SoftKraft

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO of a tech startup.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftKraft?

When I started this company, I was trying to decide if I should hire developers or outsource the work. We’re developing solution to enable one-to-one video conferencing between students and teachers.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had a PowerPoint type of thing that I developed in Keynote, and a series of screens. Basically, they built it from scratch based on what I wanted the architecture to be. We talked about where it should be hosted and the benefits of going with AWS versus something else.

Right now, it’s all cloud-based and works on Google and Firefox. We’re currently looking into creating a version for mobile devices. I wanted a clean UI with minimal information for folks to deal with. We went through several iterations throughout the project. Users can make requests, and then teachers can say whether they can help, and then they’re connected through the video conferencing platform.  

What is the team composition?

We worked with four people. I communicated with a project manager, and then we had one person working on the backend and infrastructure and one on the database modeling, as well one developer as building out the CMS.

How did you come to work with SoftKraft?

Initially, I went through Clutch. I went through the selection process and identified three companies in Poland and got quotes from. One company didn’t give me much detail on what they would do and quoted a very high price, and another recommended an architecture that I didn’t think would support what I wanted to do, so I selected SoftKraft.

They really showed that they wanted to know what I was trying to build and why in our initial meetings. The focus of our first meeting was identifying my priorities and ensuring that the team knew what I wanted to buy.

How much have you invested with them?

I’ve spent about $42,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started in November 2019 and I’m still working with them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

The company provides financial solutions for online applicants. My role is the CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SoftKraft?

To develop the full platform.

What were your goals for this project?

Aquire regulatory approval to operate through providing a functional platform.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

They were recommended by another vendor who could not accept the project due to time constraints. After interviews with other service providers, we believe this vendor showed the best grasp of the project with the most appropriate pricing.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They developed, tested, configured an online portal to manage and review loan requests. The workflow was managed through two week sprints with a weekly meeting to discuss progress.

What was the team composition?

The team consisted of professional individuals working throughout the project interchangeably from 3 to 5 members, all team members possessed great experience in their fields and provided great insight on best approaches to meet required deliverables in a timely manner.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The project was the initial kickstart for our business. It helped us launch with our desired offering

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Communication and project management was excellent. The team always met our crazy deadlines and set realistic expectations for deliverables.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The technical expertise and quick grasp of information by the team for new concepts was impressive. and the ability to translate deliverables into small tasks with full clarity and tracking of progress was a big help

Are there any areas for improvement?

My only advice would be to clearly communicate the required documents and frameworks before starting the project to arrive at a mutual understanding of expected end-results.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I was the former CTO and managing director of ZenGuard, a VPN service provider. Subscribing for a VPN on our website grants users the ability to connect to different locations in about 30 different countries. Once a user logs in, we provide full encryption for total web traffic.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SoftKraft?

The infrastructure of ZenGuard consists of the application that handles the user which is cloud-based and the several hundreds of real servers all around the world that are working as VPN nodes. Both parts have to be maintained and improved.

What were your goals for this project?

The goals were to maintain and improve the technical infrastructure during the time where our own team was not fully stuffed.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

I worked before with Selleo and while searching for a company that could support us with system engineers we found out that Selleo and SoftKraft are well connected and as I had already a high trust in Selleo we also introduced the people from SoftKraft to our team.

Describe the project in detail.

For the application part, we had to deal with raising loads as the user based was increasing. There we had to improve the infrastructure that peaks can be handled while having a good cost control. For the VPN infrastructure, we introduced a lot of automation to handle the amount os virtual and bare metal servers.

What was the team composition?

One of the system engineers from SoftKraft worked with us on a full-time basis remotely. A more senior engineer supported their work as a from time to time. He worked as a steering partner.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The projects involved work on our internal infrastructure. As a company in the cyber-security space, we cannot share any insights as this might reveal possible weak points.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was very effective as the people of SoftKraft were very good embedded in our own team. They take part in the regular meetings of planning and worked very direct with their counterparts, mostly using Slack.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

SoftKraft has extensive knowledge of cloud technology and more traditional system engineering. Challenges were discussed on their team to find the most optimal solution.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

When I worked with SoftKraft, I was the CTO of TMC Group. It's a real estate firm that invests in venture capital.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SoftKraft?

We wanted to build a web application that could process large datasets, so we were looking for a vendor to help us. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We gave SoftKraft our ideas and they turned them into reality. They used Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Apache Spark, and Apache Kafka to develop our application. It's an AWS platform that is used for data analytics. In addition to the development work, SoftKraft provided consulting services and helped us throughout the entire process. 

What is the team composition? 

We worked directly with three or four members of their team. 

How did you come to work with SoftKraft?

They were recommended to us. We were impressed with their depth of knowledge, so we decided they'd be a good fit. Also, I knew one of their team members from a previous project we had worked on.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent about $150,000.

What is the status of this engagement? 

We worked with them between 2017–2018.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The application helped us dramatically in our underwriting services. We relied on it quite heavily, so we were able to work more effectively. Everything functioned as expected, and we were able to resolve any issues quickly. 

How did SoftKraft perform from a project management standpoint? 

The project management was very solid and they were able to work through all the challenges. We used Pivotal Tracker, GitHub, and Google Docs to keep track of the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a very strong leadership team. Also, they were willing to work with us and accommodate our needs.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can't think of anything. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

There are some teams out there that are used to the agile approach. While SoftKraft is very good at that, they also really take their time to go through the process and think about the software. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Neutopia is a highly flexible learning experience platform that supports lifelong learning and the many ways that people learn in the 21st century such as social, peer-to-peer and flipped learning models. To increase curiosity and motivation Neutopia is designed like a “Spotify for Knowledge.” It harnesses an Artificial Intelligence-based recommendation engine to provide relevant personalized content based on individual preferences. It combines 3 types of systems: Content lIbraries for self-guided learning, Playlists for guided learning and social networks for peer to peer learning. I am the founder and CEO.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SoftKraft?

We came to SoftKraft to develop a machine learning / A.I. based recommendation engine that could create personalized feeds of content and weekly recommendations based on the topics most relevant to each learner. Technology wise, the solution was based on Spark and MLlib - its scalable machine learning library.

What were your goals for this project?

Our goal was to develop the AI-based recommendation to see how we could improve personalization and relevance for the learner. A secondary application was to improve content recommendations for the course designer to speed up the time it takes to construct a course by providing additional up-to-date learning resources.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

They were recommended by Selleo who have been doing our software development since 2014.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

They began the project with research and began testing various solutions early on. Then refining the solutions once we had a sense of the correct direction to move in.

What was the team composition?

Our team consisted of 2 people.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The team has completed the work commissioned. Based on early testing we had very good results. We will be returning to collaboration with them when the functionality they attend to reaches the top of our backlog again.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

Softkraft managed the project well with weekly updates on progress. They were flexible in their thinking to find the optimal solution to what we were aiming to achieve.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

We were very impressed with their commitment to achieving a high-quality outcome and their willingness to explore a variety of possible solutions for our goal. They researched several possible approaches using the latest best practices and technologies in an emerging and complex field of AI and ML. We appreciated their openness to a collaborative style of interactions with the client.

Are there any areas for improvement?

The management and team at Softkraft are extremely diligent and committed to high-quality outcomes for their customers. There is very little I can think of that they can improve. Certainly providing as much thinking and pre-emptive research from the client side along with the goals of the business can assist the developers in moving quickly towards solutions.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the president of Software Innovation Labs, a consortium of specialized software development houses.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire SoftKraft?

We have so far engaged SoftKraft to develop five major projects involving data processing and machine learning solutions.

What were your goals for this project?

We have used SoftKraft several times to deliver data processing and machine learning solutions as part of larger projects for our customers.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

One of SoftKraft’s co-founders provided services to another company I know quite well, and that company was very happy with their work. When SoftKraft was founded, I just thought we might as well try to use their services.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

First, SoftKraft built an AWS and cloud machine learning-based application that processed text for SEO. The team then created image processing software and streaming data-based user analytics for a community service. After that, SoftKraft developed a DevOps infrastructure based in AWS for a video streaming service. Finally, they also added payment features to an e-commerce site. 

As for technologies, they delivered applications built with Java, Python and Go. The solutions were often based on AWS services and included DevOps infrastructure. SoftKraft have skillfully used such solutions as Apache Kafka, NumPy, Pandas, and IBM Watson.

What was the team composition?

It's a small specialized software development house with exclusively senior consultants and developers. They usually deployed two developers to implement a project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Our clients were happy with the solutions delivered. Our clients' satisfaction is the ultimate measure of how well SoftKraft performed on any given engagement.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

We found the communications and the collaborative process both effective and efficient.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

SoftKraft’s seasoned programmers always advised on appropriate solutions for any given challenge.

Are there any areas for improvement?

They could offer more capacity so that they can undertake more projects.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Co-Founder of Diagon

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Equipping the factories for the future. 

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire SoftKraft to accomplish?

Build an AI application for buying manufacturing equipment

SOLUTION

How did you find SoftKraft?

Online Search

Why did you select SoftKraft over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit

How many teammates from SoftKraft were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

SoftKraft augmented our engineering team with specialists in DevOps, Frontend, and Data/AI Engineering to accelerate the development of our Albus platform. 

Key deliverables:

• Cloud Infrastructure: Designed and optimized a scalable AWS environment, containerized the application (Docker), and automated CI/CD pipelines.
• AI & Data Engineering: Developed complex AI agentic workflows and data collection pipelines to power our equipment sourcing engine.
• Frontend Development: Implemented UI/UX features using Next.js and managed the migration to Sanity CMS for better content management.
• Process Optimization: Helped implement agile practices (Scrum/Linear) to improve team velocity.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Developed AI application and data pipelines from Scratch. 

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

yes, very proactive when it came to project managemnet. Not only for dealing with issues and feedback but also proactively setting up projecst for success. 

What was your primary form of communication with SoftKraft?

Virtual Meeting

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

The combination of technical expertise as well as proactive project management stands out.

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

not right now. 

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CEO and Founder of Catchkey Corporation

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Mentmii is a childcare marketplace that connects high school mentors to grade school mentees for in-person coaching and training in sports, STEM, art, and music for better short-term childcare solutions and longer lasting connections.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire SoftKraft to accomplish?

• Develop our MVP

SOLUTION

How did you find SoftKraft?

Online Search

Why did you select SoftKraft over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Great culture fit
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from SoftKraft were assigned to this project?

6-10 Employees

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

We needed to stand up a marketplace MVP in six months. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

Completion of our key functions:

• Accounts - to provide identity authentication
• Mentor Listings - basic functionality
• Search and Matchmaking - location based
• Messaging - as initial mean of communication
• Reviews and ratings - necessary for reputation building among mentors
• Static pages - important for things like ToS

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

• SoftKraft’s project management was solid and reliable. 
• While not every deadline was met, they were proactive in communicating any potential delays and provided clear explanations for the reasons behind them. 
• They were diligent in keeping the project on track, and whenever issues arose, they were quick to address and course-correct, ensuring that the overall progress remained steady.

What was your primary form of communication with SoftKraft?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

What impresses me most about SoftKraft is how close and connected they feel despite being thousands of miles away. It truly felt like I had a team embedded with me, working alongside us every step of the way. Their ability to maintain such a strong and collaborative relationship remotely was unique and made a significant difference in the success of our project.

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

One area where SoftKraft could improve is by being more proactive about addressing potential hiccups before they become issues. Additionally, more transparency around pricing would have been helpful, particularly in understanding how costs might fluctuate as the project evolved. Overall, these adjustments could make an already strong partnership even better.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Co-Founder of nice solutions GmbH

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

We are specialized in providing software development and consulting services, focusing on creating customized IT solutions that enhance business efficiency and innovation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire SoftKraft to accomplish?

• Migrating shop systems to become MACH compliant
• Create a revolutionary platform for AI-powered content.

SOLUTION

How did you find SoftKraft?

Referral

Why did you select SoftKraft over others?

• Pricing fits our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from SoftKraft were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

• Migration of Shopware 5 to Shopware 6 with customized system stack (MACH compliant)
• Database Migrations
• Software Migration
• Plattform Development

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

A Working Application

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

• good project management skills
• scrum / agile
• on time, as requested

What was your primary form of communication with SoftKraft?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

We were particularly impressed with their ability to adapt to changes.

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

You can always improve, but Softkraft was always quick in optimizing their teamwork and asked for feedback to improve any possible topic.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the CTO of an education software solution company.

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Software solution for improving student attendance!

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire SoftKraft to accomplish?

• Software Development

SOLUTION

How did you find SoftKraft?

Online Search

Why did you select SoftKraft over others?

• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from SoftKraft were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

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

We contracted with SoftKraft to help us develop new features for our web application, and maintain current features.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We were able to offer a wide variety of new features on our platform very rapidly.

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

Project management has been fantastic with clear communication on how long tasks will take, and when they will be delivered.

What was your primary form of communication with SoftKraft?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

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

What we find most impressive is that SoftKraft treats our company like their own. They are not just providing people to fill seats, they are their to support the company holistically.

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

We have been very impressed with SoftKraft, and have nothing bad to say!