Pixilated

Pixilated is an events photo marketing startup, founded in 2012 by Nic China and Patrick Rife. Originally focused on B2C events, over time their business model shifted to B2B with the rise of experiential marketing. As their new B2B customers started wanting to capture more data, initially the team used a variety of tools and manual processes, but eventually hit scale issues and realized it was time to build out a custom solution.

Pixilated decided to hire an in-house developer, but didn’t have anyone on their leadership team with the kind of technical expertise necessary to help their developer make smart technical roadmap decisions. The founders at Pixilated knew the SmartLogic team from local startup community events, and engaged SmartLogic as technical consultants to support their new product development project.

SmartLogic’s Director of Development Operations, Dan Ivovich, served as a consulting CTO, helping Pixilated’s in-house developer with technology decisions and strategies. When a question fell outside Dan’s expertise, he’d pull in another SmartLogic team member, giving Pixilated access to a “library of brains behind the scenes.”

One of Pixilated’s concerns going into this development project was knowledge continuity; with only one developer on their team, the founders were concerned that all their product knowledge would be gone if and when that developer were to leave the company. Working with Dan and the team at SmartLogic gave them confidence that their product knowledge wasn’t all bound up in a single team member.

Nic, CEO at Pixilated, says one of the most valuable and unexpected things he learned from working with SmartLogic is that “Sometimes things that seem like they should be difficult are not; likewise sometimes things that seem like they should be easy also are not.” Having someone available who knows where the likely pitfalls are helped Pixilated to have a more realistic production timeline and accelerated their technical decision-making process.