What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Wolfpack Digital has done a great job of building a backend for what I believe is a rather complex app. It has been out in the wild for almost a month now. It is still early so the majority of reviews are from family and friends.
So far, everyone is pretty impressed especially some people who I know work in tech are impressed with how far we have come in such a short time. Right now, due to certain legal requirements, it is a free to play app only because in the US especially, we have to be licensed in each state in order to accept real dollars.
Now that we have a functioning app, we are now going through the regulatory process and trying to become licensed in each state, and then we will modify the app again to accept payments for clients in that state.
The app will have to become a little more complex in the future and will need to have geolocation functions. This was something that was all thought out before with the team.
How did Wolfpack Digital perform from a project management standpoint?
They are really great. Gabriel ran the project management and he absolutely killed it. I don’t know if the experience would be the same if it was another project manager. He has been working with me from day one and has done an excellent job.
He has thoroughly understood what we have been trying to do right from the start and has been able to really understand how this exchange was going to work, which was crucial.
It is like the stock market where people are buying and selling, there are market orders, limit orders, and if orders from the exchange come at the same time, there needs to be a priority. It’s complicated but the team has done a fantastic job of turning it into reality.
What did you find most impressive about them?
Wolfpack Digital does a great job of understanding where their responsibilities are and where ours are. For instance, they understand that I am not a technical professional so they had to do a lot more work.
All the backend work was theirs and so were the technical decisions, the platform, the code, and the language. They did a good job of bringing me up to speed and educating me on the choices. Additionally, they internalized the idea very well.
Building an exchange is difficult. If I needed to explain every single concept, or if we had to wireframe every single detail, I think it would have been exhausting, much more time consuming, and more expensive.
At a certain point, I could tell that Gabriel and the team understood the idea. They corrected me when I was wrong, especially when it came to describing the market maker or the order flow.
Knowing that they really understood the app made me feel more comfortable that we didn’t need to wireframe or document everything; we were okay to move quickly.
Are there any areas they could improve?
No, nothing comes to mind. The team has done really well. If anything, it would be nice, generally speaking, to get more updates from them in the form of a monthly email list about what is going on at Wolfpack Digital.
Although I follow them closely on LinkedIn where I can see all their photos and their growth as a team, I still think that a newsletter with updates would be nice.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Make sure you understand what you are doing before starting this process and spend a lot of time working with the project manager. We took an approach where we invested a lot in just talking about how this was going to work.
I sent over Wikipedia pages on certain topics of the stock market because we were going to be mimicking them and I wanted to make sure the team knew what this was going to look like. I also showed them lots of different apps.
I would advise potential customers to invest the time upfront. People might be excited to start and may be too quick to pull the trigger sometimes. Take your time at the very beginning and talk about everything.
Wolfpack Digital delivered a functional backend despite the complicated nature of the app. Their work has received positive external feedback, and they've been commended for their ability to develop the product in a short timeframe. The team is supportive and understands the business goals.