Olio Apps

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a digital health solutions provider that was founded in February 2020. As the product manager, I head the product team, acting as a liaison between the engineering side of our organization as well as the marketing and business sides.

What challenge were you trying to address with Olio Apps?

We hired Olio Apps along with a few contractors to make up our startup’s engineering efforts.

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Olio Apps acts as our frontend engineering team. They’re building an iOS/Android app in addition to a couple of responsive web apps. Both the mobile and web sides are different facets of our solution: the mobile side is a customer-facing app while the web app is more of a B2B customer admin portal. Technologies include React Native and Angular.js. 

What is the team composition? 

I only interface with Aron and Scott (Co-Founders & Principal Software Engineers). Aron heads the engineering team while Scott deals with the business aspects.

How did you come to work with Olio Apps?

One of our other contractors had worked with Olio Apps in the past and referred us to them. Out of the candidates that we’d considered for this project, Olio Apps was exceptional because they were willing to work without detailed specs telling them exactly what to build.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $150,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

It kicked off in late April 2020, and we’re still working with them. Our solution is at about 75% of where it needs to be before it can be shipped as an MVP. We hope to continue working iteratively with them as our scope continues to evolve.

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

Despite the uncertainty within our project, Aron has been able to handle an ever-evolving scope and, in some cases, help us tease out what we don’t know to gain clarity. He then directs his team around the functionalities that need to be synthesized to meet our business objectives.

We’re now on our 11th statement of work (SoW) with them. For each SoW, we define the deliverables as best we can along with the high-level features, and they provide an estimate. They’ve never gone beyond the quote nor timelines without permission, often coming in at or within budget. They’ve also met or exceeded all functional expectations.

How did Olio Apps perform from a project management standpoint?

Olio Apps is an exceptional partner, and we’re completely satisfied with their ability to meet our project needs. They use an agile framework to build our app, which keeps them on time and budget. We hope to continue working with them in the foreseeable future.

What did you find most impressive about them?

It comes down to their ability to handle an evolving scope and the occasional pivot in focus. That’s been invaluable to us and not very common compared to some of our previous partners.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind right now. I did ask them to improve on their invoices so that I could see how they correlated to the individual SoWs. However, that wasn’t a huge deal, and they’ve gotten better about it.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the COO of Warcraft Logs, a website that analyzes combat logs for “World of Warcraft.”

What challenge were you trying to address with Olio Apps?

We needed some staff augmentation. We have a small in-house development team. We give Olio Apps small, cordoned-off projects to speed up the work.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our platform consists of a website and an uploader application that sits on the user’s computer. The uploader interprets the log a little bit and uploads it to our site and server for further processing. Olio Apps works on the uploader application, among other tasks. For example, one of our first projects was a port from one technology to another.

What is the team composition?

I work with the two founders, Aron and Scott (Senior Devs/Partners).

How did you come to work with Olio Apps?

They were a recommendation from another entrepreneur and friend of mine. I think they used to work with the two founders at another company.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve done a couple of different projects together. We started talking in October 2018 and finished our last engagement in March 2020, but it’s an ongoing thing.

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

What I appreciate about their work is that it’s thoughtfully done. The code we produce in-house is high-quality because we know the system and will have to work on it again. When we get an outside firm to write the code, we may end up with something that fits the requirements but isn’t extensible and requires rewriting. 

However, we can trust Olio Apps to refactor their past projects and make design decisions so that the code can go in new directions. They have the experience and history with us to do that, which makes them different from other firms.

How did Olio Apps perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve done very well. They were very responsive and flexible enough to use our communication tools like our Slack channels. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

Our ability to trust them with our code is what I’m most happy with. They fill in the need when we’re swamped and need something to happen quickly.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Any hard engineering problems we gave them took a little longer, but that’s to be expected.

If I were to recommend them to others, they’re great developers for developers. We ask them to fulfill detailed engineering requirements. I don’t know if they can or can’t work novices because I haven’t worked with them like that.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm a Managing Partner at The data Guild, a mission-driven venture studio that creates products that solve global challenges.

For what projects/services did your company hire Olio Apps?

We hired Olio to help us execute on a new, mobile-first patient engagement platform to be deployed inside large clinical trials. Our design challenge was multilayered: Our target patient population was underserved and poor, distrustful of medical professionals, and suffered from multiple chronic diseases. On the other side, we had a small number of community health workers each of whom had a case load of 200-400 families.

What were your goals for this project?

With these stakeholder populations in mind, we needed to create a more efficient way for CHW's to effectively manage their caseloads, while providing better quality health and social services to a high-risk population. Our solution had to be easily accessible, intuitive to use, and had to simplify or automate basic tasks on behalf of users.

How did you select this vendor?

We'd worked with the Olio principals previously and knew they could deliver.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

For our project, Olio owner the full software development lifecycle, taking on technical design, architecture, full stack engineering build, QA, and deployment. We worked closely with Olio to transition product design direction and requirements, Olio owned the rest.

What was the team composition?

The Olio project team consisted of full time engineer, a project manager, a designer, a frontend engineer. They interfaced with a Product Manager, UX researcher and a UX designer.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

This project resulted in multiple follow-on customer opportunities, and provided a template on which we built a series of patient facing applications.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We followed an agile sprint-based methodology and it worked great. One key Olio point of contact managed the whole thing. It probably helped that we'd worked together before.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We found Olio's humility, humor, and desire to create value truly outstanding. They were able to adjust quickly to shifting requirements and tight deadlines with grace. Olio is outstanding value for what and how they deliver.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CEO of a boutique consulting firm, delivering solutions to Fortune 500 companies and major organizations/non-profits. We are focused on AI and Machine Learning solutions.

For what projects/services did your company hire Olio Apps?

We had a "core technology" offering but lacked a means of web delivery.

What were your goals for this project?

The requirements were state-of-the-art: multiple cloud based scalable services to deliver our highly technical products, requiring knowledge of new cloud tech just coming out of beta by cloud service providers.

How did you select this vendor?

We had exposure to Olio through prior projects where were collaborated. The team at Olio: specifically Scott and Aron were able to quickly come up to speed and listened carefully and consistently "managed up" to keep the project on schedule and below budget.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

Developed:

1. technical specifications, project scope
2. full budget for review/discussion
3. project management services
4. back end development
5. scalable cloud compute components from scratch
6. full integration
7. full documentation
8. full deployment/integration

What was the team composition?

1 POC, 1 technical lead, 1 full stack dev, various design/usability review/support from their broader team.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Achieved digital transformation: from custom, bespoke AI model development to fully automated, scalable, cost-effective cloud-based solutions.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

A++ communication from day one and throughout project.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They're humble, smart, and cost-effective: a triple-threat of goodness!

Are there any areas for improvement?

None specifically, but there is probably an opportunity for them to deploy resources directly into projects (staffing) vs. on-deliverable for their larger customers, or where requirements are less clear.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a large healthcare not-for-profit company. A couple years ago, a new division was created to provide a consumer-oriented, highly personalized healthcare offering, and I came on as the VP of engineering.

What challenge were you trying to address with Olio Apps?

My engineering team was created to develop the new solution for the company, but we didn’t have any resources who were particularly experienced on the mobile side of development. We were looking to build a cross-platform, user-friendly solution, so we brought in Olio as a partner to really get the mobile app off the ground.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Olio started out helping us to plan, wireframe, and execute the early stages of the mobile application as our primary development team for that part of the project. Over time, we brought on in-house mobile resources to take over the process, and they transitioned to serving more of a support role to augment the staff on the team.

In their work with us, they helped us build out a wide array of features that health care consumers can use to manage their medical records, share lab and billing data, and coordinate on health care provision for children or aging parents. They focused on making sure the mobile app was still user friendly and functioned seamlessly despite all those moving parts.

What was the team composition?

The size of their team varied over time. At peak capacity, we had three engineers from their team working with us, but we also interacted with their principles a lot in the early stages of the project. As we transitioned to the staff augmentation model, they had one engineer working with us to provide expertise for the most part.

How did you come to work with Olio Apps?

Before I worked at my current position, I had been with a security pipeline startup. Our dev team was all backend engineers there as well, and I worked with one of the Olio principles to develop a frontend for our web app. They were reasonably priced and provided impressive quality and speed of engineering, so I went to them when we had similar needs in my current position.

How much have you invested with them?

The total cost was just over $1 million for the two and a half years we worked with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We first hired them in October 2017 and finally wrapped up in February 2020.

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

Our contracts were typically about a quarter at a time, and we continually extended them for almost three years, so the quality of work they were completing was obviously more than up to our standards. After working with them for so long, we feel that they have been a key part of our success and we are grateful to them for the dedication they showed to us as well.

I don’t have any exact success metrics, but they were always quick and successful at building what we asked them for, and they did a great job of both providing deliverables and then training and giving expertise as our success metrics change.

How did Olio Apps perform from a project management standpoint?

Their communication was excellent, especially in how flexible they were through our growth and transition in staffing models. After moving to more of a staff augmentation relationship, they had one mobile engineer working closely with us, attending our daily scrums and receiving JIRA tasks just like our in-house team members, which worked great.

Any time we had questions or issues with specific systems or functions we wanted to implement, such as the ability to dynamically update the app without using the app store, they were able to provide the knowledge we lacked so that we could successfully integrate that capability.

What did you find most impressive about them?

If I had to pick out a single quality as the most impressive, it would be their ability to get things done. No matter what challenge we needed help with, they always jumped in headfirst and found a solution.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Whatever little things came up over the course of our contract, we were able to address in conversation and they were more than happy to adjust. Whether that was the style of documentation or frequency of reporting, they always reacted immediately to any requests we had. By the end, we had a good feel for each other and were working pretty much seamlessly, so there wasn’t anything I wish they would have changed.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

This isn’t the kind of group that you should write a detailed spec for and then have them robotically execute it. You will get way more out of your work with them if you bring them in early on your discussions and design sessions so that they can talk with you about the best ways to solve your challenges and structure the final product.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder and CEO of Cardsmith.co, an online collaboration tool.

What challenge were you trying to address with Olio Apps?

We had a limited number of developers on our team and needed to go faster with a particular piece of work. We’d built our software on a JavaScript platform and wanted to transition to a React platform. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

It was a short project. My co-founder is a designer and created wireframes and mockups of the screens we wanted Olio Apps to build. The team looked at the designs and gave an estimate based on time and materials. They then achieved our goals within two months, per their promised timeline. It was an easy, collaborative process. 

What is the team composition?

I usually work with Aron and Scott (Senior Devs & Partners). I’ve also worked with Todd (Consultant), Frank (Software Engineer Technical Leader), and Ameliah (Software Engineer) on various projects. They’d often pair a senior person with a junior person and were very good at getting work done.

How did you come to work with Olio Apps?

I’d worked with them before. They were subcontractors at another company that I consulted with. I managed their team for a couple of bigger projects and liked working with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project went from November 2019 until January 2020.

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

They delivered on time and on budget.

How did Olio Apps perform from a project management standpoint?

They were very good at communicating. Olio Apps brought us into their Slack team, gave us updates weekly, and reached out when they needed help. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They were experts at UI and React. Olio Apps was really good at integrations. Their senior people are extremely good, and the junior people aren’t too inexperienced. They’ll always make sure they get things done on time no matter what it takes, and they don’t sacrifice quality. Olio Apps is all around an excellent firm. I’d definitely hire them again if I had the budget.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I only wish they were less expensive.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the product manager for Safety in Motion. We run safety seminars for other businesses. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Olio Apps?

We wanted to develop a mobile app.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They developed the app using React Native. They developed a version of the app that is available offline and allows users to record information while they lack internet access. 

What is the team composition?

I have two main points of contact. There’s a larger team of developers that worked on the app as well. 

How did you come to work with Olio Apps?

We received a referral from a friend. We interviewed several other vendors, but they seemed like the best fit. 

How much have you invested with them?

I would estimate that we’ve invested about $300,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August or September 2016, and our engagement is ongoing.

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

They have excellent communication and met all deadlines. They’re able to meet us where we ask them to. We’ve always been completely satisfied with their work. 

How did Olio Apps perform from a project management standpoint?

I don’t know specifics about their project management tactics, but they meet all the goals we set forth. I can’t say enough good things about them. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’re incredibly capable. They can make complex ideas clear to us since my team doesn’t have a lot of technical expertise. They’re also great listeners. 

Are there any areas they could improve? 

No. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers? 

Be ambitious, and they’ll meet you where you are.