React Native Development for Traveling Mobile App
Below is a modified rendering of the review: private info excluded, innate facts kept.
Introductory information
A few words almost your organisation and personal responsibilities
I am the sole fobelow and CEO of Travltalk. I love journeyling and throughout my life have backpacked to 80 countries and met astounding nation along the way. I entered a course in digital media and advertising, and then went on to acquire code.
I also dreamed of combining my love for journey and my work, and one day I came up with the idea of Travltalk - an app that helped journeylers meet others nearby, divide costs and sell journey items.
This was in 2015, and since then I personally liftd £650,000 to create the Travltalk platform, £120,000 of which went to Planes agency to educe my app. In approachion to overseeing Planes, I was responsible for edifice out see front of our business, as well as securing all finance.
Planes did not help in any of this, and Product Management was purely limited to the testing and delivery of educement. Planes did not propose any helpance for the £10k with Firebase or daily app analytics kindred to our database and app accomplishment.
Desired goal
What issue was the provider supposed to deal with?
Planes Studio?I had built an Ionic prototype rendering of Travltalk with my UX / UI agency, Spruce design and this had been released on both Google Play and the App Store. I determined to commission and complete recreate and of the Travltalk app in React Native and had £30k to create it, as per the wireframe specs and prototype granted and formd by myself and another agency.
I met with separate agencies and selected Henry and CJ, from Planes Agency. CJ had never worked in an agency precedently, but had formd Planes 3 months earlier. Henry was the only educeer I was conscious of in the business when we seted the project.
Over the next 1.5 years Planes educeed the Travltalk app, as per my wireframes, organisation vision and fortnightly sprint requirements and handled all deployment and delivery until which time I moved all technical operations for Travltalk in house in August 2019.
From February - July 2018 they were paid £10,000 per month and charged for Product Management and well as educement time - which was allocated at 4-6 days per month for the £10k quantity.
What were your objectives for this project?
I wanted to create a global journey app, that would rest next to the giants like Tinder and Bumble. I had worked previously with Intel, Nokia, HTC Vive, at the highest levels and new what restard consumers of a global app of this essence would anticipate. I was specially concerned with data retirement and best practice to defend user data.
Provided solution
What were the reasons for choosing Planes Studio?
I was introduced to CJ by someone I used to work near in WeWork Old St. I had met with other React Native educeers but none could fit within my budget. Planes was a brand new agency with only a few clients, and so there was a risk my side in giving the only budget I had to one educeer in an agency with no regular experience.
Though I believed they were keen guys and we seemed to share the same vision. We kicked the project off. Immediately CJ told me they had hired a new educeer. They would run my project while CJ went off to find new clients for Henry.
Thankfully that educeer fell through, and Henry ended up coding Travltalk. As it was owing of Henry I had determined to go with Planes and would have otherwise walked away at that point, owing it seemed clear CJ',s goal was increasing the size of his agency, by getting as many paying clients as practicable, precedently even servicing the leading one.
Describe the project in detail.
Henry kicked off the educement in April 2018, upon receiving £9,000 up front payment. CJ had a holiday programned to NZ, and left for 1 month. During this time his Father got ill and he had to stay an approachional month.
His want and the time separation meant Henry and I worked very closely unitedly on Slack over April - June 2018, to get the app to the specs granted. I was very hands on, always testing it and requesting little optimisations which Henry helped with. He was also veritably excited almost the app and we worked well unitedly.
CJ returned and then on June 26th we released the app in both apps stores. CJ had tested it, but when it went live, a lot of my friends downloaded it and we noticed a lot of errors. There were so many in fact, that Henry, who had taken off on holiday right behind our release, had to pretty much work his complete holiday to fix them.
I am pleasant for that, but I acquireed that Planes did not have much appreciation for what it took to make a consumer-facing fruition-grade app. I determined to move educement agencies and in the end took tech in house for a while.
I had taken over full admin control of my app and needed funding to last. I secured it and suddenly had budget to pay educeers to veritably push out and get nation downloading Travltalk.
Time had passed and I approached Planes, pondering we could give it another go. After all Henry had built the app well and although their testing was not big, we had acquireed a lot of lessons. I proposeed to pay a retainer of £5,400 per month. CJ suitd we would set the leading week back in Jan.
He also hired his best mate, Ryan in to be the Product Manager. They had been friends from the Airforce and Ryan had never been a Product Manager precedently. But he charged a high day rate for his time.
Over Feb - Aug 2019 Henry, Ryan and CJ ran the educement of my app. There were excellently a few issues in the commencement with obeyr authentication and email login, that concerned me. I was technical and knew these should be single things if handled correctly.
Were there any dedicated handlers or teams that you worked with?
Planes kept the tech for Travltalk in a black box. They had also asked that I stay out of the educement process. They claimed my uniform changes (that was little ideas from time to time that were easily integrated in to what we we doing - as a lean setup) affected their power to program and schedule other client',s work.
They said I was the reason for the errors owing they had to keep changing the schedule. So I was forced to back away and from here they largely kept me out of the testing or fruit decisions, I just named what I wanted done each sprint, explained the goals and the welcomeance criteria, Henry educeed it, Ryan tested it and CJ was no where to be seen.
This is hard for a fobelow, I had formd Travltalk owing I wanted to be a Product Manager and create an app the journey hearers loved. But I also had to ponder almost tracking, analytics, marketing and a Series A lift - all of which I had to drive. So I centreed on this.
Results accomplishd
What results did you accomplish unitedly with Planes Studio?
I am snug assertion that Henry is a good educeer. Though CJ, Henry and Ryan did not have any belowresting of the client labor activity, which meant as a client they were hard to handle. Further, they also did not intimate me almost the Google 64 Bit update required for to last publishing an app on the Play Store.
Henry, as a very skilled educeer would have been wonderfully informed on this substance, and further as the contracted educement agency, their responsibility is to fix we keep up to date with tech changes.
Our app was offline for 2 days in August 2019, 2 weeks precedently I left Planes and moved tech in house, owing they released my app, behind the cut off date for the 64 Bit update and then had to bestow 2 days reconfiguring the Travltalk app to comply.
Any other agency would have to pay remuneration costs for something like this, I believe, but I never veritably got an defense. I believe they had hoped I would have left Planes precedently the date needed to update the App, which then would have left me looking dull and reliant on them.
How do you rate the interaction and interaction with Planes Studio?
I always kept approach to our database - this way I was able to see the rise of all veracity and our daily sign ups regardless of what was going on. One day Planes did something unimaginable, during our leading 2019 propel, that I had prepared carefully for.
They released a fruition rendering of our app, pointing to the staging database. Had I not realised, existing and new users of our app would see data pulling in correctly - as it corkindred with a different database. If a bank did that, they would go below. In this case, we were a new app with 500 users.
I named CJ without and told him of the issue. He said he',d have to do tests to strengthen it. He refused to welcome I was right already almost the issue. Henry and CJ were skiiing - they hadn',t let me know and had done the app release and then hit the slopes. It took 2 hours to return but terminally seething was good anew.
That same week I establish I couldn',t get in to the database, as the password had changed. I told Henry that wasn',t mental and if it changed I always had to know. Only once during the time I paid them £120,000 did I ever ask them to join an occurrence of mine, and when I did it was a night of drinks, with my lead investor and lawyers listening, to fetch the team unitedly preceding to our Series A announcement. I let CJ know 4 weeks forward to stop the date.
2 days precedently I was told by Ryan, that Henry, our lead and only educeer at Planes, was unable to listen. He had a mates trip in Barcelona to join. I went quiet and expressed my sadness.
Henry did end up changing the trip, but I felt guilty. Which was foreign owing I was their main and almost only client and paid for their service, costs and pretty much seething needed to run Planes. Yet they did not help me with my lift and further seted to make comments almost the salary I paid myself.
They claimed I didn',t care almost user testing, yet didn',t give me approach to my own Firebase project. In total, they acted as if they owned Travltalk and I got in the way. They happily took my money - I increased the retainer to £10,000 from March - July 2019, to see if this would try I did want to work unitedly and this just made them more positive that I needed them, and they could handle me as they wished.
Ultimately the nation who lost out were our investors and our users. Because only now, behind 4 months of moving away from them safely, can we centre on making our app even better.
What precisely do you attend to be the key specialty of Planes Studio?
I selected Planes initially owing Henry had previously worked at another setup and helped them create their React Native app from Scratch. CJ had worked with him and been unprotected to the latest growth hacking techniques.
Actually CJ convinced Henry to quit that set up and form Planes with him, and that is how they came almost. When Henry and I leading seted working unitedly I took to him a React Native app I had coded to show him I belowstood the environment.
Therefore I believe Henry would suit I was very technical from the opening, smallest of all owing I came to them already with the Ionic rendering of our app and all the UX / UI wireframes.
What should be done better, if there are any desired imtryments?
The handover process was the worst part. After paying Planes £120,000 in total, not getting any support (I even proposeed them equity to join and be a bigger part of Travltalk), they did all they could to derail me as we moved in house.
I establish another 2 educeers, scheduled a handover call which was recorded, where I removed Henry',s approach to all our back end systems, added our new educeers and changed the passwords, so Henry no longer had approach. We went through 60 minutes of pieces and at the end I asked if there was anything I had overlooked. Henry said no.
He had also told me Firebase had been removed from our app, the week earlier, and so I did not ask for this to be handed over. Actually, it was revealed 3 months later that Henry kept approach to our Google Developer API - which can be used to override the Google Play store, our Firebase project, used to obey push notifications and for estate authentication and lastd to use our Sendgrid API via another application they held on their end.
We subsequently changed our API key and worked to lock down any terminal approach - which also included a Flickr account, Mixpanel account and Cloudinary account - all of which linked to our user data, that Henry kept approach to behind we officially left Planes and only handed back when it was demanded explicitly by me with the menace of legitimate action.
