Hivekind

They bring an ownership mindset to their projects and take pride in shipping. They follow a very well-defined development process and stick to it. One example is their Code Review process. Their developers write proper documentation, share their learnings with other devs and explain their changes in detail on their Merge/Pull Requests. One of our devs was embedded with the Hivekind team for a year and she loved the process and saw and wanted other teams to adopt it. They were good at assessing work, setting and meeting deadlines, and communicating priorities, roadblocks, and risks. We were working with Hivekind at one of our sister companies for many years prior to their engagement with us. I was familiar with the systems they worked on and have had discussions with their stakeholders. Their development process was rigorous and we found that they took interest and care in improving the system. They were successful delivering non-trivial projects and constantly improving system health. My boss was also impressed with their work and introduced them to me. The project that I had needed help with required strong full-stack engineering skills and owning a project end-to-end. Hivekind team had that skillset. The project we began with was to re-platform a Forms builder tool that allows building complex forms not possible in the current platform. We pivoted to build complex forms for Willmaker Online and then extract a platform from it. We had a Willmaker desktop product that we want to move to an Online Service. The Hivekind team was introduced to the SMEs on Willmaker to learn about the desktop product, the business logic and product flow. The team then captured and documented the knowledge and implemented a proof-of-concept of the new platform. The new platform was built using a React.js and PHP stack (Next.js, Typescript, PHP, GraphQL, Postgres). Willmaker Online is a suite of DIY Legal products. It consisted of 6 forms three of which are complex in different ways. The strategy was to first deliver one of the complex forms which will then prove the new platform and significantly reduce the risk of introducing a new platform and building out the remaining forms. The Hivekind team built the Willmaker Online product from start to finish. The project had thousands of screens and on delivery there were no major issues. The business team was very happy with the quality at launch. The online version now enables our business team to apply different business models and pricing strategies. The conversion rate is up 70% since the launch.

Having a managed service provider in Hivekind freed up my time from having to build up an internal development team. The recruitment and testing of IT professionals was outsourced to Hivekind who could do it much better than I ever could. I then could focus on all other aspects of the business with my time, feeling confident in the team Hivekind had built for us. So then my work with the Hivekind developers was the most effective: focused on product development, refinement, etc. More than that, though, we were lucky that we had a very good working relationship. The Hivekind team itself worked very well together, and they all worked very well with me. Granted, we paid for that level of service, but if I had had to have an in-house technical team of 5 people there is no way that I could have calibrated things correctly, and so much time, energy, and money would have been wasted on trying to ramp up a tech team for a startup that was still very much in its own infancy. Throughout our time with Hivekind, the EssayJack platform: grew to support over 30,000 users (from zero to 30,000), secured external financing, won global awards, and was acquired by a larger EdTech company, Wizeprep. Throughout the acquisition process, the EssayJack platform had to go through technical due diligence, and Hivekind had to be available to provide information on technical architecture, etc. Probably the most obvious indication of their successful work was the fact that the technical due diligence as part of the acquisition process sailed through without a hitch. Honestly, had EssayJack not been acquired by Wizeprep we might still be working with Hivekind to this day. With the acquisition, Wizeprep already has a robust IT team and department and I no longer have to function as the de-facto CTO. Wizeprep has a very talented CTO and we no longer need to count on Hivekind to fulfill all those functions for us. Hivekind launched right around the same time that EssayJack launched, and I feel that we both grew our businesses together, and I'm happy with how we worked together.