RedShred

I'd definitely recommend the SmartLogic team to any early stage company that needs to get a product to market quickly.

— Jim Kukla, CTO, RedShred

Challenge

RedShred helps contractors quickly find and respond to the right government RFP gigs to save them time. As a company whose value proposition is time savings, their own speed to market is an essential ingredient in fulfilling that promise. With the technical chops in place to develop a new end-user experience, RedShred needed a partner to work on the client facing application while they continued to build and extend the backend.

Collaboration

To get on the same page, SmartLogic defined all of the work upfront by identifying the requirements in high-level detail and presenting user stories to RedShred. This structured and thorough communication continued throughout the project via daily standup meetings and a dedicated channel in Slack for the project.

SmartLogic's developers built the frontend application using React so the project would be able to scale in the future without the code becoming too complicated. To keep private data protected, RedShred provided stubbed 'dummy data' so the frontend could be developed.

While the frontend was being built by SmartLogic, RedShred’s CTO Jim Kukla built out the backend of the application. This saved time but meant SmartLogic didn’t have access to the backend.

SmartLogic built a small Node.js API that closely mimicked RedShred's real backend service in order to develop and test the frontend. This meant that the frontend could be hooked into RedShred's backend at any point in time with minimal effort.

"The team is competent. It shouldn’t be a major differentiator in the market, but it is," CTO Jim Kukla said. "They’re very responsive to concerns and needs."

Results

The SmartLogic team helped RedShred revamp its user experience. Making the decision to work with an outside firm meant the frontend and backend could be developed simultaneously, saving the RedShred team time and alleviating internal development stress. SmartLogic delivered two months ahead of schedule so RedShred could continue to build user loyalty, brand buzz and grow revenue.

SmartLogic took time to understand our business goals and needs so they could turnaround our project nearly two months ahead of schedule.

— Jim Kukla, CTO, RedShred