SAU/CAL

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the VP of sales and operations of IronGate.Wine. We are a wine retailer, selling wines from private Canadian collections to the US. IronGate Canada has been around for about 13 years, and we have been storing investment-grade wines, as well as wholesaling wines, to US partners, and into Asia.

We started IronGate.Wine about a year ago, and launched in the spring. We are now not just wholesaling, but are actually retailing wines from the private Canadian collections to US collectors and buyers.

What challenge were you trying to address with SAU/CAL?

We needed to migrate from a platform that we had been on for a month. We were looking to relaunch our website in tandem with what we had going at the time and wanted to do this cost-effectively, making sure that ultimately, we had control over our website in the long run.

What was the scope of their involvement?

SAU/CAL primarily did the development of the website and made technology recommendations that would help drive the marketing. They didn’t really help on the creative side, as we have our own creative person that we work with, but did have creative use of technology to help drive the business.

Initially, the first phase was just replicating what we had in place at the time and mirroring the site as much as possible, so that when we cut over, it was a live cut to a site that people could go and buy from. The website was developed on WordPress, and they integrated WooCommerce. They well over delivered on that, and our numbers show that. There was an increase in business on our end after launching with them.

The second phase, which is what we are in currently, is the personalization including the memberships, personal preferences, and the ability to refer a friend to the site. We are not just a wine retail site, we are working with them on the retention side of things to offer membership to our customers. Whether that is being able to buy wine before the general public, or refer their friends and earn credit on their account. We pride ourselves on being a white glove concierge-style service, and it is not just people simply buying from us and we ship it out. We contact every customer and try to build a personal relationship with them and understand them. It goes back to the memberships, and their preferences, and we will only tell them what wines they are interested in when they come into stock, and we won’t bombard with a thousand SKU that are useless to that customer. It was really getting SAU/CAL to build a site and a platform to deliver on that white glove concierge-type service.

Phase three, which we are working towards starting at the end of the year, and beginning of the new year, is really adding on top of that functionality, whether it is social connectivity, internationalization, shipping integration, more of the backend if you will, but not anything that we need immediately.

What is the team dynamic?

We had around 10 people on their team that we have worked with over the past few months, and we have a key point person that we have been working with on this as well.

How did you come to work with SAU/CAL?

I personally reached out to a number of personal contacts to get recommendations of firms to look at. SAU/CAL was one of those recommendations, and we ended putting out an RFP [Request for Proposal] in terms of what we were looking for. We had a few firms come back with recommendations of what they would do. It really came down to price being a part of it, but more importantly, it was timing. We had a couple of firms that had timelines that were too far out for what we needed to do the cutover.

How much have you invested in them?

Confidential.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in June 2017, and the work is ongoing.

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

We saw conversions increase dramatically with about the same amount of traffic. I think it had to do with a number of factors, and I really have it down to the UX as well as the UI. They built a solid site that had fantastic search capabilities. The feedback has been positive, and that we have launched a simple site that is easy to use, navigate, and buy from.

How did SAU/CAL perform from a project management standpoint?

They were fantastic. They delivered the first scope in time, and have been able to deliver more functionality within the timeframe than they originally scoped. I can’t recommend them enough.

They were responsive. We have an open Slack channel between us, which is always there and on. Obviously, when they are working on other projects there can be a delay, which is more like an hour and not days.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most impressive thing was how the nimble the team was and how fast they were able to deliver on such an excellent product.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not really. They have overperformed and overdelivered.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the COO of Dexter Industries, an educational robotics company. Through our website, we sell robotics kits to teach people about technology and how to program.

What challenge were you trying to address with SAU/CAL?

We had a WordPress website, and it took a lot of work to keep everything updated and make sure everything worked properly and that all the plug-ins worked together. We don't have a website maintenance team, so when we had bugs and issues, I was tempted to move our team out of their normal activity and have them try to figure it out.

SAU/CAL came in to do our monthly maintenance. They make sure all of our plug-ins are up to date, test the site on staging before pushing it to live, and figure out any bugs or issues on the site.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have monthly maintenance with them. They update all of our plug-ins in WordPress, especially the bigger updates. We have all kinds of functionality on our site. We have WooCommerce on our site. We have a checkout process for products and tons of content on our site as well. They also helped us figure out how to do some optimization of our images and get a plug-in that can help optimize images so that we don't use up so much space and it's not as slow.

They helped us to increase speed overall, finding where there were problems on our site that were causing poor response times and helped us solve those. They fixed a lot of little bugs in the shopping cart, and issues with the way it's connected through Shipwire, which is our 3PO, and payment issues with Amazon Pay, PayPal, or Stripe.

They also helped us with our subscription product called GoBox, a robot mission delivered to your door every month. They helped us set it up online so that it would charge people every month and integrate with our 3PO as well. It allows people to sign up and manage their subscriptions.

Finally, they helped us do single sign-on with Discourse, which is for our forums, as well as Dexter Studio, which is our project site that holds all the projects, content, and curriculum for teachers that want to teach with our robots. They also customized Discourse to make it look like our website, so you don't feel like you're in a different place.

What is the team dynamic?

We're always in touch with a project lead and an account manager. The account manager lets us know when they're starting maintenance and what they need when they run into issues. We talk through Slack so it's easy to ping them an issue or question. Mitchell's one of the senior level guys there, so he always jumps in and solves problems if needed. Laura and a few other people do a lot of the work on our site. Paulo has helped out a lot too. They shift who does the work amongst the tech team using the standard protocol of what they do on our site. Anyone can jump in on Slack if they know about a previous issue. Generally, they're very responsive and proactive. I always feel like our work is given priority because we're a subscription customer with the maintenance side of things.

How did you come to work with SAU/CAL?

I interviewed 5 different companies, and the ease of working with them was a key decision-making factor. Most of their team is in Canada, and Paulo might be in Brazil, so it was easy to communicate because we have similar time zones. Other decision-making factors in our selection were that they explained everything well and were very transparent, especially about cost. I gave them my budget, and they told me what I could do for that budget, and worked within it.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent $20,000 over the span of working with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We've been working with them since June 2016.

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

I spend about 5% of the time that I used to on making sure the website is working. Our website is our main source of sales, so being functional is important to our business. Now, I'm able to focus on other things that are more specialized around our business. We haven’t had any downtime since we started with them. We had one issue for five minutes when they jumped in and helped, and it was resolved. It's a huge benefit for our business to always have our systems up and working.

How did SAU/CAL perform from a project management standpoint?

They're well above average compared to other folks that I've worked with in a similar capacity. They've never gone over budget. They've always delivered on time and they've always given me the proper expectation of when they're going to finish. Even if it's not as fast as I wanted it, at least I know when it's due.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I was most impressed by their responsiveness and how they remember our issues. There's context whenever I bring up a new issue. I don't have to re-explain everything about our business and our site. I'm impressed that they can have these switches to different people doing work, and they all know what's going on.

Also, they've recommended some awesome tools for us to use for our business. Jilt is a great cart recovery email system that we use now that they recommend. They know the space really well. They've also introduced us to another marketing firm that we need to take advantage of.

Are there any areas they could improve?

If they increased the size of their team, they could do more faster. Sometimes, I wish things could be fixed faster, but I understand that they have timelines.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner of a review and news site about subscription boxes. Our website has about 30 new posts go out every day. There is also a directory where we record all the information about the boxes and provide a discovery layer for them. Because we're a focus niche website, we have demands of what we want to see in terms of linked data and being able to maximize what we’re getting out of WordPress.

What challenge were you trying to address with SAU/CAL?

The first thing we approached SAU/CAL about was a performance improvement. Additionally, we needed better linking of our data. Since our site sees daily readers, return readers and people who use the site as an informational hub, we also wanted help with SEO and ranking in Google.

What was the scope of their involvement?

In January, SAU/CAL recommended a designer for the re-design of the website. Based on her designs, SAU/CAL helped develop a WordPress site using WooCommerce for the directory. They also added new technical features to the site that didn’t exist before. Some of these implementations included “hearting” of a post to save for later. Another requirement that they implemented for was notifications in our directory so a user can get notified whenever the site has something new about their interests.

SAU/CAL also helped link data and build the relationship tables that underpin everything that happens in the site. This data is linked from our directory and becomes discoverable for Google and people who click on our site. We then link the data to all the posts about that category.

What is the team dynamic?

SAU/CAL has been working on my site for nearly 2 years now. We interact with the owners of the company and Matias [lead engineer at SAU/CAL]. We also interact with Olga [team manager at SAU/CAL] who manages all our day to day contact. Our current project lead is Paulo. They are all knowledgeable about the website and I can just send them requests and they’ll bundle them together and help me figure out what I actually want.

How did you come to work with SAU/CAL?

I was looking for a good team of developers for a couple years as it’s hard to find a developer for a small business. I found SAU/CAL originally on Codable. I had a couple requests in and there was no one to help. SAU/CAL was recommended from one of the owners of Codable.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent between $50,000 and $75,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with SAU/CAL in June 2016. They did the basic work without rebuilding the entire site from June to December 2016, and then we started working with the designer in December and January. The relationship is ongoing and they worked constantly since May on rebuilding and rewriting the entire thing and launching.

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

We were able to launch in time for what we needed it for. We expect our page views and income to grow quarter over quarter. The main evidence is that people find it usable and we’re having a much higher level of return readership and that’s one of the things that we really wanted as a goal besides having a good-looking site. We also received an increase in fourth quarter placements from last year.

How did SAU/CAL perform from a project management standpoint?

SAU/CAL has been extremely responsive to my needs. They took in all of my ideas and gave me a plan and broke them all up into different sprints. They budgeted a lot of time for quality control.  

What did you find most impressive about them?

On a personal level, we get along really well. They’re always professional and work with me to help me make things possible because we’re doing things with WordPress that other sites don’t do.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

PHLEARN is the #1 Photoshop and Lightroom training company online. We train people in 140 countries on how to use Photoshop and Lightroom to become better photographers and better designers. I’m the CEO.

What challenge were you trying to address with SAU-CAL?

We had a WordPress site powered with WooCommerce that had a shopping cart that wasn’t functioning well. It was slow and there were a lot of errors and things that were causing customers to not be able to check out, or they would lose the contents of their cart for no reason, or other unexplainable bugs that were very frustrating. We needed an expert in WooCommerce.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started with fixing the WooCommerce installation and making sure it was functioning properly. Then we moved onto building an entire education platform together. Next, we realized we wanted to start offering streaming and online subscription-based learning. Instead of people just downloading their courses to their computer and keeping them forever, we wanted to offer more of a streaming experience, with the user renting courses, and doing that required a lot of new technology that we had never even considered before.

They heavily modified WooCommerce to do things that it does not normally do. WooCommerce is writing a case study about PHLEARN because we’ve done things with their shopping cart system that they didn’t think people could do with it. That really shows off the talent of SAU-CAL.

They really used WordPress almost as a software language. Normally people wouldn’t use WordPress to build out a giant video-streaming education platform, but you can also think of WordPress as just a coding language like PHP or Ruby, and you can treat it like a platform to build off of, and that’s what SAU-CAL did for us. That’s been about a nine month’s worth of work and all of that was exclusively handled by SAU-CAL.

What is the team dynamic?

There were three people on their end and two on our end. I’ve never worked with an agency before where there was such a close connection, where it felt like an extension of our team. I’m used to agencies being aloof and separate. Maybe you talk to an account manager or something like that, but with SAU-CAL we always talked directly to the engineers the whole time as if they were our own engineers.

How did you come to work with SAU-CAL?

I got tired of shopping around individually so I ended up going to a specialized marketplace for WordPress agencies called Codeable where you can narrow it down more easily. Only the best WordPress agencies in the world are allowed to be part of the site so you know you’re going to get somebody good. We started shopping around, talking to a bunch of agencies, and out of those talks with several agencies, SAU-CAL emerged as the winner.

You actually sign a contract through Codeable to use these agencies, which makes it super easy to get started. I felt lucky that we were able to find them and how quickly we were able to get going.

How much have you invested with them?

We have spent over $100,000 in the last 14 months with them, but that is across multiple big projects, including dozens of feature requests, maintenance, and other bug fixes. What we originally brought them on to do is not what they ended up doing for us because we expanded the scope of the project dramatically. I would say everything they’ve quoted so far, they’ve been accurate about. They were fairly spot-on with cost and timeline estimates.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in May 2016, and the project was completed in early 2017. We still work with them on regular feature development.

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

Their responsiveness has been one of the best things. In terms of messaging and responsiveness, they were always a minute or less away. It felt like they were an extension of our team. I appreciated the experience of working with them.

The code they built has been very stable. I’ve worked with enough engineers to know that it’s easy to make bad code that slows the server down and everything starts to fall apart and you build up code debt. I never had that experience with SAU-CAL. They are talented, and their deliverables are always right or close to right on the first try. They do a lot of testing to make sure that they’re not going to break 2 other things every time they launch something.

How did SAU-CAL perform from a project management standpoint?

We had Skype video calls once a week to kick off the sprints for that week and then communicated via Slack the rest of the time. It felt like they were in the office with us because you could just pop open a Slack message, send something, and they would reply almost instantly.

The project grew in scope so much that they ended up adding a project manager on their side and we ended up adding one on our side because there were too many moving pieces. We had so much to do that if we hadn’t been really organized with a lot of project management, it would have been a disaster.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most impressive thing was their friendliness. They were great at communicating and being quick, but they were very friendly, easy to get along with, and very humble; if they messed up on anything, they always let us know immediately and never charged us for fixing anything. If something required an extra 10 hours of their time to go back and do it the right way, they would always do it and we never got billed for any of that time.

I appreciated how candid and honest they were. They were completely transparent. If they did something that caused some random error in the code they didn’t even build, they would tell us immediately and they would just go fix it. Even if it was something that we would never have noticed or known about, they would let us know anyway.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not really. I’ve worked with good and bad agencies, and the experience with SAU-CAL is way above average. If more developers would behave the way they do, the startup world would be a better place.

Do you have any advice for potential clients?

Know what you want to build before you approach them. I think we all assume we know what we want to build at first, but I find those early plans rarely match up with reality. It’s good to really think whether building some expensive tech feature is actually going to do anything meaningful for your customers. If not, you shouldn’t pay to build it. If you’re paying a premium price and you build out even one feature that goes live and you realize it had no measurable positive impact on your business, you just burned money. It was a bad set of assumptions you paid thousands of dollars for. SAU-CAL is really good at thinking those things through with you. They’re very good at providing an excellent recommendation on what plugins to use and things like that.

If I were approaching them again, I would have done a better job of thinking about what exactly I wanted to build. They will build exactly what you tell them to. Sometimes they will even add a couple special features in there you hadn’t even thought about. But for what you’re paying, you really need to know what you actually want.

Please describe your organization.

Black Lion Digital is a web design agency.

What is your position?

I am one of the owners of the company.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Saucal?

We had a project for a startup fitness program which was a bit beyond our normal engagements as a design agency.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

We originally engaged with Saucal for consultation. We wanted to receive some expert advice and build the platform ourselves, but we realized that it would be a bit beyond our comfort level, so we contracted them to build the product.

Our website was built using WordPress, which was an initial requirement. Saucal integrated our membership software, MemberMouse, making it work as a custom algorithm. I was in charge of creating the full functional specs for it. It was a complex project which featured fully-custom elements tying in with our membership software as well as with various plug-ins such as Gravity Forms.

How did you come to work with Saucal?

I found Saucal through codeable.io. We'd used that site for a few projects, but had trouble in finding a company that would take on our project. It was quite large. We came to speak with one of the owners of codeable and were put in touch with Saucal. I interviewed over a dozen other companies through Skype.

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

The total cost was around $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project was completed a few days ago, after a 3-4-week development time.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We were so happy with the finished product that we actually bought a present for the lead developer from Saucal. We couldn't believe how thorough they were.

I've dealt with many developers and am one myself, so I know that they usually do exactly what's in front of them. There were a few pieces in the functional specifications that needed to be worked-on. Saucal looked at those from an outside perspective, determined what we were trying to achieve, and pieced them together, making significant improvements to our initial specs. We ended up with a better result than we had ever hoped.

How did Saucal perform from a project management standpoint?

They hit the deadline set by us, which was a very tough one.

What distinguishes Saucal from other providers?

I appreciated how fast Saucal moved in terms of responsiveness and testing the work. They were quite flexible with the scope and remained on-call for us 24/7.

Is there anything Saucal could have improved or done differently?

No. I can't think of anything that Saucal could do differently. We plan on using them for a second round of development.

Please describe your organization.

We are an oil and gas company located in Manitoba. We started our operations in 2013.

What is your position?

I am the president and Chief Executive Officer of the company.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Saucal?

Even though we're a private company, we needed a website in order to keep our shareholders informed. We report our business information as if we were a public company, just to keep our discipline high. We needed help in developing our site.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

Saucal worked on the development and design of our site. We also use their services for designing and coordinating our quarterly report. They take our financial information and set it up for printing.

We needed to only allow our shareholders to view the data within our site, so Saucal designed a security system through which it was determined if a user was a shareholder or not. The system would then generate a password for that person.

How did you come to work with Saucal?

They were located in the same building as us. This is how we met.

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

I do not have this information. I remember that the total cost was reasonable.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December of 2012. The relationship is ongoing.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We've had a high hit rate on our site. Our shareholders are interested in it. We update the data on it on a quarterly basis and send out emails to our users announcing that information is available for review.

The page is mobile-friendly. Once in a while, we evaluate it and make redesigns.

How did Saucal perform from a project management standpoint?

They performed very well.

What distinguishes Saucal from other providers?

Saucal has a good team that understands our business and listens to us. They're very responsive.

Is there anything Saucal could have improved or done differently?

Not really. The collaboration is working well for us.

Please describe your organization.

We're a music software company. We handle programming, audio sampling, and any other requirement for digital instruments such as virtual synthesizers. We've been around for over two years.

What is your position?

I am an associate director of development. I am in charge of the web interface and infrastructure building.

What business challenge were you trying to address with Saucal?

We needed assistance in building a new company website.

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

They provided additional resources for building our site. Saucal helped in the migration process, following a domain change, among other items.

They've done a lot of infrastructure work for us. We work on user cleanups and email integration, as well as other WooCommerce elements. We're planning to use Saucal as a frontend developer as well.

How did you come to work with Saucal?

I searched Google for Wordpress and WooCommerce development companies.

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

We've worked on projects that range from a total of $300, all the way up to $4,000. Project estimates are provided by them based on hourly rates. Any tasks outside of the original scope are charged with $149 per hour.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started our collaboration in June of 2015. We're still working together.

How did Saucal perform from a project management standpoint?

Of all the development companies I've worked with, Saucal has excelled at making sure that the scope of work is dialed in before it's actually started. I rarely have to add on additional work.

They've also always been good at sticking to delivery times, varying by a couple of days at most. They use a tool called Slack for project communication. Their entire team is available to me, so that I can message specific developers on the staff. They make themselves available while working on real-time development by offering staging environments in which I can play and send notes.

What distinguishes Saucal from other providers?

I appreciate the communication tool they provide us, and their attention to getting the scope of work done prior to actually starting the work. They make sure every element is discovered beforehand. Most developers never actually flush ideas out, whereas this is not a concern with Saucal.

Is there anything Saucal could have improved or done differently?

I'd love to see them increase the number of developers they have on their payroll. They could then open themselves to more projects and have a faster turnaround time. Saucal is a young development agency, so I foresee that their structure is probably going to change.