Kogi Mobile

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Latin Hosts (latinhosts.co) partners with an exclusive network of Airbnb properties in Latin America to provide concierge services and support for those properties’ guests and hosts.

What is your position?

I am the founder of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Kogi Mobile?

We needed to build a proof-of-concept for our business.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

We've built the initial version of our product and are now looking to expand to a more robust application, which will be launched to a larger group of visitors and hosts across Colombia and Latin America.

I initially wanted to build an application for iOS and Android, but Kogi Mobile convinced me that the best test for the concept would be to build a responsive website. Also, we weren't quite ready to implement some of the typical items that would be found on an app. Functionalities like notifications of a visitor's arrival at the Airbnb property and providing geo-sensing weren't something that we needed to have available at the time.

The next phase of development will also focus on having a responsive website. We've found that the vast majority of our users are accessing the page on their phones already, so we will only build an app at a later stage.

How did you come to work with Kogi Mobile?

I've started companies in the US and Latin America for the last 15 years. I've worked with vendors in China, India, and other different countries. I've also worked with in-house developers. I interviewed a number of companies, using Upwork and other channels, in order to find someone that could build my solution. I was launching the product on my own time and without any investors. I needed someone that I could trust to produce the kind of work that I needed. Kogi Mobile's owner and I are mentors within The Founder Institute, which is a global mentoring organization in Colombia. Given their track record and proximity, I decided to work with them.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

The total development cost so far has been $80,000. I expect that with the future native app development, the total project cost will reach $200,000. One of the reasons for selecting Kogi Mobile was their cost to quality ratio. The fact that I have a technical background has also helped in cutting costs down. I was able to save a lot of time in the process of conveying requirements to them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June, 2015. The project has had moments of slowing down in the meantime, but we're now working together on the next iteration. Phase three of our work will involve building native apps for iOS and Android. Users from Latin America tend to use Android to a greater extent than people from the US.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I'm very pleased with the quality of work offered by Kogi Mobile and their general responsiveness. They dealt well with my lack of clarity about what I required from the app. Building an app in its early stages requires constantly changing new features, which they did very well.

What distinguishes Kogi Mobile from other providers?

The difference between having an in-house team and an external vendor is the reaction time of each, based on user feedback. Certain development shops, especially in other countries, aren't able to be as reactive to changes, which is a crucial factor for startups in the present. Kogi Mobile has figured out how to ship a product quickly to the client, but also stay within their budget. I gave them a big requirement list, out of which they suggested testing two or three key functions first in order to get a measure of the market response; only then would we move on to building something bigger. They could have just had me pay a lot of money for features I may never have used, but they actually pulled me back, realizing that I may exhaust my budget on the first release and be left without a revenue-generating business. We built a little piece, received feedback for it, and demonstrated it to people. In the second phase, we're planning to introduce a lot more features and will be making changes based on what people have told us.

Is there anything Kogi Mobile could have improved or done differently?

I am a unique client for them in the sense that we are closer together physically. I've visited their development shop a couple of times. I don't know how they handle clients in the US, but I have heard that their owner travels to clients' locations. Being able to sit in their office and work through technical issues together has been important. They've also done a good job of selecting English-speaking staff, so we've had no communication issues.