North Labs

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the founders and owners of a SaaS software company. We specialize in venue and management software.

What challenge were you trying to address with North Labs?

We were looking to move away from a local data center in Denver to an AWS.

What was the scope of their involvement?

For our initial project, North Labs basically had to figure out how to get us out of our data center environment and convert to cloud services, which was very different from being in a local data center.

We had all sorts of servers — web, database, task scheduler servers. We worked with North Labs to analyze our environment and find the equivalents in Amazon. They figured a short-term plan, which they called a lift-and-shift.

We then moved on to phase two, which would be really taking advantage of Amazon Services and starting to break things apart from our big, monolithic application. We had 3–4 months of just planning, strategizing, moving assets, and testing before eventually going live.

Since then, we signed an ongoing contract with North Labs. They’re an Amazon partner, so they manage all of our Amazon services on a daily basis. Every 2–3 months, we contract them to work on specific projects, updates, and things we want to do, so we’re constantly working with them.

What is the team composition?

We had about four people working on the initial project.

How did you come to work with North Labs?

I initially contacted Amazon and told them about our needs; they recommended North Labs as the consultant that would best fit them. Thus, I got in contact with North Labs and started talking from there.

I had several meetings with Colin (Founder) just to get a feel of the company and decide if I could trust them. I eventually started talking to John (Director of Engineering), his lead project manager, and then disseminated down to the actual people who worked on the project.

The first reason I picked them was because they were experts in what they do, but most importantly, they understood the importance of the migration for me and my business. They didn’t take it lightly; they were aware of the stress levels that are involved when you move your entire environment and hope it works because it’s your business.

Additionally, I felt really comfortable with them; I felt that they could really do the job.

How much have you invested with them?

Up to date, we’ve spent somewhere around $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We officially contracted them in September 2019. The initial project was done in December 2020, but we’ve been working with them ever since.

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

Talking about hard metrics, the only thing I can compare it to would be what we were spending on a monthly basis at the data center versus what we’re spending with them and Amazon. In total, we’re getting vastly more services at Amazon and overall, we’re saving money.

How did North Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

I communicate with them through Slack on a daily basis. I have a direct line of communication with the people on my team.

The project management side is a bit unofficial; I just ping them and tell them I need something. We then have a startup meeting, usually through Zoom. They take that back, work out a timeline, tell me what to expect, and then we set Zoom meetings to coordinate, check, test, launch, and so on.

They always deliver quality work and never miss a deadline. They listen to me and have my back when something goes wrong. I’ve never had to worry about them, check in, or ask for anything twice. We just talk about it, and they do it, which is incredibly rare.

What did you find most impressive about them?

There are three things that distinguish them. First and foremost, they know Amazon and its environment inside and out. I’ve thrown some fairly complex requirements at them, and they haven’t even batted an eye. Everything has been delivered to that ultimate level of expertise without fail.

Second thing, they’re just nice people to work with. We joke around and they’re friendly, but they never mix that with business.

The third thing is that I never have to worry about a deadline. They just deliver. I say we need a project done, and it gets done.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not really. We're just very happy that we’ve found them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The more time a company spends really thinking about their requirements, what they need or want out of the engagement, the better off they’ll be. North Labs will do what you say you need to get done, and with a third party, sometimes that’s correct and sometimes it’s not. Thus, if you take more time to understand what you need, then they can help you translate that into the Amazon services that would be the best fit for you, and that’ll be a really successful relationship.