Metastate

Please describe your company and your position there.

Mitter.io is a developer tools company based out of Bengaluru, India, providing easy to use Chat APIs for developers to consume and build applications and services around IP messaging.

I, Sharath Ramesh Iyengar, Co-founder, and Business Development Lead was primarily responsible for handling client projects. As we were an early-stage startup wrt this idea, I also looked into all support functions of the company including but not limited to Product design inputs, finances, hiring, contracting, etc.

For what projects/services did your company hire Metastate?

Situation As mentioned in the earlier section we were an early-stage startup of fewer than 10 employees and weren't looking to hire a full-time designer. We had built a pretty good dashboard which would be the primary interface for our users (developers) to use while working with the Mitter.io Chat APIs.

Challenge/ Opportunity This dashboard needed not just a cleanup but a UI UX overhaul from the basic barebones version the engineering team had cooked up to a professional-looking usable interface at par with the other players in the market to match with basic industry expectations from a dashboard.

For this job, through a reference, we came in touch with Jay Sahitya and his team.

What were your goals for this project?

Note: We started work on the dashboard project but ended up working on 1 more as mentioned above in the first section.

Each of the project’s goals is mentioned below Mitter Dashboard At least try to offer industry-standard wrt UI/ UX of the dashboard if not all features, as usability was the key -- fear of bounce on login/ repeated usage of the dashboard.

Mitter Website Professional industry-standard website to improve the trustworthiness of an unknown brand and its unique offering in a decently competitive market landscape.

How did you select Metastate?

We primarily reached out to our first circles for references specifically looking for UI/UX experts. After going through 2-3 potential teams to partner with we went ahead with Metastate.

I think within the first 2 interactions, both Rohan, Co-founder, and Engineering Lead and I were super impressed with Jay and his team. 2 cents about Jay, Co-founder of Metastate, being an engineer and worked in the IT industry for a short stint he understood the requirements from the Get-Go.

It wasn't just about understanding requirements but also the effort Metastate invested with our team to understand the details, willingness to hear our ideas out, and not just use acronyms or industry jargon saying this is how it's done today, etc, never.

They actually shared their knowledge about how we should approach this together and this showed their capacity in breaking down complex problems into simple chunks to solve them effectively.

Describe the project in detail.

Mitter Dashboard A clean, minimalistic design, simplifying complex user flows and merge certain existing ones to bring in uniformity across the platform. This needed to be done keeping in mind the existing work in terms of the foundational engineering effort invested and reduce the additional engineering man-hours needed.

Mitter Website Bold yet minimalistic design with a lot of emphasis on the landing page accentuated using the brand colors along with code samples/ refs to capture the user’s attention to the power of Mitter’s offering In addition, visuals (illustrations) to explain the offering in detail including but not limited to a separate features webpage.

They provided additional support and delivered more than what was discussed as discussed mutually to complete the project.

What was the team composition?

Totally, there were 3 people who interacted with Metastate, directly or indirectly. Sharath -- Projects’ Lead from Mitter.io Rohan -- Engineering lead of Mitter.io Aniket -- Brand and Communications lead From Metastate, it was primarily the Co-founder Jay who worked with us personally and Reshma who coordinated the project

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

The engagement was definitely successful even though it was on very short notice in general. The outcome of this exercise was that we were able to signup a 500 fortune company's India division for a project $50000 upwards.

The overall positioning we were able to achieve with the combined project/s delivered helped us create a strong trustworthy brand image and increase usability internally ( Our engineers were the first ones to use the dashboard every day) and externally.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

This was definitely huge learning for a small company like us who are completely engrossed in what we were building and not just being tech engineering heavy but believe in structured processing using all of the tooling available.

Invision and sketch were used for sharing the design prototypes, workflows, and even for visualization. It was further used by the front-end team for the implementation of the dashboard and the website.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The passion to create something of value and not just deliver because they have to and it's a project. It was a lot more and the trust we built with Jay and his team go beyond just work today which is a key to long sustained business growth.

The bottom line, they didn't just deliver but delivered in the right spirit, quality, and commitment by owning the work.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I believe if they can get a few more folks with a varied skill set but maintain the culture, they could go really far and this would assist working with startups and established companies as requirements in today's dynamic world are every changing/ updating.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company is an early stage fintech startup aiming to solve the liquidity problem based out of Bangalore, India. We are currently in stealth mode and are in the process of launching an alpha version. I am the COO and one of the co-founder.

For what projects/services did your company hire Metastate?

We hired Metastate for three projects:

1. Design, UI and UX of our main website to detail our product and value proposition to our customers
2. Design, UI and UX of our on-boarding platform to on-board the users of our platform
3. Design, UI and UX of our platform which had several components - Dashboards, transaction pages, status pages, emails, notifications and auto triggers to name a few.

All of these were designed for different types of user personas

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals of the project were:

1. On time delivery of the project
2. A clean and minimal UI/UX for our platform users where every single journey point was well thought out and optimised

How did you select Metastate?

When we decided to look for an external agency to help us with our project we did extensive research on the players. After zeroing in on 1-2 prospects the following steps were taken in choosing Metastate:

1. Call with the Founder and project lead to understand their process
2. Evaluated their existing work
3. We also loved the fact that Metastate offered a free 1 week sprint to where they spent considerable amount of time with us to understand the product and come up with initial designs and thought processes at no cost to us
4. As both teams were working remotely, Metastate very clearly laid out the plan and tools that will be used to deliver this project on time.

Describe the project in detail.

Since we are in stealth mode we will not be able to divulge too many details about the project. We are building a fintech platform in India which is addressing a pressing need of liquidity issues for various stakeholders.

The platform has several components to it - On-boarding, KYC, documentation management, financial transaction management, dashboards etc. Metastate had a very clear product mindset and we were running two week sprints.

Jay was the main point of contact and he made sure that the entire process was smooth and the project was delivered on-time. Metastate had to deliver design, UI and UX of the entire platform and website.

What was the team composition?

A product manager/owner from Metastate with analysts, designers etc worked on the project.

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

1. https://invis.io/HVUCRQG2WEU
2. https://invis.io/YSVJRVU9Z6R
3. https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_kwuT294=/
4. https://loagesteam.atlassian.net/l/c/wavDqMMH

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

On a scale of 1-5 I can say it was a 5. The tools chosen by Metastate and the process was top notch and it made sure we had a smooth journey right from start to finish

What did you find most impressive about this company?

1. The way they think and imagine the product by putting themselves in the users shoes. Very forward thinking and very few companies among all my research that follow google’s design ideologies
2. The amount of hand holding or knowledge transfer required about the product was minimal. Least amount of time spent on this exercise
3. Small team and they were able to deliver a product at a significantly lower cost and quicker turnaround times than established companies with more resources and bandwidth

Are there any areas for improvement?

We had a very pleasant experience and no major areas of improvement. Small issues but those are prevalent with any small team and will be fixed as they grow.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I head the marketing team at Ken42, an edtech startup, India's first system for education design and management. (SEDM)

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

To create a website to introduce a tech platform and services poised to disrupt education.

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

We found them to be responsive and truly interested. They worked like an internal team.

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

Building a responsive website with a cutting edge user experience.

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

Jay and Reshma Basthi worked directly with us.

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

We love the site design and experience. It led to many conversions from our campaigns.

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

They use notion and slack to keep track of the project and communicate with the Ken42 team.

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

Design Approachability Customer support

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

Shorter timelines Faster turnaround