Weptile

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m one of the owners and directors of a dog daycare company called Soulmutts.

What challenge were you trying to address with Weptile?

There are a lot of small and mid-sized dog walking daycare companies. The traditional way that everyone organizes their companies isn’t very good because it’s not scalable. Most dog walking daycare companies probably handle around 20–-30 dogs, tops. We’re hitting around 150 dogs a day, so imagine having a single point of human interaction to try and schedule and organize all that — it was insane at that point. 

Even though we solved the formula for the growth of having lots of staff and customers, it was talking up all of the hours in a day for ownership as opposed to being able to focus on the growth of the business. We wanted a custom solution that could help us manage our operations.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We came to Weptile with an idea to build a custom ERP that handles all our clients, staff schedule, and billing, so we can offload a lot of the administrative work and become an automated process. The custom platform is a web app that we built on top of WooCommerce using WordPress.

What’s different about the software Weptile developed is we offer pick up and drop off transport which is a much more complicated delivery. What our software really does is allow us to assign new clients to certain staff and have them automatically book certain services.

We can also restrict which services they get based on the area of the city they’re in. We can then create an ordered list that automatically generates on a daily basis so that the staff and drivers know their route throughout the city. They can also record from their interface whether they were able to successfully pick up the animal, or whether they were locked out or if the owner isn’t home.

On the administrative side, we can see the master list of everything that’s going on. We have a POS interface because we also have walk-in customers, so our staff can record when dogs are dropped off or picked up for daycare. All of that funnels into generating the invoices automatically which ties into QuickBooks.

As you can imagine, we invoice our clients on a biweekly basis. We have 150 dogs a day which equates to about 2,000 clients at any given time, so generating invoices a month by hand is just not ideal.

It only takes one push of a button on this system to confirm bookings, check-ins, and check-outs. The invoices are then sent to QuickBooks online to go out to the customers automatically. It handles everything and basically runs the whole company essentially at this point. It’s a full-blown ERP which is a crazy undertaking for a dog daycare but it allows us to continue to grow and focus on bigger problems other than knowing how to generate invoices.

We can focus on where to spend our marketing dollars and how to choose locations.

What is the team composition?

We deal directly with Ufuk (Owner) and I believe he has around 5–7 people working on this project.

How did you come to work with Weptile?

I interviewed them along with a number of other companies. Weptile was really excited about the project and showed me they were confident that they could deliver the work. Another factor was their reasonable rates. Once we got started, we basically scoped out the features in phases since Weptile didn’t really know anything about running a daycare.

How much have you invested with them?

We initially spent around $20,000 to build it out and then another $10,000 to add more features. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in May 2016. The development with Weptile is still ongoing as we’re adding more and more features along the way.

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

Our previous process took around 30–40 hours of manual administrative work a week. With this tool, we’re accomplishing it in 1–2 hours. We’ve reduced the processing time by order of magnitude times ten so to me, that is a massive success. 

I don’t think we would have been able to scale to where we are now without Weptile for two reasons. One, we would have gone insane and given up because we can’t always work 100 hours a week nonstop. Two, we reached a point where we were making too many errors and mistakes doing things manually. 40 hours a week freed up is a lot of time. That’s 160 hours a month less work, so to me, that is a huge success.

How did Weptile perform from a project management standpoint?

What we would do is develop the scope with them in Google Docs because that way, we can really outline ideas and go back through the comment process and work through it. They’re in Turkey, so it’s a little hard to get phone calls. We just communicate through WhatsApp since it was an effective way to communicate.

Right now I think Ufuk is putting a ticketing system in place. Although I like the direct communication better, if he wants to scale his business he needs to organize himself more.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m impressed with how much Ufuk really cares. We have a time offset of around eight hours between us because they’re in Turkey and we’re in Toronto. He would always answer texts and emails even at times way out of business hours so he would actually go above and beyond to try and help us.

Let’s say we find a bug after going live with the new feature. It’s a critical moment for us because we need to generate invoices. He would still be available for us even though it was at 2 o’clock in the morning.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The only thing I think they can improve on which they have already improved on over time, is they made too many assumptions about the scope and features when they weren’t clear on certain things in the beginning.

We had to backtrack and fix things, but as we went along the process, it got more refined and they got much better at asking more important questions. I think this was probably the most complicated project they took on so it was a bit of a learning experience for them as well.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

My advice would be to make sure you’re very detailed in your requirements. There will be a few issues with time zones but they handled it pretty well all things considered.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the IT Manager at CanvasHQ, a platform that allows users to have their photos printed on canvas.

What challenge were you trying to address with Weptile?

We developed our first website in-house and, while it served us well for 8 years, we needed an updated version.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Weptile developed our e-commerce website for us using WordPress and WooCommerce. We were looking to duplicate the functionality of our old website within a modern framework. Our main feature is our canvas creator, which allows users to see a 3D rendered image of how their canvas will look when they open it up.

What is the team composition?

We worked directly with a project manager, designer, and developer. There were a few other members of the team that we interacted with. 

How did you come to work with Weptile?

We spent about a year researching partners to work with on this project. Eventually, we got it down to three options and we chose to work with Weptile based on their track record and references.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $40,000 on the first build of the site, as well as an additional $5,000–$10,000 on updates.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our engagement with Weptile ran from January 2017 – March 2018.

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

The new site is incredibly easy for our customers to use. The new site shows up correctly in browsers and is responsive, which is a big step up from the old version.

How did Weptile perform from a project management standpoint?

Weptile has an amazing project management system. You can tell that they’re experienced, they know how to delegate their team. They seem to know what the rest of their team is thinking.

We used a Google Sheet to track what needed to be done, such as bug-fixes and testing. Their team also relayed any updates via Slack. We use Slack Teams to interact with the entire Weptile team, which has worked well for us.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Weptile has never told me that they couldn’t do something, they always get it done. We come up with these crazy ideas for the backend, but they manage to make them work.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They could build a bigger team. Your project is in their pipeline for a long time, although this is common for small shops. There are both pros and cons to bigger teams, but with a few more members they could handle a little more and be a bit more responsive.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be patient and be reasonable about your timeframe. Building a new site takes a while, don’t try to speed it up just because you want it now. IF you want it to be correct, it’s going to take some time.