Potado

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the founder of a Travel and Teach company that aims to help people live in Asia and work as TEFL teachers.

For what projects/services did your company hire Potado, and what were your goals?

Many schools are looking to hire foreign teachers and some of them don't have any staff that understands how to communicate with them while they are not in the country. They then have to hire recruiting agencies that have high fees. We decided to create a job board with Potado that will allow them to find teachers easily and affordably.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We were refereed to them by someone in our network who had previously worked with them on multiple projects. They offered us a quick development time as well as the ability to do some custom work that others were not experienced with.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

They designed and developed the entire project for us. They started with drawing up some rough sketches to show the flow and then went on to design the interface in Figma. Once we were happy with the look and flow they developed the project using React as well as Next for server side rendering as we needed our content to be indexed by Google for SEO. The project including the ability to Authenticate with Email and Google, creating and viewing job posts, a content management system for blog posts, and TEFL course profiles that include reviews. Firebase was used as the backend solution. We also required them to develop a scraper to pull content from other sources and this was done using NodeJS and Puppeteer.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with a total of 5 people. There were 2 developers working on the project, 1 designer and 1 project manager. We also worked 1 person to assist with strategy before we started the development. This was really helpful and one of the reasons that we enjoyed working with them.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The project was completed within the timeframe we discussed and actually weeks early, but this was part of the time estimate as it was meant for testing. We were able to run through the project and iron out any issues and optimise and improve before launching. We also like that the team will be able to continue working with us on a "when needed" basis with no lock in contracts.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We were very happy with the way the project was managed. It was all very simple and we used Email and Whatsapp for communication as well as Google Meet for video meetings and Github for progress tracking. We were sent regular screenshots asking for feedback and also with suggestions from their team.

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

The best thing was the collaborative nature of the team we worked with. They constantly offered suggestions on how things could work better and let us first try what they suggestion and see for ourselves. We are not used to working with such proactive people so this was great.

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

We were happy with they way they worked but if we need to pick something we would suggest having more in person meetings because we are old school so working through video calls is very new to us, but it was all perfectly fine.