10Clouds

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We have developed a social betting app that allows friends bet each other on football. Our approach is different to what exists today with common betting sites, which don't actually allow users to bet against their own friends. We have produced an iOS app that is going to be released soon. I am the business manager and a co-founder of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

We went through a successful crowdfunding campaign earlier in 2016 for accelerating the development of our app. After this, we started looking for a developer.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have worked with 10Clouds as a team, in order to design and develop the iOS app. 10Clouds also participated in the approval process for the App Store.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

I found 10Clouds on Clutch. We're located in Europe and wanted to find a developer that we could meet physically. Local development in Sweden is quite expensive, so we looked at markets and prices that fit our budget. I had heard that there are many good developers in Poland. We made a list of 30 candidates, connected with them via email, reduced the list to 10, and 10Clouds came out on top.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds?

The cost of 10Clouds' services has been between €25,000 and €30,000 [approximately $26,000 and $31,000].

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with 10Clouds in June 2016. The work ended in November [2016] when we began an approval process with the authorities. We will continue our development with 10Clouds after this.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

One of the reasons for choosing 10Clouds was their experience with Agile, which made giving them detailed tasks very easy. Through daily stand-ups and proactive questioning, 10Clouds handled the project well.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

We've worked with a developer, project manager, and financial person from 10Clouds' side. There was very good response from 10Clouds, and the work was good quality. We used GitHub and Slack for project management.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

I haven't worked with too many developers, so there isn't something I could mention.

Are there any areas 10Clouds could improve?

No. We are very happy with what 10Clouds has produced and with their support.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We run a comparison platform for business software. We connect buyers of business applications with technology consulting companies, helping them find top-notch solutions. I am the chief executive officer and founder of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

We needed some deeper development knowledge for creating our web page.

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds has developed our website in its entirety. Our page allows users to view ratings for companies, compare options, and find a match for their needs. We have a Django backend, wiki pages for knowledge exchange, and the site was built using PHP and HTML.

10Clouds assigned one resource for project management coordination, as well as 2 user experience designers, a backend developer, a front-end developer, and a marketing advisor. We interacted with them directly, as well as through a project lead.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

We found 10Clouds through Dribbble, where I'd seen some of their work. I also viewed 10Clouds' profile on clutch.co.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with 10Clouds in June 2016, with some initial workshops held at 10Clouds' location. Since then, we've been working remotely.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

10Clouds has a very powerful team, with young, fresh, and innovative developers. I've liked working with them very much. 10Clouds is professional, with good knowledge, but they're also trying new things in order to get the job done.

I've appreciated our constant interaction process with 10Clouds. We've discussed problems together, finding the best solution, instead of 10Clouds simply executing our requests. They're in touch with the latest market trends and technology.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

10Clouds delivered the work on time and within the expected budget. We initially used Slack, but I prefer to communicate via email, Skype, Google Hangouts, and phone. We also use Jira, Confluence, and InVision.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

I have no comparison points, given that I haven't worked deep in the app and web development spaces. I have worked for a big consulting company, and am used to projects in general. In this sense, 10Clouds' team was very focused, with a good feeling for timing and the workload, as well as for planning in general. 10Clouds has a positive attitude towards making anything possible.

Are there any areas 10Clouds could improve?

Not at the moment.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We're a Swedish-based startup that develops private cloud and IT automation software for commercial and nonprofit clients. We plan to launch a public cloud at the beginning of 2017. We will be competing with Amazon Web Services and DigitalOcean, among others. I am the chief executive officer of the company as well as the product owner.

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

Hiring front-end staff and developers, in particular, is difficult to do in Sweden. There are more jobs than applicants, and even within the applicant pool itself, there just isn't enough talent. As a result, we decided to look elsewhere. We wanted to find an outsourced extended team of developers. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, our collaboration with 10Clouds involved coding and implementation. However, we realized that it was becoming hard to keep the front-end development together. Our involvement evolved from 10Clouds being an extended team to outsourcing UX/UI and development to them. Our work with 10Clouds has been exclusively web-based.  

We currently work with 1 to 2 UX people, a UI resource, a project manager, and 2 developers. We started working with just the developers, who have been with us from the beginning. The UI, UX, and project management resources were added 1 month ago. Before deciding on developers, we assigned them coding tests. Otherwise, we left the selection process up to 10Clouds.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

We decided to look in the East, given that the pricing there is more attractive compared to Swedish firms. We talked to a few companies, including ones from Poland and Ukraine, and gave them test work. 10Clouds turned out to be the best option. I'm not sure where we found them, but we shortlisted a few companies in Eastern Europe based on Google searches.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds?

We have spent around $65,000 on 10Clouds' services so far. [60,000 euros]

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with 10Clouds at the middle of April 2016.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The first part of our collaboration with 10Clouds, while only working with developers, hasn't been entirely successful. This is partly due to some issues we've had integrating into their workflow. Generally speaking, the quality of 10Clouds' code has been very nice. This is in large part owed to their main developers, who work well as individuals and as a team.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

We've had to extend some deadlines and the collaboration hasn't been perfect. As I’ve mentioned, we had issues guiding 10Clouds towards what they were supposed to deliver. When we added a project manager on 10Clouds' side, things started working better. We use Jira and GitLab for project management. We also communicate over Google Hangouts and Slack.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

10Clouds is the first nearshore outsourcing party that we've been involved with. I've found them to be very approachable, especially our product manager. We've been able to obtain additional hours from 10Clouds over the summer, even though they had other clients. Flexibility is good on 10Clouds' end. Not everything had to be done according to strict specifications. We were able to talk to developers and come to a solution together.

Are there any areas 10Clouds could improve?

There has been some flexibility involving hours and commitments, but we quickly discovered that we had different ways of looking at the development cycle. Our own developers are keen on writing their own implementation tests and hold on to the code until it's ready for production. The developers from 10Clouds semi-implement work, which looks alright and then use separate testers. We wouldn't push something as being done when it really isn't, so 10Clouds' approach caused some headaches for both of us. We identified bugs consistently during the acceptance testing phase. I'm guessing that this has to do with the fact that a tester in Sweden has a much higher price than in Poland, so we try to keep the process shorter.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a subsidiary of a consulting company that handles large customers in the innovation and change space. I am the chief technology officer of the company, but I prefer the term lead engineer. 

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

Our company founders identified the need for an electronic probe. This tool would gather observations about change. After talking to our customers, we've come to describe the solution as a digitization of the feedback process. It's used not only for various company applications but also for quality assurance. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds developed almost everything in our project. They created a minimum viable product after which we received estimates for continuing the work. 10Clouds handled back-end and front-end development for our applications using Django. The technology was decided upon by 10Clouds, but I would have made the same choice, so I'm fine with it.

The front-end has a user interface featuring graphs that reflect observations and what we call clusters. Given that our clients are in the enterprise space, the app needs to run on modern browsers like Chrome and on older ones like Internet Explorer 10. This was a tricky part, but 10Clouds did good work on it. The initial technology used was SVC, which didn't perform well. 10Clouds engineered an alternative solution based on Canvas and achieved a significant performance improvement. Beyond this, 10Clouds also engineered our Android and iOS apps. 

Our initial team comprised 3 people, but we ramped it up along the way. Until 2 months back, we'd been collaborating with 1 senior back-end developer and 2 senior front-end resources. We’ve also worked with one and a half resources for iOS and Android respectively; one engineer worked on both. Initially, we had a UX designer from 10Clouds, but we have shifted the work to a designer from Munich. This change was done in order for us to be able to iterate faster from a business point of view. We've worked with 1 project manager on 10Clouds' side for day-to-day operations. We've also had 2 quality assurance resources.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

I was introduced to the company after we started our collaboration with 10Clouds. I don't know the specifics of this topic.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our project began in June 2015. We are now in the maintenance phase, concentrating resources on sales and marketing in order to obtain initial customers. Currently, we are working with 2 engineers for front-end and back-end development from 10Clouds, as well as a QA person. 10Clouds helps us with bug fixes and other changes whenever we need it,  

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The product delivered by 10Clouds was mostly well-received. We often talk to customers who've had experience with one of our competing solutions. They've told us that our platform is fast in comparison. In general, I'd say that 10Clouds has provided a good implementation of our needs and their code was more-or-less spot-on. They've also been able to deliver quickly.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

In the beginning, our definitions were a bit vague and weren't formulated in order to extrapolate what we actually wanted. So, the collaboration with 10Clouds didn't always work out. I've seen improvements in the last months as I've been able to communicate better with 10Clouds on how engineering is handled. We've worked closely together in order to improve the engineering infrastructure. It was a give-and-take process.

We collaborate with 10Clouds using Jira, Confluence and GitHub. Slack is also used for communication on a short-term basis. 10Clouds also provides server monitoring tools for us. We augment these with Trello on our side, which is used more for business aspects and long-term planning. Whenever something is ready for engineering, the card will be moved from Trello to Jira.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

One of the most positive things I can say is that they are eager to improve certain aspects of their business in order to make our lives easier. Whenever something doesn't work out as expected, we can communicate with 10Clouds. They offer solutions and try to improve the way in which they do things. For example, bug handling has improved, reducing the amount of communication which needs to occur. We've also established a good release process with 10Clouds. There were no surprises in our collaboration with 10Clouds, though I was sometimes irritated by certain issues. Given that I've worked with and for other providers, I'd say that there was nothing about 10Clouds which was considerably worse than the average.

Are there any areas 10Clouds could improve?

One thing which can still be improved would be the release process for mobile applications. It was an area where we expected 10Clouds to have answers. I found that 10Clouds engineered our app and then handed it to another party for the necessary housekeeping for an app store launch. I am familiar with server and iOS releases, but my experience is more on the enterprise side. 

Introduce your business and what you do there.

Edevate is a higher education cloud platform that acts as a curator of educational resources and brings them together in a proprietary qualification called the micro-degree. Trust Stamp is a means for strangers to be able to establish their identity and trustworthiness of their counter party in any economic and social transaction.

I am the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Edevate, and founder of Trust Stamp.

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

We’re US based enterprises. When we started Edevate, we had a very limited budget and we were looking to offshore the work because costs in the US were at least four to five times what we could afford.

Trust Stamp is where we’ve really pushed the envelope. We have had areas of execution that have required the integration of some innovative computer science that’s come out of university research. 10Clouds has had to work out how to take raw science and turn it into something you can code and deliver. That’s a whole jump beyond anything we did with Edevate. We are developing some incredibly valuable IP which has attracted a phenomenal amount of interest including some of the biggest banks in the US wanting to partner with us. That has only happened because we were able to take principles that nobody had managed to productize and turn them into a working prototype. That has been quite exceptional. No one believed we could build what we wanted to build especially with the budget we had. Everybody has been amazed at what the result has been.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had a business concept and we were looking for them to provide a complete package from conceptualizing the architecture, working out how to do various things that hadn’t been done before, and producing the back and front ends. You have two parties to the relationship. One is an institution and the other is the user. It started out by bringing together a large number of institutional sites that were offering educational programs and providing an engine that could analyze and sort those by multiple factors and allow potential students to register to find the courses that were appropriate to them. We also needed to create a universal transcript which would import all of their current educational experiences but allow them to keep a lifelong record of their current education. It then evolved so that you could take all their qualifications and stack them towards a proprietary micro degree qualification. So it’s handling large amounts of data and allowing an individual to store the data that’s relevant to themselves, providing that to third parties as evidence of their lifelong educational achievements. Both platforms are coded in Python using Django for management, and in both cases we used SQL databases on AWS [Amazon Web Services].

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

We were very nervous about offshoring to most of the jurisdictions that we looked at. We put it out to bid and had bids from a very good number of companies, but we weren’t comfortable about the quality. Then there was a reference to 10Clouds. I think it was an Economist magazine which was talking about high quality offshoring. We were attracted to them because they appeared to have a lot of highly qualified staff with good academic backgrounds. They were not as low priced as China or India, but still provided substantial savings over the US with higher qualified development teams.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds?

We spent $100,000 on Edevate. For Trust Stamp, this year we have a budget of around $400,000. We’ve had from 8-10 people a month, mostly developers and user experience designers, but also R&D [research & development] specialists. There’s one person who isn’t developing. He’s working full time on doing the research on how we apply the science as code. We have two competitors, and we have exceeded what one of them has built. They spent $36 million.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started January of 2013. Edevate’s site has evolved substantially. It was originally called MOOCDOM. We built the proof of concept from January through March of 2013. Then it evolved through 2013 and 2014. There was maintenance only in 2015, but then in 2016, it’s gone through a substantial rebuild in order to incorporate a lot of new features. It’s been a continuous development project where the platform has grown.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The platform offers a level of user utility today which is over and above competing platforms that have had investments between $5 million to $10 million. That may sound absurd, but it’s accurate. The product that has been built is quite remarkable in terms of its scope and usability. I think the work they did over the years went far beyond what that budget reflects. They’ve always gone above and beyond.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

They use Jira and they’ve encouraged us to be active in the management process. We trained our team members in the use of Jira. We have two project management meetings a week with them - one which is a thought team meeting and one which is a high level management meeting. We participate in Jira as far as identifying bugs and adding work to the workflow. They also have a Slack channel which we participate in for general chit chat and making sure questions don’t have to wait for the weekly meetings. Any of their developers can pose a question to us in Slack so that we keep things moving as quickly as possible. We always felt as if they were our development team. Google Hangout is the video technology they prefer. We’ve participated at different levels over time. When we developed MOOCDOM, we participated in the daily scrums. We don’t now. They’ve always been open to as much integration as we wanted to have into the daily working process.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

The team members become very engaged with the project as a business, not just as a coding exercise. They tend to do research and bring their own ideas to the table for product improvement, including competitive analysis. That has proven to be very valuable. They are also very willing to take on R&D. In our latest project we are building things that haven’t been built before. We’re truly having to deploy computer science in a very innovative way. They have people that are willing to take that on. We don’t see that in most companies. With Trust Stamp, they have shown what the high caliber of staff can deploy. This makes them very different to a typical coding company.

Are there any areas 10Clouds could improve?

One thing they’ve improved on hugely over the last several years is their range in staff for user experience and design. It has increased tremendously. That is a continuing area of development for them. A relatively new area for them is to offer DevOps services. We might be one of the first customers using them for DevOps. I believe it’s important that they’re able to do that. If they want to provide a complete service, I think that’s a critical area. Until recently, we had to do the DevOps, but they have started offering them now so that’s something we encourage them to grow. Our objective is to use them as our IT department.

With Trust Stamp, it’s been a perfect experience. We spent 10% of what everybody believed we would spend. We spent more than we had because we were very adventurous. They charged us what they knew we could afford as opposed to the time that was actually spent. That’s because they have a commitment to the project, and are willing to also invest for the long term knowing that we have bank contracts coming. This is going to go on for many years and at a much higher level. We’re going to want to have more and more resources from them as we continue.

Please describe your organization.

I am a professor of computer science at an accredited research university.

What business challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

Even though I haven't taken part in many development projects, we occasionally have the need for a development component for certain products, which we're trying to support. In this case, we wanted to develop a website for public health researchers. We did some initial research and put together some ideas for it before going out to have it built. 

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

10Clouds has been involved in all of the actual building, including design and implementation of the system. 10Clouds built a media aggregation and monitoring platform. We can use it to input many news stories daily, which are relevant to the public health issues that we want to track. After that, the news stories are downloaded and sent to an analysis pipeline, which does things like identifying the topic of the story and its language, translating it into English, as well as retrieving information like the global focus of the story. The analyzed story is thrown into a search engine database, and the website itself is where content is displayed. It allows us to make complex searches for any structured fields as well as keyword searches. The website also allows us to create alerts and count how many stories have been published about a topic in a certain language. There is also an analytics component: we can see how many news stories were published in a given topic, over a period of time, compared to another topic, and broken down by language.

There is a pipeline of decisions within the system. Some of these modules were developed in our lab while 10Clouds only integrated them and others were developed by them. 

Our team from 10Clouds has changed in time, but we've consistently had two full-stack Python developers and a program manager assigned to us. In addition to them, we've also worked with a website developer in charge of JavaScript and HTML coding, depending on what we needed on the site. 10Clouds has been very good at finding people, which can be rotated as our needs grew and changed. We've also used a DevOps person who worked on our servers. Whenever we go through a design phase, we will use a designer from 10Clouds.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

I have a colleague who is a professor at another university. I was very unhappy with the developers that we were using at the time, so we started by trying to hire our own developer. I interviewed a dozen people, but only one person was even remotely qualified. We came to hire another company, but I wasn't very happy with them, either. I looked around for other options, and my colleague recommended that I try 10Clouds. I'm glad that he made the suggestion.

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

The cost varies quite a bit, but we have typically spent between $10,000 and $15,000 per month during the last three years with 10Clouds, depending on how many people are working with us at any given time.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with 10Clouds for three years [since 2013].

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Our project is research-funded, so our budget is renewed on a yearly basis. The fact that we've had our funding renewed year after year means that the funder is pleased with what we're producing. This is the best measure of success, in my opinion.

I've come to default to 10Clouds for any project that requires development work, whether it's a large-scale one or we just need to throw up a website. 10Clouds is very fast, responsive and easy to work with. They have many in-house members who can cover a full range of things so, whenever we need to do a lot of back-end Python, Django, HTML or CSS development, 10Clouds will assign us resources who are experienced with the various tools that we are using. Whenever we needed to rethink a prototype from a design perspective, 10Clouds gave us a designer. There's been much flexibility on their part.

We had used other companies in the past, but 10Clouds was much better in terms of communication, and they produced good work. 10Clouds has actually rewritten a lot of the code produced by other people because it simply wasn't very good. It's not just that I've been happy with their work on our current projects, but they've done a better job than the people who worked on our previous projects.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

Being a professor of computer science, I'm probably different to most customers. I had no problems managing the team from 10Clouds. I am very hands-on with them and probably know the code base as well, if not better than 10Clouds. I've been involved in the project since conception, whereas new developers from 10Clouds will come in every year. We don't work with 10Clouds based on estimates that they're supposed to stick to. We have a collaborative process. If anything takes longer to complete, it won't be a huge surprise because I understand why it's taking longer. For what we've been able to build, 10Clouds has been a very cost-effective solution. They do good work quickly and aren't very expensive.

We use JIRA for project tracking. We also have weekly calls using Google Hangouts, and we use Slack for communication.

What distinguishes 10Clouds from other providers?

I have frequent contact with 10Clouds's CEO [Maciej Cielecki], who reaches out to me just to see how things are going. Whenever I have a problem, I can contact him. He's been hands-on whenever we needed it and left us alone for the rest of the time. With any software project that goes on for this long, not everything will turn out right. I've always felt that we were able to sit down with 10Clouds and work any problems out, which gave me a lot of confidence in their judgment and abilities. When a developer says that a certain approach is the right way to do it, I will trust them. This is something that took a long time to develop.

Is there anything 10Clouds could have improved or done differently?

Through the years, there have been improvements that I've pushed to 10Clouds, including being more communicative with me about what's going on. This was because I was treated the same as most clients, who don't necessarily care about what library was being used, or what the right way or restructuring code was. I'm very involved, so I've encouraged 10Clouds to keep me in the loop about those things, and they have. There have been around half a dozen developers assigned to our projects through the years. The people working with us now are the best ones since the project started, so I'm very happy with 10Clouds at this moment. A new developer has been assigned to us today, and I'm excited about this. She seems to be very good. I think that we will continue to improve our efficiency.

I manage research labs and am looking for new funding. When I find it, I intend to give it to 10Clouds for them to do the work.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

iPlay is a social platform for sports, something like a combination of LinkedIn and Instagram. At this point, we’re only focusing on handball, but we will take in football at the end of 2016, as well as hockey at the beginning of 2017. I am a co-founder of the company.

What challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

We had an idea of what we wanted to create, and we needed a developer who could do it. It didn't make sense to hire someone to do this because we needed more than just a coder, we needed a lot of different skill sets. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

10Clouds built our app originally for iOS only. They developed the back-end databases for Amazon Web Services. 10Clouds used some third-party products as well, for messaging and other functionalities. They helped us with everything from defining to coding.

When originally starting out, 10Clouds suggested that, before we move forward, we should change our logo type. I’d already paid someone to design it, but 10Clouds told me that they could do better, without additional cost. They presented their version after a few weeks, and we decided immediately that we would be changing our logo to the 10Clouds version.

I tend to write content and descriptions for the app. We’ve had to ask for a quick response in getting it released, due to an upcoming championship. 10Clouds took care of the quick review process for the iOS version.

They were always keen on listening to what we had to say and providing alternatives when necessary. 10Clouds has given us a good climate in which to work.

We’re still working on the product and plan to release the Android version of the app next week. At this point, around 12 members from 10Clouds are working for us, both backend developers, as well as UX/UI [user experience/user interface] designers. 10Clouds gave us the first setup, explaining why they picked those resources. We have meetings every 2 weeks, discussing how they performed and whether we should be assigned more senior or more junior resources, as necessary. Getting the best team possible has been an ongoing process. Resource changes have mainly been due to over qualification, which equated to us spending more money than necessary. There have been few occasions of this happening, but we do maintain communication to stay on top of it.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

We contacted our CTO [Chief Technology Officer] early on in order to translate our idea into something that could be understood by the developers. He has concentrated on outsourcing our IT development within the last year, and conducted a very thorough process, looking at firms in Ukraine, India, and Poland. His background research involved looking in on various forums for development companies. He often found 10Clouds being mentioned as one of the best firms in Poland.

We considered 5 companies in total. After making a few reference calls with previous customers, we determined that 10Clouds would be the best choice. They understood what we wanted to do and it seemed to us that they would likely do a great job. 10Clouds became part of our shortlist. The answers we got from them made us interested in a collaboration. We flew the 10Clouds team from Poland to Sweden and felt strongly from the start that they would be the ones with whom we’d be working. We haven’t regretted our decision. In fact, we didn’t bother meeting with any other company in person.

How much have you invested with 10Clouds?

So far, we’ve spent $150,000 on 10Clouds’ services. We work on a time-and-materials basis, discussing what needs to be developed for the upcoming period. The budget is not carved in stone. We make minor changes based on 10Clouds’ performance.

What is the status of this engagement?

We have been working with 10Clouds since October of 2015. The iOS app was released in January of 2016, while the Android version will be launched next week. We estimate that our work with 10Clouds will continue over the next few years.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I follow the iOS app’s usage in order to see how it is performing. I’ve received messages from many users, saying that it is a fantastic app. It’s very reliable and we’ve had very few bugs. We’ve made many improvements to the app since its initial release.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

We have a good in-house project manager. He has daily talks with the 10Clouds team through Slack and Google Hangouts, and we also have weekly calls with their two founders. Beyond this, we’ve visited 10Clouds three times in Warsaw, just to be able to walk alongside the team, high-five, and have workshops. Their English isn’t perfect, but it’s better than I expected.

We use Jira for project tracking. Slack is used for communication, and we have video calls through Google Hangouts. We’ve also added Google Analytics for our app, which offers us some key performance indicators. 10Clouds is helping us to set up a special database through which we can use Mixpanel in order to get hands on and analyze the app. 10Clouds is keen on using those tools. They want to know that they’re doing a good job, and they’re anxious to hear what can be changed in terms of interface or functionality.

10Clouds uses the scrum methodology fully, which has worked great. They’re keen on keeping to the schedule and delivering on time. There haven’t been few situations in which 10Clouds overpromised or had any issues.

What did you find most impressive about 10Clouds?

Our CTO is very pleased with 10Clouds. If he is able to say that they’re really good, then I believe him; this project has been his full-time professional job for 4 years. I think that it’s important for a client to have a clear vision of what they want to build. This was true in our case, which made the startup process easy. 10Clouds interviewed us about some considerations for the product, how sophisticated it should be, and how it should look. 10Clouds did a good job in defining both what the product should be and how it should be presented.

Please describe your organization.

Our service consists of an app and a website. We help people identify and avoid unknown and unwanted callers. From a technical perspective, we've tried to solve the problem of keeping one version of the phone book up to date, for all of our users, so they will know who's calling or texting them, and make an intelligent decision about answering or responding.

What is your position?

I'm the founder.

What business challenge were you trying to address with 10Clouds?

I have done remote development for a handful of companies, thus I'm comfortable working with remote teams. Doing your work with a remote company will lead to cost savings. The problem is that you're not in the same place, communication sucks, deadlines get missed – it's chaos. I've worked with engineers in Poland and was impressed with them. When I was looking at a team to hire, we looked at who was on the speaking circuit in Poland. 10Clouds was a company that came up. There was social proof already for them. If you're at an app development conference, they'll be one of the featured attendees, either in Poland, Slovakia, or other countries in the region. It's a good indicator as far as who's in that ecosystem already.

Please describe the scope of their involvement.

They worked on our iOS app. The technologies used were Swift and Xcode. Our stack is Amazon Web Services. 10Cloud is actually a Python shop, and we started out in PHP. They've basically hired in order to support us in that capacity. We've used them for both mobile and web development. They're our entire team.

There are between five and eight developers working for us at any given time, and they're assigned by 10Cloud. I think they're terrific at hiring. As an entrepreneur and as a founder, I was keen on building it as quick as possible, and there've been multiple instances when they've told us they don't have the technical resources to build something at the time, but they can hire. I've been consistently impressed with the people they've brought in, and with their ability to admit they're not ready for something. In my experience with other offshore teams, people will say yes to just about anything, when they're not well-suited to do it.

How did you come to work with 10Clouds?

It was through Google searches.

What is the status of this engagement?

It's an ongoing relationship.

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

We have more than 300 five-star reviews in the App Store. That's a testament to what they've built. Other than that, I don't have any kind of metrics or figures.

How did 10Clouds perform from a project management standpoint?

They made the suggestion of using Atlassian, so Confluence and JIRA, for project management. From a design standpoint, we're using nVision. We started the business with them, so we're different from other companies that may have had existing teams in house. 10Clouds was going to be the team from the beginning.

What distinguishes 10Clouds from other providers?

Our product manager is in Argentina, our design team was in Thailand, and the tech team is in Warsaw, 10Cloud. We went to Warsaw earlier this year, we sat down in their office, and I was impressed with the experience. I spent three to four years in Silicon Valley, I have friends who run tech companies, and 10Cloud's offices would stack up with anything I've seen in the Valley. They've got a meticulous approach to Scrum development and they've built a culture around it. It was an impressive office visit.

Is there anything 10Clouds could have improved or done differently?

Something we've done in the past months is to build redundancy around some of the key people in the team. For instance, we have a system admin who is very close to the project at 10Clouds. He's been sick, and it became clear that we needed some redundancy around him.

Please describe your company.

My company offers online materials that help people become literate in English and other languages to children or to anyone learning to speak either their first language or a foreign language.

What is your position?

I’m the founder.

Could you describe the business challenge that you were attempting to address when you first approached 10Clouds?

I originally had some resources written in Flash. The problem was, the teachers wanted to make their own resources and record their work. Then, iPads came along, and they wanted something that worked on that. I decided to start from scratch again, but this time fix the deficiencies with the original product. I originally went to them with my Flash resource and had them update it and convert it to HTML5. After several months, I came up with a big change with animations for the program. They’ve been developing the product ever since. The concept has been so big, and we’re trying to get it right and make it a resource that the teachers need. They want everything in a single resource.

Could you describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail?

They have provided all of the coding for the program. They’re doing the front end and back-end. Originally, the person who wrote the Flash was going to do the back-end, and he was writing in .NET. The current developers are writing in HTML5 and JavaScript. It was difficult to communicate between the two teams, and also get the two technologies to communicate. In the end, we decided that 10Clouds would take on the whole back-end as well. So, they’re storing all of my lessons on Amazon S3 and other databases, and they’re doing the whole solution.

How did you come to choose 10Clouds as your partner?

My former programmer recommended them as he had moved across the country to pursue another opportunity. We interviewed a number of different companies. I found them online by doing Internet searches for HTML5 developers, and then he interviewed them.

Could you provide a general cost estimate for this engagement?

It was in the $50,000 to $200,000 range.

What is the status of this project?

We haven’t finished yet, so it’s still ongoing.

In terms of results, could you share any statistics, metrics, or user feedback that would demonstrate the quality of their performance?

My biggest client is a chain of schools in the Middle East. They like the Flash resources that they’ve already bought, but they want to bring their own device, and they’re interested in a similar resource using the same concept. When they asked for things, I haven’t done much user testing, but I’ve been checking for bugs and issues. I’ve received some feedback from teachers and students about what they wanted and have made changes here and there. My users have been impressed with the whole idea, concept, and the current state of it. In time, we’ve developed a very nice, intuitive design.

When working with 10Clouds is there anything that you would consider unique about their strategic approach or development methodology that distinguish them from other vendors?

I honestly can’t say because I have only had one other person working on it with me, so I don’t have the experience to answer that. I can say that I’m happy and satisfied with the choice of 10Clouds because I think they’ve got some great developers. I’m very pleased with the quality. Overall, I’m happy with how they’ve treated me. I would encourage people to use 10Clouds.

In retrospect, are there areas in which you think they could improve as a service provider?

There have been some issues with the running of the project. It’s overrun in terms of time and budget, but it’s difficult to pinpoint culpability. A lot has been due to me, I would say. Looking back, I didn’t have a clear enough original design proposal, and during the process, I came up with some new ideas, one of which is a great improvement on the Flash product. This has been hugely impactful both in terms of the complexity of the programming, and the extent of the development time required. I think that we could have tried to look at the bigger picture more, as there were times when I knew what we had wasn’t right, but didn’t know what was.

User testing, we said we’d set this up, but haven’t set up a testing area as much as we could have. Again, I think I am at fault here, too. Other development issues took more of a priority. However, I’m not at the MVP stage, designing a product for unknown users, not knowing whether they’ll like the product or not, trying to find product-market fit. I already have a client base who have bought and are using the Flash product, but have asked for certain, general, improvements, such as working on tablets. The design process has been about delivering these.

Ultimately, though, I believe if you want to create something that is both valuable and differentiates you from the crowd, there will be times when the ride is a bit bumpy. I have to say that these issues are minor when compared to the overall quality of the product that (version 1.0) we now have. These kinds of projects are very difficult to steer and manage, especially when you don't have a lot of experience doing so.