Unagi Software

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of BlackBook

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

BlackBook Travels is a Travel and Hospitality centric company, headquartered in Singapore.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Unagi Software to accomplish?

• Augment our technology team in both working on new features and refactoring old modules using tools such as Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, MySQL, Ansible, and AWS.

SOLUTION

How did you find Unagi Software?

Online Search

Why did you select Unagi Software over others?

• Great culture fit
• Company values aligned

How many teammates from Unagi Software were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

BlackBook Travels is a Travel companion product, helping in searching, booking and managing your travel itinerary, with both a server component and a mobile component to it. The scope of work was to augment the staff working on the server component, to enhance it by adding new features and to refactor some of the old modules in further improving their performance.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Our inventory refresh of over 2 million hotels used to be a tedious and time consuming process. This has been fundamentally re-designed to run a lot smoother and a lot more interactively, and at a much faster pace.
• We built an efficient process to manage 50+ million images.
• We standardized a catalog of 40+ million amenities.
• We fixed bugs to reduce hotel search times to 2-3 seconds, even with thousands of results.
• We refactored code that was over 5 years old and increased test coverage by 24%.
• We set up dynamic disposable environments to simplify QA and test features before deploying.

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

Deliverables were submitted in a timely manner. Regular scrum calls and daily check-ins allowed for all stake-holders to be in the loop at all times, ensuring great transparency. The team was flexible and great fun to work with.

What was your primary form of communication with Unagi Software?

Virtual Meeting

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

The company has a fantastic culture that inculcates a good work ethic balanced with quality time off. The team blends to the point where it is hard to realise that they are outsourced. Very organized and structured in their approach.

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

All good.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the VP of Product of a business services company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Providing a platform for learning and development of professionals

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Develop and maintain our online platform

SOLUTION

How did you find Unagi?

Third-party

Why did you select Unagi over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Unagi were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Unagi helped us develop and reliably use a complete platform to onboard, engage, and manage our users and customers allowing multiple user types to get what they need from our platform and has maintained it for us.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We have a fully functional and reliable software to run our business with with new features and functionalities added regularly enabling us to do things better and faster

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

The communication has been excellent with clear expectations and timelines from the beginning. They take ownership of their work and deliver results in a reliable way. The teamwork, both internally among themselves and with us, has been excellent. This enables us to focus on what we want to build rather than the nuances of software development and complexities that come with it. 

They are responsive to what we need and listen to understand our needs. Then they can come up with solutions to address the problems we have and do their best to keep us informed about how everything fits together.

What was your primary form of communication with Unagi?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The quality of communication and ownership of the results and responsiveness of the team.

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

Nothing comes to mind at the moment.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of Aero SRL

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are a travel operator

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

• Find a technology partner that gives me the solution I need
• Develop a payments platform for ariline tickets credit control
• Find a team that gives me a full solution (PMs and developers)

SOLUTION

How did you find Unagi?

Referral

Why did you select Unagi over others?

Close to my geographic location, Great culture fit, Good value for cost, Company values aligned

What was the size of Unagi’s team?

2-5 Employees

What was your primary form of communication with Unagi?

Virtual Meeting, Email or Messaging App

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

They are helping us developing a standalone application to help us control the credit for agencies when trying to make a ticket emission. The application will be used as a service in our applications environment helping us also with an integration of a third party software for ticket reserve and emission. The MVP is a system that has a frontend for users to allow the emission to keep going, send that over an API and then the flow would keep going in the other application. It seems simple but it's not that easy.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• No specific measures, we keep track of the achievments in our online staging platforms

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

It's been a real pleasure to work with them from the beggining. They have met our expectations, they have been improving their performance once they understood the complexity of the business logic. The PM keeps pushing for the advance of the team, giving us detailed information of the advance of the project using different platforms (Basecamp, Slack), but the most important thing is that we found an excellent way to work together, adjusting the project management to our needs and possibilities.

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

Human quality, values, responsibility, and professionalism

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

Nothing to highlight. Everything we needed we talked about and agreed on

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm one of the engineers of a civil construction company. The company has +30 years of experience and a vast experience in civil engineering projects in oil refineries / plants. Together with another team of engineers, I am in charge of projects from tender to execution.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

When we hired Unagi we had 3 big projects and +180 employees. We had grow really fast and needed someone/something to organize our work the right way. We had tried a couple of canned software solutions paying a monthly subscription, but none of them was solving our problems.

Each project should manage all its resources independently (hhrr, equipment, clothes, invoices, payments, providers, deliveries, etc.). But also the managers should be able to have access to a high level picture of the entire company for decision making.

So, everything should be kept separate but also combined in reports. We were doing a lot of things manually and it was a mess. That could work when you are 10-25 people, but it doesn't work when you are almost 200 employees. So, we wanted a provider that could help us build a custom solution. The problem was that we didn't know exactly how to do it. Luckily, the team from Unagi is fantastic and not only built what we needed, but also helped us created internal processes that we were missing.

What I think is great from their job is that their software, based on how it was done, make us follow procedures that are necessary for our work. Finally, working in power plants requires us to comply with a lot of quality and safety controls. Thanks to the Unagi system, we were able to comply with all of them and quickly, keep track of information and detect the changes to be made to pass the inspections.

SOLUTION

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

We found them through a referral who was pleased with their service. It was a similar company that had worked with them before. We were considering other providers too but with Unagi we got a good feeling since the very first moment because, during our initial meeting, they made more questions than we asked them. We had not seen that with the other providers.

With the other providers, we were the ones asking questions to them, but none took the time to ask about our problems. Unagi quickly made us realize they were truly committed to our project, despite they didn't know if we were going to work with them.

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

They designed, planned, and developed a custom software solution to manage our company resources. We first started with meetings where we went through some exercises driven by them to define our needs and problems. We quickly understood that there were many tasks we were successfully solving, but could definitely be improved. There were many processes that were relying only on a person, which was a serious risk for an industry where people rotates constantly.

During these exercises, they made clear that their software was going to be the means to an end, that was organizing our tasks and creating internal procedures. Then, they built a lot of sketches that helped us understand what they were suggesting to do. What I loved about them is that they took the time to explain why things should be done one way or another, or to suggest improvements. Their team is one of the most empathetic people I have ever worked with. Some of the modules they built:

• HHRR - to manage employees, hours tracking, payroll, clothes that are given to each employee, etc.
• Stock -> to manage stock of materials and keep track of when things are delivered and who received each truck -
• Financial -> to manage invoices, providers, clients and make and collect payments. Something amazing here was an option to do bank reconciliation and a report with future obligations to be paid.
• Equipment -> to manage vehicles, backhoes, forklifts, hydraulic cranes
• Internal messaging system - to communicate effectively with the different employees within projects
• Calendar -> to track deadlines (really important when you manage a lot of people, vehicles, equipment and each item needs to go through an inspection) And everything is customizable by project. Once we were all aligned, they helped us define our priorities and create a roadmap.

What we were building was huge, so we knew it was going to take a long time. However, they split the app into different modules that allowed us to use the system without waiting for the entire project to be finished. Every week or two we had a demo where they presented the new features and received feedback from us. Another thing I liked about them is that they were really transparent with their work. We had access to their check-ins and weekly they shared docs with all the progress. Although it was new for us, the communication was great and we even learned that there were things that are better when done asynchronously. That saved us many headaches.

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

It has changed since we started, but I would say there were 3/4 people involved most of the time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The most impressive outcome for me was that we didn't hire more executives/managers. We were able to manage almost 200 hundred people only with 6 engineers and 1 administrative. The bank reconciliation module frees up our employees' time, which allows them to focus on other tasks. The internal message module allowed us to keep track of decisions, but also work asynchronously, reducing the number of meetings. The reports they created allowed us to save dozens of thousands of $ as we were able to compare providers before choosing where to buy and have more data to negotiate better prices. It also helped us do better estimates for future projects. By keeping deadlines in a centralized calendar, we were able to reduce failed inspections or missing deadlines.

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

The project management and communication were excellent. We learned the benefits of writing things down, they included in their internal management tool (Basecamp) since the beginning and kept up to date with the progress. They used Basecamp mostly.

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

That they were really commited to our project. They quickly got a sense of our needs. They also took the time to explain better ways of doing things and suggest solutions. I always say to them that what they do is more than software. They helped us organize ourselves and create internal processes that we needed.

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

Honestly, I can't think of anything. Just to mention something, they should have insisted more about including a UX expert early, although I think this is more our fault than theirs.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there

I’m the co-founder of an immigration consulting firm. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenges were you trying to address with Unagi?

Looking to escalate our business, we needed a more solid technology team to help grow our website. At the time, we were working with one developer. We hired Unagi to grow our team.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement? 

Unagi took over our existing website and codebase. Their team expanded our website, coding mostly in Ruby on Rails. They built new features and refactored existing functions.

What is the team composition?

We worked with 3–5 members of Unagi’s team.

How did you come to work with Unagi?

We found Unagi on Upwork in addition to three other companies that we also contacted for an interview. We chose Unagi based on their team’s bilingual skills and experience.

How much have you invested in them?

We spent more than $25,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started our collaboration in late 2018 and the project lasted about one year.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Before partnering with Unagi, it took our clients a very long time to fill out forms. As a result, we had a high bounce rate. Unagi optimized our code and made our load speed a lot faster, which translated into more clients. Thanks to this project, our site’s conversions increased a lot.

How did Unagi Perform from a project management standpoint?

We used Jira to communicate, and their communication skills were great. Despite being highly technical, they used direct, simple language with our team. All members of our team fully understood Unagi’s processes even though we didn’t have technical knowledge. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

When we reached out to Unagi, we didn’t know how to move forward. Their team made it clear what we needed to do. They helped us focus on improvements that would bring us value. Thanks to their expertise, we were able to refine our project. Their communication was great too. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

We talked about this with them too. It would be great if they expanded to more locations. For example, they could open a branch office in Peru. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Working with them is a great decision. It will definitely be a good investment.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO and founder of Pinta Libre, a food and beverages company. We have the fastest growing platform for restaurants, pubs, etc. The platform allows restaurants to fill empty tables by offering up to one free pint per day when they dine out. We’re helping fight empty tables and sedentary lifestyles through a subscription beer app that invites our users to socialize and have fun as much as possible.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Unagi?

We needed someone to develop our mobile app.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Unagi developed the platform from scratch. It’s a mobile app for iOS and Android. The app has registration forms and users can find screens that explain how to use the service. They can subscribe through a payment gateway like Stripe. Unagi helped us in doing the integration with payment processors. Users can find an image or a review of the beer bars. They can see if they’re open or closed. The system has a referral system that allows users to invite friends and earn points.

There’s a front- and backend system to the app. My team and I work with the backend. The app offers our beer pubs and restaurants a web portal so they can handle administrative tasks from their computers. The system is quite complicated, it’s a hybrid software.

What is the team composition?

We work with four people from their team. There are two full-stack developers, one UX designer, and the CEO helped by being a project manager until the time we hired one.

How did you come to work with Unagi?

They’re based in our same city. We did some research and found them to be the best choice in our city.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about $40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in February 2018, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The system is working really well. We have metrics that say the app is supporting our traffic. We’ve had more than 100,000 downloads. Our conversion rate is 18 per year. It seems the app works well. We’re not having a lot of trouble with the checkout process. It’s great because we’re working with a subscription-based business model so the checkout must be excellent.

We’re very happy with Unagi. We’ve never had a single problem with them. Their team is young and phenomenal. They support the idea of validating before programming.

How did Unagi perform from a project management standpoint?

They formerly used Trello for project management. Right now, they’re using Basecamp and we have a team chat to communicate with them. We’re so happy with the communication, and they’re transparent. We don’t have a CTO in our company. They’re basically our CTO and it’s great.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Unagi works on the project as if it were their own. Their team does an excellent job. It’s wonderful working with them. They’re a good fit for us culturally. They’re super-fast. Not only do they strive to do a good job but they also ask us about the next roadmap and the why in order to understand us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing I’d have them improve. We’re so happy with them. I strongly recommend working with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Trust their methodology. It will turn out great.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Platform to make a match between freelance consultants and temporary concrete projects. My position is that of founder and director.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

Perform an integration of the STRIPE payment platform in our platform and create an application for a better experience for our two types of users.

SOLUTION

How did you select Unagi and what were the deciding factors?

The proposal we requested from UNAGI was consistent and professional and adjusted to our objectives.

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

UNAGI conducted a survey with us to collect information on our needs. They then sent a proposal in good detail of what their job would be. Some requirements were adjusted. The proposal was approved.

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

We are a small team of five people. We work remotely. Our suppliers are selected for their quality and alignment with our needs.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The work done by UNAGI was excellent. Simply adjusted to what we wanted without unnecessary details. His availability was excellent.

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

The UNAGI proposal was on a website and communication was by telephone and email. The execution deadlines were adjusted to those foreseen with little margin of difference.

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

Reliability.

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

Everything can be improved in principle, but it was not too big a project and both the technical work and the communication were adjusted to our expectations.

BACKGROUND

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

• Add features to a consumer-facing web and mobile app
• Explore additional business opportunities

SOLUTION

• Great culture fit
• Referred to me
• Company values aligned

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of a hospitality & leisure company

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We've created a one-stop shop where customers can purchase all of their nightlife products in one place. Customers can purchase and redeem fast passes to skip the line, general admission tickets, VIP table/bottle service, and pre-ordered drinks.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Unagi Software to accomplish?

• Software Development

SOLUTION

How did you find Unagi Software?

• Referral
• U.S. Consulting Firm

Why did you select Unagi Software over others?

Referred to me

How many teammates from Unagi Software were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

Rewrote a website for ticket purchasing and redemption in TypeScript and Node. Added many new features to a backend dashboard and the ticketing site itself.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Releasing often

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

We managed the project internally

What was your primary form of communication with Unagi Software?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

The quality of their developers is outstanding

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

No

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of a Fintech company. We are focused on the Latin American market.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

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

We needed an efficient and secure solution to run our existing business (at that point based on spreadsheets mostly), with an intuitive UX for our customers. We also needed a way to protect our Intellectual Property and the customer data we manage. We had some failed attempts until we met Unagi.

They brought fresh ideas that helped us improve what we had by executing consistently and bringing incremental value with each iteration. That was crucial as it allowed us to tackle the most relevant issues first, and then have time to think thoroughly about building new functionalities as the platform evolve.

SOLUTION

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

We needed a team that was able to use some of the components we had already built. None of the other companies I contacted were willing to do that, they wanted to start from scratch using a tech stack of their choice, Unagi was the only company that was willing to take the time to review, understand and use our existing code base. Their rates were also very competitive compared to the other companies I evaluated for this project.

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

Unagi started their work with a product discovery to understand our business and processes. For ~3 weeks, they learned everything about our business and came up with ideas on how to improve our current workflow. They found creative ways to leverage some of the code and assets we had from a failed previous attempt, which resulted in some time and money saving, as well as a faster time to market.

Based on the result from the product discovery, they built prototypes and worked together with our current designer to create a Design System based on components, that allowed us to save time and be sure every corner of our app has the same unique identity. Then they built a web application that includes a backend on Ruby on Rails and a frontend with Stimulus JS. The platform allows our to have a more fluid experience and our internal teams to bring more and faster value to our clients.

The application has several integrations with many 3rd party APIs, payment gateways such as Mercadopago, and other third-party software. In addition, Unagi is in charge of all the technical decisions, including DevOps and Infrastructure.

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

We worked with 4 teammates from Unagi, including two experienced engineers, a UX designer, and a Project Manager. Their Project Manager being a technical person was a big plus, as it helped to quickly understand what a feature involved and improve estimation. That allowed us to make decisions faster and reduce the scope of work when we detected we were trying to go too far.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They built an impressive application in a few months, reducing meetings between clients and representatives by 75%. The new user experience improved efficiency, as clients moved from answering 15 questions to only 4 and us getting the same information, and surveys confirmed that 50% of clients were more motivated to complete the required information.

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

The team is effective and timely, communicating swiftly through Basecamp, holding the required meetings, and always promoting asynchronous communication. They share daily written updates with the latest news. That is a big plus as it respects everyone's time, helps build the project documentation, and tracks all the decisions we make.

Also, the entire team knows the domain and are detail oriented, which is great to avoid bottlenecks and allows one to quickly jump into a call if needed.

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

Their team focuses on delivering intuitive and effective solutions, with the final user always in mind. Be ready to receive a lot of questions that will make you doubt what you know, which is great to really improve. In addition, they have a good follow-up and management process in place.

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

We were moving on an aggressive timeline and we had to change priorities many times so a few features took longer than we'd hoped, although this was out of Unagi's control.