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Ruby on Rails & Meteor development team

4.5
3 reviews 

Ruby on Rails & Meteor web & mobile development team from Poland. We work with startups and mature businesses.

 
Undisclosed
 
$25 - $49 / hr
 
10 - 49
 Founded
2012
Show all +
, Poland
Headquarters
  • Naturaily
    Poland

Portfolio

Key clients: 

International House London, Zapnito, Sociomatik, Shuttlefare, GetSafe

Shuttlefare

Airport shuttle ride booking service available on the US market.

MotoCeny24

Vertical for comparing auto parts prices. Optimized for large amount of data.

Pocademy

Texas hold’em hand replayer on roids. Share your hands and get valuable feedback from other players.

KupMi

KupMi is a Pocket-like app for collecting links to things you’d like to buy or get.

Reviews

4.5
3 reviews 
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Ongoing Dev for Internet Business

"They're good at staying in touch and not leaving us in the dark about where things stand."

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4.0

Quality: 
3.5
Schedule: 
4.5
Cost: 
4.0
Willing to refer: 
3.5
The Project
 
$50,000 to $199,999
 
Jan. 2016 - Ongoing
Project summary: 

This engagement involves extensive Rails-based maintenance and feature development for an online knowledge sharing platform. 

The Reviewer
 
11-50 Employees
 
London, United Kingdom
Co-Founder & CTO
 
Verified
The Review
Feedback summary: 

Noteworthy aspects include how easily the dev team integrated into the client's existing Agile process and how responsive they have been. It was also recommended that the team improve their English skills. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a software-as-a-service [SaaS] provider. We have developed an expert knowledge community that we sell to scientific and B2B [business-to-business] publishing companies. I am a co-founder and the chief technology officer of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Naturaily?

We needed the option of scaling up our in-house development team. Naturaily has provided a good way of tapping into additional resources reactively, based on client demand.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Naturaily initially helped us with maintenance work for the Ruby on Rails technology stack. They helped us through a large version upgrade; from 3.0 to 4.0.

We've also used Naturaily for building new features, as well as bug fixes and maintenance. We use other technologies in-house, but Naturaily has only worked on Ruby on Rails tasks.

We've used up to 3 developers from Naturaily. We tend to manage the project work ourselves, and generally, drop developers into our existing team.

How did you come to work with Naturaily?

A sales person from Naturaily dropped me an email when we were in the market for this type of service. Naturaily was a good fit for our company in terms of size, and we thought that we'd get a good amount of attention from them, instead of being one of a hundred different clients.

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

The cost of Naturaily's services has been around $50,000 over the course of 10-months.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been in contact with Naturaily for around 18 months, but only engaged them for work in January 2016. There's been at least one full-time developer working on our projects over the last 10-months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Naturaily has definitely helped us by taking on maintenance work and allowing our core development team to focus on value-add tasks. Once that work was done, we were also able to package up features that were quite easy to scope and offer them to Naturaily, while our internal team worked on items that required a lot more thinking and communication with the product owner and the customers. Naturaily is quite good at taking simple-to-scope features and delivering them within our Agile process.

How did Naturaily perform from a project management standpoint?

We've used Slack for day-to-day communication, Google Hangouts for video conferences, Trello for user story management, and GitHub for code reviews. We treat Naturaily as a proper team member, with only some restrictions on access.

What did you find most impressive about Naturaily?

Naturaily's responsiveness has been great. They're good at keeping in touch and not leaving us in the dark about where things stand. I don't have to chase them very much, which is great. Naturaily has made the effort to learn our technology, and I feel that they're an extended part of our team.

Are there any areas Naturaily could improve?

Naturaily's team could improve in terms of English language skills. This has been our main drawback. The main reason for Naturaily not being as integrated as we'd like them to be is because of language skills. We tend to rely on written communication, and Naturaily doesn't take part in our daily standups.

4.0
Overall Score
  • 4.5 Scheduling
    ON TIME / DEADLINES
  • 4.0 Cost
    Value / within estimates
    Naturaily provided good value for money, but they're not cheap. We've negotiated prices depending on the quality of individual resources.
  • 3.5 Quality
    Service & deliverables
    We've not used too many other outsourced providers. Being English, I tend to be more on the pessimistic side.
  • 3.5 NPS
    Willing to refer
    I would recommend Naturaily.

Web & Mobile Development for Technology Company

"Ultimately, our satisfaction came down to Naturaily's quality of output. Relative to cost, their quality was good."

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5.0

Quality: 
5.0
Schedule: 
5.0
Cost: 
4.5
Willing to refer: 
4.5
The Project
 
$10,000 to $49,999
Project summary: 

Naturaily was hired in response to technical staffing limitations. The ongoing engagement involves custom Rails and JavaScript development.

The Reviewer
 
11-50 Employees
 
Greater Boston Area
Founder & CEO
 
Verified
The Review
Feedback summary: 

Pros include responsiveness, communication skills, and a clear commitment to their craft, all of which contribute to a fluid client experience. 

BACKGROUND

Please introduce your business and what you do there.

We develop custom software for a range of clients, as well as providing consultation services, helping them decide what to build from scope, architecture, and design standpoints.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Naturaily?

We rely on Naturaily for team augmentation, from a development perspective.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

Naturaily worked with us on one project to date, but we intend to engage them for more work.

Naturaily has provided web development for our company, working on custom-built solutions. The technologies used were Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.

Naturaily assigned us 2 developers, one senior and one junior. We have hired a third person who is scheduled to start next week. I work directly with Naturaily's Chief Technology Officer in order to source our resources, but the project management is handled by our own company. We give tasks to developers directly.

How did you come to work with Naturaily?

I received an outbound email solicitation from Naturaily. From my conversation with their Chief Executive Officer [CEO], we found that we have a similar specialization and philosophy to Naturaily in terms of how our teams are built and trained. They also had a try-before-you-buy approach, allowing us to spend 1-2 weeks working with developers and determining if we have a good fit. Naturaily's CEO had a commitment to his people and we've received good quality work from them. We've had no reason to switch since then.

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

The total cost of Naturaily's services has been around $40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started negotiations with Naturaily at the end of November 2015. Our project started in December.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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.

5.0
Overall Score
  • 5.0 Scheduling
    ON TIME / DEADLINES
  • 4.5 Cost
    Value / within estimates
  • 5.0 Quality
    Service & deliverables
    As I said, our satisfaction is binary, but the collaboration with Naturaily has been very good.
  • 4.5 NPS
    Willing to refer
    The only reason for not giving Naturaily a full rating is that we are competitors in some ways. Naturaily augments our team so, if a client came to us asking for development, I would first try to do it myself before shipping it off.

Custom RAILS Development for Consumer App Startup

"They [Naturaily] had an 80 percent on-time delivery rate and communication was never an issue."

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4.5

Quality: 
5.0
Schedule: 
4.5
Cost: 
5.0
Willing to refer: 
5.0
The Project
 
$10,000 to $49,999
Project summary: 

The client is a consumer application startup specializing in wearable gadgets, fitness apps, and connected medical devices that help users improve their overall well-being by delivering insights and analysis of their personal data. Limited technical expertise required that the client find a partner to develop and configure the back-end of their custom solution. Naturaily was vetted carefully and then contracted to supply a team of experienced Rails developers and a project lead.

The Reviewer
 
1-10 Employees
 
London, United Kingdom
Founder & CEO at Quantid
 
Verified
The Review
Feedback summary: 

The client considers the partnership with Naturaily a major competitive advantage. According to the client, their successfully developed app has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from end users. It was noted that Naturaily has an exceptional talent pool and flexibility. The client recommends Naturaily to others.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

Quantid is an app for building quantitative style platforms and aggregating health and wellness data from a variety of mobile devices, and connected health and fitness apps. We allow users to see their personal data in a single place as well as allowing other applications to access it.

What is your position?

I'm the founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Naturaily?

We hired Naturaily to build the part of the system that integrates with all the APIs [application programming interfaces] that our platform needs to connect into in order to collect the data. An example would be the wearable bracelet Fitbit. It's one of the mobile devices that we integrate with. To collect that data, we need to connect into its API, authenticate onto their system, and pull the user data into our system. We then store it into an intermediary database, where it's processed and then hand it to our core database. We needed Naturaily to build the system that reaches out to various APIs, collects the data, processes it, and hands it out to our main system.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

They worked entirely on the back-end using Ruby on Rails. They didn't do any work in the front side of things.

Their team consisted of one core developer and two associates for him who worked intermediately. We liaised with the developers directly. I acted as project manager. We left it up to them to delegate their own responsibilities and track progress.

How did you come to work with Naturaily?

I was approached by another Polish software developer. They worked on the front end, specializing in mobile apps. When I spoke to them about the complete solution we were looking for, they mentioned Naturaily for back-end things as a company they collaborate with. We established a relationship with Naturaily, and I was confident they could deliver.

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

It was $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The development took six months. Since they built the app for us, we haven't continued any further work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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.

4.5
Overall Score
  • 4.5 Scheduling
    ON TIME / DEADLINES
  • 5.0 Cost
    Value / within estimates
  • 5.0 Quality
    Service & deliverables
  • 5.0 NPS
    Willing to refer