Pulilab

Please describe your organization.

The company is being shut down now. What we did was help cities when they wanted to expand into a new area or do some changes. Because, in Denmark, we also know that you need to involve your citizens. Pulilab made the system where you can send a text message, and you can set up the system using a projector or something else anywhere where you have people that you usually can't get any feedback from the municipality. 

What is your position?

I am the owner. I was the technical project manager communicating with Pulilab and working closely together with one of their developers.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Pulilab?

The challenge was finding a qualified, reliable developer. We needed additional resources to help us develop our custom mobile app. This was essential since we had a tight budget and timeframe and no technical skills in house.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

We don't focus on the small screen experience. We wanted the system to make projections or put them on a big screen in public space. That was the original idea. Previously, we have been working with a multimedia development framework and interactive installations worked awesome for that. It's a web page that's intended to run on a projector. It's basically JavaScript that you run in a browser and put it full screen. 

How did you come to work with Pulilab?

I have a personal relationship with one of the founders. When I knew we needed extra talent, they were one of the first companies to come to mind.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We've spent around $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

Doing a software service like this, it's never really completed. You always want to do more. I think it started in 2013. I think it was in February and it remains ongoing.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I come from a background in doing custom media installations and stability is a very crucial thing for me. It has to be rock solid. Of course, there have been bugs, but that's to be expected in any software project. I don't have anything specific to measure. I'm not that much into developing things. 

How did Pulilab perform from a project management standpoint?

They were able to deliver on time and within budget. Whenever there have been delays it has been mainly due to us not being able to test it within the allotted timeframe that we had agreed on with Pulilab. We used Trello for project management, which worked well. They've definitely gone out of their way to ensure that we hit all of our targets and they're rarely unavailable. 

Is there anything Pulilab could have improved or done differently?

Not really. We were well advised in what we were getting, and we got exactly what was proposed. The idea was that I should be the project manager, so we got a developer, and we have the developer a certain amount of time. Then, it was up to us to get something done. That worked very well. I was impressed with the independence of our developer.

Could you share any tips or advice that might benefit future clients of theirs?

Just go ahead and follow their strategic recommendations. They know what they're doing. Now, they have experience in running these projects. They can communicate with you and make sure that you get what you need. If you ask for something less than that, then they can give it to you, but they will tell you that you should probably get. They also have project management so you can actually have them run the project for you.

Please describe your organization.

We provide explainer video content for companies big and small all around the world at affordable prices, on time, and on budget.

What is your position?

I'm a co-founder.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Pulilab?

We needed additional technical resources because we were somewhat limited in-house.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We've built a video collaboration platform. We worked together on building that. We built it from scratch using Python and Django.

Multiple users could comment and provide their feedback on videos. As you provide your comments, it's recording when and who provided it. We created a UX [user experience] that was easy to use to help us make the feedback process much easier for our clients. This is a tool we use when collaborating on animated videos with clients.

They provide the technical expertise for us to execute on our vision. That has nothing to do with the actual production of the videos. It's just the software that allows us to collaborate. The platform has been in operation two years.

We started with what we call the preview platform, where we just collaborated on the previews themselves. The upgrade was to allow us to collaborate on a storyboard to allow us to collaborate on scripts and to take in information from the clients independently They can go in through our website, sign up for a production, and then that takes them straight through to the questionnaire. It's self-starting without any input from our side. We have what's called a dashboard, and that allows us to view all of the productions we're working on at any given time in each stage and how long they've been in that stage. The contributors and people who do animation illustration – they're able to see their production and work on the production internally, and then our producers release them externally. There's quite an extensive software collaboration platform that we use, and that's actually one of the reasons that we stand out in the market because of the ease of collaboration.

Any plans to expand the scope of their involvement?

In line with the overall strategy, they are key to us being able to achieve our end goal of having this formidable platform that allows us to scale at will and manage all of the contributors and clients very easily. We would be fully dependent on this platform that's been designed specifically for our ability to scale the number of videos and contributors and make the whole process efficient. 

How did you come to work with Pulilab?

I know the founders personally.

What is the status of this engagement?

We had a few different phases, and it's hard to say. I'm not actually sure how long we worked on the design. We've had a relationship for four years [since 2011].

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

I'm not sure what benchmarks would make sense. Another thing that we do in the platform is we measure how much time an individual collaborator spends on any given project. We're able to have a report on how much time any person put into a given project, and we can look at how long a project took and who contributed to it. That's another part of the platform that we designed, and that is activated through a check-in/checkout feature. But, in terms, of giving you how well the platform is performing, it's hard to quantify that.

We didn't set out to define the number of users we'd have on board or the number of productions that we'd put through. We did everything before this on Google Docs and on different platforms, and it was hard to collaborate, so we started off with the animation preview part of it, where we could collaborate on that. Once that was done, we built the rest of the system around it and, with that, it wasn't just good for the customers, but was also good for the contributors and for the people managing – the producers who manage all of the productions at a given time. Moving forward, we have a number of other things that we want to do to improve on the platform. Something that I would say is that these guys are skilled at is defining what's important.

How did Pulilab perform from a project management standpoint?

Every project has its own issues but, I would say that, for the most part, whatever is promised and agreed on is always delivered. They bring solid professionalism and accountability to the table, which we've really appreciated.

Do you have any tips or advice for future clients of theirs?

What I would say is be sure of what your objective is and listen to their input on the project. At the very beginning, we had to decide whether or not we were going to build something that would just be put into the market and used by everybody or if we were going to build something that was specifically for us. Having that conversation is very important to the success of the project.

Please describe your organization.

I don't work for the business anymore that worked with Pulilab. The company was into media publishing.

What was your position?

I was the chief technology officer.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Pulilab?

We needed a handful of developers. We started with a few engineers and then we expanded the team to ten. We had a few different types of positions to fill - developers, front-end developers to Android developers and iOS developers, system administrators, quality assurance specialists and project leads.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We were using primarily Java on the backend together with Python and Linux. They handled the custom coding, testing and implementation. We offered guidance and helped refine the technical requirements. We did some testing internally, too.

How did you come to work with Pulilab?

We didn't have any kind of formal process to do so. We were some of the first clients for Pulilab and I knew their CTO personally before they started and I had worked a little bit with their CTO. I knew he was doing great work. He was a great CTO with a lot of great experience.

We had considered more traditional outsourcing companies in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, but we did not have a personal relationship with them and we had endured some poor experiences with providers in India before. As a result, we were a bit skeptical about using price as an indicator alone. We were looking for a setup and were looking for quality more than price. The cost of the resources wasn’t nearly as important as quality and understanding. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We were with them five years and the company still maintains a partnership with Pulilab as far as I know.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The people that they staffed were integrated into the native base point media team. I see that they had great communication skills, great loyalty, great technical skills and creativity. As we expanded they also performed as well as our local unit. I can’t share any statistics because I no longer have access to that information, but overall, everyone was always very impressed. 

We only had to replace a developer one or two times when the person decided to move on. They always tried to find solutions that fit us best. They're also very meticulous with their hiring process. They don’t have random developers that they pull out of the closet and put into just any project. It takes two weeks to a month even to find a perfect candidate for us.

How did Pulilab perform from a project management standpoint?

We worked extremely well with them. We used email and Skype to communicate back and forth and it always seemed to work. They were very responsive to our requests and do their best to incorporate user and stakeholder feedback as quickly as possible. They definitely pay very close attention to their clients.

What distinguishes Pulilab from other providers?

They really understand the circumstances and priorities of startups. It was a huge advantage for us and probably is also for other startup clients. They are able and willing to sit down with you and strategize long-term objectives. We really appreciated that about them.

Please describe your organization.

We’re an independent ad agency. We are medium sized by Norwegian standards. That would put us in the small business category by European or US standards. We did work with national and regional brands. We worked with two of the biggest telecoms in Norway and we worked with Mitsubishi locally. We did some work on tourism sites for a Norwegian destination, which is big here.

What is your position?

I was the digital director at the time of my engagement with Pulilab.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Pulilab?

We didn’t employ any developers in the company at that time. Hiring adept developers in Norway takes a little time and it’s sort of pricey. The talent pool is limited, too. We found Pulilab by chance. They looked like they had the right approach for us. Being run by two Danish people, it was also really easy to communicate with them. We established a rapport online. We did a test project together with them first, before we actually hired them for the scope of our more important work.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

We did both projects and we did traditional offshoring. The project was led from Norway and all the development was from the architectural standpoint until launch, which was led by the Pulilab team. That was a good experience. They had a wide array of capabilities. It was a very smooth, collaborative effort.

We often found ourselves limited by our budget. The fact that we only had one guy working for us at Pulilab gave it the right picture of what we could have achieved with them. That says more about how hard it is to offshore teams. From a management standpoint, the Pulilab guys did everything in their power to make it work. From the Norwegian side, it was hard to incorporate a guy working in Budapest and a Norwegian team. That’s why we left, but he did his job very well.

We were quite pragmatic in our approach. We wanted somebody modern, well trained and with good UI/UX [User Interface/User Experience] sensibilities. We were looking for someone with experience writing Python or Ruby. During our discussions with them, we ended up doing it in Python and that was a good choice. Pulilab recommended the choice and we went with it based on their proposed reasoning.

How did you come to work with Pulilab?

If I remember correctly, we did start with a freelancer. At some point, we stumbled upon Pulilab. The thing that sold us was the professionalism of the guys who run it. We had some initial communication with other companies in Eastern Europe and Poland. Pulilab understood what we needed, were really flexible and we could run a test project with them and scale up. That was important to us. That made them a really natural choice when we ran this side project. We knew they were flexible and they delivered high-quality workers.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

We spent between $50,000 to $100,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

I can’t speak to that now since I do not work at the company anymore.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

The project that they took from a concept to deployment won a couple of local prizes for the best online advertising effort that year. That’s a benchmark in the industry. It says something about the general quality of the work at the time, which was great. They were ahead of us when it came to methodology and the right way of working in code. One of the key things we got from working with them was an understanding of how to better improve our own processes and workflows. Not only were they able to help us with the development of our solution, they were also able to improve our overall practice.

How did Pulilab perform from a project management standpoint?

I don’t remember if we used tracking tools for project management, but we never had any major issues with delayed or defective work.

What distinguishes Pulilab from other providers?

Their personal touch is a huge factor and advantage. We flew to Budapest and set up there for a bit.  They tried to understand our business perspective - the brand we were trying to create and the quality level we were looking for. They were trying to augment that in a good way. Compared to other offshore providers, they were a really good fit for our Scandinavian clients. It removed a lot of the cultural issues that tend to arise in these relationships.

Is there anything Pulilab could have improved or done differently?

When we had this guy working for us, he was under used a little bit. That’s maybe an area where we could both be a little better with, at identifying when and why that was happening. Apart from that, I was really happy.

Please describe your organization.

We actually do photo booths and, what we do is custom animated, like GIF-animated photo booths, so we create custom designs and custom experiences for brands, usually, and for events as well.

What is your position?

I'm the founder.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Pulilab?

We completely outsourced the functional development. We don't do any of that in-house development and so I researched a couple of companies locally in Hungary, and I found them, and that's why we actually started working together. They did all the development for us and implemented the custom software that they coded.

It's not a standalone app but a photo booth with some custom software. They did software development for an application that's running on Linux and there's sort of an app as well for Android, but they don't work separately. They all work together in unison as an integrated system. They also created a website for us that allows us to perform all of our administrative functions. It's an ecosystem between the website, the application – the Linux application – running on the computer, and the Android application running on the tablet.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

They actually created the whole app from the ground up, so we were working together throughout the whole project and finding out and figuring out what would be the best solution for different issues, or just how the app works and how users would interact with it. I'm thinking of a good example for this. What happens is if someone sits in front of the booth and takes pictures, all of the images are uploaded to our website automatically. What is a good feature is that for each of those you don't have to set the event graphics and the text that are displayed on the computer itself. But, if it's connected online, we can change the settings from our website admin panel, which is a good feature, and we always have access to the booth, so we could randomly restart a booth even if we're offsite, through our website. That's been a good feature that Pulilab integrated into the application and the whole ecosystem.

In the beginning, for the testing stage, they usually did all that work as well, so they uploaded the graphics, set the events, and everything, but after a while they trained us how to do all of that. We did a lot of school shooting and they also helped a lot with the issues in the beginning. There weren't many and most of them were more technical issues due to the camera, flash, or printer, but they were also helpful with that even though it's sort of unrelated to the software. It's more of a hardware issue.

As far as I know, there was someone developing the website—front-end and backend – and those are two separate people. There was a general systems admin, two guys were working on the Android application and, one or two guys were also working on the application running on Linux, so there were six or seven in total, I assume. I don't know them by person – the developers. I work directly with their project manager.

How did you come to work with Pulilab?

One of the owners of Pulilab is actually a previous classmate of mine from university. We spent a year together in university, but then we changed schools, and then when I started thinking about getting the development done, I researched a couple of the companies and then I got in touch with Christian [Buus Nielsen, chief executive officer and founder of Pulilab], and that's why I end up choosing them as well because there was also a personal relationship. I trusted their work, and I've seen a lot of stuff they've been working on before we start working together.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

It was about 10,000 euros [approximately $10,700].

What is the status of this engagement?

We haven't worked together for the last year, but we actually started in the negotiating phase for some new development for the same project – extra features – we want to implement. The original work was completed in 2014 around October or November, but there were still a couple of maintenance-related stuff they helped on the beginning of this year.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Our website part of the service is just sort of a small feedback part. We don't track all of that data, but we had a short deadline to launch the product. There's a huge festival in Hungary called the Sziget Festival. It usually has 400,000 visitors each year, and we wanted to launch the product before the festival began. We had 15 days altogether, from the kickoff of the project until the event itself. They were working day and night, actually, to meet the deadline we specified, and it was hard because we didn't have access to all of the hardware in the beginning, so they started developing without having real access to the hardware that would drive the service, and I think they did a good job with them. They're flexible, and I'm happy with how we were able to work together.

How did Pulilab perform from a project management standpoint?

They've been able to complete the project on time within the budget that we agreed upon. We had a fixed budget in the beginning so everything was delivered in that manner. There were some issues, but all of them were handled in the end. Just some random development issues like bugs. Again, I would like to emphasize that most of these issues were hardware-related and, we didn't know what caused them. In the end, we figured out most of them were hardware-related – not necessarily software.

We didn't use any specific project management tools. I don't know if they did, internally, but we didn't use any of those. What we wanted, because we were not IT [information technology] people, was to hand over all of the technical stuff to them. Because time was so short, we didn't discuss each and every step, so all I wanted was a product with the specifications cited, and what they delivered met all of the specifications that we asked for, so we were happy with that.

Is there anything Pulilab could have improved or done differently?

Our situation was a bit unique. They usually have a project manager for each project. I worked with their CTO. I was communicating with the CTO, and it was smooth, but I think it would have been easier if I had worked directly with one of their project managers.

Do you have any advice for future clients?

It's important to always specify requirements as detailed and as thoroughly as possible because it's hard in the end if you don't have every specification in the contract. You know, there are some areas that, I assume that will do this, I assume it will do that. If you don't have that settled in the beginning that can cause a real hassle in the project.