They were friendly, smart, engaging, overly competent, and competitively priced. After a few meetings with the founding team, I was confident they would deliver on what they promised and they did. We were also able to sit down face-to-face, which was comforting and valuable.
We met with several firms when looking for help with this project. Gnar stood out for a couple reasons: during our initial talks they had a grasp of the project's challenges and some good insights based on past experience for how to approach them, were willing to work in a style that matched our style and were willing to work alongside our team, making sure our engineers fully understood the code they would inherit.
The Gnar totally integrated with our in-house team. They provided both horsepower and additional expertise to help us architect and deliver everything from minor bug fixes to major new features. They quickly earned the respect of our team and became a trusted resource. Gnar was easy to deal with from a business perspective, and the talent they delivered was top-notch. We would highly recommend The Gnar Company to anyone looking to accelerate development.
Gnar’s test-driven development methodology gave us a lot of peace of mind in avoidance of regression issues as the app scales; I chose Gnar because of their warranty on the code they provided. I actually thought they were foolish to be offering a guarantee on code being defect-free...how could this be profitable? But then I realized they provide this warranty because issues almost never come up. With the test-driven approach, they know that new code won’t cause something else to break.
The quality of their code was really good—it was well-tested and well-factored. It was clear that they’d been working with technology for a long time. The code is still in production today. From an interpersonal perspective, they were very professional, collaborative, and insightful, all of which are as important as the quality of the code. They were really great partners, not only in getting the work done but also in helping us drive the software in the right direction.
The Gnar Company’s professionalism, enthusiasm, and ownership of the technology space distinguished them. I never felt that they wouldn’t be able to do anything that we threw at them—they were ultra-capable and ultra-enthusiastic about the type and level of work that we were looking for.
We were concerned about adding people into an ongoing project, worrying that it would cause more of a disruption than would return benefits. Based on the quality of The Gnar’s talent, they were able to contribute quickly. Over the course of the project, their team added tremendous value.
They never fail to deliver. They’ve provided a high-caliber resource and I’m really happy with how we work together. The person we’re working with is a good person, and they’ve been able to integrate with our team. We don’t view them as a third-party at all.
We had another application prior developed by another company…with [Gnar], our first objective was to look at the old code and see what we could do with it. In the end, we decided they should start from scratch. That was a tough pill to swallow and required us to have a lot of trust in them.
Previously, the app was an information guide, but Gnar took it to another level. We shared pain points and they delivered new functionality…We had around 1,800 users on the old application, which is sizable for our industry, but we’re at nearly 3,000 users on the new app. The feedback we’re getting from our end-users call it clean and friendly; they’re actually using it as a reference material as we intended.
We’re not directly using the application—it’s our customers, and their feedback is that it’s a massive improvement. Our first responder community doesn’t get a lot of good apps, and they’re amazed that Gnar was able to deliver exactly what they needed without being first responders themselves.
We weren’t just a project to them. Even now, they catch up and ask how the app is running, and not from a sales standpoint. They really care about our end-users. Project management was key to them, as we wanted to meet some conference and launch-plan deadlines.