Xenio

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of Chads World, an ad tech company that combines natural language processing. It’s an online display banner with chat functionality in it.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Xenio?

We needed help with machine learning development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Fernando (CEO/Co-Founder) worked on a daily basis developing the core. He actually elaborated on the concept both strategically and the execution part. He did full-time work for us.

What is the team composition?

We worked with Fernando, a designer, and a frontend coder.

How did you come to work with Xenio?

One of my developers knew Xenio as a supplier in the area. Fernando developed his own version of Siri and I was really enthusiastic about his work and ethics. Part of the core he developed in the past was something very similar to what we were looking for.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in January 2017-June 2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They’re very cooperative. We always had very good conversations with the team. For someone very deep in tech and the core tech, he’s extremely communicative. He has a really nice way of making things concrete as well as being a listening ear. It was highly unique for someone so deep in tech.

How did Xenio perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management was very good. I think corporate companies, like myself, would expect more documentation and more Jira-style or waterfall type communication. That’s also something I can’t really conclude. He knew what our style was and we did a lot of ad-hoc work. He was able to break things down and set a backlog. We used Jira in a simple manner.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I was very impressed with their communication style. They were capable of building something that none of our competitors have been able to do up until yet. We’ve been in conversation with Google and they are actually trying to copy our products but haven’t succeeded thus far. They asked us to open up our code as part of getting onto the platform which we chose not to. They did a really good job in a relatively short amount of time.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Having more people fluent in our language would have helped. We did get everything across and it didn’t take us a lot of time, but it could be improved. Their design styles are very U.S. centric and different from what we’re used to in Europe.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be aware of the language barrier. Once you acknowledge it, you can really move rapidly.