Shapeion Technologies

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Managing Director of Digital Uncut, a data-led digital marketing agency for scaling startups

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Shapeion Technologies?

We needed to:

1. Automate Linkedin Ads UTM configuration.
2. Integrate Google Ads API: setup scheduled data extraction jobs for analytical purposes.

Both tasks required a deep dive into the problem and the corresponding APIs as well as excellent skills and experience in data engineering and automation.

SOLUTION

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

Shapeion had a proven track of successfully finished challenging projects in AI, Data Engineering, and automation. They also had many great reviews and feedback from their customers.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Here are the stages of 2 projects that Shapeion developed for us:

1. Linkedin Marketing API
   • First, we formulated the task together. After understanding the scope and studying the documentation of the LinkedIn Marketing API Shapeion developed the initial prototype. After internal testing and approval from LinkedIn for a full-fledged launch, Shapeion launched the solution in production for all our clients.
2. Google ADS API
   • After the task formulation and studying the Google Ads API Shapeion team implemented all necessary ETLs and data integrations. Then they launched the software in automatic mode for all our customers.

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

Their CTO was our main point of contact, and we also worked with one Data Engineer from their team.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

As a result of the great job done by Shapeion team we were able to:

1. Automate adding UTMs to our ads on LinkedIn, this was previously done manually and so saves tens of hours for us for each new client.
2. Expand Google Ads analytics scope by adding some new data points to our analytical dashboards, for example, “negative keywords”.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

We used Slack as our main communication channel and had weekly meetings. The workflow was seemless

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

LinkedIn API documentation is not complete and doesn’t cover all the information we needed to solve our problem. They've gone beyond documentation and performed reverse engineering to achieve great results.

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

No

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of a legal software company. We develop software for law firms to help them with the legal due diligence process as part of corporate transactions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Shapeion Technologies?

We want to help lawyers find relevant clauses in contracts through machine learning (ML) technology. Shapeion helps us do that. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

During the initial stage of the engagement, Shapeion developed a layout analysis model. They engaged a team of annotators to develop tools that tagged relevant sections in a document based on the client’s needs. The tool could discard irrelevant information after the model had been run over the document. 

The second stage has been about natural language processing. The system identifies specific clauses related to a certain topic. For instance, if the lawyer is looking for relevant clauses for termination, then the software will tag or annotate the relevant termination clauses in a document. We haven’t finished the project yet since we’ve paused the ML development temporarily. 

What is the team composition?

I work with Alex (Co-Founder & CTO), who also serves as an ML engineer. 

How did you come to work with Shapeion Technologies?

I found Shapeion on Upwork and reached out to Alex. He had the relevant experience we needed for the business problem we were trying to solve. They also had technologies needed for it. As a result, we gave their team a go. 

How much have you invested with them?

We invested over $25,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in September 2021, and the engagement is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Alex has provided results from the analysis model they’ve built. These results have been quite good even if only a relatively small amount of data has been annotated. We’re still in the early stages of the project, but the early results have been good — we’re happy with that.

How did Shapeion Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

Shapeion’s project management has been great. Alex is good at it. To communicate, we use Slack and Zoom.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They’ve provided good results so far, and their management has been great. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there aren’t any. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure that your requirements are communicated clearly. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

In J TURNER Research, we do market research for the apartment industry, working with multifamily management companies to help them with their resident satisfaction and online reputation, conducting surveys as needed. We’ve also created a proprietary score that allows these companies to track their performance regarding online reputation. Overall, our work is focused on helping our clients find actionable ways to improve their businesses by keeping their residents and attracting new ones.

I’m the senior strategist within the company, so I wear a lot of hats. Primarily, I help with client relationship management, engaging with some of the executives of our client companies. Additionally, I spend a lot of time with our director of operations at our IT department to help figure out ways to make our company more efficient.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Shapeion Technologies?

We needed help to develop an AI tool. Our clients get a lot of open-ended commentary data from the reviews that people leave online and the surveys that they answer. Each month, they get up to 2,000–5,000 pieces of feedback, which get very difficult to manage.

We found out that the executives we worked with didn’t have the time to read every comment, but we thought that they contained important information to fully understand how people felt. Thus, we were looking to develop a tool that could categorize the comments into 22 different topics that could be summed up into performance metrics.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Shapeion is helping us create our AI tool. With this tool, companies will be able to identify their areas of improvement. For example, they might see in the metrics that communication is being negatively mentioned the most. In that case, they can easily see it as an area of improvement instead of having to read all 5,000 pieces of feedback each month to get to the same conclusion.

Prior to meeting with Shapeion, we had talked about the project with a few people, so we already had a general sense of how the system would work. However, they’ve been developing mostly from scratch. During the development phase, Shapeion has gone through different types of logics to get to the accuracy we’re hoping for.

What is the team composition?

We’ve mainly worked with Alexander (Co-Founder & CTO), but another person has stepped in to help us with the system’s optimization.

How did you come to work with Shapeion Technologies?

We found Alexander on Upwork. As I mentioned, we had met with other people to get their proposals on how they would approach the project. However, Shapeion’s proposal was the most impressive one by far.

Additionally, Alexander was the easiest and most flexible person to work with from the ones we contacted, and we really appreciated his dedication to hearing our feedback. He did a great job showing us how he could take our suggestions to build a system that worked the way we wanted. He was also very open and transparent regarding expectations.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in April 2021, and our engagement is ongoing. We will continue to work with Shapeion at least until the end of 2022. However, our eventual hope is to get this system embedded into our dashboards, so our partnership will continue indefinitely to improve and enhance the tool.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Shapeion has created an AI tool for text categorization that competes with the best tools in the world. They initially told us that the best AI models for text categorization were about 90% accurate. However, we challenged them to get us to at least that accuracy because anything less wouldn’t be useful for us without some manual adjustment involved.

The first model that they delivered was about 77% accurate, and it helped us figure out how to improve it from there. Since then, Shapeion has optimized the model, changing some of its logic. We’re currently at a 90% accuracy rate, and we’re looking to make some additional adjustments to go beyond that percentage.

How did Shapeion Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

Shapeion’s project management has been very good. They’ve been very clear regarding expectations and timelines, as well as very transparent regarding our involvement in the engagement. For example, They’ve told us that we needed to attempt to annotate 30,000 comments. This approach has been instrumental in helping us plan the resources and time we need to allocate to accomplish our goal. Overall, it has been an easy process to follow, and Shapeion has been very helpful along the way.

We mostly communicate via email. Alexander is very responsive and reliable, and he answers at any hour of the day, even on weekends. We’ve also had 4–5 phone conversations with him to check in and discuss the bigger picture.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Shapeion’s level of expertise and ability to openly communicate with us while taking our feedback into account separate them from other companies. The other companies we talked with didn’t have the same level of expertise, or they were very stubborn in their approach in a way that didn’t meet our needs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not really. After having the first model ready at 77% accuracy, we got a little plateaued, and the project faced a small delay because it took Shapeion some time to implement the new logic into the system. It would have been great if they could have implemented the new logic faster to speed up the process. However, it was a trial-and-error process, so I don’t make them accountable for that.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The most important thing is to be clear with your expectations and requirements. We’ve had a lot of success since Shapeion understood exactly what we were trying to accomplish.