Viral Strategy Group, Inc.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-owner of an organic juice bar that serves cold-pressed juices, smoothies, and foods. We also have a weekly juice subscription where customers can sign up for one or more quarts of juice, bone broth, or wellness shots per week.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Viral Strategy Group, Inc.?

We needed help building a headless architecture for all of our technology.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Viral Strategy Group, Inc. (VSG) is building a responsive website with a customer portal for online ordering and subscriptions. The VSG team is creating the ordering system for our foot traffic and a separate ordering flow for subscriptions.

I’ve provided text and images, and VSG is developing our infrastructure. They’re building the technology from scratch, so we’ll house and own the portal. The team is helping us customize our shopping pages, how we optimize, what the customers see, data collection, and the kind of reports we get.

VSG is also adding functionalities that will enable customers to track orders or pause subscriptions if they’ll be traveling or need to take a break. Customers will also be able to see all of their order histories on the portal. 

We’ll be going into testing the website soon. After we launch the site, phase two of the project will be building a mobile application. The app will have our rewards, loyalty, and affiliate programs, and it will allow us to push out various kinds of marketing to our customer base as well. 

What is the team composition?

Richard and Adriano (Co-CEOs) are our strategic advisors for the project. On the technology side, I work directly with Fawad (CTO), though I know he has a team of people who handle some of the buildouts.

How did you come to work with Viral Strategy Group, Inc.?

We met Adriano because he was a customer. He was interested in us as business owners because he loved our product, and we would get into business conversations with him.

When we learned what VSG did, we asked Adriano if we could explore the options for our ideas. We had a casual conversation with Adriano and Richard about our ideas and where we were headed, and we thought VSG would be a good fit for the project.

How much have you invested with them?

Our contract for phase one was for $90,000. So far, we’ve paid $60,000, and the remaining $30,000 is due at the completion of phase one. 

The next phase would be around $140,000; we haven’t committed to that yet, though we definitely will.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in July 2020, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

VSG’s work will enable us to customize anything we want in our site any way we want to. The infrastructure they’re building will free us from the limitations of third-party templates and frameworks, which have been a struggle for us in the past.

We haven’t launched yet, so we mostly have projections. In an industry like ours, there isn’t a POS system that can handle subscriptions streamlined for both the customer and the company. The systems we have are clunky and don’t allow for exponential growth. Once the site VSG is building goes live, we’ll be able to have that exponential growth. For instance, we had 40 subscriptions in 2021, and we’re slated to have 650 in 2022.

How did Viral Strategy Group, Inc. perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re excellent at project management; we’re highly satisfied with them. VSG is great at keeping the project on track and on task. I take every opportunity to spend time with them to help them understand my vision and problem solve. 

We have regular meetings with Fawad to go over what we’re looking for and the progress. Since I’m more of a visionary, the project flow scales he brings to the table are really helpful. We mostly use email and Zoom to communicate, and sometimes we text. The team is pretty much available whenever we need them. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m most impressed by Richard and Adriano’s role in our project. Getting their time and expertise as our strategic advisors has been invaluable from marketing and growth standpoints. Typically, we’d only be working with a tech person or a project manager. With VSG, we feel that they care about our business, its success, and about us as people – they see our vision and believe in it.

Moreover, we’re really grateful that we can have a strategy conversation with them at any stage in the project. That conversation might have happened at the start with other vendors, and then we would have been passed off to the tech team. Meanwhile, with VSG, we’ve been able to connect on strategy at every stage, pivoting and thinking differently when needed, which has been really helpful. 

Working directly with the CTO and knowing he’s the project manager has been really helpful, too. Fawad can map out how everything would or could go, poke holes, and show us where we might get tripped up. As a result, he’s able to help us in advance, ensuring we carry out our vision put into the context of how it will look in reality. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

I don’t think there’s anything they need to improve; we’ve been really happy with our investment.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be really clear on your vision for growth and your options on an exit strategy. If you’re clear about those things going in, the sky will be the limit. VSG has a very talented team that can help you take that vision to the next level and implement it.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and CEO of Evolution 316, a social media startup. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with FLAGD Mobile Corp?

We needed a local mobile app development company to help us with our project. We had paid $30,000 for a developer to do our wireframing and storyboarding. However, that previous vendor misrepresented their development capabilities, and they also communicated poorly with us. We needed a new partner we could count on.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They started from scratch because there wasn’t any actual coding from the previous developer. They took on the design and development. They’re developing our iOS app right now and our web-based MVP. Then they’re going to do our Android development in the next two months. We’re not going to officially go to market until we have all three out there. We’ll be doing a soft launch with iOS. They’re using JavaScript. They’re going to do integrations for the website to match the mobile version.

Our social media app allows users to take a picture of a scenario and create a comic book of the stages that led up to that event, like a personal movie. If you’re with a friend, you can create a story and share it with the other person and they can create a one-page story. It’s basically a comic book.

What is the team composition?

There’s a project manager, an account manager, and the development team.

How did you come to work with FLAGD Mobile Corp?

A venture capitalist friend of mine recommended them, and he knew the CEO of the company. We approached them and met them in person. We also liked that they were local, and we took a leap with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in October 2018 and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our project is going to be done in the next three months. We have nothing but good things to say about them. They’re a startup company but they have a lot of developers on their staff. They don’t outsource anything. They only handle a certain number of projects throughout the year based upon their in-house capabilities. They do a lot of great work.

We’re in the beta phase right now and we have about 22 testers. Every one of our testers says it’s unbelievable. They’ve brought great value to our project; they took an idea we had and they brought it to life. They put every single element of what we wanted and more. There are some features in there that we never asked for and they to put them in. Everyone loves it.

They brought us to a couple of events in Boston and we actually gained some resourceful contacts. One contact has been helping us along the way and he might be coming on as an advisor to my company. He knows everybody in the space that we need to be in the market.

We’re bringing the beta to investors and we just locked another $175,000 investment based off the prototypes that FLAGD Mobile Corp has delivered. We’re very happy with them.

How did FLAGD Mobile Corp perform from a project management standpoint?

Their quality of service is way better than the other companies that I deal with. I love that there’s no being transferred or waiting. If we have an issue on a Saturday or Sunday, we’ll get an email back. If we have to talk to them, they’ll call or we’ll call them.

They’re very transparent. There’s a conference call every Tuesday. We’ll talk about the sprints of them creating the technology and we’ll give them the notes back on what want and don’t want or if we want to wait until version two.

On Tuesdays, we have a project manager, an accounts manager, and the development team all on a call. They’ll talk about the new updates that the developer had. Then we’ll talk to the project manager about if we want to add a feature or get rid of a feature. He’ll give it to the accounts manager who will give us a quote before we agree to go forward. They even send us an email stating how much it’s going to cost and if we don’t want to do it, he’ll give a recommendation or suggest waiting to do it when we do our soft launch. Sometimes there is a marketing guy that listens to the calls and give us some direction.

I love that they’re a startup too because they get where we are and we get where they are. Their CEO or the project manager will text me and ask how everything is going, even after hours. In the beginning, they said to call them if we had a problem at 7:00 PM. They’re always available.

What did you find most impressive about them?

When we presented our project and what we wanted, the CEO gave us both a larger estimate and a smaller estimate. He said we have all these great things going on with our project, but at the end of the day, we need an MVP out there. He was basically telling us that we want to set realistic goals. I respect that because he saved us money and time and ensured a better and simpler UX.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They should be raising tons of money for their company. They have so much potential to be in a bigger space.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you’re a startup and you’re looking to create a mobile app, I recommend hunting down a local mobile development agency so that you’re able to sit down and talk. Getting that relationship going is a big difference. I recommend people to get quotes from different people. Be vigilant. Don’t just say yes to one company. Sit down and talk with them in person.