Beetroot AB

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the e-commerce manager at Åtta45, the biggest printing company in Sweden and the Nordic area.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Beetroot AB?

We needed support for our ongoing WordPress project.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Beetroot AB has been providing web development services. Initially, we were working on keeping our main site in order, but our cooperation evolved into a larger project where we rebuilt our WordPress and WooCommerce sites. We've used the old framework and have our own in-house art director and editor.

Our website is the window for our services, and we have seven different business areas. We've wanted to give our website a more modern look and added motion pictures. When users enter our website, they get a pop-up with a movie that explains our business terms and services. They can also navigate to our WooCommerce Boutique and all our different services and send files to us to secure servers.

The team has also worked on our WooCommerce site. They’ve sorted out API connections to a big supplier, where we can display all the products and then go to our MIS system. This lets us update schedules, products, prices, and order flows.

They've offered hosting services, but that service is expensive for us now; we might be changing our actual partner in the future.

What is the team composition?

We're in daily contact with Anastasiia, the WordPress developer, and Dmytro, the full stack developer, but they work with a business contact support teammate, so we work with three people. 

How did you come to work with Beetroot AB?

We had a web agency in Sweden, but they had their own developers in Poland and Estonia. We paid them a lot, and the developers did all the work. I ended that cooperation and got a tip to call Beetroot AB, so I did.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent about 350,000 Swedish Krona.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in September 2023, and our engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

They've been good at following our needs. They've also provided suggestions and workarounds, which resulted in good cooperation.

How did Beetroot AB perform from a project management standpoint?

We use Asana as our project management tool and communicate via checkup meetings through Microsoft Teams. We've had no problems with staying on budget. Meeting deadlines is difficult in web projects because of changes, and we often find out we want something else. However, we've had constant cooperation towards deadlines, which could be for every functionality or on the whole. We had a big launch on the 27th of December, and everything has worked out fine.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have order in their process. They follow up on an hourly basis, and I've never complained about an invoice because it follows what we agreed on. They also work a lot, so we can communicate late at night.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, they should keep up the good work.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Asana has been a good help, so I recommend using a project management tool to communicate since we’re in different countries and speak different languages.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Founder of LöwgrenIT AB

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Business IT consulting and development of apps

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Beetroot AB to accomplish?

• Develop a travelers app
• Develop UI/UX and define a MVP
• Define POC and identify technical challenges

SOLUTION

How did you find Beetroot AB?

Referral

Why did you select Beetroot AB over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Beetroot AB were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

The work was to take an idea and define different functions and narrow a scope for an MVP and to build a clickable prototype in Figma to showcase the project for investors.

Key deliveries was:

• Definition of MVP
• Estimates on development
• UI/UX in Figma clickable prototype

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

• Definition of MVP
• Estimates on development
• Clickable prototype in Figma

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

Delivery was on time, and work was well structured. The project manager also had a good communication skills, and all in the team understood the main idea for the app and how to translate that in the best way into a UI/UX.

What was your primary form of communication with Beetroot AB?

Virtual Meeting

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

The team was very reactive to suggestions and improvements and also had a lot of suggestions on how to improve the UX/UI experience. All work was done very professional and with high quality. The output was a roboust clickable prototype in Figma, that's going to be used to showcase the idea for investors.

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

Nothing I can think of right now.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO and Founder of Hospi Housing. Hospi Housing connects international students with local hosts. Hospi - short for hospita; host in english - started from necessity and as a social initiative. The Dutch housing market experiences major shortages for (international) students and starters and prices are skyrocketing.

Hospi Housing builds no houses, Hospi owns no houses, what Hospi does is providing a platform for unused rooms and people looking for a room. Hospi connects people with different backgrounds. With Hospi you don't rent a room. With Hospi you stay at someone's place.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Beetroot AB, and what were your goals?

Our website was mainly an online advertisement with a lot of manual processing in the backend. We reached out to Beetroot to help us automate our matching flow and bring back the amount of steps needed to successfully match a student with a host. For this we needed a whole backend build.

SOLUTION

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

We interviewed 10 different companies, in 3 different countries. For us it was important that the company was not just building what we asked, but also challenged us in our ask and provide consulting along the way. Furthermore, the mission of Beetroot very much aligned with our own, especially the social impact they try to make was a deciding factor for us.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We knew pretty well what we wanted, so we already approached them with a detailed list of technologies required as well as a front-end design. We wanted the front-end to be written in javascript with React framework. Backend had to be in python, and it should all run on AWS in a serverless design (lambda functions, dynamodb, SQS) to keep the run cost as low as possible.

For us to achieve this, we went over the design frequently, and together with a project manager, came up with a detailed backlog of user stories that the developers could pick up. Furthermore, cost (and not going over budget) was very important for us, therefore, we have split up the scope of work in 4 deliveries.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We had 1 project manager who mainly managed to backlog and was our point of contact the whole time. There was 1 lead developer/architect, and then the team consisted of 1-2 backend engineer and 2-3 front-end engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We managed to bring back our manual steps from 27 to 3. The overall engagement from our end decreased from 6 hours to 1 hour per match. This is a huge difference and very important in our growth journey. Without this effort none of our ambitions would have been possible.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

I had weekly checkins with the Project manager with whom I discussed the process. We deliberately did not participate in the standups, since I believe developers should be able to discuss freely what problems they encounter without the client being present. Communication mostly went via email or Slack, and slack allowed us to talk directly to the developers which was very use-full, especially at the end of the project.

From a time perspective, sometimes they took a little longer than promised, but we also mentioned that time is not an issue for us, but money is. In any case, if time was of essence (which was only true in 1 case), they simply added another developer or 2 to ensure they meet the deadlines.

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

Everyone was very helpful, you could approach the developers direct and ask questions. Changing something throughout the process was never a problem and they always tried to make sure that everyone we required was there. Especially in the aftercare, fixing the last 'bugs' was very fast and they went above and beyond to ensure we were satisfied.

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

Beetroot has build a huge platform and logically it consists of a big codebase. Which is obvious not bug-free. Especially in the cross platform (iphone/andriod) there are minor rendering issues that I would not have expected.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a co-founder, the CTO, and the chief director of the board of Normative. We were founded five years ago. We help large companies with sustainability by taking their data and calculating various things related to sustainability, such as CO2, water, land, chemical usage, biodiversity, and social things, like how a supply chain might affect child labor and other issues. We’re a 15-person IT startup.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Beetroot AB?

We were trying to get a small codebase up to par. It had been written by a data scientist who wasn’t very good at coding.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Beetroot AB helped with backend Python development related to data science and data engineering. The project is about calculating impact and scalability, scraping data, and integrating with other services. Beetroot AB helped with writing tests and such. They were mainly raising code quality from very bad to good or great. The team provides ongoing support.

What is the team composition?

There are two members of their team working part-time. Trofim (Team Lead) is my main point of contact. I have also been in contact with other people in charge of management on their end.

How did you come to work with Beetroot AB?

We’d heard from a contact that Trofim in particular was an awesome developer. We had an interview and were really impressed.

How much have you invested with them?

Thus far, the total is about €32,000 (approximately $35,600 USD). We were paying around €9,000 (approximately $10,000 USD) per month initially, and then that went down a bit.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Beetroot AB in September or October 2019, and we have an ongoing support contract with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I’ve used a tool called Code Climate to check the quality of their code, and it’s very good. It went from being catastrophic to having the second-highest ranking on Code Climate. That was the main goal of the project: to stabilize the code base and improve quality. We haven’t launched it to production, so we don’t have any user feedback, but Beetroot AB has helped us move closer to production.

How did Beetroot AB perform from a project management standpoint?

Trofim speaks very good English and is good at communicating what he sees needs to be done. They presented different options for us to pick from. They have their own project management system, on which we can look at how things are going and plan things. We mainly use Slack for communication, and Jira for the project management itself.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their breadth of knowledge on different frameworks and technologies is impressive. We’re using a somewhat niche or rare framework, and we were struggling to find people who even knew about it. Trofim knew about it, along with all of the popular frameworks.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Working with us to improve the domain knowledge could always be improved. The challenge with our project was that it required a lot of domain knowledge that was more or less impossible to get into in the short period that they had.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

My advice is to just set up a call with Trofim and plan out whatever work you have. I think he will solve the problem.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Briteweb is a Brand, Digital and Marketing agency who works with social impact companies. I am the Director of Project Operations and manage all the resourcing at Briteweb

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Beetroot AB?

Initially, we hired them to be the developers on all our support retainers but it quickly led to more resources being needed for developing websites.

What were your goals for this project?

Having a dedicated resource to tackle all our incoming support so we could serve our clients better

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We have worked tried working with a lot of different development agencies in the past and did not have great experiences. Beetroots values align with Briteweb and we were really interested in the investment they make in their employees through education.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

One dev is dedicated to our large support department servicing anything from bug fixes to larger changes to the client's websites. The other devs we have used complete the backend, front end and integrations for Wordpress websites we build.

What was the team composition?

Singular developers working on various projects and support retainers. They work very well with our Project managers, strategist and other in-house developers. We are able to scale up and down depending on the demand we have in our business. We have a couple full-time developers who are a part of our team now but we also have used developers in a T&M capacity to fill any gaps we may have for a shorter term,

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Beetroot has been such a pleasure to work with and are very fair. They always solve any issues we may ever have very quickly and in a fair manner. The developers are highly skilled and are very hard workers. It has done so much for our business from a client satisfaction standpoint of being able to move through tickets and projects faster with these skilled, dedicated resources. It also has helped our bottom line significantly to be able to have the Beetroot developers on monthly retainers and be fully dedicated to Briteweb.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Beetroot has been quick to pick up our communication and development process. We had an instance with one developer that didn't suit our needs and Beetroot quickly solved the situation and found us a new dev. The timezones come with its challenges but again, Beetroot was able to adapt and come to a compromise when we need video meetings and adjust their schedules accordingly.

The language sometimes is an issue but I think all the other attributes outway this small thing. They just do great work and are always so eager to please us. We use, Gitlab, Slack, Trello, Accelo and email

What did you find most impressive about this company?

They are just on top of everything from invoice breakdowns to solving any issues that may arise. They are willing to invest new parts of their business to strengthen the partnership they have with us. The entire team from sales to support to development have been a pleasure to work with.

Other vendors weren't as skilled, had bad communication and many times we end up having to redo the work that they did. Beetroot is far beyond other agencies we have worked with from a skill, communication and issue resolution perspective.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I think we have ironed out most of the kinks we were experiencing at the beginning of the partnership but that is true of any partnership. We will continue to strengthen our partnership with Beetroot and continue to expand the team we use on our projects.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the director of Studio Bovenkamer, a Dutch company that develops websites and provides UX, design, and development consultancy services. We specialize in WordPress.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Beetroot AB?

As a self-employed developer and designer, it’s hard to keep up with my growing client base. I wanted to do less development.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Beetroot AB provides development support. They mainly do frontend development and then a little bit of WordPress backend development. We initially did two proof of concept (POC) projects. After those were done, I decided to hire one of Beetroot AB’s developers full-time, and I’ve been working with her for a year-and-a-half. 

Our process is that I send wireframes and a web design to the developer and explain the clients’s requirements to her. The developer then implements the web design into code so that we can use it for WordPress. She does the whole technical realization and creates fully functional websites. If any of my returning clients need to create some new functionality, add to their website, or require maintenance, Beetroot AB does that. 

What is the team composition?

I currently work with one full-time developer. For the first two projects, I worked with junior developers, a developer, and a project manager.

How did you come to work with Beetroot AB?

Beetroot AB emailed me and proposed doing business together. I got in contact with a sales manager, who explained to me how they did their development and what their main processes were. What was appealing to me was that they worked almost the exact way I did; they used the same techniques and took the same steps.

My primary concerns were whether they’d deliver high-quality work and maintain a healthy, communicative relationship, since I’m in the Netherlands and they’re in Ukraine. 

How much have you invested with them?

The first two projects were on a fixed price base, but I can’t remember how much that was. Since hiring a developer full-time, I’ve spent $2,000 a month, or between $36,000–$40,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

I began working with Beetroot AB on the first two projects in 2016. There was a gap in our work together, and then I hired one of their developers full-time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

I’ve outsourced 75–80% of my development to Beetroot AB, which allows me to pay more attention to my clients and build better relationships; I can be a better account manager. Beetroot AB's deliverables are functional and reliable.

How did Beetroot AB perform from a project management standpoint?

Project management only applies to the first two projects we did; now, I manage the projects, and the full-time developer is only concerned with development. I handle all of the planning and communication with clients. 

They’ve delivered on time and within budget. Beetroot AB’s main selling point is their ability to communicate. Their team has good English, and they have the same ethos. For the first two projects, we had a bit too much communication; we were still building up a new relationship. We use tools to communicate and bridge the gap between designer and developer. I’ve enjoyed working with a team from a different country; it’s fun to train them. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

They bring dedication, communication, and price to the table.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I think they could become more technical and have more knowledge about security in development. Their skills could go beyond just frontend. However, this only applies to my developer right now, and she’s grown a lot over the last year-and-a-half of intensely working together. Beetroot AB offers internal trainings and teaches their team English.

Any advice for potential customers?

Give them the benefit of the doubt and try them out. Outsourcing can be scary, but these guys are trustworthy and reliable.