Voypost

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company provides a platform for realtors, buyers, sellers, and lenders to connect. RealGenius provides realtors and lenders with tools to help buyers and sellers make financially savvy decisions when committing to the purchase or sell their homes. I'm a product management consultant.

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

We needed to digitalized tools we have provided to realtors and lenders for years. Our goal was to develop an MVP, including basic calculations required to qualify a buyer before the house searching begins.

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

They were chosen based on these considerations:

• The attention to detail when discussing the requirements
• The responsiveness of the team and professionalism
• The technical recommendations and approach selected by the team

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

Their work involved:

• Developing a browser-based application with backend and frontend including the following features:

1.  Home screen
2. User account creation and login
3. Customer card creation
4. A financial questionnaire, calculations and rendering the results of these

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

The project manager & architect directly coordinated with us. But the team also involved firebase engineers and QA.

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

The results included:

• High quality MVP
• Flexibility to review and adjust when possible (this was really important, given the fact that our requirements, in terms of UI, were still evolving)
• Responsiveness of the team
• Creative thinking to address challenges as we went through the development cycle

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

They were open, agile, transparent, driven by the commitment to provide a high-quality end product. Super patient when it comes to deal with incomplete or ambiguous requirements & different timezones.

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

The willingness to find creative ways to achieve the desired requirements. The understanding of the different tech stack options we could have applied to develop our MVP & definitely the friendliness and patience the team had when dealing with indecisive founder and various stakeholders.

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

None that I can think of. The team was professional, took an advisory role which was really needed in our case & helped us navigate the very first phase of what we hope will be a product that helps realtors, buyers, sellers, and lenders connect and complete successful real estate transactions.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Our company makes SaaS solutions for the enterprise with the ultimate goal to help them better understand their people in a frictionless matter.

For what projects/services did your company hire Voypost?

We wanted to explore a new business opportunity that our core-team didn't have time for to develop. To validate the MVP we had to go from idea shipping to users <4 weeks. The challenge was to develop a lightweight and frictionless way to understand employees without bothering them.

This required us to build a SaaS application with analytics and a discussion platform to manage the responses, as well as a dashboard for users, a chrome extension, and a landing page.

The Voypost team helped us to scope out and develop a large part of the back-end while we did a design sprint, and from there we were able to quickly develop the front-end.

What were your goals for this project?

It needed to be built for the web, be mobile responsive, and frictionless for users in the browser through a chrome extension. The initial MVP was all about speed to deliver, but as we continued our partnership, the product was built to have flexibility and reliability in mind.

It had to be able to scale smoothly without having to redo the entire architecture.

How did you select this vendor?

Because the project was critical to delivering fast in order to validate the idea, we wanted to work with a team that knew how to launch products quickly. Voypost and the team had the experience of startups themselves, and it helped us to ship in weeks vs months for the first version.

It really helped us reduce the scope dramatically, and collaborate closely as if they were fully part of the team and not act like typical agencies.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They helped us to through ideation face with how to make a stable back-end infrastructure that would scale enough for the initial MVP, yet lightweight to build within a few weeks.

As we completed our own design sprint, they plugged into the process smoothly and scoped out in detail the cost and timeline, which really helped us greatly to prioritize and cut out non-essential solutions. They helped build the back-end, front-end, and performance management throughout the project, and we continued the collaboration across a few more releases.

Also, their project management to help translate the requests and needs to the developers and the detailed issue management was very smooth. They also supported us greatly with QA testing.

What was the team composition?

We had a core team of 3 developers constantly, with one PM to help coordinate all the efforts. The lead architect and the PM took care of all the admin, so we could really work smoothly together. Depending on the timeline and the needs to ship before a certain timeline, we were able to quickly add up to 8 developers to make sure the deadline remained sacred.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

The impact was huge for us. With their services, we were able to make them a natural extension of our own team, which made it a super smooth experience. It helped us pursue a new opportunity and ship a product in weeks, that we were previously not able to do.

The regular reviews on both sides, helped us sharpen our internal processes tremendously to make sure we could always ship big updates fast to our users. It really helped us rethink how to ship high-quality products fast.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The deadline was sacred to the Project Manager, she did an incredible job to

1. deal with our continuous request, and
2. to make sure the needs were always properly translated to all the engineers.

We never had to worry about scaling up the team when it was needed, the PM made sure that everything went super smooth, and also challenged us when needed to cut down on scope and requirements to make sure we made the deadline to the users.

What I was most impressed by was the hungriness to learn from our shared retrospectives and instantly make changes for the future.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The team really cared about the end-result and the deadline was sacred to everyone. They knew how important it was to ship a high-quality product to users and showed in every step they cared. Typical agencies tend to care about billing and protecting their hours. With this team, it was like the A-players in our own team.

If necessary they worked entire weeks 14 hours per day to make sure it was shipped on-time when the promise was made. Typical agencies or freelancers think it's 5 or 6 pm, this is what I got done, that's what you'll have. This was the opposite, I would hire them full-time as employees without second-guessing. They always kept their promises.

Are there any areas for improvement?

When working with startups that are in ideation face, or explore a new opportunity, things can be a bit messy, and as you learn new things as it comes alive, it requires sometimes the flexibility to go outside the scope, and re-ass how to best make impact for the users, and refactor the scope.

You could ask the client to say "If we say Yes to this, what can we say No to? Perhaps that will help the sparring to come to the best outcome without losing time.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Head of Product

For what projects/services did your company hire Voypost?

We had customers requesting a simple dashboard for one of our an existing products.

What were your goals for this project?

• Deliver a quick prototype that delivers value to our customers.
• Potentially act as a foundation for a larger product.

How did you select this vendor?

Found them through Upwork, where they were highly rated. Their professionalism made it an easy decision.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

The project was a prototype dashboard using React and Firebase. The work required integration into an existing product we've built internally.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Code quality was good for a prototype, and ensured we could iterate quickly with our own customers. There was some scope change during the project, and this was dealt with well.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Before accepting the job, Nikita had made a very clear breakdown of stories and tasks, with an estimate for each. It ensured alignment and transparency, and was a great way to start the project.

Good communication was vital, and Nikita et al were super responsive and very specific. Changes needed on our end were clearly specified to our engineer. Issues were dealt with rapidly.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Structured communication

Are there any areas for improvement?

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