Ragnarson

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Neon Fuzz is an independent online production music library. We non-exclusively license professional music tracks primarily to television, advertising and other media companies.

Our music is available for use across all media platforms. All licences are valid for worldwide use and in perpetuity. Licences start at just $45.00 for a simple online licence, with a single advertising production licence costing $295.00.

Founder, Evan Buist is an independent media professional with over 15 years experience in advertising, post-production, and broadcast. Evan has a thorough understanding of the media landscape, with a working background as both composer and producer.

Our mission is simple: to become the world’s leading online provider of high-quality music production.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

Technology is vital to any online business, but particularly those working with a large database of large digital files, like us. I needed to find a company that understood the importance of speed and UX for this project. We needed an intuitive music search engine, one which made finding the right track easy. Ragnarson understood this and so much more from day one. Working in Ruby on Rails is what they do, and they do it very well.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I came to Ragnarson with an existing codebase from which the team were instructed to make several alterations, add new features and completely re-design the look of the site. Our existing codebase was built in Ruby on Rails. We had two fantastic developers working on this project, Piotr and Kasia, as well as a project manager, Marek.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

I’ve only ever heard the best reports about Ruby devs in Poland (and that area of the world), so I contacted several companies in Ukraine, Poland, Germany and Belarus. Ragnarson was a perfect fit for our company so we went with them - and I’m so happy we did.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started development around the beginning of March 2017 and completed the main scope of the project at the end of June 2017. We are now working on the second stage of development with Ragnarson. This relationship is ongoing, I wouldn’t think of using another company right now.

How much have you invested with Ragnarson?

$10-50k

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We’re currently moments from a private beta launch, but the initial feedback we’ve had from clients and colleagues has been very positive.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

Marek, the project manager, is an absolute professional and a pleasure to work with. He was meticulous at every stage of the job, ensuring that the team was on top of each issue and worked skillfully via Slack, Pivotal Tracker, and our weekly sprint meeting via Google Hangouts. Ragnarson’s well-structured, agile workflow is the best I have ever experienced.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

The philosophy at Ragnarson is unique and one to be greatly respected. Check out their Core Values page for more details. This is absolutely reflected in the interactions I had with all staff members and in the quality of work delivered. Integrity is trait often left behind in the current international business landscape, but Ragnarson possesses real integrity and so much more.

Are there any areas Ragnarson could improve?

I honestly don’t think so. Considering the budget and timeframe, they were absolutely spot on. They delivered everything we agreed on and more.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We provide an app for the management of insurance contracts. It has been available for the German market during the last two years and it has 20,000 customers. I am the co-founder and CTO of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

We have worked with Ragnarson from the beginning, in order to build our platform.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ragnarson has helped us build our API server, management platform and mobile apps. Our technology stack was Ruby on Rails on the backend and the Ionic Framework for the mobile apps, which is a hybrid approach based on the Cordova SDK and AngularJS.

We started out using one developer, and increased the size every few months. At peak level, we used seven or eight developers from Ragnarson.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

We chose Ruby on Rails as a technology stack, and Ragnarson specialized in it. It would give us the ability to develop a stable and maintainable system in the beginning, with a high speed. That was crucial for a startup in order to ensure speed, quality, and enough performance. Moreover, Ragnarson not only built the platform quickly and with good quality, but also allowed us to scale up the development team well. They’re not a 100-developer agency where the team members don’t know each other. Their familiarity improves their way of working together.

How much have you invested with Ragnarson?

The cost of Ragnarson’s work was between $300,000 and $600,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Ragnarson in 2014. The project duration was a little over two years, ending in the summer of 2016.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We cannot attribute results directly to Ragnarson. They were used only as an engineering team, so KPI improvements are related to our product team. Items like response time didn’t factor in.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

Ragnarson was always keen to follow best-practice processes in terms of software development and project management. Given that we are a startup and had a small team at the time, we were not always able to follow best-practices, so we were grateful to be reminded of what we could do and where we could improve the development process. Ragnarson coached us in this area, which was great for us, as a small and inexperienced team.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

Their developers know each other well, which leads to fast ramp-up times, once they are on the project. They go on company retreats and similar things, and all work from the same office. We haven’t had to worry too much about team dynamics, once we scale up.

Are there any areas Ragnarson could improve?

Sometimes, the developers should try to think more from a customer’s perspective when developing products. They are not the most customer-centric developers I know, but they were also not reluctant to work with us.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

1FORhunger is a social enterprise which helps facilitate meals for those in need by working with restaurants. We have built an app which helps users find participating locations where they can become a part of the process. I am a co-founder of the company and also handle much of our business development, marketing, and product development. We’re a startup and haven’t yet hit critical mass, so my role involves a bit of everything. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

We were looking to build an application which helped users learn about our program and the available restaurants in and around their locations. At the same time, it would help them track their own progress based on the purchases they made at participating restaurants. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ragnarson developed our iOS and Android app. We used Ionic Creator, which allowed us to stage mockups of the screens in order to experiment and test versions. Ragnarson assigned one frontend and one backend developer, a project manager, and another resource on an as-needed basis who worked mainly on the backend.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

My co-founder participated in a networking session at a startup event. There was a contest being held by Ragnarson in which the winner would receive a chance to work with their team pro bono after meeting a number of criteria. We won that contest. The rest took off from there.

How much have you invested with Ragnarson?

Because we won that contest, our costs were minimal. We were able to work with Ragnarson and get top-notch guidance and input for nothing.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

At this juncture, there is not much to report in the way of metrics at a market level, but regarding their ability to deliver what we envisioned and asked for, close to 100% of everything was made as we wanted. Ragnarson met our goals without any hassle; whenever there were any challenges, they were good at voicing them and helping identify potential workarounds. While it would be hard to quantify from a Net Promoter Score standpoint, I’d give Ragnarson a 10/10 based on our experience.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

They used Slack and Trello in order to ensure that we were project-managing at an efficient level. The process was fantastic, with daily 10 minutes to half-hour sessions during which we planned for the next day and talked about the work which had been done so far.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

We worked with a manager on a daily basis and also had a chance to meet Ragnarson’s senior leaders, including their CEO and some other top members. They flew in from Poland, and we had a breakfast and learned more about where they were coming from. It was a good chance to learn more about Ragnarson as a company. We also had a strong relationship with the developers themselves, with no acrimony involved. I would highly recommend Ragnarson to other businesses and individuals.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a Berlin-based startup working on a car-leasing platform.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

We are building an application using Ruby on Rails.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ragnarson developed our platform using 4 developers. The spectrum of technology used includes Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Redis, Heroku, AWS S3, as well as other cloud computing services.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

I know Ragnarson from working on previous projects for another company, where I was the CTO. I had a great experience with Ragnarson's team. They have excellent front-end and Ruby on Rails developers.

How much have you invested with Ragnarson?

The cost of our project with Ragnarson was above $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have an ongoing project with Ragnarson, working on our company's main platform. We started working together in the summer of 2016.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Everyone has been happy, which is why we continue to work with Ragnarson.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

Our interactions with Ragnarson had me as the project manager. They were involved strictly in the technical implementation.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

The reason I've kept hiring Ragnarson is that, regardless of which developer is assigned to our project, they will always be skillful and well-motivated. Ragnarson tries to participate in the product life cycle, discussing features and learning what our business needs are, instead of simply coding blindly. I couldn't say the same thing about other providers.

Are there any areas Ragnarson could improve?

No. Ragnarson has done everything to my uttermost satisfaction.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

BookingSync.com is a vacation rental software offering centralized property management with distribution to platforms like Airbnb, Booking.com, and Trip Advisor. We centralize all marketing efforts, reservations, payments, and so on, and continue with steps like email notifications, generating websites for clients and providing invoicing.

I am the founder and chief executive officer of the company. I also lead the technical side.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

We have a challenging platform with numerous functionalities. One of our biggest challenges was building a central app. Booking itself is done through a co-product and many modular apps using our public API. Similar to a smartphone's architecture, we have a main operating system with apps plugged in on top of it. Some of them are made by us, and some by other developers. Regardless of this, we need a robust system in terms of APIs, authorization, record control, and so on.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ragnarson developed our system using Ruby on Rails in the backend, an SQL database, and jQuery on the client side. 

The number of developers has varied from 2 initially, to 7 at peak capacity. We have since built an internal team, so we're only using 2 developers from Ragnarson now.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

I've tried multiple agencies in parallel but didn't have a good experience. I realized that, because I'm a technology person, I can quickly see inefficiencies in the processes of other groups. Ragnarson's motivation to get things right differentiated them from others. We have established a process which works for me, following common open-source patterns that have been proven to work well on other projects.

How much have you invested with Ragnarson?

We have spent between $400,000 and $500,000 in total.

What is the status of this engagement?

We're currently building an internal team, so we're slowing down the work with Ragnarson, but we're not going to stop anytime soon.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

In my past work, I've had a chance to make contributions to the Ruby on Rails and EmberJS technologies. I can see that the developers from Ragnarson have the same level of capabilities and involvement in the project. I haven't found this while working with other companies.

The API we've released has around 200 partners currently. Some of them have told us that the system is a pleasure to work with and is one of the best they've seen in the industry. We've had fast integrations with partners like Airbnb, for which the process took 34 days. Some of our competitors still have problems after one year, so it was a huge difference. Airbnb has come to value our technical skills, which also speaks to the capabilities of Ragnarson.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

Most of the project management was done by me. It wasn't something I was trying to get out of this partnership. We used Slack and Skype for communication and GitHub for project management. Our groups have a similar way of working, so the process was very efficient.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

I found the technical and human quality of Ragnarson's developers to be high. They took responsibility, making the project their own and doing everything possible to make it work. Ragnarson has a group of great team players, with good communication and English skills. It's been a real pleasure working with them.

Are there any areas Ragnarson could improve?

Ragnarson could have improved in terms of business discussions, gaining more clear knowledge about how transitions within an internal team work.

This review was updated by Karol Galanciak (CTO, BookingSync) on August 28, 2020. The original star ratings were: Overall - 5, Quality - 5, Schedule - 5, Cost - 5, NPS - 5. New content is below:

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I work as a CTO in a company that develops a property management software for short-term property managers as well as individual owners who reach their customers using Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway, TripAdvisor, and more.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

When we launched our product, the infrastructure was appropriate, but, as the scope of our operations grew and our platform gained new features, the then-existing infrastructure began to be slightly underwhelming for our purposes. It was simply outgrown by the set of applications and we’ve been expecting heavy loads of traffic coming to our servers as the numbers of users grew.

It became obvious that we needed more scalability. During one of the meetings Ragnarson team came up with the idea to take advantage of AWS features and web services like Kubernetes and other open-source tools (Terraform and Docker). I liked the idea and decided to work with them.

The ultimate goal was to ensure stable product performance with a high degree of automation and flexibility. This required a smooth and a fail-safe transition towards AWS from our legacy servers to build a scalable system and cloud monitoring solution. We needed to implement new tools to utilize cloud components in a cost-efficient way.

At the same time, we wanted to keep our software development, testing, and deployment routines pretty much the same.

SOLUTION

How did you select Ragnarson and what were the deciding factors?

We had been already working with Ragnarson's Ruby on Rails developers before for a long time and their DevOps Team had been helping us occasionally with the previous platform. As we were happy with the collaboration, continuing to work together on a new platform was a natural choice.

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

Ragnarson handled the full scope of the tasks that needed to be done to update and optimize our infrastructure and software delivery pipelines. Their consultants investigated our existing workflows and assessed infrastructure and software development processes.

Then they gathered our requirements and came up with a detailed plan for designing and moving our workloads, data, and set of applications to a custom AWS-based platform suited for our needs.

They eventually moved our data and applications to the cloud and performed mostly seamless migration so our team experienced no interruptions in the workflow process. We received detailed developer documentation on the architecture of our AWS infrastructure and tutorials on using it. The assigned consultants were very helpful in explaining some particular details to our developers.

Once we were happy with the new set up, they executed some changes to improve the security of the infrastructure and set up monitoring and alerting notifications. Currently, Ragnarson provides ongoing maintenance and monitoring of our infrastructure. If something is wrong they are ready to take action immediately.

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

They’ve been very flexible when it comes to the way they work with us. The team size fluctuated between 1 and 3 depending on the scope of work and phase of deployment. They are skilled and very proactive at identifying the issues and offering ready solutions for nearly all the challenges our infrastructure set-up encountered.

We work with them on-demand, however currently one engineer from the Ragnarson collaborates with my developers working full-time as an integral part of our team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The ecosystem became significantly easier to manage and extend as well as the costs of scaling it vertically and horizontally decreased. Our infrastructure is now managed and deployed automatically, using Terraform and Chef.

Ragnarson built a new Kubernetes-based platform and it meets all of our requirements: from deployment, security, maintenance to troubleshooting, monitoring, routing, network configuration, etc.

Yet, from day 1 the whole infrastructure is constantly evolving towards the most optimal solutions available on the market. I have an in-depth understanding of the current system performance at any time due to the smart monitoring system.

We also work with the dedicated DevOps consultant to maintain and constantly improve the infrastructure. He is available on-call duty and provides 24/7 support when needed.

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

All of the assigned specialists use our tools for project management and ongoing communication as well. They are quick to respond, even during non-working hours, so all communication goes smoothly and with no delay. That helps my team to focus on core product development and always stay informed without the need for micromanaging.

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

I liked their proactive attitude at identifying the issues beyond the initial requirements and offering solutions for them. The team draws from their past experience to offer critical insight into technical challenges. That helped them foresee most of the issues and solve them upfront, instead of dealing with the consequences.

Ragnarson is always willing to go the extra mile if needed, which saves lots of time and money in the long run.

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

They have proactively solved several issues, which could have resulted in major problems, should they have been left unaddressed. I was kept informed at all times and this fact gave me reassurance that the team will deliver effectively.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Stewardly is a social-purpose business in the human subjects research administration space. When people perform research on other people, testing drugs and devices within hospitals and universities, there is a series of checks and balances that exist in order to ensure that the research is ethical and that everyone has done their homework before testing potentially risky new health products in humans. When people make a decision as to whether to participate in research, they need to be fully informed of the known risks and what the demands on them will be. Through our work, and our software, we aim to cut 1-2 years out of the up-to-14-year, up-to-5-billion-dollar drug development process by helping the people who oversee research at hospitals and universities to be more efficient at what they do.

I am the founder of the startup, which is a social purpose business.

What challenge were you trying to address with Ragnarson?

Like many startups, we have done a bunch of software development in order to establish an MVP [minimum viable product] from which we could receive feedback. We had what I would call “intern-quality” software at the time, and when we actually needed to deploy it and gain a larger user base, it behooved us to have enterprise-grade software out-of-the-gate. I found out about Ragnarson through an excellent software platform they had developed, and got in touch with them because I was looking for help in making that leap.

Because I work in a fairly specialized field, I didn't have the same worries as someone building solutions for the general population. We will never suddenly gain a billion users, but we are still planning for the future, and are re-architecting our software in order to make it as efficient as possible.

The business goal was to work on the world's first hosted electronic research ethics administration software. In the field, there is something called an IRB [Institutional Review Board], which is a group of people who oversee research that is known by different names in different parts of the world. We wanted to come up with the first free software service for research ethics administrators, allowing them to keep track of the research studies their IRB oversees. One of the problems is that there is a big divide between hospitals and universities in terms of the resources they have available to them. Many places use Excel in order to keep track of studies, but there can sometimes be hundreds of them going on at the same time, which amounts to a lot of manual labor. As part of ‎Stewardly's social purpose model, we wanted to take the least valuable work, namely, Excel “grunt-work”, and level the playing field, allowing any research ethics committee across the world to get away from these types of arduous efforts, and to have good data as a right instead of as a privilege.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Ragnarson was tasked with recoding our entire codebase from scratch. In the process, we took advantage of some opportunities to create elements which we hadn't even thought of for the intern-grade software, in order to better serve our users and take certain tasks off of research administrators' plates. Ragnarson was in charge of everything from authentication to security elements, which were all rolled from scratch. This is not often done nowadays, and it speaks to Ragnarson's abilities. We have a Ruby on Rails- and JavaScript-based software service, which are Ragnarson's specialization.

One senior developer from Ragnarson was assigned to our project. I also interfaced with their chief executive officer and account manager at the front-end of the process, as well as over the course of development, in order to keep things on track.

How did you come to work with Ragnarson?

I spent a significant amount of time and effort looking for a good platform-as-a-service provider. That search eventually led me to a Ragnarson spin-off company. I eventually followed the fruit back to the tree, given that whoever built that solution knew how to build good, intuitive, human-centred software. That solution was a joy to use, compared to every other platform I'd seen.

The larger consideration for me, as a startup business owner, was if we were going to become a software development organization or not. If yes, we needed to provide the environment and resources which developers need in order to grow and thrive. I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't make sense to do this, especially since hospitals and universities often make purchase decisions through long and involved processes, so it wouldn't be reasonable to expect a need for continuous software development. Oftentimes, the product would be built, and only enhanced months or years later, depending on how long it would take for it to gain traction.

The quest then became to look for an organization which invests in its people and provides a good environment for them to thrive. I wasn't looking for the lowest bidder because developing software requires craftspeople. It became readily apparent that Ragnarson makes significant investments in sending its team to conferences, taking on open-source projects, and mentoring junior developers, assigning them different kinds of projects that could provide opportunities to learn.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Ragnarson in February 2016 and worked continuously until April. We took a pause at one point, but have now resumed development for the Stewardly software. We are now in maintenance mode, and make small tweaks to the software as needed. 

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

A good portion of our budget is dedicated to communication. We meet every day with Ragnarson for one hour in order to review the code written on the previous day and to plan the next day. The collaboration has been quite good in enabling us to ensure that test coverage is proportional to critical aspects of the code. Within research ethics administration, there is a concept of proportionate review: the riskier the research, the more “pairs of eyes” need to review it. There are a few different camps with respect to test-driven development in the software world. On one hand, there are people who drive everything with tests; on the other hand, there are those who find tests to be a waste of time. I don't necessarily believe either of those and have followed a philosophy of proportionate test coverage. It's hard to assign a metric on this, but knowing that we will be actively discussing and making decisions on test coverage at every point, as a trade-off to new features being developed, it has been a good way to gain peace of mind. The sense that I've gotten is that Ragnarson is entirely flexible, based on the philosophy of a business. I've never gotten a one-size-fits-all feeling working with Ragnarson.

How did Ragnarson perform from a project management standpoint?

We use standard tools like Pivotal Tracker for user stories. Ragnarson has its own time-tracking app for developers and we share documents through Google Drive. Slack is used for communicating day-to-day things and scheduling meetings. Ragnarson has a default toolkit of services, but they're also open to using other tools or services which I might want to bring to the table.

I've worked with different groups of technical resources in the past, and communication was not necessarily their strong point. It's been quite the contrary experience with Ragnarson. It's always easy to communicate with them, and nothing is ever lost. If something comes up which needs discussing, the appropriate members of the Ragnarson team will quickly make the time to do so.

What did you find most impressive about Ragnarson?

It all comes down to Ragnarson's team giving the impression that they care about what it is they're working on. One common theme I noticed was their eagerness to be involved in purposeful projects which can improve the world. Ragnarson's team takes their work seriously and has looked at the larger business context of why I was working on a project, and whether the solution would have the ability to be maintained, expanded, and cultivated over time. Ragnarson has an internal selection process in order to ensure that the team is working on meaningful projects with a certain level of impact and longevity, and I am honoured to have “made the cut” so to speak!

Are there any areas Ragnarson could improve?

Ragnarson's project manager asked me this at certain touch-points, but there's nothing that I can think of right now.