Launch Scout

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the COO of Configure. Configure is a start up which has spun out of KLH Engineers. We are building a Construction Marketplace.

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

Configure being a start up was starting 100% fresh. Gaslight helped with with initial visioning and discovery sessions. This was the first time out team was taking on a project of this size. We needed the consultation of industry experts to make sure we were starting in the right direction. We are an engineering company and needed help with UI/UX. Gaslight support us greatly by augmenting our team.

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

We interviewed local and national companies. We considered responsiveness, personalization, and expertise. We chose Gaslight for these reasons.

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

We had a discovery exercise where we used User workflow mapping to congeal a plan. The initial plan was taken to our beta users for feedback and comment. This kicked off a repeated exercise of building and testing.

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

Peter helped us scope in our needs and gave use confidence in their team. Doug and Ryan lead our discovery exercise. Ryan then augmented our team with UI/UX experience. Ryan lead the UI/UX development. He shaped Configure's online presence.

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

Its been a large build, we have limited users at this point but are moving into 2022 with a full focus to bring more users on.

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

This does not really apply as they integrated into our team. We used Teams and Whiteboard and Adobe XD to communicate mostly.

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

The initial planning helped us set the direction and Gaslight's tech stack help has really put us in a great spot.

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

Service was great. Here is one idea to drive innovation. What about a show and tell event? Gaslight has a lot of expertise which Configure only got a small portion as it was limited to individuals assigned to the project. What if the Configure project was demoed for the whole Gaslight company. A critique and ideation session could add immense value for a relatively short effort.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Our organization is a technology startup intended to take the entire technological barrier out of the way of small, artisanal food producers. Essentially, we want to let them have an online presence and connect them with consumers. I’m the CEO and founder of the organization, and I do everything outside of the development of our platform. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Gaslight?

We want to make it easier for food producers to sell their products in a way that’s reflective of their size and inefficiencies. It’s easy for anybody to put up a storefront nowadays, but customers may not actually find the store given that everybody has one. As a result, we’ve built a platform that’s similar to a storefront community. 

We had a bit of a learning curve with a couple of other organizations, and things didn’t go very well. However, we learned enough to keep going, and Gaslight was the third company that we came to. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Gaslight currently provides us with development guidance and support for our platform, which is written using a mix of programming languages, including Elixir, Phoenix LiveView, and JavaScript. Technically, it’s a web application, and users can access it through a web browser either on a desktop PC or a mobile device. 

We haven’t been working constantly together since we’re taking an Agile development approach. We’re building the app in stages, and we stabilize each stage and get feedback first before building another stage. 

When we engaged Gaslight, we already had a prototype developed in Adobe XD. At that time, we’d also already received feedback about its visual design, concept, and layout, so we had a refined vision of what we needed to build. 

Moreover, we had our own general style guide, but Gaslight built another one when they started working for us. They implemented that in building the whole structure, and we currently use it to keep the entire frontend cohesive. 

What is the team composition?

We’ve done several sprints with Gaslight over the last year and a half or so. As a result, the team has changed a bit through those sprints, depending on our needs. Generally, though, we work with one developer. Sometimes, we work with a designer, but I also do frontend design cleanup tasks with them. 

How did you come to work with Gaslight?

I found Gaslight by way of recommendation from a nonprofit in the Cincinnati area that helps startups. I met with them and told them about my experience with the first two organizations that worked on this project. I told them I needed to find a business that had the skills to do what we were trying to do. They gave me the recommendation to go to Gaslight. 

Outside of the nonprofit, I also received similar recommendations from different people, and that sent me in Gaslight’s direction. 

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve invested less than $300,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together around August 2019, and the relationship is ongoing, although we’re not constantly engaged. If I need anything from them, such as fixing some random bugs that pop up, we mostly work in sprints. In other words, we have no retainer or finite contract. 

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

For a startup like ours, success is difficult to quantify because it’s contingent on many factors outside of Gaslight’s control. As a result, I look to Gaslight to deliver on two things: the build should be stable, and it has to be secure — that’s what they’ve done. 

In every new development sprint, we've successfully tackled every problem we wanted to address, and we get things done. That’s why I keep coming back to Gaslight as opposed to the other two businesses that I had tried.

How did Gaslight perform from a project management standpoint?

In terms of project management, we use two tools. The first one is Discord, which is a chat room similar to Slack, and the second one is Favro, which is essentially a Kanban board. 

Within the Favro board, there are cards that contain tasks, such as bugs to be fixed, new development goals, or some design work. We move those cards around so we know who is doing what, when, and in what order.

When we go through rough patches, Gaslight pulls in more people to make sure we get through. For instance, the web app’s payment feature was a unique build and was at the very core of the customer UX. Given that, Gaslight pulled in more people from their whole team and not just from the core sprint developers. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Gaslight can solve problems — that’s what it all comes down to. Speaking from the experience of somebody who’s been learning the language in which our app is written, there will always be bumps that require some experience to work through. Luckily, Gaslight has the ability to take on any problem, and they’ve helped us navigate through technological solutions. 

They’ve steered us in the right, pragmatic direction that also minimizes our cost. That being said, Gaslight is expensive, and many other options are less expensive, but I personally think that it’s foolish to go with those options. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing really stands out in this area. We can always look back at what has already happened and pull out miscommunication, misunderstandings, and errors. However, none of us are perfect and we’re all learning. After all, Gaslight has been able to work with us flexibly and shift things around. 

Moreover, I have some ideas that I’d love to share with Gaslight in terms of how they can better engage somebody like me. However, I’m not sure if I can talk about those ideas without talking to them first because I have a limited perspective. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

For anybody who’s going to undertake a startup in the technology space, don’t choose an inexpensive provider over a more knowledgeable one. When I think about the amount of money that we lost while working with the first two organizations, I realize that those options were far more expensive. 

Secondly, make sure that you have 2–3 times as much budget as you think you need. I’ve never contemplated spending as much money as we have on this engagement. Yet, the more we got into it, the more I love it, even though we have a long road ahead. 

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a data scientist and project leader at AMEND Consulting. I am involved in leading the launch of a new SaaS initiative we are working on called Batched.

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

AMEND has developed an advanced planning and scheduling optimization algorithm for the label printing industry. We have implemented the solution for a few clients and we wanted to scale this into a more repeatable SaaS offering.

However, before we invested the time and energy into software development, we wanted to validate the market demand for such an offering. In order to effectively sell the product and give prospects an idea of how it would work in practice, we wanted to take out rough algorithm code and turn it into a user interface that prospects would see and test with their own eyes.

We hired Gaslight to help build our product roadmap, our plan for market validation, and to actually develop our prototype. This was part of their Design Sprint offering.

How did you select Gaslight and what were the deciding factors?

We selected Gaslight because of the close business relationship with AMEND and Gaslight. We also felt Gaslight's Design Sprint offering was what we needed. We wanted a finished deliverable, but did not want to spend money on a full software project, just a design prototype.

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

The project was 3 weeks. Week 1 was discovery where we defined the roadmap of the product based on our assessment of customer needs and behaviors. Week 2-3 was development time and constant feedback and iterations on the design.

We focused on a few core features of the product and worked to make those live, interactive tools in a "web app" prototype. We used a combination of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Heroku.

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

Gaslight had 2 designers and 1 development lead.

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

While our sales cycle was interrupted by COVID, we were still able to use the prototype Gaslight used as support during our first sales calls. We were able to land 3 alpha customers in the first year (which is all we wanted).

The prototype has served its purpose for helping demonstrate the use of the product and getting customers excited about onboarding.

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

Gaslight communicated very well during the project. We had daily huddles where we discussed plans and priorities for the day. We ued a combination of Favro for design action items and Discord for communication. The timeline was short, only 3 weeks.

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

They communicated very well. They worked very fast and were able to build the tool in a short amount of time. I was impressed with their ability to understand our actual business problem and not just focus on the design/code.

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

No major feedback on the design sprint. There wasn't much time to deliver more than what they did. They delivered everything in scope. The only thing that might have been more helpful was feedback on the development roadmap and technology stack for the full product.

That was included in scope and it seems like Gaslight tries to focus on a few select software languages. It would have been nice to get a little more into the weeds of the code and pick the right software stack given our actual use case and algorithm.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of an edtech company that's solving the labor issue in education, injecting university students directly into the classroom and building the platform to do that. 

We’re a very early-stage company. We started this project back in October, and we’re full steam ahead. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Gaslight?

As an entrepreneur, I don’t have a technical, design, or programming background. There’s only so far I can take a theory and a model for a platform before I actually have to develop software or a clickable prototype. It can just be an academic study, paper, or thought process or advance the idea into a startup development. 

I got to a point where I can’t take a project any further. That’s where Gaslight came in. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

I hired Gaslight to take my thesis, theory, essays, and research and turn them into an actual clickable prototype. 

They fleshed out what was on paper into an actual platform that I can refine and raise money off of. The team used Adobe to build the prototype. 

For the next steps, I’m securing funding now. They’ll be moderating focus group sessions, and then we’re going straight into software development. 

What is the team composition?

I have two very talented designers that I work directly with. We have a team leader who’s also a designer. We work directly with the CEO, though he doesn’t spend a lot of time with us. He was like the product manager in the prototype development phase.

How did you come to work with Gaslight?

I have some startup experience, so I’m familiar with development businesses. I’ve worked with one company on previous projects. 

I’ve moved home to Cincinnati, and I wanted all operations, team members, and builders to be based here. 

I’d seen some of Gaslight’s work in the years past and made a mental note of them. I knew they were based in Cincinnati, and I wanted to work with a local firm. After talking with them and seeing the value they could offer, it was a very easy decision to hire them. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $20,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

I started the company in July 2020, and we engaged with Gaslight that October. The initial project ended in November, and it was a very efficient two-week engagement. The partnership is ongoing.

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

The prototype is functioning, and it’s clickable. It allows us to present our thesis in a much more observable way to investors and educators who’ll be engaging in focus groups.

We gave a pitch to a couple of our angel investors, and they were very impressed with the work and the way the thesis came into a visual or a clickable prototype. They even said it was easier to envision the concept using this prototype than listening to slides, presentations, theories, and approaches. They were very happy. 

We’ve shown the prototype to some of my advisors who’ve worked with Gaslight, too. The team exceeded expectations and received nothing but good feedback from the people they’ve shown their work to. 

This isn’t a one-off project with them; it’s definitely a long-term partnership. That was the intention from day one. After they’ve done the work they did with the prototype, there’s no reason for me to go anywhere else. 

How did Gaslight perform from a project management standpoint?

The project is a step-by-step process. It’s planned out and efficient. The onboarding process has been great. It took only an hour to explain the concept and research, and I was onboarding them like I was onboarding my own design team.  

The team leader not only helped design the actual prototype, he also helped me take different approaches from different angles. That way, Gaslight was actually helping with the formation and thesis of the actual business. That’s a value-add that I didn’t expect. 

We’ve also had some great conversations with the CEO. He came in key moments and sparked some great conversations. He spent 4–5 hours with us, asking some poignant questions. He made sure I was happy with what was going on with the two team members assigned to us. He was there for the handoff as well.

Phase one was doing the prototype, and he’s currently helping us transition into phase two, where we’re doing focus group sessions. He’ll help us seamlessly transition into phase three, which is the actual software development. He’s an engineer by background, so it’s been a real blessing to have him for the smooth transition to version 1.0. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their communication and dedication to involving the client in the entire process are most impressive. We have daily morning standups where we go over the progress from the previous day, the progress we want to make on this day, and any updates, shifts, or pivots that we want to make. 

We do this daily throughout the entire process, and that’s great because it’s a continuous business, development, and design exercise. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, I don’t know where I can see any gaps or anything like that. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Go into the engagement as well-prepared as you can. Don’t engage a development shop like Gaslight — or any development shop for that matter — until you have the thesis, research, approach, and design from your end, where you can’t take it any further without their help. 

That’s coming from a startup founder and entrepreneur perspective. I know they do big projects with companies who do specific software products. The best time in my experience to engage a company like Gaslight is when you can’t take the project further to approach investors without design and development.