Lexis Solutions

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the managing partner of Kreston Bulmar - an accounting and business consulting company that I started 25 years ago.

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

We greatly value the knowledge we have accumulated in the company for the past 25 years and we have been dedicating time for knowledge sharing every month for the past few years. This practices get us great results and we wanted to bring it to the next level.

We wanted to create a platform in which everybody in the company authors documents which are linked to articles of legal acts and that everybody in the company can access. This way the employees at Kreston Bulmar can solve their everyday challenges quicker and grow faster as professionals.

From the very start on we realized this is a product we can sell to other professionals and we have taken many steps to make BALANS.bg into a purchasable service.

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

Lexis Solutions was brought to our attention by a close friend. By that time we had already received a proposition from another company yet we took the time and met with Emil and Milush from Lexis Solutions.

During our first meeting we clicked and spent the next 2 weeks in full-day brainstorms that lead to a new, broadened vision of what balans.bg should look like. Lexis Solutions proved to be not only executers, but partners that could give ideas and enrich the product. You cannot buy this attitude so even before receiving a competitive pricing we had stopped onto them.

Describe the engagement and overall scope of work in detail, including the stages of the partnership and any software or documents used.

balans.bg proved to be a very dynamic project. The initial specification was created after the first 2 weeks of non-stop meetings, discussions and brainstorming were over. We started the implementation phase right after that and work in milestones until this day. We would meet 2-3 times per week and discuss how the project is progressing and also discuss any ideas that may have came up. We do make little changes often and Emil have proven very flexible in implementing them.

Describe their billing or cost structure.

We agree on milestones and a time frame in which the features of the milestone should be ready. Payments are made monthly depending on how much hours they have worked.

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

We work with 3 people - 1 full-time, 1 part-time and 1 that is currently part-time but was full-time for the bigger part of the project.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the engagement or general feedback about the services?

The project is unique with nothing of the sort on the market. We did not believe it could be done as we imagined it - with all the complexity of links between resources and the actual parsing of all those different types of legal acts. But we did it and that's what's most impressive. The general feedback would be that Emil, Milush and Stefan made what seemed impossible possible.

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

We are in a non-stop communication with Emil. We meet every other day in person and exchange emails for weekly updates and ongoing questions. Emil is responsible for the whole system and I synchronize my expectations of when milestones will be ready with him.

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

As I already described Lexis Solutions completed a project that we thought improbable to successfully implement. Rather that focusing on the problems they thought of solutions and made it happen. That being said their availability and willingness to communicate are also at the highest levels we have seen.

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

A few times milestones were postponed due to over-communication. This happened as new features were added to the milestones on-the-go. It is sometimes better to call new implementations off so we go on schedule. It would be OK if in these situations Emil prioritizes the current tasks and leave the new features for the next milestone.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a shareholder and managing director. We deliver custom software solutions to clients in Europe and the Middle East and specialize in the areas of marketing, information security and healthcare.

For what projects/services did your company hire Lexis Solutions LTD, and what were your goals?

Our goal was to create a software application for customer feedback analysis and more specifically text and sentiment analysis. We hired Lexis Solutions to develop the application end to end for the requirements gathering to delivery and deployment.

The business value of the application is the extraction of topics and improvement areas, sentiment and emotion out of text messages, posts on social media and verbatims from customer satisfaction surveys to provide an indication on how our customers' products and services are being perceived and what the end customer feedback or pain points are.

How did you select Lexis Solutions LTD and what were the deciding factors?

We have reached out to a variety of companies we've met before. Lexis Solutions pitched to the company in the past. We went through our due diligence and looked at cost-effectiveness and how together we would work well.

Then we did a technical review of the engineers themselves to ensure that our technical specifications can be met. They gave us a really great impression of being professional and thorough.

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

We work in 2-week sprints, so there is no initial full project scope but broadly speaking the scope of the work was to collect requirements together with our team, describe them in user stories and estimate them, prioritize and plan each sprint accordingly.

There were also at certain stages customer releases with major functionalities and these milestones were met on time. The scope of the work included also testing, Dev Ops, integration and deployment. After the final stages of the product are released Lexis will also support the application through an SLA with us.

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

We worked with four developers in total. Two of them were engaged with the front-end work, one with the backend and another one who was more focused on building the API.

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

We partner closely with Lexis Solutions, whose team members support the members of our team. They easily plugged into our meeting rhythm and communication process quickly, so they really felt like a part of the team. They worked hard if we had deadlines to reach in their iterative process.

They staffed us with the right people at the right times. When new people were introduced to the development, it was always a seamless transition. Generally, we operate in sprints, and Lexis Solutions team members contribute to the deliverables as any other team member would.

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

We are pleased with this aspect. We organized weekly calls where the entire project team was present to review the project and discuss all design elements and their implications on the development. Then, we mostly used Slack as a day-to-day channel. The CEO also checked in on us periodically to make sure everything was going well.

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

Lexis Solutions takes care of the developers. They invoke the feeling of loving what they're doing. The developers are not only creative but motivated. Nothing was ever too much trouble, and they were never too busy, despite increasing as a company. Their team was available readily.

The four people that worked on the project were very dedicated. If a particular skill was needed on a project, they could find someone to do it within two weeks. We could feel that they knew the work inside and out.

They certainly weren’t spread too thin on too many projects, and that positively impacted the overall quality of the deliverable. They offered not only the best quality but also the best communication.

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

I don't have a particular major improvement point to mention here. Of course there are always ways a collaboration can be improved. In this particular project we could have done more intermediate releases to our customers to get feedback faster on new development.

Although the overhead was in the end much less then we expected such an approach would have made our progress somewhat faster. This would have benefitted the project overall but wasn't the sole responsibility of Lexis.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I co-own an umbrella company that builds online businesses, predominantly in the SaaS & affiliate space.

For what projects/services did your company hire Lexis Solutions LTD, and what were your goals?

For one of our projects we wanted to test a concept that is quite established in the US (affiliate website focussed on curation of funny/original/humorous products and gadgets) and see whether or not this is something that could also work in Germany. In addition,

I was very keen on testing out a new headless CMS infrastructure, so we thought this is a low-risk project with which to gain better understanding of a (to us) new tech stack for future projects down the road.

How did you select Lexis Solutions LTD and what were the deciding factors?

I screened numerous candidates on freelancer marketplaces (fiverr and upwork) and conducted interviews with a few select ones. Top of the list in terms of deciding whom to trust was 1) smarts & fast understanding and 2) communication. Generally, I don't really mind if a developer is not a 10 year veteran for certain programming languages.

More important to me is the willingness to learn fast, execute cleanly and communicate concisely. I do want to emphasize "communication skills", because this is somewhat of rare trait amongst great developers, and I feel like I really hit a home run with Bilyal/ Lexis Solutions.

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

We provided Lexis Solutions with 90% ready designs in Figma and I started work on how to best model the content in Contentful (headless CMS) so that we could hit the ground running. Having never worked with Contentful, though, Bilyal supported in developing a streamlined yet flexible content model structure. We then uploaded a 50 or so dummy products so that we could test categorization, filters, pagination, lists, etc.

Once the groundwork was in place, it was all about execution, and Bilyal was very fast in developing a 80%+ version of the website using a GatsbyJS/ React/ Contentful stack. We fine-tuned thereafter and added a number of additional requirements (such as cookie notifications, analytics, custom mailchimp integration, social sharing, etc).

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

I worked exclusively with Bilyal Mestanov, who I believe is a co-founder of Lexis Solutions.

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

Bilyal did a great job - the website looks fantastic and has been up and running for weeks without issues or bugs. Now it's up to my team to add content to the site and generate some traffic (mostly social) in the upcoming months. More importantly, we're partnering with Lexis Solutions on further projects using same tech stack, e.g. in building a headless e-commerce store.

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

We mostly used Trello to coordinate tasks - if there were any follow-up questions we'd discuss via whatapp or a quick call. As I said earlier, communication was very smooth and efficient, and we managed to execute the project without any delays to our planned timelines.

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

While I have some limited experience with web development, I am still dependent on developers' clear communication along the way so that projects are successful and we're not developing a product in silos/ in parallel (which has happened in the past). With Bilyal, I feel that we were aligned at all times, and that saved us weeks/months in development work. Also, they were approachable and provided quick feedback at all times which we certainly didn't expect.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

TimeZone (Europe) Ltd. is building a new social media platform for web, Android, and iOS devices. I’m one of the CIOs of the company. The platform combines businesses and private users in a location-based way, without any direct advertising to private people.

What challenge were you trying to address with Lexis Solutions?

We hired them to work on our website, mostly in terms of the backend.

What was the scope of their involvement?

The iOS app was done by other developers, but it uses the same backend. Lexis Solutions has mainly worked on the backend and the web part. They built the frontend of the website with React, and the servers mostly use Node.js. It uses Google Firebase for the chatting tool and has multiple security features, push notifications, and so on.

What is the team composition?

Deyan (Co-Founder, Lexis Solutions) and Milush (Co-Founder, Lexis Solutions) are our two main contacts. They set up everything, but I don’t know how many others are used in the backend.

How did you come to work with Lexis Solutions?

We first started with other companies but have been working with Lexis Solutions for the last two years. That meant starting anew because everything had become a complete mess. We found Lexi Solutions through Upwork and after some initial contact, we began to work together.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $25,000–$30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in September 2018, and the work is ongoing. The initial setup is almost done, but it will need to be maintained.

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

We’ve tested the platform, and it’s working well. The server seems to be the correct size, setup, and security.

How did Lexis Solutions perform from a project management standpoint?

We’ve mainly had Skype conversations and I haven’t had any issues with them. If I ask them to do something, they always answer within two hours and give me an estimate of how long it will take. The deadlines are always met.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re very flexible, and they always provide real quality. So far, Lexis Solutions hasn’t provided us any bad work. They test everything before delivering it, which is outstanding.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing that really comes to mind. There has been some feedback from our side during the last two years, but they always took it into consideration.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

Be open and tell Lexis Solutions what you want. We have open discussions and state exactly what we want, and they give it to us. They determined what the time and budget were at the beginning and never charged us if we went over the timeline.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of an early stage startup. We have around 10 employees and develop a digital mental training solution for other companies. I oversee the development of our core product.

For what projects/services did your company hire Lexis Solutions LTD?

We needed additional devlopment power.

What were your goals for this project?

We needed new features implemented. Especially some sort of graphics-heavy gamification system on the frontend / app side.

How did you select Lexis Solutions LTD?

We worked tightly together. 1-2 of their best engineers joined our team as a full-time member.

Describe the project in detail.

Lexis soultions were involved in most steps along the process. They communicated well with product development, design and tech and added valuable feedback and work.

What was the team composition?

Our team consisted of 3 designers 1 product manager and 2 developers + Lexis Solutions

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The features were completed in time and satisfactory.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Very effective.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The communication was frequent and direct. They were very professional.

Are there any areas for improvement?

no