Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.
We’ve had a couple of different engagements. One of them was taking our existing five-year-old mobile app and revamping it and making it more modern and current, adding new functionality for iOS. For iOS, in particular, they had taken the existing code base and they absorbed all the business requirements, all of the unusual esoteric institutional knowledge of how the company works, and all the rules. They then took that information and optimized it for today’s app. We worked with them to also create an Android equivalent app.
Shortly after that, we started to do some alternative projects related to trying new business models, new websites, and new extensions. After that was done, we moved onto a new third phase which involved doing some of the existing review work and our platform, which is a little bit antiquated and trying to figure out how to make it faster, as well as create some redundancy with our current team.
Symphony is probably what they used for the most part. For iOS, they used Swift, and Android was whatever was required by GooglePlay. They were 100% native apps.
The vast majority of the initial work with them was defined in the sense that we knew what we wanted to do. We wanted to make an extension that would be in Chrome and Firefox. That was something that existed already that we wanted to augment to be more dynamic by pulling in assets on the fly. So we support a lot of different charities, and for each one of those, there’s the ability to skin it differently. We wanted to take that and then interface with our existing CMS and have an admin upload photos and different texts so that through ATI work, which they developed, we could just send that information through our extension. Revamping our contest system, we did a lot of giveaways for our charities. They created a custom instance of WordPress, which would serve as the admins for the contest to leverage all these third parties like BlueBox.
We also work on analysis tools to go through our coupons and our merchants to make sure that nothing was getting flagged by malware. It was a pretty diverse set of things that we were working on. Today it is less defined only because we’re working more closely with them on the core product. That is sort of every day, “What do we need to do today?” in terms of improving the deploy process, in terms of developing small features that we need based on the marketplace. We need a better filter. We need internal linking. It’s gone very well defined to not so defined.
How did you come to work with Umbrella Web?
I used to work with them at a previous company and I think my Head of Technology found them on Upwork. We did some initial WordPress work with them and I got to be close to them in terms of relying on their skill level and trusted that they would get things done.
Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?
Approximately $150,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with them November 2015 and have been working together since.
The launch was successful and under budget. They leveraged an impressive variety of skills and expertise to fulfill the scope requirements. The team was flexible and communicative.