annual commitment ranging in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with IntelligentBee six years ago. The collaboration is ongoing.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

IntelligentBee’s development work is driving a bit over a third of our monthly recurring revenue. The quality and scale had to be there for this to happen.

In terms of support, we gauge results by response time to inquiries. IntelligentBee has met all of our objectives, which are the same as for our domestic team. Whether the customer is being served by our team or theirs, the response time is exactly the same. All customer interactions receive an NPS [Net Promoter Score], and have an opportunity to mention how fast and useful was a response was. IntelligentBee’s metrics match ours.

How did IntelligentBee perform from a project management standpoint?

IntelligentBee is faster than us. They’ve been on time and within budget every time.

What did you find most impressive about IntelligentBee?

They have created an environment that makes employees happy to be working for the company. This certainly shows in IntelligentBee’s productivity and ability to be flexible, quick, and high-quality.

Are there any areas IntelligentBee could improve?

Because IntelligentBee is a self-sufficient group and we have few contact points, there are occasional times when we need to lean in and make sure that the alignment is in place. In their speed and agility for getting things done, IntelligentBee may be a bit ahead of where the platform is, so we may have to coordinate with them and have the team slow down.

Please describe your company and your position there.

EventWay is a full-featured online registration platform SaaS. Our target market is event organizers of any type and kind. I am currently Account Manager for this company and worked directly with IntelligentBee in order to develop our product.

For what projects/services did your company hire IntelligentBee?

Develop the entire app from zero (web + mobile apps) and added features along the way according to our requests.

What were your goals for this project?

To have a very competitive full-featured online registration platform for any event.

How did you select this vendor?

It was recommended by another company that worked with IntelligentBee.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The product was built from scratch, meaning project management, backend and frontend development, design, QA and deploy on servers.

What was the team composition?

For this project, we had: 1 project manager, 1 frontend, 1 backend, 1 QA and 1 SysAdmin.

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

Our solution was launched on time and any feature added was done extremely fast considering the fact that developing the product was an ongoing process based on our customers’ feedback

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

IntelligentBee had an important role for this project: any delay or any hick-up would risk the delivery for the entire project so on-time deliverables had a huge impact and they performed really well using AGILE methodology with 2-week sprints. We communicated via Slack, Skype and used JIRA.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They came proactively with solutions for our ideas, based on their experience in working with SaaS applications. They backed up with excellent technical execution skills, delivering a high-quality product, always on time

Are there any areas for improvement?

As any startup, we wanted to start our project “yesterday”. They started the project with a slight delay, but that was only because they have a very high standard on recruiting and forming the technical team. In the end it was all worth it, we couldn’t be more satisfied with the end result.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We're a platform allowing smooth and simple sale of cars from private individuals to car dealers

For what projects/services did your company hire IntelligentBee?

Data entry services from PDF invoices to Excel

How did you select IntelligentBee?

Through online research

Describe the project in detail and what their cost structure looked like.

We provided IntelligentBee with batches of PDF invoices and an excel template. IntelligentBee entered to PDF data into the excel template. We prepaid for a batch of hours on a monthly basis

How would you describe/assess the quality of their work?

The quality of work was very good.

What impressed you about their services?

Fast learners, accurate, quick to respond

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing particular