NewGenApps

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

It’s a new company. I founded this company about a year ago primarily for developing mobile apps both for consumer and business space.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the founder.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with NewGenApps?

I needed a development company. I am able to do a lot of design work and some of the development, but some of these projects can get quite big, so I needed to contract out a good portion of the development work.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

It’s just been development work for me so far. It’s been a lot of coding. There’s been no design work, because I do it myself. I outsource graphic design elements to other contractors. They can do some of that work and have assisted with some of it but, for the most part, I just hire them to do the actual coding work. They do a lot of coding for iOS-based apps live currently and some Web-based stuff as well like PHP, database design, and integration.

What was your process for selecting NewGenApps with which to work?

I put out a pretty detailed request for proposal for the work I needed done and NewGenApps responded. That’s how we started our business relationship more than a year ago. 

Can you provide a ballpark dollar figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

It ranges quite a bit and depends on what project we’re working on. The very first project we did was in the range of $15,000 to $20,000 worth of development work. That’s a fixed-price project.

Other work has been time and material on an hourly basis for updates and bug fixes. I work with them in both of those capacities. Usually if I get a new project that I accept, it starts with a $5,000 to $30,000 sprint. It begins with intense full-time work. The last phase involves minor work on bugs and adding features. That’s done on a part-time basis. When we start a new project, it’s full time for a certain amount of window and then just tapers down hourly after that. They help me on both types of work.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the results of the project?

This work is still ongoing and there are no plans to stop. With software development, there are always changes. When Apple releases iOS 8, it will typically break different things and you have to update it and do all sort of bug fixes. Then there’s the SDKs that plug in, like Facebook and different graphic SDKs [software development kits] that are always changing and needing to be updated. You need to stay current. There are always feature requests from users. I communicate with them on a daily basis.

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

Everything has been great. There’s always challenges when working with an overseas partner, the biggest challenge is usually communication with the time difference and different working hours. The one thing that’s always been good is they’re quite willing to go the extra mile with deliverables. If there’s a critical fix that needs to get implemented, they do it quite promptly within a day. The quality of work has been good, too. I’ve been diving into the coding work that they’ve done, and I can see that the way that they’ve developed that code is good with the integration of the different plug-ins.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

When it comes to offshore development, there are so many different developers, whether it’s individuals or companies that will bid on your work. Filtering through all that noise and mess is difficult. NewGenApps stood out due to the professionalism of the proposals that they put together.

I put together a very detailed list of requirements. They came back to me with a proposal, and they would reiterate what the requirements were. They communicated this well and that really stood out. I made my decision with NewGenApps not based on price,  [as] the price was very good, but mostly just based on the level of understanding they came back with of what I was looking for.

They also stand out in the way they work together as a team. It’s not a huge company, although they’re growing. I work with and communicate with the business owner quite a bit, having that connection with them is good as opposed to working with a bigger company and just getting a hand off to a junior developer. If there are any issues that need to be escalated, you can bring it up to the owner and they get handled a lot more effectively.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or something that you might do differently?

It’s been a learning process for me. Because it is an overseas shop, the biggest challenge is managing those projects, people, time, and individual detailed tasks that need to get done. The biggest challenge is always communication of what those details are; it’s not like you’re working with a team that’s right beside you and you can reach a person beside you to get a minor change done. I’ve had to put a number of different systems in place for managing those tasks and managing that level of detail. I’ve put in bug-tracking systems and source code management systems. If I had that level of stuff at the start, a lot of my challenges and tasks would be a lot easier to handle. They don’t have any of that stuff in place, but I’m not sure if any other company does; I think they expect you as the business owner running and managing your project to manage that side of it.