Uhray

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the leasing agent for a company that manages properties.

What challenge were you trying to address with Uhray?

We needed to create software to help us with scheduling and managing appointments with leads.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Uhray developed software with a feature that automated our messaging, which enabled us to efficiently respond to more leads. Using the tool, we can embed links in messages that allow our leads to schedule appointments without having to interact with an agent. It’s a web-based tool, so people can find it on our website. Uhray still works on it.

What is the team composition?

We typically work with 1–3 people from Uhray. It's a team of developers who focus on different tasks.

How did you come to work with Uhray?

I found Uhray through a recommendation by a mutual contact.

How much have you invested with them?

Over the course of our partnership, we’ve spent between $60,000–$90,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in November 2018, and we’re still working with them.

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

The tool's automation reduced the overall workloads of every individual agent. Users typically say the tool’s convenient and easy to use. There is, however, a crowd that avoids automation and wants to speak with agents. In the beginning, we could service approximately 60% of leads. We can now service 95% of leads. There’s just that 5% we’ll never be able to capture.

How did Uhray perform from a project management standpoint?

Communication is one of the key reasons that I like working with Uhray. I’m able to reach them by phone, text, or email. There are instances when there's an emergency after business hours. I'm able to reach them on the phone and then they start troubleshooting the issue.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I most appreciate the level of accessibility that Uhray provides to us. I can reach out to them if there’s an emergency at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, nothing comes to mind at the moment.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Learn how to use collaborative communication techniques. Uhray focuses on creating outlines and presenting them in a format in which everyone can collaborate at the same time. There was a bit of a learning curb for me. Once I overcame that curb, the process was efficient.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a job site for the hospitality industry that creates a virtual experience between job seekers and hiring managers.

What challenge were you trying to address with Uhray?

We hired Uhray to do our development work.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Uhray is working on our web-based job application platform. We started from scratch with them.

One of the features that we worked on was a video resume tool that's completely independent of other software products. They helped us create intellectual property (IP). We also worked on the platform’s backend so that we could receive job applications and everything would communicate with each other. 

What is the team composition?

We initially worked with Nick (Co-Founder). As they grew, our account transitioned to Matt (Software Engineer). He’s our project manager at the moment.

How did you come to work with Uhray?

I put out a job posting on LinkedIn and Uhray responded to it. Nick told me over a phone call that we actually needed to do more than I’d thought. That started the conversation, and from there, our team decided to proceed with them. 

The reason we went with Uhray was that they took more of a consultative approach instead of giving us pricing right away. They tried to understand our company’s goal and then help us get off of the ground. The other companies we talked with began by listing how much their services would cost, instead of sitting down with us and trying to figure out what the best approach would be to get us from point A to B.

We didn't have a big budget, but Uhray liked our idea so much that they accommodated our price. They gave us a good discount just to get us off the ground. I don't think that most companies were willing to do that, so it was an offer we couldn’t refuse.    

What is the status of this engagement?

We started the conversation in December 2017, and the actual development work began in 2018. Our partnership is ongoing.

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

Most of the work that Uhray has done so far is pretty good. I’m happy with our platform and the way it’s designed and functioning, especially when I compare it with our competitors’ products. 

We’ve received mixed feedback from users. Some people enjoy our platform and some don't. That's just part of being a startup — there are always things that you have to figure out and fix, and that takes time. I take user feedback with a grain of salt.

How did Uhray perform from a project management standpoint?

We're using Trello for project management. I can see what projects they’re working on and their progress — it keeps me informed of everything. If they don’t update Trello, I’ll just email them and ask where we are exactly.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They try to understand your concept and the bare minimum so that you can build upon that. They don’t proceed with grandiose concepts, only to realize after it’s built out completely that you don’t need all of those things. What separates them is that they try to be an extension of our team. 

If we have some ideas or need to make improvements, Uhray thinks it through and comes back to us with a better solution. They take an approach that they’re not just Uhray, but they’re also a part of our company. They try to think about our interests, too, and that separates them from other companies out there. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could be clearer with their invoices and indicate exactly what work has been done. We need this information so that we can backtrack and avoid miscommunication. 

There are also little things that we sometimes miss together. I don't think it's entirely their fault —  all of us miss things that we shouldn’t have overlooked. It’s a hurdle to go back and fix it. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Just be open-minded. They have a great team, and they are creative. Just be willing to listen and see what they come up with. Don’t go with the first company that gives you a quote.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CEO and president of CDLLife. We are an online news publication and advertising firm that does a lot of digital advertising for transportation clients. We are diversified across several different business models but the core model that we have is basic lead-generation marketing. We try to help trucking companies acquire hires and applications which is the main purpose of our business and what we do.

What challenge were you trying to address with Uhray?

It was a little bit of everything; all things really. I needed somebody to be able to be my in-house developers more or less. Being a young entrepreneur and small company, I am not the guy that knows how to go and interview a developer and figure out what sort of developer I need. I am taking a giant risk in doing that because I don’t know how to interview for it or what I need, and my hiring one developer may not be the developer that I need. I may hire the wrong person.

Uhray was hired on to just be a development resource for us on whatever we would need from a development capacity. As we innovated and added different products, our demands for their services really increased tremendously because of it.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started off really, really small. We had a 30 hour a month service agreement and as our company has scaled and grown and, as our models have changed, our demands for development changed with it. The very first thing I needed them for was something as simple as getting Google AdSense loaded into our news website to monetize our traffic page views through a header bidding solution where we would call Google AdSense or Facebook audience network to help me monetize the traffic on our news publication. That was before we even got started on the marketing side of the business; we were just still a news publication and Google and display ads were the main source of our revenue.

They have fully designed our mobile app from start to finish; everything from the wireframe to the prototype to translating my ideas from the conceptual to implementation and building it. They did our entire mobile app build. They have done all of our backend lead generation admin portal where we manage all of our clients and their insertion order and their billing. They have integrated things like Stripe for payment processing. They have built a CRM tool for our sales prospecting side of the business, and they have done all of our automation into Facebook’s marketing API and Google’s marketing API, even CallFire and Bitly links. We use all of these external software programs and they have been able to build the bridges with all the various APIs to bring it into one dashboard that we use and that governs our entire ecosystem. We probably have 20 external integrations for products that we use, but I don’t want to have to go to Bitly to create a short link. I want to be able to automate that process. I don’t want to have to go to Facebook, for example, to set a daily budget for spending. I want to set it in one place and our system does that.

They have really pivoted along the way to wherever I have needed them to. We are actually their biggest client. It’s bittersweet. I honestly don’t want them to grow because I want to hoard their resources.

What is the team composition?

On my mobile app, they have a tech lead and two software engineers so it’s a three-man crew that works on the mobile app. They are self-contained because those developers know that codebase. For my lead gen product line, there is a different tech lead and two software engineers that work on that. They have a team of five UI/UX designers in their Boston office. They have an office in Boston, and one in Kansas City where I am headquartered.

How did you come to work with Uhray?

I am the major owner of the company, but I was previously working for a transportation company where the owner of the company I used to work for was neighbors with a doctor and his son was just graduating from Notre Dame and was a computer science major. They were starting an entrepreneur company.

I think when Uhray started, it was referral and word of mouth where the guy I used to work for brought them on for a small project. I worked with them back in 2015 when they were out of college and it was just a two-man crew. When I worked with them it was a pleasant experience and I didn’t really know who else to go to. When I started this company and started growing, I just reached out to them and signed a $95 an hour MSA for 30 hours a month. I knew I needed something, but I didn’t really know what it was.

How much have you invested in them?

I am at $1.5 to $2 million in total. I do 1500 hours a month with them right now; it is an insane amount. I am paying them $85,000 a month, but they have a 10-man team that is dedicated to me more or less. I am their biggest client and as my company has scaled to what it is today, their company has scaled as well.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with Uhray for about four years now, since February 2017.

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

It has been this really symbiotic relationship where 100 percent, I would not be where I am without these guys. They would not be where they are without me. Our companies have really grown in parallel. I know that they have relied on referral business. In the four and a half years I have worked with them, as I understand it, they have never had to market for business. It has always been word of mouth and referrals. They have kept the continuity of work and a pipeline of business in place from that. Part of it is as I have grown, every month my hours have gone up and they haven’t needed to really prioritize business development as much as I have grown here. 

How did Uhray perform from a project management standpoint?

We use Trello. My project has grown across seven different Trello boards. I have one for my news platform, one that I use for my mobile app, as well as one for our lead generation. For every product suite that we have now, they have different product owners and different tech leads, and different software engineers. The UI and UX people will handle all of the initial prototyping and spec work. They take the idea from me to paper.

They would track their time on the Trello board, and I would just dump in a project and they were really good. They would tell me how long a project would take and eventually I had a list of 30 projects I wanted, and they would have one guy who was a project manager/wireframe guy, and he would assign the hours for me. Eventually, I had a list of 300 hours with the things I needed, and I was only on 30 hours a month. They would make the progress so as my company grew, I went to 60 hours with them, and then 90, 120, 240, and 300, 600, and 900 and more, over a four-year period. I remember the biggest jump I made was going from 300 to 700 about two years ago. At that point in time, and we had an NSA where I could cancel anytime.

Once I got to the 700 hours a month, to protect them, they had me do a six-month cancellation notice because they had 50% to 60% of their entire book of business on my account. Everything has been MSA, even today, I pay them hourly and I get a chunk of hours. We track hours to the minute, but I did one fixed cost project with them in March of 2018 for a mobile app. They wireframed out the mobile app. It was $153,000. I had a budget in mind, and that was the one thing where I wasn’t willing to let the clock run.

I needed to give them the vision and they were going to do everything from start to finish. The cool thing about them is they told me that if we did a fixed cost, they would probably have to charge me more because they had to pad their numbers. They couldn’t take the risk and told me on an MSA it would maybe cost $100,000, and that they would just log the hours. They weren’t willing to take the risk on the fixed, and they don’t like the fixed because the complexity of things might change. I was good with the cost they gave me for the fixed cost project. They are super guys.  

The UI and UX team used to use Sketch but they ended up going over to Figma which they use now. Figma takes a little bit longer. I saw that when they made the switch over from Sketch to Figma, the fidelity of the mock-ups is 10 times greater in Figma. All the components are there, and everything is ready for the developers. Sketch used to be a really fast way to get a baseline mock-up done, and I would then have more hours available in the development. Now they have made the shift, as I have scaled so much, the need for really good master screens in a Figma library of all of our products has grown to where now the product side takes a little bit longer, but the development side is drastically quicker.

When their product team in Boston takes an idea that I have and move it over to development, the developers can power through it much faster now than they ever could because everything is there; the notes are there, all the CSS, exactly where the buttons are going to be, and how the workflows and screens are going to work are all there. There is no guesswork involved and there is no interpretation for the developer to have to figure out things. I am basically given an interactive prototype of all the screens and buttons, load demos, slideshows, and transitions. I can see it all and in Sketch, there never used to be that level of fidelity.

The way they operate, at least for me anyway, they don’t have a product person assigned to each project. The product people float, and they can float around whatever project, but they specialize the people who code because they have told me if they move the coder from one project stack to another, he will be less efficient, so they try to keep the same coders on the same product stack because they know the codebase. It seems to be working and I am happy with it. All of the stuff is in GitHub. We did InVision for a bit, but Figma was much better than InVision. Figma has been leaps and bounds better.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I have not come across one concept or idea where they have told me it is not possible. We have this running joke where I promise I am going to stump them at one point in time. I could go and hire my own eight-person development team and it would be cheaper in cost, but I honestly don’t think I will find a replacement for them. I am committed. Their answer is always that they can do it and then they ask how much time I am willing to invest in it.

I have learned so much about the software side of things in the four years of working with them. I am not a coder; I have seen code on the screen. I can talk like I know what I am talking about by just from working with them for so long. My expectations of where software is today are different than what it was when I only have 30 hours with them. I was $2,250 a month and that was so precious to me, so I expected so much. I expected them to build me this giant thing. I pushed them so much early for quickness and speed. You take shortcuts because of the time and now I am paying for it. We have made decisions early because we were trying to build a race car, but we are trying to build it with no interior. Now we are having to do a little bit of refactoring here and there from really bad decisions, but my whole attitude on software has changed as we have grown. The best quality for them is that there is never going to be a project that these guys can’t do. I would be very surprised.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Overall, I have been very happy with the level of service that Uhray has provided me with.  The results they deliver to me have allowed me to grow my company substantially over the years and as a result of my work with them, they grow in unison.

I do not have any meaningful suggestions or concerns in regards to how they can improve as a company.  Through working with them we have developed a strong development process that works for both companies and I am confident that they will be able to do the same with any company they work for.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I am pretty sure that anyone that goes to them with any sort of idea, there is going to be no shortage of their ability to pull off the vision.