Tango

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm an executive of a beauty tech company. We provide beauty services on-demand in our beauty bars, and we also have products that we sell via our online store.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tango?

We have an in-house technical team, but we needed a backend developer, a frontend developer, and an iOS developer.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We've worked with Tango closely for several years now. They've helped us build the tech platform, which functions as a calendar app that allows clients to book beauty services.

The app is for iOS and desktop; on the frontend, we work with Node.js and Java on the backend. We also have some third-party service integrations they have helped us with, such as payments and other related aspects. In addition to that, we've also used Tango for UX tasks.

What is the team composition?

Over the years, we have worked with 6–7 members of their team.

How did you come to work with Tango?

We found them through a referral.

How much have you invested in them?

We've spent around $500,000 with them so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with them since January 2018, and the engagement is ongoing.

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

We are happy with their services and their account management — their founder and project manager are great! In addition to that, we have a log of things that we need to do, and we base our metrics on the tech tasks, but I know that our users like our site and that it is easy to book services.

Generally, we have found that they have high-quality developers that also solve bugs, and the quality of work is high, so we feel safe when we get new staff from them because they get involved as a team.

How did Tango perform from a project management standpoint?

So far, we have been happy with that because they have great communication skills — they're always there if we need to get in touch with them. In terms of tools, we use Trello and GitHub for project management and email, phone calls, Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and WhatsApp for communication.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They are always very reliable and knowledgeable, which is outstanding. Even if we have a question and someone on our team doesn’t have the immediate answer, they can still find the competence in-house because they have a lot of competence within their team.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There's always room for improvement, especially in terms of costs and time management, but I feel that whenever we have had any suggestions, they're always very open to discussing them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Ensure that you're aware of each project's core functionalities and scope because Tango has been able to adapt to it, even if the project is big or small.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of digital products and health of a startup that researches and develops exoskeletons and powered orthoses. We’re in the process of productizing those in a couple of verticals.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tango?

We have a lot of data that’s being collected. One of the key issues in orthoses, as well as any medical device or intervention, is adherence and compliance. One of the things that has been proven to bolster adherence and compliance is digital tools and mobile apps. That’s what we were trying to build in our engagement with Tango.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We provided Tango with a few wireframes and mockups and there was back and forth in terms of the design. They provided technical guidance, design input, and development services. For the frontend, they did everything in native languages such as Objective-C. 

What is the team composition?

We have one main point of contact, and we work with between 3–6 teammates.

How did you come to work with Tango?

They were an internal referral from my manager, so I vetted them and they passed based on my criteria. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $20,000–$25,000 for this first project.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement began in late 2018, and it's ongoing. We’ve had several engagements with them. For the first one, I was peripherally involved.

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

Because the project is ongoing and we’re pre-launch, we don’t have customer feedback yet. However, from a qualitative perspective, I’ve been very happy with Tango’s quality of work and turnaround time.

How did Tango perform from a project management standpoint?

Their ability to set expectations appropriately is spot on. They’ve never been late to deliver, which is good. 

In a startup pre-launch, there’s a lot of scope creep and redirection, but Tango is very agile and able to understand how this impacts timelines and communicate that in an appropriate way. We communicate with them via Slack, email, and video conferencing. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

From a development team perspective, Tango is very professional. There’s no bureaucracy or ego; they give a lot of good feedback. The team is very informative, and they’re teaching and guiding me in terms of the right approaches to take. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing jumps to mind. However, as a product manager, I always want things to be done faster. But there’s an engineering rigor that requires time, which I respect. Other than that, Tango is doing a stellar job. A lot of the issues we’ve had have been hardware hiccups on our side. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My recommendation would be to make sure that all of the hardware and data layers are thought through prior to engaging with Tango.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the COO of Kawa.pl, a coffee e-commerce company specialized in B2B services.

What challenge were you trying to address with Tango?

We were looking for a company to digitalize what we were doing. We wanted to move away from trading goods and instead facilitate the connections between business customers, small roasteries, and manufacturers in the coffee industry. The idea was that we’d build an app that would help people manage inventory while also helping customers buy the inventory. 

At that time, there weren’t many mobile marketplaces that would allow people to buy things using their phones. We were looking for a company that had this very specific profile.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Tango gave us a background of mobile versus web development, and they recommended that we start with mobile. We had initially wanted to start on the web, but we realized it would be a huge competitive advantage if we were the first ones to build a mobile app; in a café environment, there isn’t much room for a laptop or any larger device.

They were really helpful in transitioning our existing e-commerce system and accounting and warehousing software. The idea was that we’d become the managers of this marketplace, and we moved toward the Amazon position versus being just an e-commerce platform on its own. They helped us integrate our environment into what would become this engine that manages things in the background. The next step was creating the mobile apps. 

We didn’t have any expectations when it came to how much the back office would work and automation. They had the blueprint for that, and we had to align on a number of questions and things. Based on that, they suggested that we do some of those things manually to be closer to the customers, but then the remaining 90% could be done automatically when it comes to integrations of various services, payments, logistics, etc. Apart from this mobile-first approach, they helped us understand that there’s a lot more to automate than we thought.

We first tried to build some kind of click-through app so we could see what the user would be experiencing. It took about three months to get a running marketplace where the first customers could execute transactions. Then, we kept working on it.

What is the team composition?

We hire on-demand. In the beginning, it was more of a strategic/consulting partnership, where there were three people involved in mapping our goals and creating flowcharts that would describe what we really wanted to do. Later, nine people were working on the project. When it came to graphic resources and mobile developers, they were on and off as needed. When we had 100 new customers who needed to be signed up, we had the whole team available.

How did you come to work with Tango?

We found the founders of Tango at the perfect time. They had founded their first café, and we supplied them with some espresso machines. We realized that they were the perfect agency to build our product. They told us about the other things they were doing in their line of work, which were marketplaces in the travel industry, online gambling, and something with B2B services. We had a lot of questions, such as how to manage transactions and how a marketplace could be built, and it was super helpful to hear from them.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent €150,000 (approximately $164,000 USD). 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in June 2019, and the work is ongoing.

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

Working with them saved us around two years, just based on the fact that we didn’t have to hire developers ourselves and didn’t have to understand the processes. We could scale up and down as needed. Not having a technical background, it’s super helpful to have something like a CTO-on-demand with a team included. Whenever we need technical expertise or some product expertise, they’re there for us.

I give them a 10 out of 10. We don’t have any complaints. They have a very good balance of asking what we want and making suggestions for the solutions. It’s going so well that we’re talking with high profile investors who are interested in getting involved. It’s quite an interesting industry from a financial perspective. 

We plan on ramping up soon. It’s going to be a long-term relationship with Tango. They feel like they are in-house in the sense that they join our calls and feel like a part of the team. We had worked with a company a year prior to Tango, but we were charged a lot of money without results, and we had to pay for every single small improvement.

How did Tango perform from a project management standpoint?

We don’t really have a project manager, but every developer is a senior person who understands our case and can make suggestions. Everybody is involved in the process. The transparency and communication are good. We use Jira, Google Drive, and Notion.

They feel like an extension of our own team. They’re available; we can pick up the phone or get on a conference call with them whenever we need. For every Euro we spend, we see where it goes. We always know what is being done.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have in-depth knowledge of marketplaces. We didn’t have to explain to them how B2B business works. They act more as entrepreneurs and less as an agency, which is cool. They understand the dynamics of a marketplace even better than we do. Their developers have a lot of initiative, and they’re super reliable. We often get notifications in the middle of the night if we need to fix or update something. Their pricing is very transparent.

Are there any areas they could improve?

If you want to build a product, they’re the perfect team, but they won’t do all of the other services that a huge company might do for you. For us, it was fine because we already had that set up.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I have my own IT/Business consultancy company. For bigger projects I use sub-constructors. In Talixo I coordinated most of tech projects & worked no business development.

For what projects/services did your company hire Tango?

Full development of the Talixo Marketplace, mobile app, frontend & backend. Literally everything tech related was done by Tango.

What were your goals for this project?

Reaching 100 countries globally & break even point.

How did you select this vendor?

We were looking for a partner that would scale with us and give us the strategic product focus necessary to complete the project at a top level. We were looking into partners based in Central Europe to find a company that was experienced with working with foreign development partners, and had a relevant experience in building scalable, international products.

As we started the collaboration and built up the MVP, it became clear that Tango would become a critical partner for us - the team gradually expanded to at some point 30+ people responsible for design, development and product. Talixo was working on a very tight schedule to build up a product complimenting its exponential growth and it was a true blessing to have a partner based in a location where quickly scaling up the tech team was easily possible.

Wojtek and the team are exceptional communicators and people who claim responsibility for every aspect of the product and it was clear from the first meeting that they had opinions and experience that would help shape the product - indeed, in the end it helped us scale from a small, Berlin-based startup to a 150+ people company providing services in over 100 countries worldwide.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

At the beginning Tango was responsible for the whole process of the product development from scratch, including creation of the marketplace and backend & frontend implementations.

As the platform was designed to serve both B2B and B2C on mobile and desktop apps, Tango worked on different interfaces and features for various stakeholders such as drivers’ app & users’ app, corporate accounts with different payment methods integrationed (Stripe, Ayden, AirPlus), API integrations, white labels, landing pages, SEO (Analytics, AdWords, GTM).

What was the team composition?

Frontend, Backend, mobile app, Product

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Tango helped raising 15MЄ+ of funding and building it from scratch to a global company, present in over 100 countries worldwide. Also, the platform had a great feedback enabling the company to sustain a 100% y/y growth for 6 consecutive years.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Tango was the driving force of our digital transformation process. They provided us with the right tools to do the job (we worked primarily with JIRA and Atlassian products) but primarily, we built tools that helped us analyse the product performance and find product and technology gaps that could use improvement.

One of the milestones was the SalesForce integration which consolidated all of our datapoints in one place and helped us prioritise our backlog. When it comes to the process, it was fully agile allowing us to preview product updates every week and prioritise the backlog with every sprint.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The team had experience not only on the tech side but also knew the business challenges we were facing. Including legal perspective, product development, user experience etc.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Not from the tech perspective.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the VP of Engineering at dscout, a remote experience research platform. We are headquartered in Chicago but our customers are international companies. We have about a 100 employees and I manage all of technology at dscout.

For what projects/services did your company hire Tango?

Our challenge is more of a staff augmentation one. We need to be able grow our team quickly and manage costs at the same time.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goals were to have our internal teams be able to seamlessly work with Tango engineers located in Poland.

How did you select this vendor?

Tango was selected before I joined dscout. However, I would select them all over again if I had to do it. Their developers are top notch, all speak excellent English, and are flexible with working hours to overlap with our internal teams.

Describe the project in detail.

Tango is helping us with our mobile app development for both iOS and Android. They are also helping us with React frontend development.

What was the team composition?

Our mobile team consists of 1 internal iOS and 1 internal Android developer as well as 2 Tango devs (iOS and Android). One of our non-mobile teams has a couple FE devs, a BE dev, and a Tango FE dev working alongside as part of the team.

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

The quality of work from Tango engineers is top notch. For the most part they are a part of our engineering team, they do code reviews, offer architectural advice, and so on. Their work and opinions are valued by our Product Managers and engineers.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Tango makes sure to work with us so that the overall team process has an optimal flow. They participate in regular team retrospections and continuously improve how they work.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I've come to trust their engineers to be good technically as well as good team players. When I ask for a new engineer, I feel that they will good and will fit into our workflow well.

Are there any areas for improvement?

There's not much I can think for improvement here. They are always receptive of feedback and I like working with them.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder at Fix - a marketplace platform seamlessly connecting clients with contractors.

For what projects/services did your company hire Tango?

Tango has been responsible for the whole tech side of the business since the commencement of this project.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to build a lean MVP for two mobile apps (client + contractor), with which we would reasonably be able to prove our concept on the market.

How did you select this vendor?

We connected to Tango through common acquaintances. Following a round of discussions, we sourced offers from other software houses in Poland. The choice to work with Tango, was based on their biggest relative competence and experience in terms of creating marketplaces, as well as a very reasonable price offering.

Describe the project in detail.

We came to Tango with documentation relating to our initial concept for the business, as well as with plenty of ideas for our desired features. Ever since, we have worked together to conceptualize and forge the subsequent stages of the project. As said before, Tango was in charge of everything relating to tech - Android, iOS and desktop developers, the backend, as well as UX and UI. They have also developed our branding and helped us develop a marketing strategy.

What was the team composition?

We worked with two frontend developers, two backend developers and a UX/UI designer.

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

We have successfully developed an MVP, which we have currently began testing on the market. So far we are receiving very good feedback about the flow of the platform and we continuously work with Tango to solve newly appearing issues and develop new features.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The communication between our team was one of my favourite aspects of our cooperation - we worked in weekly sprints, and reconnected with the whole team once a week during a call, during which we discussed the progress and tasks for the following week. Tango's team was always very receptive of our feedback and happy to brainstorm with us about how best to face both the tech and business challenges we were facing.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We have been in awe of Tango's relentless willingness to challenge our assumptions and propose meaningful input to our product and strategy all along. It is clear that their team is very experienced, but it is also fantastic to see that they are willing to put just as much energy into work on the product and novel discoveries.

Are there any areas for improvement?

You pay for what you get.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO at a gambling software supplier. Our company has about 40 employees and we serve mostly European regulated markets.

For what projects/services did your company hire Tango?

Our co-founders had extensive experience in gambling companies and they wanted to start new company to fill the niche they thought appeared in the market. They wanted to setup a . company with an office in Central Europe, but they didn't have any employees. Tango helped by supplying the first key software developers and helped with marketing and lining up a strategy.

What were your goals for this project?

The main goal was to release first playable game to display on a major gambling event 2 or 3 months into the first day of the company and have it live with operators within another 3 months. All went wel . and according to plan.

How did you select this vendor?

Several companies were suggested by word of mouth and social platforms. Tango had the best experience helping to kick start other companies – they already had a track report of 2 or 3 already functioning businesses that they helped set up.

Describe the project in detail.

There were several introductory meetings taking place where co-founders described their needs. Tango found best staff for the tasks and helped with execution.

What was the team composition?

Initially, Tango supplied one front-end developer and one artist. It then helped with recruitment of a project manager and more front-end developers and artists.

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

We have created first game within 3 months and released it within next 3 months.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The initial developer and artist that were assigned were experienced, knowledgeable and easy to work with. The workflow was managed using Atlassian suite of tools.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Broad area of expertise – both front and back end development, social media, marketing. Many talented employees, most of them trained internally. Excellent english skills.

Are there any areas for improvement?

Nothing that I can think of, no.