West Agile Labs

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a mobile app that connects salon owners to stylists to fill their empty salon space by the day. I am co-founder and COO, so I’m responsible for the day-to-day operations, including marketing, business development, partnerships, and strategy.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with West Agile Labs?

We needed to create an app because we didn’t have a technical co-founder.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We came to them with a drawing on a Chipotle napkin. We still have that napkin, believe it or not. My other co-founder is the subject matter expert when it comes to the beauty and barbering industry. He drew out what the screens should look like and what the process should be.

We spent $250 with another vendor to create a logo. West Agile designed a better logo and helped us with our corporate colors, the font, and our overall brand identity. They took time to understand what we were trying to do, which is disrupt an industry that’s been the same for decades.

The next step was building an app. We thought we needed everything in our MVP. West Agile understood our entrepreneurial mindset and could explain where our money would be best spent.

We created a bare-bones MVP, and that got us to the next step. They created the Android app first,  and we waited about 3–4 months before we moved forward with them developing the iOS app as well.

The app now has several key functions: determining location of both the stylist and salon space providers; mapping; filtering based on user specialty and other preferences; stylist profiles, reviews, and ratings; payment; confirmation; referrals; and chat. Plus, we’re in a sprint now working on a photo carousel. It’s a lot.

What is the team dynamic?

There were at least five people on their team, but there may have been seven or more, depending on the project manager side.

How did you come to work with West Agile Labs?

When we first had this idea, we’d been manually matching stylists to empty salon space for about 2–3 years as a side project, and it got to be too much. It didn’t feel like we were helping the community.

We thought there must be an app to push people to, but we couldn’t find one. We contacted a well-connected friend in Silicon Valley, who thought ours was a billion-dollar idea. She recommended talking with a friend of hers who had done a lot of work for Y Combinator and 500 Startup companies. That’s how we found West Agile.

Based on our friend’s recommendation, we reached out to Pramod [CEO & Co-Founder, West Agile Labs] and had a couple of conversations with him. We felt extremely comfortable in those first conversations—enough to make the decision to move forward with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together August 2015, and the work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We launched the beta in September 2016. Now, we have over 1,500 users. We have over 600 hosts on the platform in 375 cities and 11 countries. Users usually find the app by word of mouth because that’s the mainstay of the beauty industry. They are also finding it through Google, Facebook, and the influencer program we started a couple of months ago. People love the fact that they can safely book salon space to work from the palm of their hand.

How did West Agile Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

I I have nothing to compare it to because this is the first app I’ve created from scratch. As far as project management, a project manager we loved moved on early on, but Pramod jumped in and filled the gap himself.

They’ve always been extremely good about getting back to us and have been receptive to our feedback. We use Pivotal Tracker a lot to communicate with the dev team, and we use phone and text to communicate to the project management team. If I need to talk to Pramod at 11 at night, he’s always readily available.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The fact that they’ve been entrepreneurs before and they’ve walked in these shoes. They’re really good at helping entrepreneurs or co-founders realize their dreams without spending a lot of money. That’s rare. They help you figure out the minimum you need to start generating revenue. It may only be three things on your list that need to be checked off. It’s really good that they help you press the brakes and think strategically where to spend money when it comes to development. That ability was so meaningful.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The last couple of iterations were a little buggier—not the app itself, but when going through the QA.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the head of product at NVOLV. We build mobile applications for events of any kind, such as conferences, tradeshows, expos, and festivals. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with West Agile Labs?

We needed to redesign the entire app. We were working on building what we were calling version 2. Our older UI [user interface] wasn’t meeting our needs, but the functionality was there. So, we just needed to give the whole thing a new look. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We wanted to use someone besides our own in-house design team. Design was a big component of this project. We asked West Agile Labs to help us figure out the mapping, UX [user experience] flows, placement, and reorganization of items and features within the app, which is available on both iOS and Android. We set out to do 5–10 screens initially. They ended up completing 70 in the original budget. They focused on UI/UX, the hierarchy flows, and then the entire look of the app.

I personally worked with Alex [Former Lead Designer, West Agile Labs] and Jackie [Art Director, West Agile Labs]. Alex was super responsive.

How did you come to work with West Agile Labs?

I knew of Jake [VP of Business Development, West Agile Labs] through a mutual friend. I posted on Facebook that my company needed UX help.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $10,000–$15,000. They completed the work well within budget and over-delivered almost 10-fold. That was great.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together April 2016, and the project was completed within 2 weeks. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We operate in a competitive space, so standing out to attendees can be tricky. People are reluctant to download something on their device. Some of the biggest feedback that we get from both users and event organizers is how good the app looks, how friendly it is, and how well things are laid out. We typically build a brand-new app for each client that comes on board with us. There’s a degree of customization that comes with that process. Through the customization of additional app functions, we’re offering an a la carte setup based on what they paid for. From there, we help clients organize stuff within the app. People definitely love it.

How did West Agile Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

They were responsive to feedback throughout the process. I actually worked with them personally at their office. I routinely visited to review their progress, or we’d use Envision to hammer out details quickly. At the initial meeting, I talked about the scope and started drawing things on the spot. The whole collaboration worked pretty well, and everything stuck to our schedule. They were always ready to have me review their work.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their over-delivery was impressive. Art is hard to get right. It’s a highly subjective area. I appreciated being able to agree on what items would look like and crank out production and screens from there.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I have nothing in particular to suggest. I had a great time working with them.  

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We are an event discovery and promotional app. It’s a place for people to find things to do and for people to promote their events. I am the co-founder and chief strategy officer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with West Agile Labs?

The biggest thing we needed was speed-to-market, as well as someone who could solve the problems of double work and deadlines being missed by internal teams.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

West Agile Labs took on the technical side of the company. They provided resources to do the coding for our check-in apps for both iPhone and Android. They also did the desktop application. They did basically all of the technical infrastructure, including setting up our servers and anything on the technical side of our company.

We have a project manager here in our office who liaised with a project manager at West Agile. We provided West Agile Labs with a framework. We had some specs written out and some ideas of where we wanted to go. There was an existing platform and an existing website that was up and running, but what they ended up building off of that was basically from scratch.

The ticketing side of the app was something we added once we engaged with them. We now have the ability to create and sell tickets, including user-generated tickets. We built that into our platform in the last year. We have ideation calls 2-3 times a week. The general design and user flow, we do that here. Our direct contacts with them certainly provide input into those areas, but West Agile Labs mostly just implements it.

How did you come to work with West Agile Labs?

They were recommended to me by someone I do business with.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

Over a million dollars. West Agile is worth the rate. That said, from an outsource perspective, they’re the least expensive option that we’ve had and the most quality that we’ve had.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them June 2015 and have been working together since.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We’re growing across the country, city by city. That’s important for us because we’re an event discovery app. When we started with West Agile, we were in 1 city and testing, and now we’re in 6 cities. We’ll be in 10 cities by the end of August/September range. Our user base is growing as well. Our downloads are growing.

How did West Agile Labs perform from a project management standpoint?

There are obviously learning curves with every project, but their willingness to jump in with both feet and to provide resources was great. I think the biggest positive about West Agile was the founders’ ability to understand what a startup goes through. They’ve been there themselves; they know the pain points.

They also have a very deep bench as it relates to accessing talented resources that are working on other projects or coming off other projects. That adaptability really helps us when we have deadlines coming up that we’re not sure we’ll hit. They have the ability to increase the team size to make sure we hit those things. I especially appreciated that early on.

Then they helped us put together true development guidelines about ideation phases, testing, and those kinds of things. That’s been helpful for us too. We communicate through Skype and UberConference. We use all the third-party tools like Pivotal Tracker for all of our development, and then we use Basecamp for ideation. We’ve streamlined communication through some cool third-party software tools. The size of the team from West Agile Labs working on our project has ranged from 8-18 depending on what we’re working on.

What distinguishes West Agile Labs from other providers?

I think relationships are the big thing for West Agile Labs. It’s been my experience in the technical world that there’s a lot of overpromising and under delivering, and things always seem to take longer and cost more than what was initially estimated. Their willingness to make sure they meet or exceed expectations says a lot about their character. Their 2 founders, Pramod and Owais, have a good background and they’re understanding of challenges, especially from a cash flow perspective and as it relates to needing to get a product out in the marketplace quickly. They understood that we needed to raise money or do things to drive user base, at the same as building extra features. There’s a good balance there. Owais particularly understands that as well as anybody I know.

Is there anything West Agile Labs could have improved or done differently?

I think the one challenge we had, which was addressed through communication, was getting started. The scope of work is never quite truly defined because to truly define it would take too long. I think in the early parts of our relationship, we had trouble understanding exactly what a big undertaking this was, versus expectations of speed and cost and those kind of things. But, I think those are just normal things that happen. They were good in how they reacted to those issues.