Lion Interactive

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We had an idea of what we wanted the brand to be about and an idea of what we wanted to say on our website, but we used LION in a consultative manner to help us make the brand more professional. We had a logo, but they talked to us about colors, fonts, white space – all that design insight that helped us appear to be a more professional brand on the Internet. It started with a consultative phase where they talked to us a lot about the persona of our customer, talked about the market that we want to serve, helped us flesh out how the brand would work on the Internet, and then they actually went ahead and built our home page. It's built in WordPress. They offered some ideas about marketing but, at the end of the day, I don't believe that's their core business. It's not what they bill themselves as.

How did you come to work with LION Interactive?

I think it was a Google search for agencies in the Bay Area. I started in San Francisco and then broadened our search to the Bay Area and even Sacramento. At the end of the day, I had a guy in Sacramento who had frankly unbelievably a great price, but maybe too low. Most of the agencies in San Francisco that seemed qualified.

A year and a half ago [January 2015] when we engaged with LION, it was hard to get people in San Francisco to return your call, and the ones that we did get prices from were quite a bit higher. I found them to be quite honestly a nice middle ground. The guy in Sacramento had all the stuff offshore. He seemed like a reasonable guy, but I wanted a little bit more hands on where I could go in and meet with the designers, and that's what we found with LION.

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

We've got different projects with them. The first was just the web page build out. That's in the $10,000 to $50,000 range. Then, we hired them later on for help with UX/UI [user experience/user interface] design for our actual product – for our application. Again, that was between $10,000 and $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We originally engaged with them in January 2015. It was a month or two of engagement for the brand consulting about what are you trying to say, to whom are you trying to say it, and showing us ideas. The execution then took another two to three months. All in, I would say it was less than six months – in the four to six months range from initial contact through execution.