Sutunam

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of ActivCorner. Our mission is to help companies with their initiatives when it comes to wellness of their employees. We do that by proposing solutions to be made available to the employees in their offices, whether they be coaching, team building, challenges, and other things of that nature. Outside of the work environment, we offer them a marketplace. It’s the backbone for our service. The marketplace references all sport and wellness avenues in France. We have about 3,000 partners today. We’ve been open for four years now and we have about 80 clients.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sutunam?

I needed help with full-stack web development. At the very beginning, I was a young entrepreneur and I wanted to build the Facebook of sports. There were millions of people trying to accomplish that. Not many have prevailed. They first developed for me a social network around sports in 2013.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I outsource 100% of our tech to them including frontend, backend, and APIs. They built the marketplace and helped us with all the tooling of the CRM it involved. We’ve also done a mobile app together and dropped it for budget reasons. I became more focused on the web platform, making it responsive. It’s working very well on mobile and I’m quite happy with it. They use Symfony, JavaScript, and PHP; we have some SOAP integrations for the APIs.

What is the team composition?

There have been many people over the four years. For now, I have four people, all based in Vietnam. There’s one project manager, one backend developer, one frontend developer, and another developer who used to be the lead architect because he has the most knowledge when it comes to our platform.

How did you come to work with Sutunam?

In 2012, I was looking on 404Works, a marketplace where you drop projects you want to develop and the tech teams contact you. When I launched my project for the sports social network, I had about 30 different companies contacting me to assist me. I chose Sutunam because we clicked right away. Many people at Sutunam have the sports knowledge. I knew I could find a tech partner in many places but I needed to find people who knew the technology and had the sports sensitivity. The second thing was the cost. They have teams in Vietnam and they were able to propose rates to me that were lower than the market price. The third thing is I was very confident in their technical expertise. They not only knew what they were talking about but they could back it up with projects that they had worked on. They work with big brands. I looked at everything they had done and it was very convincing.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent around €230,000-€270,000 euros ($270,300-$317,200 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in May 2016 and the work is ongoing. It took us 5-6 months to build the marketplace and get an MVP. They continue to be our primary developers.

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

They’re very competent when it comes to Symfony platforms. I’m extremely satisfied. The sports network product was good. I have people coming at me seven years later saying they’re thinking about doing a social network with ideas and features that we did seven years ago. I was quite happy with the product. I think we were just too early in the French market. It had nothing to do with Sutunam’s work.

I was a failing entrepreneur trying to build a new product. They helped me at every step. Even when the money and energy were slow, they were always there to pick me up. They weren’t just an outsourcing company but were partners. They’re extremely honest and direct. Many times, they wouldn’t agree with me and would tell me why they didn’t. They saved me from many bad decisions. I’m really thankful to them for that.

They’re very curious about the technologies. Every time I benchmark what we do and what’s happening in the market, my contact is telling me to open an email he sent me two years ago when he was already telling me about it. They’re very aware of the technology and keep up to date, which is extremely reassuring for me because I don’t have to worry about looking over their back and making sure they’re keeping our platform competitive.

How did Sutunam perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a weekly Monday meeting to discuss what has been accomplished the previous week and what there is to do for the upcoming week. I’m satisfied with their reactivity. They have a ticketing system that we use. Every time I have new requests or a new project, we discuss it and submit it to the ticketing system. They’re very responsive to the tasks. Usually, when I have a request or question, I always have an answer within the day. What’s been extremely satisfying is that there are people working at night when I’m sleeping because they’re in Vietnam. I have enough time with them until 2-3 pm to discuss the tasks. Whenever they leave, I still have people in France who are able to help and assist me until I leave the office. This allows for our project to advance very quickly.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I really like that it’s a human-sized company with people that are passionate about what they do. They don’t sugar coat things. When we discuss projects, I feel they’re partners and not just people that execute. I feel like my team is double the size because I have all these people at Sutunam who are willing to assist and go the extra mile with us. I’m very confident in their competency in technology. I’m happy with what they’ve done for me over the years.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I originally mentioned Sutunam was quite good when it came to UX/UI but could improve somehow. I realize that's not fair to them because most of the projects we've worked on, the decisions were often taken on our side when it came to UX/UI, and I realize the best experience our platform provides when it comes to that, has been built and provided by Sutunam.