Toptal

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Chair, litigation department of (a/an) Legal

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Software tools for immigration attorneys.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Toptal to accomplish?

• Build a working app

SOLUTION

How did you find Toptal?

Online Search

Why did you select Toptal over others?

Great culture fit

What was the size of Toptal’s team?

1 Employee

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Built a website to scrape immigration court hearing information from a website, save that information into a user's account, and integrate the information into court pleadings drafted automatically and delivered to the user, as well as keeping track of court deadlines and other useful stuff that I, as an immigration attorney, use regularly.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Build an app that scrapes info from the site successfully.
• Build an app that can keep track of cases by repeated scraping.
• Build an app that can deliver well-formatted sample pleadings with integrated case information.

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Vladimir was great, he exceeded my expectations and built everything I needed. However, we had some roadblocks emerge as the project moved along. The website instituted a captcha system that prevented scraping. Vladimir was able to work around this using VPNs partially, and that worked, but only for users from overseas. I was not able to pull scrape requests any longer once the captcha was implemented.

He assured me that he could work around this because there's a GitHub repository that gets updated regularly to overcome captchas, but he eventually was not able to overcome this problem. Without the ability to scrape this info domestically from the US, the app is not usable. He advised that he would continue to look into solutions and would reach out if he found one.

What was your primary form of communication with Toptal?

• Email
• Messaging App

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

They offer great talent for affordable prices. 

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

It would be nice if someone could review the project with Vladimir and see if they can find someone else who can solve the captcha problem.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We, Media Backoffice, Inc. provide imaging BPO services in Japan and India. I'm the founder CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Along with launching our AI-based imaging service, we needed solid Salesforce developers who have the latest method, and API integration knowledge with external platforms like Stripe, Heroku Connect.

SOLUTION

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

The vendor has proposed experienced developers who align with the said requirements. We discussed with the developers and select a very knowledgeful person who has rich experience of building a multi-tenant large scale system.

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

We used the following technologies, 1. Salesforce 2. Auth 0 3. Stripe 4. Django 5. Heroku-connect 6. Custom API for image processing The vendor has arranged the upstream design along with our product manager and implemented Salesforce-related parts.

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

1 person. He has worked as a Salesforce developer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The person was one of the most high-productivity Salesforce developers I've worked with. His ability to understand the big picture was also high.

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

CEO (product owner/manager) created a large portion and detailed design / itemizing was done by the Salesforce developer. We used Slack, Jira, and GitHub.

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

Always providing us no-false talents.

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

I'm not sure.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm the CTO of a mobile app startup in the San Francisco Bay Area.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We wanted to white label our existing platform (mobile app, API backend, other services), and set up a new cloud project for it.

SOLUTION

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

We found them online and they were very responsive, unlike other companies.

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

JIRA, GitHub. Two week cycles with cycle demos.

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

One project manager. One Android developer, one DevOps engineer. One account manager. One UX designer.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We completed the project on time and within budget. There was a significant amount of work also shouldered by the non-Toptal internal engineers, but the Toptal team was productive with their portion of work.

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

Standard Agile methodology. Slack. Very responsive.

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

Execution was tight.

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

I wish we could have resourced additional resources on-demand, but time was too short.