Itekako

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am a former department director for LTSE (Long-Term Stock Exchange)

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

LTSE created a new SEC approved stock exchange in the US. The Long-Term Stock Exchange is a trading and listings venue, first of it's kind. LTSE provides software for private and public companies to manage their equity, stakeholders, and long term strategy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Itekako to accomplish?

• Fullstack development
• Automated and manual testing
• Augment product management

SOLUTION

How did you find Itekako?

Referral

Why did you select Itekako over others?

• High ratings
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from Itekako were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

The scope of work included building multiple web applications from the ground up and maintaining them over a course of 7 years. The Itekako team built captable.io, hiringplan.io and startuprunway.io from ideation, to early MVPs, and until these products were acquired.

Key deliverables were:

1. Write code to build initial MVPs
2. Build features as per prioritized roadmap
3. Fix bugs and issues that arose in production based on defined SLAs
4. Report weekly progress, and meet customer deadlines
5. Handle code refactors and security posture 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Main measurable outcomes from the project were:

1. Meeting product specifications.
2. Meeting quality expectations in terms of correctness, usability, reliability.
3. Delivering to planned goals consistently week over week.
4. Handling bugs and user feedback withing defined SLA timelines

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Project management was their strength. The Itekako team had one of the most consistent track records of delivering on time and per expectations. 

They were very clear about expectations of how quickly they would respond to things (within 24 hours), and they always met expectations.

What was your primary form of communication with Itekako?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Every one on their team was very smart, eager to learn and brought a positive attitude. It was clear that the folks enjoyed their work and were doing waht they loved to do. That translated to priduct quality and effort they consistently put to raise the bar higher.

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

I would have liked if they let some of their team members visit our offices in the US in person more often for team building.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder & CEO of Block Party

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Block Party builds tools to help end users protect their online presence from being weaponized against them in social engineering attacks, harassment campaigns, fraud, scams, and more. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Itekako to accomplish?

• Help ship MVP

SOLUTION

How did you find Itekako?

Referral

Why did you select Itekako over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from Itekako were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Support in building a full-stack application that pulls large volumes of data from Twitter and applies muting and blocking logic for end user accounts. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Completion of key product features. 

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

We handled most project management in-house. Itekako staff were working full-time with our team and integrated into our systems around project planning and software delivery. Our point of contact with Itekako was extremely sympathetic and responsive to any issues around personnel.

What was your primary form of communication with Itekako?

Virtual Meeting

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

Commitment from leadership to delivering quality work and motivation to make things right if there were any issues. By contrast, many other vendors will gaslight you about performance issues and try to blame you. It's only natural that there is some bumpiness and alignment needed when managing large teams of people, and Itekako takes on that responsibility well. 

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

The caliber of staff members varied considerably. Some people were fantastic, and others were a little oversold in terms of their capabilities. Junior folks tended to struggle, whether on the technical side or in soft skills like communicating and working with a team -- sometimes English was a barrier. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO and Founder of Primal Systems Inc.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Primal builds clients, scaling infrastructure and analytics for Nostr.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Itekako to accomplish?

• Build a content caching service for Nostr
• Build web client

SOLUTION

How did you find Itekako?

• Referral

Why did you select Itekako over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Itekako were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Our objective was to help scale Nostr by implementing a caching service that connects to all public relays, collects all events published in real time and stores them for efficient querying. We then used this service to implement performant client apps as well as to conduct fundamental analytics operations.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Within less than two months of development, the team was able to ship a public preview of the entire product stack, including: caching service, web client and analytics. Rapid development continued in the following months and we are on track to ship the full v1.0 of the product within six months of development.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Itekako is one of the most capable teams I've encountered in my 25+ years of managing software projects. All meetings are always of extremely high signal, issues are identified and addressed on time, which results in delivering high quality products on schedule.

What was your primary form of communication with Itekako?

• Virtual Meeting

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

The most impressive thing about Itekako is their team culture. Everyone takes responsibility for their deliverables, while being generous when there is a need to help their teammates. The entire team is focused on achieving the common goal.

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

I can't think of any areas of improvement. Itekako is the ideal software development partner. I have already recommended them to multiple contacts who are looking to staff/expand their dev teams and I certainly plan on working with them on future projects.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Publishing of an engineering company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We manufacture industrial machinery and systems

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Itekako to accomplish?

• Digital document publishing from SharePoint to the web
• Automated print sheet with publication web link
• DevOps process and Azure hosting support

SOLUTION

How did you find Itekako?

Referral

Why did you select Itekako over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from Itekako were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Using a provided design and architecture, create a mechanism for delivering documents digitally on the public internet considering all cyber security risks and monitoring requirements. Manage our Azure resources and DevOps.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

10,000 document downloads in 10 months and rising

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Regular meetings and working DevOps with sprints ensure we keep moving through the backlog. Very responsive to our customers' needs.

What was your primary form of communication with Itekako?

Virtual Meeting

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

They take direction well and deliver what you ask for without an expensive analysis before getting started.

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

No is the answer to this question in any working relationship. No.