Pixie Labs

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am an executive of Capable Health

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Capable Health is a developer platform for building, launching, and scaling virtual-first healthcare services. We enable telemedicine providers to start up a digital clinic, offer care, take payment, and manage patients using our suite of compliant tools.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Pixie Labs to accomplish?

• Design and launch our MVP

SOLUTION

How did you find Pixie Labs?

Referral

Why did you select Pixie Labs over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned
• Deep engineering expertise

How many teammates from Pixie Labs were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

When we approached Pixie Labs, we had a potential customer but no MVP. We contacted Pixie to help get us to market in record time. Pixie designed our initial API and helped us launch it a few months later. The key deliverable was an API specification document which we could share with potential customers and partners.

Later on, Pixie Labs engineers provided team augmentation to help deliver that API. A year later, we worked with Pixie again on a separate project to build a sales demo. Our startup was growing, but we had a complex sales process that took several months to close a sale. We needed a tool that could rapidly show what Capable could do, and we got Pixie to build it on an incredibly tight timeline.

The sales tool was so successful that we turned the demo app into an actual feature, which grew our sales by over 50%. This rapid growth would not have been possible without Pixie. The key deliverable here was an end-to-end demo environment of our tool, including a brand-new mobile application to show to prospective customers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Pixie Labs helped us to kick the project off as we brought in some of our own engineers in parallel. Pixie's head of engineering acted like an interim CTO to us during this time. He wrote a first pass of the API spec, drew an initial API design, and handed down some initial good best practices for the first 4 months.

This first engagement tapered off as they handed over to our engineers. During the second engagement, we approached Pixie again once we had built the API and it was running. By this point, we had an established customer base. As part of our sales process, we wanted to develop a sample reference application that demonstrated some of the features of our platform and could be dressed up in potential customers branding to help them visualize the product capabilities.

This application was also intended to be something we could easily white-label and give to new customers as a starting point. They built the application using tools like React and Material UI. The goal of this work was to make our sales process easier and faster and it worked - our sales jumped by over 50% once we rolled out the new tool. The sales tool was so successful that we actually incorporated it into a full-fledge feature of the Capable platform which became a new product line for us.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Pixie Labs uses the agile approach for building software.This matched our own process internally at Capable. They slotted into our sprint cadence and joined our standups. They delivered accurately against their initial estimates. As with all software projects - requirements change midway! Pixie was able to adapt to this without losing momentum.

What was your primary form of communication with Pixie Labs?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

What stood out about working with Pixie Labs was their technical expertise. There is no problem that they shied away from. If something is outside of their comfort area, they'll do the research and figure it out.

This is in contrast to teams I've worked with before who will avoid things they don't want to do, by saying "we're just a mobile dev team" or "we only work on the back-end". Nothing is off limits to Pixie and that lends confidence that they'll be able to overcome obstacles when they appear.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Pixie Labs could have done differently?

As is often the case, the greatest strength of a person or an organization also points to the areas of improvement. Pixie Labs is an incredibly technical agency. They approach the work methodically and expertly and deliver what they say they are going to. On the sales side, they don't have a formal sales process. They typically like to get stuck in immediately to understand the problem, and then discuss how to solve it.

This approach worked well for us (and I suspect would work well for other fast-growing startups) but might be unexpected for some organizations which want to be sold to. Neither approach is better than the other, though I have found that a strong sales process often hides a weaker engineering and delivery process which is ultimately what you're buying.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Head of Product of Tussell

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

All-in-one UK public sector market intelligence platform for business development professionals

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Pixie Labs to accomplish?

• Collect, clean and aggregate data on UK public sector procurement

SOLUTION

How did you find Pixie Labs?

• Referral
• Other

Why did you select Pixie Labs over others?

• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Pixie Labs were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Pixie Labs helped us with all aspects of digital product development covering strategy, design and development. They took us through a detailed discovery process to help us frame the problem and explore possible solutions.

After that, they helped us to explore and validate different ideas to arrive at the solution that would be most valuable for our customers and business. They helped us architect and then build that solution using an Agile methodology which let us update the plan as we got feedback along the way.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Success metrics pre-dominantly link to business growth metrics, such as customer retention, NPS, average contract value. Product metrics cover platform performance, downtime, data quality, data coverage etc

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Pixie Labs play a large role in the project management of builds for Tussell, predominantly through their Senior Product Manager, Josh. We've always have clear communication around project delivery times and their involvement in discovery has always helped us to adjust expectations if ever necessary.

What was your primary form of communication with Pixie Labs?

• In-Person Meeting
• Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The culture and communication, and having the confidence to challenge our assumptions about our product and plans, with a view to ensuring we're always adding value with our developments. Our relationship with Pixie Labs felt more like an extension of us, rather than an external agency.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Pixie Labs could have done differently?

We would love Pixie to play a bigger role in driving more long-term product planning, which in-turn would smooth out any recurring issues in discovery.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Department Head of Blink Cat Food

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We make pet food

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Pixie Labs to accomplish?

Website Build

SOLUTION

How did you find Pixie Labs?

• Online Search
• Referral

Why did you select Pixie Labs over others?

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

What was the size of Pixie Labs’s team?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Deliver version 2.0 of the Blink Website to reflect current branding and messaging 
• Enable text and custom backgrounds 
• Enable mobile responsive site 
• Deliver improvements to checkout funnel 
• Enable customer testimonials 
• Deliver improvement to page load speed

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Improved website conversion rate
• Improved customer retention rate 
• Reduced customer contact rate

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Everything on time, high visibility of progress and next steps, very responsive to our needs

What was your primary form of communication with Pixie Labs?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They were extremely capable and valuable in offering input during the scoping period. They also delivered without any new website launch drama at all.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Pixie Labs could have done differently?

No notes