NaNLABS

BACKGROUND

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

• Build the engine of the jobs marketplace
• Create both the Candidate and Company application
• Enable video interview functionality with candidate feedback.

SOLUTION

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Technical profeciency

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

BACKGROUND

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

• Efficient building from wireframe to MVP
• Security and privacy sensitive SaaS business and technical requirements
• Easy to use and adapt environment with a highly invested and engaged team

SOLUTION

• Pricing fits our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

BACKGROUND

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

• Back-end development and API integrations
• Front-end development
• Redesign & branding refresh
• Implement Agile practices
• Architectural improvements

SOLUTION

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

• Product robustness: NaNLABS worked closely with us to enhance the robustness of our product. Through their expertise, they ensured that "The Hub" could handle the increased demands and complexities of enterprise clients.
• Infrastructure and deployment: NaNLABS collaborated with us to streamline our cloud infrastructure and deployment processes. This optimization was essential in ensuring the seamless performance and reliability of our product, particularly in enterprise environments.
• Security enhancements: security assessments were conducted to fortify the product's defenses, a critical factor for gaining the trust of enterprise clients. NaNLABS played a pivotal role in strengthening our security measures.
• Agile methodology implementation: they also introduced an Agile organizational structure, enabling us to work with greater speed and efficiency. This organizational shift facilitated faster development and delivery of features and improvements.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

• Swift transition: NaNLABS facilitated a seamless transition within just one month. They efficiently compiled crucial documentation and knowledge from the previous provider.
• Product stability: the bug-fixing time was reduced by nearly 80% and monthly deployments were doubled, ensuring a more stable product.
• Efficiency: we increased our development efficiency through the implementation of the Agile practices that encompassed sprints, retrospectives and Scrum dashboards, among others.
• Front-end enhancement: NaNLABS successfully updated the front-end to match our new branding requirements, that not only improved the look&feel of our solution but also enhanced the user experience.
• Process automation: they automated tasks like deployments and improved communication between their team and our team. This gave us time back to focus on the business aspect of Amalgam.

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the SVP Engineering of Artifact Uprising

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Artifact Uprising enables people to give permanence to the moments that matter with thoughtfully sourced photo books, prints, and decor through a custom authoring and configuration editing experience.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Gain additional skilled resources to finish development of a large rewrite without expanding FTEs

SOLUTION

How did you find NaNLABS?

Tech leadership worked with NaNLABS at former company

Why did you select NaNLABS over others?

• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me

How many teammates from NaNLABS were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We endeavored on rewriting our entire editing platform from the ground up. This involved going from a brittle, older react app with little to no test coverage and antiquated component structure to a modern TypeScript React application but with extensibility, feature iteration, and test coverage in mind. The new application was built to be able to release individual products and product lines on to the new experience to test and iterate to ensure little to no negative impact. 

As a result, we released functionality in incremental stages, first starting with our frames product offerings in September of 2021, a second milestone in January of 2022 releasing the prints offerings, October 2022 released a majority of the book offerings, and currently in process of releasing the remainder of our book offerings in August of 2023.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Releasing our product offerings in totality on the new platform, building a firm foundation to be able to test and iterate on, and ensuring that the customer order rate is at or above the previous version of the editing experience.

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

For most of the project, we ran a traditional scrum process of two week sprints. The NaNLABS developers participated in all of the standard ceremonies and were responsible for delivering within the standard sprint. Additionally, we shifted to a milestone-based process where we targeted a single date for a large amount of functionality. I was incredibly impressed with their responsiveness and the efforts they put into hitting the tight deadline.

What was your primary form of communication with NaNLABS?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

I've been very impressed with the individual engineers and their commitment to understanding the needs and desires of the project as a whole. They all show a desire to build quality solutions, not just execute the work.

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

We worked with an engineer who was not actually an internal employee of NaNLABS, but a subcontractor. That experience did not go well and was a little surprising, given the positive experience with a majority of the rest of the team.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Product of INE

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

IT Training in the Cyber Security, Networking and Cloud space

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Analysis of a Data Engineering solution
• Alternatives to implement
• Implementation details (in depth) of the chosen solution

SOLUTION

How did you find NaNLABS?

Referral

Why did you select NaNLABS over others?

High ratings, Referred to me

What was the size of NaNLABS’s team?

2-5 Employees

What was your primary form of communication with NaNLABS?

Virtual Meeting, Email or Messaging App

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

We were looking for a partner with experience in Data Engineering to collaborate with us on developing a brand new analytics system for INE’s platform. The main challenge was to design an analytics system able to collect, store and analyze a high amount of data.

Thousands of users log into the platform simultaneously and millions of events occur every day so we had to consider the volume of data. In the meantime, the new analytics system had to be scalable and cost-efficient. NaNLABS’ team managed to deliver viable solutions to overcome these challenges.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Concurrent users querying our analytics dashboards
• Response time for default chart in the order of milliseconds (using caching or other mechanisms)
• Response for custom charts and dashboards in the order of seconds
• Adaptability of the infrastructure to be queried by our APIs and BI tools (AWS Quicksight)

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

The NaNLABS team worked closely with us to define the project goals and our requirements. They consistently prioritized our satisfaction and feedback to ensure that the end result met our expectations

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

The team maintained open communication and collaboration with us, working closely and providing rapid responses

Are there any areas for improvement or something {provider_name} could have done differently?

Not really. I wish I could have continued working with them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder of Popr.ai

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Popr.ai is a tool to add motion to messages to help earn a response in noisy inboxes.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Design and develop our MVP

SOLUTION

How did you find NaNLABS?

Online Search, Clutch Site

Why did you select NaNLABS over others?

High ratings, Close to my geographic location, Good value for cost, Company values aligned

What was the size of NaNLABS’s team?

2-5 Employees

What was your primary form of communication with NaNLABS?

Virtual Meeting, Email or Messaging App

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

I needed a solution that made it easy for users to be able to create personalized, animated slideshows. Each slideshow should contain text based slides with unique personalization variables. I was looking for a capable technology partner that could help us design, build, and launch the product to market.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• We had a clearly defined scope and timeline established.

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

The NaNLABS team used Agile practices. They worked in sprints and delivered working software from the get-go. I could give them feedback on product design definitions, early versions of the product, and test integrations.

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

NaNLABS struck a balance between challenging me and ensuring that the solution we were arriving at was something they could deliver—not being the ‘yes-man’ and not the ‘no-man’ either.

Are there any areas for improvement or something {provider_name} could have done differently?

They delivered on the scope of the project in a timely manner. We are very happy.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the founder CTO/CPO of WootCloud Inc, an IoT Security company. WootCloud is an emerging innovator in enterprise IoT device security.

In 2016, the startup launched an innovative IoT risk assessment platform able to uncover all types of unmanaged devices by scanning both the radio and network spectrum to provide critical context about each device.Thus, the platform analyzes a large amount of data in order to detect, prevent but also remediate security issues.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We wanted to improve how large enterprise organizations handle their network security and specifically IoT security. We had a small team and a very complex and ambitious roadmap ahead.

So we were looking for a reliable software development partner that could help us along the way and shape the engineering together with our internal team. We needed help with front-end UI ( both the client and server) and back-end cloud development , and cloud infrastructure.

SOLUTION

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

One of our principal engineers has worked with NaNLABS in the past and he strongly recommended them to help us build and scale our platform.

The salient reasons are

• They have experience working in the CyberSecurity space and they were a very technically sharp team.
• Our team had prior great experience working with this vendor
• The leadership is strongly technical and engineering-driven which led them to give us the right engineering talent to design and develop.
• Very good support and the team is always ready to help

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

We've worked together for 4+ years, they were instrumental in several initiatives inside our project. They have even led some of these: Revamped the entire UI using ReactJS and advanced charting libraries.

Improved our back-end services to support bigger customers and larger data processing. Using techs like Python, AWS Lambda, Elasticsearch, Kafka Automate manual work and set up CI/CD mechanisms.

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

There were 4 main developers working on the project with the supervision of a project manager and a principal engineer. They brought consultants on for business-critical tasks. Over the years, there were different people that worked on the project. They have always had strong technical talent, motivation and good communication skills. .

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Consistent results, great code and timely release of our product to customer.
• Making the team better equipped to experiment with features and validate them with customers.
• Development velocity was increased by 4x thanks to the additional manpower, agile organization, and automated processes.
• Our deployment times were reduced by 3x.

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

They brought an Agile organization that worked great with our internal processes. The NaNLABS team was very responsive and transparent in their work. Timeline-wise they were very aligned with our goals, going the extra-mile when the business needed it. Very helpful, dependable team and management.

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

We had direct contact with developers. They were all involved and committed to our project. Their talent is exceptional and always had a strong relationship with their leadership team. Leadership team is very keen to take feedback and find ways as to how to collaborate and deliver better results.

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

Not really. Along the way, we had some minor issues that were discussed and addressed quickly.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a partner for a small product management and design consultancy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with NaNLABS?

We’re managing a software product for a Fortune 500 company, and we needed a new development team. We hired NaNLABS to continue the development of the application while adding new features and functionality to the existing coding base. 

We wanted to hire someone we knew we could depend on to make sure that the app stayed up, and someone who would be highly responsive if there were bugs or issues that needed to be handled.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The app is an internal sales enablement application that relies on rich mapping functionality. The primary workflow is effectively adding data and managing all the data visualized on the app. NaNLABS and our company work together as the software team for this project, so they’re helping provide maintenance, but it is ongoing, and we’re still doing active development. 

They took on the existing code base of the web application, and we’ve been developing from there. The key technologies being used on the project are React, Java, Neo4j, MongoDB, Google Cloud, and everything is being run in Docker. NaNLABS is also assisting us with our container setup and managing some of the DevOps for our builds and development. 

What is the team composition?

We usually work with 2–3 front- and backend developers, a project manager, and occasionally bring in a UI designer when needed. We recently had to scale up the team rapidly and had some senior help to assist during that period. 

How did you come to work with NaNLABS?

We found them on Clutch. 

How much have you invested with them?

We started working together in May 2021, and it is ongoing. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve invested more than $500,000 with NaNLABS so far.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

When they initially inherited the project there were some real challenges with it because it has a huge code base, there are unique technologies, and the product was buggy. NaNLABS has been meticulously organizing a plan to handle those hurdles, and over the course of their engagement, they’ve been able to mitigate some of the key issues in addition to adding new features. They’ve also helped us reduce our deployment time, downtime, and our number of help desk tickets has gone down by 75%. 

How did NaNLABS perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re super responsive, and we meet regularly. They’re very transparent about where they’re at and highly communicative. We use Slack and Google Meet for communication and ClickUp for project management. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

NaNLABS is extremely committed to building and retaining talent. They use the opportunities available as teaching moments and bring in team members to shadow and learn. We like working with a partner that's so committed to their team and who puts so much into the education and training of their team members. 

We have a steady team that we work with, which is great because we don’t always have to get people up to speed. They’re highly organized, especially in terms of approaching big development problems. They have a robust documentation system and always evaluate before diving in. They’re also highly flexible, open to feedback, proactive, and quick to solve any issues. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing more that they could be doing for us. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust them and take advantage of their process because it’s successful.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of engineering at an art gallery that buys and sells art pieces through various channels. Our company represents many living artists and some not-living artists and their foundations. We put on quite a few throughout the year and participate in major art fairs. 

Additionally, we do a lot of work and outreach around art and artists, publish books, and work with museums, artists themselves, and artists’ liaisons to perpetuate good art. I work in the engineering department, and we have enhanced technology that we use for various purposes.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with NaNLABS?

We build technology in-house and also use external technology, so we require a development team to maintain it and build new features related to sales, keeping track of artwork, and other aspects of running an art gallery. We service, develop, and refine various applications, and we contacted NaNLABS to help augment our engineering team to build out new features.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

NaNLABS has helped us with back-of-house application work. We initially brought them in to work on the frontend of a web app. They helped with new features that we were building into our web application stack. Later, we brought them in for backend services to build features there as well. Although we’ve scaled down some aspects of the engagement, we continue to use NaNLABS for some of the backend work in our pipeline. 

What is the team composition?

We started with two developers from NaNLABS and later scaled to three total developers, one backend and one frontend developer. Currently, we’re only working with the backend developer.

How did you come to work with NaNLABS?

Our former CTO had worked with other nearshore and offshore agencies in the past. Although I don’t recall how he came across NaNLABS, I know we explore all avenues when bringing in a partner. I was heavily involved in the sourcing and interviewing of their developers, and we felt like they were a good fit.

How much have you invested with them?

So far, we’ve spent less than $200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2021, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

NaNLABS is a great partner. Their work has received positive feedback from stakeholders; everyone is quite pleased, including our in-house developers. The folks from NaNLABS are super invested, have keen attention to detail, and see things through with high fidelity. Moreover, the team has a desire to get involved in other aspects of the work — they’re very involved and keyed into the process. Overall, they’re responsible and responsive, and their work output is good.

How did NaNLABS perform from a project management standpoint?

Their resources are full-time members of our team, so we oversee the project management side of things. However, their internal project manager is good at keeping in sync and ensuring the team gets feedback. We have a monthly check-in to understand how everyone is doing and if we need to pivot or shift. 

NaNLABS is very communicative and responsive. Overall, I’ve had a good experience with them, and the fact that they’re nearshore doesn’t impact our communication. We have a long feedback loop around their performance which is always nice to have with a vendor. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

NaNLABS’ team quality is high, and their output is good. They’ve been quick to bring on multiple people who have very swiftly understood a fairly complex system. I’ve worked with providers where that was not the case, so NaNLABS’ ability to source talent distinguishes them from others. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

NaNLABS has an interesting approach to how they model some of their developers, where some resources come as a unit, which is fair. However, this introduces cost and complexity because it’s a rigid system. Although I wouldn’t say they’re inflexible, this has definitely prevented us from continuing with a resource we may have wanted to keep working with. 

On the other hand, this might be what makes their team work well across the company, so it’s a cost-benefit aspect I can’t really speak to. Still, it would be ideal for me to more easily scale a team up or down without dealing with ramifications across the rest of the development team.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice is to be engaged with NaNLABS. If you know you can oversee their development team directly, they’re really great.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of a SaaS company. Our app is a conversational platform that aims to help employees improve their knowledge in the workplace.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with NaNLABS?

We needed their support in developing our web application.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

NaNLABS’ engineering resources implement different software solutions to develop some of the key functionalities of our web app. Our technology stack is comprised of TypeScript, React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Google Cloud.

What is the team composition?

We work with 5–6 resources from their team, depending on the project phase.

How did you come to work with NaNLABS?

My friend recommended NaNLABS’ team to us. I reached out to them and was quickly impressed with their passionate and collaborative approach, so hiring them was an easy decision to make.

What is the status of this engagement?

We kicked off our engagement with NaNLABS in August 2020, and it’s ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

NaNLABS is a skilled team that swiftly delivers solutions without compromising quality — they’ve built innovative features that continue to elevate our app’s performance. 

How did NaNLABS perform from a project management standpoint?

We mainly communicate via Slack. NanLABS has strong collaboration and project management skills. They incorporate our feedback, respond to our requests, and deliver our needs within quick turnaround times. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

NaNLABS is a professional team that easily translates our business ideas into feasible solutions. They communicate clearly to help us figure out what we truly want to build.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing else they can improve. NaNLABS has been a great development partner to us.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

NaNLABS has a highly thoughtful implementation process — they’ll surely generate the right solutions for you.