The Gnar Company

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Senior Product Manager of (a/an) Consumer Products

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

24/7 health and fitness wearable that provides actionable insights and helps you live your best life.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire The Gnar Company to accomplish?

Act as our API onboarding and support team, working with our customers to help them integrate with our API. Help build out our API documentation in an effort to make our API more self-serve.

SOLUTION

How did you find The Gnar Company?

Referral

Why did you select The Gnar Company over others?

High ratings Close to my geographic location Pricing first our budget Great culture fit Good value for cost Company values aligned Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

We hired Gnar to help us scale our API onboarding and support, which also reduced the load on our core engineering team to let them focus on building our product. Gnar was responsible for being the "first line of defense" and contacts for our API customers/partners: they built out and distributed API documentation, they had onboarding calls with developers, they managed shared Slack channels where they answered development questions, and they also provided feedback to our team on ways to improve our API offering.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Our engineering team spent a fraction of their time (from many hours per week down to < 1 hour per week) supporting API customers. Instead, we mostly interfaced with Gnar who gave us consolidated feedback & detailed bug reports. Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Yes; Gnar was very punctual on all projects / workstreams. They were extremely responsive to emails and Slack messages from us and from our customers/partners.

What was your primary form of communication with The Gnar Company?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They balanced being professional, personable, available, amicable, and knowledgeable. This is a tough combination to do well, but they did.

Are there any areas for improvement or something The Gnar Company could have done differently?

Nothing comes to mind.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Global Solution Delivery Director of Onepak inc.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Onepak provides IT reverse logistics services and a offers a reverse logistics platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire The Gnar Company to accomplish?

Establish a new React based framework for our web apps Create a new front end portal in React JS Enhance our React Native mobile app Create a new Consumer facing web app

SOLUTION

How did you find The Gnar Company?

Online Search

Why did you select The Gnar Company over others?

Close to my geographic location Great culture fit Referred to me What was the size of The Gnar Company’s team?

6-10 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Create a web app React framework Create a new React JS portal Enhance a React Native mobile app Create a new customer facing web app

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Launch of the new React JS web app Launch of the new consumer web app Implementation and use of the enhancements to the mobile app Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Agile project management was managed by OnePak. The Gnar developers were all professional, agile proponents Their engagement created a hybrid model that worked as though they were part of the OnePak development team The team always responded positively and rapidly to requests and were proactive in their efforts to streamline delivery and processes. What was your primary form of communication with The Gnar Company?

In-Person Meeting Virtual Meeting Email or Messaging App What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

It was always easy to work with the company founders, who went out of their way to meet our needs Developers were specialists in our required fields and offered broad experience and expertise. Are there any areas for improvement or something The Gnar Company could have done differently?

None

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder of Shepherdly

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Bug prediction for pull requests

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire The Gnar Company to accomplish?

Build initial web application Design for website Design for logo

SOLUTION

How did you find The Gnar Company?

Other

Why did you select The Gnar Company over others?

Good value for cost Other What was the size of The Gnar Company’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Web app: Build initial web application off figma designs. This involved implementing on top of an existing API. The application included search facets and data visualization. Website: Design a single page website from scratch, along with logo and other visualizations to showcase the product.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

Completeness of agreed upon JIRA tickets Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

The team is proactive in their communication, giving updates daily in Slack. We also had a weekly zoom meeting to sync on the remaining issues. Items were delivered within a reasonable period of time.

What was your primary form of communication with The Gnar Company?

Virtual Meeting Email or Messaging App What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The quality of the code is well written and they were able to optimize for speed given my project requirements. The team also responds to pivots in priority very well and are willing to dig into problems with you to make sure the solution is right.

Are there any areas for improvement or something The Gnar Company could have done differently?

I think it could be beneficial to have tiered rates based on developer experience. This would allow clients to potentially optimize for cost vs speed/quality.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the COO of Gridly

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Gridly exists to accelerate the adoption of clean energy solutions for single family homeowners. With just the entry of an address we provide a bespoke plan to optimize the energy efficiency of a residence and convert all fossil fuel burning systems to clean, electric based equipment. Gridly demystifies the whole-home electrification process, doing all the upfront research and analysis for the homeowner and then connecting them with qualified installers to execute the Gridly Action Plan.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire The Gnar Company to accomplish?

Assist with designing look and feel of the user interface Build the customer facing platform Manage the development effort

SOLUTION

How did you find The Gnar Company?

Referral

Why did you select The Gnar Company over others?

High ratings Close to my geographic location Great culture fit What was the size of The Gnar Company’s team?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Given a set of business objectives, the Gnar team collaborated with the business lead on defining the screen designs, functionality, user flows, and external integration needed to build our product. Through an iterative process a wireframe prototype of the product was built and refined. The product was then built, tested, validated by the business lead, and deployed.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

On-time delivery of bug-free code Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Gnar assigned strong PM resources to our project. Work was accurately estimated and completed within the timeframes planned.

What was your primary form of communication with The Gnar Company?

Virtual Meeting

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The quality of the work delivered was exceptional. The competencies of the engineers, with support from the Gnar management team, was very strong and they produced clean code consistent with the business' requirements.

Are there any areas for improvement or something The Gnar Company could have done differently?

We were pleased with all aspects of the relationship with Gnar.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I’m the co-founder of a home inspection SaaS company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire The Gnar Company?

We needed an additional Ruby on Rails engineer to help accelerate the development of new features for our platform.

SOLUTION

How did you select this agency and what were the deciding factors?

I found them while searching for local development shops on Clutch!

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

The work was comprised of several self-contained mini-projects, including connecting our system to third-party services. I wrote up the requirements as JIRA tickets, and we took advantage of a visual designer from Gnar as well for one of the mini-projects. 

The engineer assigned to us was able to work through these tickets to build the features, and adapted easily as we changed things along the way.

Describe the recruitment process in detail.

I talked with Pete (the head of growth) and he matched me with an engineer that worked with us.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the engagement that demonstrate progress or success?

The work that was done is either already in production or undergoing beta testing. We've been happy with the results.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Their Ruby on Rails engineer was able to jump right into our productivity tools and go.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Our system is quite complicated, and Gnar was really able to be productive quickly without a lot of ramping up.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

At the beginning of the project, Gnar had more involvement in the code reviews that were happening. It tapered off towards the end, it was nice having another set of eyes on the work.