Naturaily

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

From our perspective, feed-back from clients has been given based on our choices for solutions and how we attacked certain problems. Typically, positive or negative feed-back will rely on the work we provide in-house. Our clients haven't had the opportunity to speak directly on the quality of specific blocks of code. Determining success is based more on negative effects: was the code buggy, was it improperly written, did it take too long to write, and so on. We haven't experienced any of these issues with Naturaily. Our experience will tend to be binary: we're either happy or we're not. So far, working with Naturaily has been good. The output from Naturaily has certainly met our requirements.

How did Naturaily perform from a project management standpoint?

We work on a time-and-materials basis with Naturaily, so coming in on-time and on-budget is predicated on our management. Naturaily was always responsive and able to produce code in a timely fashion and we've been happy with the output.

We use 4 primary tools with Naturaily: Slack for communication, Trello for project and task management, as well as GitHub and BitBucket as code repositories.

What distinguishes Naturaily from other providers?

Naturaily has a willingness to stay behind their team. We also appreciated the opportunity to try out their services in the beginning. Ultimately, our satisfaction came down to Naturaily's quality of output. Relative to cost, their quality was good. The responsiveness and communication between me and Naturaily has also been good, from the executive level down.

Given the fact that I'm located in Boston and we have team members all over the world, while Naturaily is located in Poland, being able to communicate via remote tools may not have turned out well. Many of Naturaily's competitors don't do this particularly well, so the fact that Naturaily has this ability is a good feature.

Is there anything Naturaily could have improved or done differently?

No, there haven't been. Naturaily has done a good job of being clear about the skill level of the people who are provided to us. We didn't have miscommunications in terms of what we paid for and what we received in return.

We have provided Naturaily clear directions and showed them exactly what we wanted to build. Naturaily has been able to execute our instructions very well. If another client comes to them with well-specified products, I am certain that Naturaily will be able to execute. I think that Naturaily could offer a lot more, but we haven't had the opportunity to give them a general concept, allowing Naturaily to make a number of general decisions, coming back with conclusions and a built product. I can't speak about how well Naturaily could architect and construct a solution from scratch, but as far as taking directions and being thoughtful about their output, Naturaily has been very good. Any customer with a well-specified project and willing to communicate extensively with the development team, will be a good fit for Naturaily.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I have no metrics per se. We are happy with the system they've built. It performs as desired and very reliably. Unfortunately, for scaling the product in order to launch it to a bigger audience, we will need an additional amount of funding.

One of the specs that we gave Naturaily was the ability to handle high volumes of data coming in relatively short periods of time. We haven't been able to test that yet, but the testing we've done at the current level meets all the requirements we specified in the beginning.

How did Naturaily perform from a project management standpoint?

They definitely delivered within budget and generally on time. They're on the good end of the scale, compared to other developers we've used. They have been late here and there, so I can't say they've delivered everything absolutely on time, but I'm certainly not upset in any way with the slight holdbacks there might have been. When they weren't able to deliver on the scheduled time, we understood their reasons, and there were no unexpected surprises. They had an 80 percent on-time delivery rate and communication was never an issue. To be honest, some of the delays were due to change requests that we'd made.

We didn't use any special tools for project management or to exchange documentation. We communicated entirely through email and Skype, and it worked well.

What distinguishes Naturaily from other providers?

Our main contact person was very good at maintaining the relationship – checking in and touching base. This doesn't always occur when working with developers.

Is there anything Naturaily could have improved or done differently?

No. I was satisfied with the overall relationship.