Marzee

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO of Creativ Strategies

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Creativ Strategies is a full-service marketing consultancy and studio for entertainment, media and tech brands.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Development of a full built website
• Development of landing pages for creative
• Maintenance and bug fixes

SOLUTION

How did you find Marzee?

Referral

Why did you select Marzee over others?

• Great culture fit
• quality service

How many teammates from Marzee were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We developed the entire Star Trek site, including a custom design, development of the site, custom modules for view and blog content. In addition, we built landing pages for numerous campaign and even localizing them into several languages for global campaigns.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The client has retained us and Marzee in multiple capacities moving forward. Marzee continues to demonstrate value to the client, aiding our other efforts across multiple game titles. We also built the game's best performing landing pages with an almost 50% download rate and boosted all on site metrics including SEO, load speed, engagement, time on site, and reduced bounce rate.

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

Yes always and very responsive to my needs and client asks.

What was your primary form of communication with Marzee?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

Their quality of development work. I've worked with several developers and Marzee has been the best and most straightforward partner to work with.

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

The most difficult thing is timezone management as they are based in Portugal and us in the states. However, we managed this by having our standing meetings in the morning.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of RealFevr

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

RealFevr is a web3 sports gamified ecosystem.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Increase our team capacity and expertise

SOLUTION

How did you find Marzee?

Online Search

Why did you select Marzee over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Marzee were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Help our team dev team on building an NFTs marketplace, home page, and related drops mechanics features. Help our design team to deliver more components on UI.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• We had really hard deadlines to accomplish and the specification was not 100% closed at the time. Anyway we achieved our goals in terms of product quality and delivery.

What was your primary form of communication with Marzee?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The project management was always very flexible and adapting to our needs. We had hard timelines to achieve but we met them. The resources where always very professional and with good understanding of the technologies we're using.

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

The transparency and easy communication. They are really good at responding to the client's needs and flexible enough to adapt to new scenarios and needs.

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

I think one of the things they can think about is to enlarge a little there competencies in terms of tech stacks that they work with. We had some needs that were not possible to suppress with them. But anyway they cover web development and UI/UX very well.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a charity by the name Malaria No More, located in London. Our goal is to end malaria through public awareness campaigns and advocacy to influence politicians to pledge more money to support the malaria fight. I'm the senior manager of digital marketing, and I help manage the execution of digital campaigns and websites.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Marzee?

We worked with Marzee on a small website for a summit we're putting on. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We initially discussed what we would like with the project manager, and then I put a wireframe together. We then had another meeting with their designer, and he brought the wireframe to life. Later, I was introduced to a broader team to help implement and upload content onto the site after they'd worked on it for a few weeks. They used Figma to design the site from scratch.

What is the team composition?

We had direct contact with the designers.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent £6,000 (approximately $7,000 USD) on the entire project.

How did you come to work with Marzee?

We had worked with them before on a previous project and went with them again after they introduced the idea that the site being serverless would save money in the long run.

What is the status of the engagement?

We began our working relationship in January 2022 and completed the project in April of the same year.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We didn't have any metrics, as we simply needed a website to host our campaign. We weren't measuring traffic that much.

How did Marzee perform from a project management standpoint?

Their team was straightforward to work with and delivered everything on time. They were also very responsive, quick, and reasonably priced. I found them to be great, and they always let me know if they weren't available during a particular time. We communicated through email and Slack.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don't think there was anything that could have been improved for this project. Everything went very well.

Any advice for potential customers?

Provide as much information as possible and know what you want the website to do. It also helps to have clear examples of what you like because Marzee can consistently execute them. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Founder & CEO of educational equity analytics platform

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We consulted Marzee to help us create and arrive at the final scope of our MVP. This entailed benchmarking competitors, identifying our unique value proposition, and arriving at the final list of features, among other deliverables.

SOLUTION

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

Worked with a consultant to identify Marzee as our best choice for development. We scheduled a call with them, and since the first discussion, we knew they were the right partner for us!

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

Project involved a series of bi-weekly discussions between our team and theirs in which we discussed and worked towards key deliverables. Fluid communication and full transparency combined with monitoring and agile methodologies made those meetings super productive.

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

A product head, a tech head, and multiple other developers (both front and backend.)

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Marzee used a variety of modern technical architecture to approach the development of our MVP. Relying on the advantages of existing tools, cloud-based services and API integrations, It enabled a solid technical foundation to test our product in the market and allow for scalability of the product in the future.

This approach produced the following results: - Faster and more flexible platform; - Less maintenance and low to zero costs with hosting; - Improved performance and easy scalability; - More security and reliability. Marzee had high-quality development, communication and security standards throughout all steps of the process.

Not only did they build a super intuitive front end but also They were also super flexible and fast in pivoting from SurveyMonkey to Typeform for added cost savings.

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

Work was timely, efficient and organized based on SCRUM with github, slack and email as major communication channels.

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

Their strong problem-solving and management skills mixed with a focus on security were impressive. Moreover, their best practices and innovative tech stack were commendable.

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

Nope.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

The European Forest Institute is an international organisation established by European States to conduct research and provide policy support on issues related to forests.

I'm the communication officer in charge on the development and maintenance of the website. I am part of the Ministerial Conference on Protection of the European Forest, Forest Europe, team.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Marzee Labs?

We wanted to restructure content and give a fresh look&feel. Amongst other, the following needed to be improved:

• Menus
• Navigation with clear pathways according to 4 types of audiences
• Article formats including text, images
• Social media cards
• Mobile responsiveness of tables/charts, and image alignment
• Event module

What were your goals for this project?

We needed to have clear visitor flows that enable users to find the most relevant information according to their profile.

SOLUTION

How did you select Marzee Labs?

We initially run an UX/UI analysis with them, and we were happy with their work and decided to continue to the design and implementation of their recommendations

Describe the project in detail.

The content was already there, so the main idea was to work on a theme that could adjust to this and create some content types for the new pages. I was the project lead and liaised with the rest of the web user group at EFI.

We did a few rounds of feedback with the whole team and pandemic aside, we were able to negotiate a final look. The new design was based on a contemporary take on the corporate identity launched in 2018.

What was the team composition?

We had a project manager (Ana), a designer (Pedro), a Drupal backend expert (Luis) and a tech QA (Peter).

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We are still in the process of gathering web analytics to see the actual change, given that the implementation just finished in December. There was a round of website presentations in all the different offices (Finland, Germany, Spain, Malaysia) prior to the official launch. Everybody at EFI has given very good feedback about the new look&feel.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Communication was very fluid. We schedule meetings on the spot for specific issues and to handle them faster. We conducted several feedback sessions and a training session towards the final stag eof implementation. After the initial implementation, we used GitHub to keep track of bugs and enhancements.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I think the fact they don't need a physical space to run and everything is under control and on time is impressive. This probably reflects on their overall flexibility and willingness to do a good job.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I had Friday update meetings with the project manager, however despite of GitHub, during the rest of the week it was difficult to track what everybody was doing. Although this may be just my personal management style, I felt a little lost.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a biomedical research laboratory focussing on understanding the role of protein aggregation in human diseases such as Alzheimers’ or other dementias. Our lab brings together about twenty researchers from bioinformatics, biophysics and cell biology backgrounds. We also produce scientific software as part of our efforts. I am a senior scientist at the Switch laboratory.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We asked Marzee to solve several problems for us: we wanted to move two existing websites to a new host, rebuild our laboratory’s existing website that was based on an outdated architecture, and set up a new website for a recently created bioinformatics tool.

Our goals were making bioinformatics tools publicly available, increasing visibility of our work and preventing that our laboratory website become obsolete. In the case of the laboratory website, we also wanted an updated and more appealing look for the website.

SOLUTION

How did you select Marzee Labs and what were the deciding factors?

We worked with Marzee labs in the past and we were satisfied with the results, but there was a personal connection, as well, since one of the founders used to be a member of the Switch lab.

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

My supervisor explained our goals to Marzee and then he handed most of the details over to our lab manager, one of my colleagues and myself (depending which the part of the project it was). Marzee used Netlify to set up the basic structure of the websites and involved us in putting content in.

They transferred some of the content directly and they gave us access to the content manager of the website in preparation to change the content we wanted to update and we also could make modifications to the website structure (like adding new pages). It was important to us that we could add or modify content later on after the website became live without their help.

They developed a new logos for the lab and our bioinformatics tools, and made a new colour scheme for the laboratory website. They had great training material explaining what and how we can do and they were very patient if we had questions. They addressed our requests for changes until they achieved a look for the website we were happy with.

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

We were in contact with the head of business. She gave us regular updates on what they have done and relayed our requests to the developers. For some details we were directly communicating with one of the developers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have new websites up and running that are stable, look good, and deliver the functionality we require.

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

Very smooth. We had a Google Meet teleconference with the head of business and a web designer from the Marzee side and our lab manager and myself from our side at the beginning of the project. We have two other video calls with the business developers thereafter, but we mostly communicated via email with the head of business. The information was always transferred to the developers because we saw the results in the website. Despite Covid19, things went at a good rate.

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

I have never worked with any other company before therefore I cannot compare them with other web developer companies. What impressed me mostly how patient they were with us, because we didn’t know much about developing websites, and sometimes we had to get internal alignment before we could tell them what exactly we would like them to do. Their head of business is a fantastic communicator.

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

A better internet connection for teleconferences!

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Founder at menos hub menos hub is a non-profit with the mission of simplifying micro-business creation to allow anyone to create their own opoortunities.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Marzee Labs?

Build a plataform to showcase smallbusiness that had an adapted product/service during covid times

What were your goals for this project?

A functional platform that could allow people to research small businesses by type and products at the same time that would allow small businesses to enroll and register as members

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

Willing to collaborate and speed

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Web plataform development

What was the team composition?

Programmers, designers and an account manager

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

After 3 months we have almost 500 businesses registered on the platform, with good usability and no technical problems.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The communication was good and clear and the timmings were always set beforehand and agreed upon

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The complete response provided - web development, UX, design and an account manager to follow the proccess

Are there any areas for improvement?

The result was really great and I highly recommend. The team is small and naturally the timings of the development set in the beginning is not always exactly how you wanted but we always discussed it and reached a middle ground

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the design lead for a health innovation company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Marzee Labs?

We needed to create our website. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They provided frontend development services using a Static Site Generator stack. We had the design and all of the specifications ready for them. They only had to develop the interface of the website. They also helped with some backend features as well.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 4-5 people from their team.

How much have you invested with them?    

We’ve invested $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in December 2019, and we wrapped up in April 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

 They delivered on time and their designs were pixel perfect. We’re very happy with them.

How did Marzee Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

It was easy for our team to work with them. They created a Slack channel just for us and we also communicated via email. They’re always available for anything we need.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They delivered everything correctly, which means we don’t have to review their work too. It was exactly like the design we gave them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, we’re very happy with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

It should be easy to work with them if you have your specifications ready.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We connect brands and consumers through influencer marketing, music, videos, streaming tv, and feature films. We integrate brands into those entertainment properties. I'm the senior marketing manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Marzee Labs?

We recently launched a proprietary AI product that helps us find the best entertainment vehicles for our clients. We needed to redesign and restyle our website to reflect the tech theme that now runs through our brand. We were unhappy with our previous agency, and we wanted to work with a new contractor.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with a creative agency to set all the layouts and designs. Once those designs were finalized and approved by our executives, Marzee Labs digitized everything and created the website. We liked the flexibility and the functionality available in WordPress, so they built our sites in it.

What is the team composition?

There was one lead contact and two frontend developers.

How did you come to work with Marzee Labs?

They worked for us as a frontend developer on a previous project. They came to us through a recommendation from our head of technology. We did do an RFP for this project, but a lot of the agencies we work with come to us through referrals.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent around $50,000 for two site development projects, a site optimization project, and maintenance contracts.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in July 2018, and the largest release was in January 2019. We still collaborate with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They completed a major project within two months. That can often be a nightmare, but they really rose to the task. They created custom modules on the backend that we can repurpose for many different pages and scenarios, which are very helpful.

How did Marzee Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

We gave them challenging deadlines within the December holidays, but they hit all the milestones. We were in constant, daily contact, and they did very well.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their competency is very good, and all of their designs and code are tight, clean, and easy to understand. Even though we were separated by several time zones, they contacted us every day. They were straightforward and easy to work with.

Are there any areas they could improve?

We had to work out some bugs with a form they built, and their QA could be a little better. I'm still very happy with their service.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be clear and concise about your objectives and your desired deliverables. If you're communicative, you will get a good result.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of the digital team at ARTE, a French-German publicly-funded TV company. My team is in charge of making sure that our company’s video content is available on both desktop and mobile devices.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Marzee Labs?

We needed an expert to help us with our Drupal systems.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Over several years, they’ve worked on our four main websites that were built using PHP and Drupal. More recently, they’ve been using React and WordPress. We explained our functional needs for each of the websites, initially meeting them in-person to answer all their questions. They got to know us pretty well after some time, so we didn’t need to meet in person anymore. We described the required functionality of our end-result during those meetings, and they filled all the gaps with their technical staff.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with Peter (Founder and Lead Drupal Architect, Marzee Labs), João (Frontend Developer, Marzee Labs), another frontend developer, and a web designer. There were 7–8 people involved in total. We’ve also been in touch with a success manager, who was mainly in charge of making sure we had everything we needed, the budget, and other items. We were in contact almost daily using Slack and if required, we’d also have weekly calls to make sure everything was alright, and there weren’t any misunderstandings.

How did you come to work with Marzee Labs?

We have a strict selection process, by which we publish requests for proposals and then make a selection. As we’re publicly funded, pricing is very important and takes up 40% of the final score. The remaining 60% of our consideration is about the technical support. Marzee Labs was both the cheapest and the best on the technical aspect.

How much have you invested with them?

It’s reached several hundreds of thousands of euros.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Marzee Labs 6–7 years ago. Our latest project ran between January 2017–July 2019.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We’ve been able to participate in some open-source projects with them, which has given us a good overview on how the space works as well as a presence in those communities. On the project side, one of our websites has a lot of live streaming concerts, and we’ve had some really big success thanks to their work. We’ve been able to successfully livestream some pretty big concerts.

How did Marzee Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

They were more on the agile side in this respect, and they taught us some nice things about scrum. They’re quite cutting-edge.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to always find new talents and recruit some good developers impressed me.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I couldn’t say anything for now.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I recommend having a chat with Peter, then clients will be convinced pretty quickly.