WooFound

Woofound is on a mission to help people gain self-knowledge—and personalize their worlds. With the help of their internal team of psychologists, Woofound developed a matching engine that measures conscious and unconscious aspects of personality.

The Problem

Woofound wanted to build an iPhone application to allow people to use their matching engine to find events and activities nearby. While Woofound has a team of developers in-house, their team did not have mobile application or native application development experience. They started looking around for an outside team to work closely with their internal team to build the app.

Why SmartLogic?

After evaluating a few firms, Woofound went with SmartLogic because, as COO Josh Spears said, "We operate under the same principles in terms of agile and rapid iteration cycles. It was a complementary pairing and it was a good fit." Since working together to build the iPhone application, Woofound has continued to work with SmartLogic and build a trusting, enriching relationship. As Spears explains, "SmartLogic has been tremendous in helping us grow the company by collaborating and teaching us things we may not have learned until later. It’s a good extension of our own team."

The Solution

Throughout the application development process, SmartLogic and Woofound worked together to build the best iPhone app possible.

SmartLogic became more than just an outsourced development team to Woofound in the process, as demonstrated by the below:

1. Woofound came to SmartLogic with detailed designs and ideas of how the iPhone app would function and feel. SmartLogic offered feedback to Woofound at each stage to help the app function better—and to make development more efficient. "SmartLogic works with you to find the smartest conclusion," said Spears, "they’re not trying to rack up the hours to get paid. They want you to have the best app and build it in a manner that’s as efficient as possible."
2. The plans for the iPhone app morphed as SmartLogic and Woofound worked together. SmartLogic’s outside perspective "helped us vet our own assumptions and ideas," said Spears. "We came to conclusions that were more robust."
3. As SmartLogic worked on the Woofound Explore iPhone application, both teams realized that the core API needed changes. SmartLogic suggested changing Woofound’s core API into a hypermedia API, which made it more flexible and scalable. The hypermedia API continues to streamline development for Woofound as they build more tools and channels for users to interact with their matching engine.
4. SmartLogic and Woofound leveraged the core API in order to build applications for other verticals, most notably Woofound Compass. Woofound Compass is a web application that gives personalized career recommendations, built with Ruby on Rails. SmartLogic and Woofound were able to use the core API in order to quickly get the application off the ground.

SmartLogic continues to work with Woofound as they grow. As Spears said, "We have a level of trust and understanding. If we ask SmartLogic to do something it will be completed in a timely and effective manner that often goes beyond expectations. SmartLogic does good work and we can count on them."

The Results

Woofound’s Explore mobile application has received a solid initial response, said Spears, "it was mentioned in various publications and articles, and was generally heavily praised." Woofound is still working on including more data so that users can find more matches, but "the way it looked and felt, the functionality, was well received. That speaks to the quality of work."

Would Woofound recommend SmartLogic? Absolutely. "When you go to SmartLogic, you feel like they’re a part of the team. They’re not just hired guns who are in it for the money. They’re actually going to take a vested interest in what you’re building and want it to succeed and be fruitful."