Simplicate Interactive

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner of an advertising agency. 

What challenge were you trying to address with Simplicate Interactive?

One of my clients built an existing website with a development company, but the website didn’t meet the customer’s needs. As a result, we needed Simplicate to help us. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

The website’s UX design was poor, so Simplicated worked on providing a better one. Meanwhile, we also had an opportunity to capitalize on having a subscription-based business model, so Simplicate also worked to help us do that. 

For website functionality, the platform needed a subscription-based function where end users can leave food in their shopping cart and receive their selected items every month. At that time, no other web product did that, and Simplicate helped us create such a product. 

At present, we’re still working with Simplicate, and we’re working on four websites right now. 

What is the team composition?

We work with a web designer and a web developer.

How did you come to work with Simplicate Interactive?

I posted on a Facebook group. I was looking for somebody to help us develop the backend of a complex website. Steve (Owner) reached out to me, and that was when we started the project. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested around $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2016, and the engagement is ongoing. 

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

Our end client for this project has seen an increase of 50% in revenue, and their conversion rate has been up 4X than before. There’s almost a 100% increase in unique page views. 

How did Simplicate Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

Simplicate’s project management is excellent. They keep us on track in terms of timelines, and they make us aware of options to pursue when it comes to costs — they’re truly upfront with this.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have the ability to suggest many options when it comes to budget points. They can make things as simple or complex as I need them to be. In other words, they have great flexibility in terms of the development types they need to do. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, there aren’t any. I’m extremely satisfied with their work so far. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Bring all your ideas to the table no matter how outrageous or extreme you think they are. The Simplicate can help you understand what you can do, how you can do things, and what alternatives you have to meet them halfway. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the executive creative director at ICON Digital, a media production company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Simplicate Interactive?

We needed someone to help us with digital campaigns.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Simplicate Interactive provided various design services to help us with multiple campaigns. Furthermore, they helped with information architecture, CMS, and programming to solve our clients’ problems. 

Our projects usually started with us giving them a brief of the project and what our client required. Afterward, they’d come back with a series of questions to narrow down the scope. Once we kicked everything off, the team would then work directly with our clients. 

What is the team composition?

I worked with Steve (Owner) and Dan (Creative Director).

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $100,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project lasted from January 2011–July 2021.

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

It was a seamless experience. Simplicate Interactive always got it right the first time, and every project they worked on was successful. They were a solid, knowledgeable team.

How did Simplicate Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

The amount of planning they did before every project was unparalleled — their attention to detail was something I never saw in other agencies. In terms of budget and timeline, their estimates were always accurate. No matter what time I call them, they’ll always pick up the phone. Furthermore, Simplicate Interactive was proactive and reached out to identify any issues, which they then solve. We had a friendship that developed throughout the engagement.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They definitely contributed to the overall success of our projects. The team always hit the right spot and provided high-quality work. They had the expertise and professionalism we needed to help us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The team developed their processes to be more robust with each project, so we didn’t really have any issues. In fact, the team found ways to solve problems before we even start working together.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust their processes — they know what they’re doing and are ready to help.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m VP of partnerships at an events company.

What challenge were you trying to address with Simplicate Interactive?

We needed help with web development and branding. We also wanted a backend CMS where we can manage a portal for all of our vendors and sponsors. 
 

What was the scope of their involvement?

They reimagined what our website could look like on Craft CMS and how consumers could better get to where they wanted to go. The team worked through a number of iterations around the redesign. 

They came to us with solutions that really nailed the look and feel we were going after which helped us tap into the creative side on our end. They’re currently working on phase two of our backend CMS as we speak. 

What is the team composition?

I work with Steve (Owner) and Dan (Lead Designer). 

How did you come to work with Simplicate Interactive?

They were recommended to us through an agency we had done some work with. They really understood everything from an SME business perspective.  

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $50,000–$100,000 CAD ($40,000–$80,000 USD). 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2010, and our work is ongoing. 
 

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

The internal response to our new CMS has been through the roof. With this backend system, everything is ready to go. The external feedback that we’ve gotten so far has been great as well. Simplicate has really helped us reimagine our brand position for consumers. They’ve always over delivered on our goals and objectives. It’s been really helpful. 

How did Simplicate Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

From a client management perspective, they were able to explain their thought process really clearly. They’re very helpful at keeping everything on task. We communicate via email and phone. Every once in a while, we meet at the office. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

As a small business, pricing is always important to us. We have to be really careful of where we put dollars, especially during a pandemic. They always give us a deeper understanding of the decisions we’re making. The team also makes sure our website stays fresh and relevant. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s always room for improvement. We can all learn to be better communicators. That’s a note to all of our vendors, not just Simplicate. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Make sure you have a clear understanding of what you want your website or web development project to do. Sometimes just get out of their way, they might do it better than you even thought possible. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of communications at Canadian Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, a nonprofit organization that represents private capital investors in Canada.

What challenge were you trying to address with Simplicate Interactive?

We needed to relaunch and revamp our association’s parent website. Our former website was pretty slow, and its content was all over the place, so it didn’t make sense. Thus, we needed to reorganize and clean up the content, make the site user-friendly, and change to a new web hosting platform.

We also needed a new content management system and an improved architecture and accessibility. Additionally, we required a general facelift and modernization of its look and feel.

What was the scope of their involvement?

After we went through the scope of work and the RFP process, Simplicate coordinated a meeting with us to analyze what we were looking for and why we needed the website. We spent some time reviewing some websites that Simplicate presented us with to find inspiration and see where we wanted to go.

Then, we had a planning session with them where we looked at the content that we needed on the website. This process included defining the navigation menu and the headings.

After that, Simplicate worked on their own to develop the website. We helped writing some content, but they also did so. We kept refining everything until we launched the site.

What is the team composition?

Steve (Founder) was our main point of contact, and I believe he was the web developer. We also worked with one of his designers.

How did you come to work with Simplicate Interactive?

We had done some work with Steve and Simplicate in a previous project; he had saved us a couple of times with different needs. One time he helped us build a tool within our CRM system really quickly. On another occasion, he helped us build a website for a digital publication.

As we already knew Simplicate, they were one of the agencies that we approached during the RFP process, and we ended up choosing them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2020, and we launched the site around the second week of June 2020.

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

Thanks to our new site, our SEO improved significantly. If we Googled anything related to our organization before we relaunched our website, we didn’t appear anywhere near the top of the search results. Now, even when using Google assistant, we come up first in some search results, which has helped us a lot.

Additionally, people didn’t know what we did before, and now it’s very clear, which has been a significant change point for our membership. Our board of directors is thrilled with the results.

How did Simplicate Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

Simplicate’s project management was great. One of the things that I enjoyed the most about working with them was that they were proactive and amazing problem solvers. Steve and his team picked up on issues that we didn’t even think that they could help us with.

They facilitated everything so that we could continue with our jobs and do them more efficiently. They also coordinated all the touchpoints and gave us a work schedule with the time estimates for the whole project. Everything was very clear to us.

Our communication was one of the greatest parts of our relationship. Every time we reached out to Steve, he was very responsive, and our engagement was pretty smooth.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Simplicate was very reliable. I had worked with other providers, but they either fell short on the deadlines, or their cost was extremely high. However, Simplicate offered the perfect balance between development skills, cost, and communication.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Open up about your project. If there are some aspects that you need to work on, and you think that they’re not related to the project, tell Simplicate about them anyway. They have a complete understanding of the full scope of what they’re working on, and they might be able to solve some of the issues for you.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of operations at Cardus. We’re a small nonprofit think tank with 30 employees. We’ve been around for 40 years, and I’ve had progressive roles here since 2005.

What challenge were you trying to address with Simplicate Interactive?

They’ve often helped us with email and other forms of marketing, but generally, the challenges have been web marketing and data architecture.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Simplicate has been our outsourced technical lead, web director, and coder since 2010. They’re our one-stop-shop. They do everything from domain DNS and name servers to all of our MySQL database and root folders set up. We have 12 different websites, and they’ve built them over ten years.

On web development and stack, they do code from scratch, using CSS, HTML, PHP, and several different languages. Cardus’ web server runs primarily in a Lambda environment, and it uses Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and cPanel as WebHost manager. JavaScript is used extensively across the front- and backend of multiple sites. They’ve used React and a couple of tools to build the staff dashboard, and they’re familiar with Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks. Also, they use Amazon Glacier for long-term backup storage.

Before CMS’s were a popular thing, they built our custom CMS. However, they’ve also gotten us to use Craft CMS for our content, and we’ve got some headed WordPress installations across several websites. We provide all the content, and I work fluidly with Steve (Owner) every day.

What is the team composition?

Since the beginning, I made it clear that I only wanted to work with Steve. He has other people on the team, but I don’t have to sweat the delivery between him and his subs. I only have to care about Steve. He’s a gifted marketing and UX consultant.

How did you come to work with Simplicate Interactive?

I honestly don’t remember. I inherited the relationship with Simplicate when I took over this job. The previous guy knew them, and I don’t know how he originally found them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $150,000 CAD (approximately $119,000 USD). We’ve used a couple of other contractors, but they’re our main vendor. I suspect we’ve actually spent over $250,000 CAD (approximately $199,000 USD) over the years.

What is the status of this engagement?

My engagement with them began in December 2010, and it’s ongoing.

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

The most important metric is that we get over a million hits a year on our websites. Since we’re religious in a pretty non-religious country, we punch well above our weight, and much of it is thanks to their ability to steer audiences away by building a responsive, clean, and appealing site,

Last year we had to take a step back because of COVID-19, but other than that, we’ve grown every year since 2009. That year we were a $2 billion organization, and now we’re over $6 billion with steady growth, and our web presence is a giant part of it.

How did Simplicate Interactive perform from a project management standpoint?

It has been outstanding, especially the last five years. The first five years were a little more scattered, but that was also because I wasn’t trained as a project manager. Since then, everything has been very clean and effective. They do the schedule, fix the budget, and take on risks so we don’t have to. We get certainty on deadlines, scope, and cost. If they can beat those, that’s great, but if they take longer, they assume that risk.

We use Asana, Facebook Messenger, email, and phone to keep track of everything. However, Asana is our project management tool of choice. We mainly communicate through there, and they’ve got between 50–100 tasks from our company at all times.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Anybody can code, but their expertise, consulting skills, and insights into audiences are what make them different. Simplicate makes me better; they don’t do just what I tell them. I can trust their instincts even more than my own. They’re a big part of our team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could grow faster. I’ve been asking them that because I sometimes max out what we can get from Simplicate. We get one project going, but they decline to do two simultaneously because it’s too much for them. However, some people prefer to keep their team small and stay in a niche marketplace.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be upfront and get clarity on scope, duration, and deadline. With clarity in those areas, Steve and his team can perform at their absolute best.

Please describe your company and your position there.

No

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

We hired Simplicate to design a new website and brand. That's all.

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

We hired Simplicate because they sounded like the right fit for our project.

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

We discussed requirements and Steve made great suggestions at first.

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

Just Steve and I.

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

Simplicate did not deliver. The project was a complete failure.

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

Steve likes to promise and not deliver.

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

We disliked how little they cared about their clients.

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

I could write a novel.