AGS Logo AGS Logo

Do you have an idea for a software product? Are you trying to get your startup off the ground but don’t know how to staff it? Do you need a technology partner for your venture?

Do you have skills gaps on your team? Are some members of your staff totally overworked while others are bored?

Andromeda Galactic has the solution for you: hire us instead of (or in addition to) building your own product team.

To get a new software product off the ground you’ll need:

  • Product Owner
  • Project Manager / Scrum Master / Agile Facilitator
  • Business Analyst and/or Technical Writer
  • Quality Assurance Team skilled in:
    • manual testing
    • automated testing
    • security testing
    • accessibility testing
  • Solution Architect (or Software + Data Architects)
  • Backend software developers
  • Frontend software developers (including web developers and mobile app developers)
  • UI Designer (skilled in accessibility, user experience, and CSS)
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Support Staff
  • Systems / Infrastructure Engineers
  • Experienced managers and team leads to keep everyone working together smoothly and achieving business objectives

Going it alone, all of this will cost you between $1 Million - $3 Million each year in salary and benefits alone for just a small team, but you can get a full product team with Andromeda Galactic Solutions starting at just $500,000/year.

Does it sound too good to be true? Probably, but it’s very real. Here’s how we do it:

  1. We use our own Vortex™ development process to deliver consistent results and keep the team running smoothly
  2. We work on a serverless infrastructure, which lowers operating costs (both ours and yours) and reduces the need for operational support of your finished product.
  3. We don’t follow the bleeding edge or all the latest technology trends, but instead focus on our core technology stack sticking to the latest long-term support (LTS) releases. This allows us to be experts on every technology we use and to build libraries of code and patterns that accelerate the rate of development while reducing bugs, errors, and support costs.
  4. Our team members train on a minimum of two projects at a time. This way they can switch between projects as demand changes so they can stay productive without costing you anything for the time you aren’t using.

Other perks:

  • Built-in redundancy - When you have your own team, you need to have enough staff to handle illnesses, vacations, and other events that could cause interruption to your business. We cross-train our team to ensure there is always someone available to jump in with a key skill.
  • Leadership - Our founders have worked with over 100 companies from startups to the Fortune Global 500 and have been managing development teams for over 20 years. But we aren’t just good at technology – we understand that the technology we build is serving a business need, and we know how to speak that language and meet the demands of your customers and clients.

Interested? It all starts with a conversation. Book a meeting to tell us all about your product!

How will it work?

Most clients will choose from one of the following options:

Full product team (starting at $500,000/year) – we provide a full-stack team to fully manage the development of your product.

Front-end product team (starting at $250,000/year) – we’ll handle the front-end, user-facing parts of your product while you handle the back-end, data, and APIs.

Build an MVP (from $50,000 - $500,000) – we work together to define, design, and develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for your startup or new line of business. This works best when you want to build something small up front to work on product-market fit before committing to a longer term relationship.

Production Support agreements are also available for monitoring and management of your product. This is most popular for clients who choose the Full Product Team.

Visual Design
Development
Quality Assurance
Security
Marketing
User Experience

The Vortex™ Process

Andromeda has developed their own development process, Vortex™, based upon established Lean and UX models to produce accessible, user-friendly applications that meet the needs of end users.

The VortexTM Process: Define, Observe, Plan, Design, Implement, Deliver, Measure

null

As indicated in the above diagram, Vortex™ is iterative with the following steps: Define, Observe, Plan, Design, Implement, Deliver, & Measure. Based on the size of the project and the distinct users and stakeholders involved, there may be multiple steps in progress at any one time, relative to different aspects or components of the project.

Case Studies

Power My Analytics - User Experience

Power My Analytics is a helpful business tool that connects dashboards, reports, and spreadsheets from a wide range of data sources and popular analytics tools all in one place. The end result for their user base is a single source of analytics data they can refer to for all their business reporting needs, instead of needing to manually compile information from multiple apps and sources.When they first spoke with the Andromeda team, Power My Analytics had been fielding a high number of support calls regarding their billing process. They had also found that at that time customers weren’t converting from trial to paid accounts as often or as consistently as had been hoped. Based upon the valuable feedback they received from their users, they determined that the user experience for their existing billing screen was not intuitive and the details shown were hard to understand in the context used to present them.With this vital information about Power My Analytics’s goals to guide the Andromeda development team’s planning, we kicked off the project by reviewing their own analytics to figure out how their customers were using the billing and plan-related pages in their application and looking back over several months of their support tickets to spot any common trends. In the end, we were able to deliver them a complete modern design for a brand-new billing screen that was more straightforward in answering any questions a user might have about the service without requiring them to contact support. A strong emphasis was also placed on improving the way that the value of the different plans offered by Power My Analytics were explained and displayed to their potential customers as a way of encouraging more sign-ups. Their own in-house development team was able to implement the code changes necessary based on our designs.Once the new billing screen had been implemented and launched to the public, Power My Analytics experienced noticeably better conversion rates and fewer support calls, resolving all of the challenges they had previously struggled with. This has resulted in a direct and immediate positive impact on their bottom line and helped them to grow their monthly revenue. In fact, Power My Analytics was so pleased with the outcome of the project that they opted to retain our services for a complete redesign and enhancement of the user experience for the rest of their application.Do you have a customer-facing application that just doesn’t seem to deliver the expected results? Are your customers complaining that the application is too difficult to use, or simply not choosing to use the application at all? The Andromeda team can help you determine how best to improve your existing app and work with you to design a solution for all of your challenges. We’ve got the skills to implement the designs ourselves in your codebase, or to help your internal development team do it themselves. Send us a message through our contact form today and we’ll get the conversation started.

TripMaster TripPortal

TripMaster offers non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) software allowing transportation and mobility companies to quickly and reliably schedule rides for their customers to and from appointments. Many of the transportation companies using their software specialize in providing accessible transportation for people with a wide range of mobility impairments and other disabilities. The existing software was designed primarily with these transportation companies in mind, but TripMaster wanted to develop a way for the person needing transport to get involved in the ride-planning process themselves instead of having to go through dispatch or customer support every time. These riders would need to be able to manage their own trips via a reliable and accessible scheduling portal, including requesting rides for whatever date and time was needed and rescheduling or cancelling the trip if their plans changed.

Making both digital and offline spaces usable by everyone is something we’re passionate about at Andromeda, so we were excited to discuss TripMaster’s needs and get to work. Our solution was to design a mobile-friendly application to provide all of the features their riders would need to manage their own transportation, with a format and functionality familiar to anyone who’s used any of the major ride-sharing mobile apps while still keeping accessibility by the transportation company’s user demographic front and center. To ensure that the new feature would be accessible to as diverse of a user base as possible, TripMaster was released not only as a mobile app for phones and tablets through the Google Play and Apple stores, but as a web-based application, with full feature parity across all platforms.

After we completed our work and passed the scheduling portal back to them for review, TripMaster let us know that they were extremely pleased with our solution. Thanks to the Andromeda development team’s hard work and accessibility-first design, TripMaster is now a broadly accessible application available on a wide range of devices. This has made a tremendous difference in the way they work as a company and their ability to support the transportation companies who use their software, as well as significantly improving their ability to communicate with all of their users.

If you need an innovative mobile-friendly and accessible application for your business or for the clients who depend on your software, Andromeda is here and ready to help. We can assist you in putting together your project requirements, finish or create modern user experience and visual designs, and deliver a complete solution tailored to the unique needs of your business and your user base, all while keeping our lines of communication open throughout the development process for your feedback and input. Send us a message through our contact form today and we’ll get the conversation started.

TripMaster TripCalendar

TripMaster offers non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) software allowing transportation and mobility companies to quickly and reliably schedule rides for their customers to and from appointments. Many of the transportation companies using their software specialize in providing accessible transportation for people with a wide range of mobility impairments and other disabilities.

We had previously worked with TripMaster on TripPortal, their rider-facing scheduling portal, and they were so pleased with the end product that when a new project arose, they reached out to us again. Since the launch of TripPortal, they had purchased another transportation software company and were experiencing a rapid growth spurt. The buyout meant that they now owned an additional transportation app that offered a calendar view of scheduled rides, a feature that had not yet been added to TripMaster’s existing application. Transportation scheduling is most intuitive for users when the scheduling portal’s design incorporates a timeline or calendar overview of all the activities for a given day, serving as a more efficient and completely digital version of the old pen-and-paper appointment books. To ensure a smoother and less disruptive transition for the purchased company’s existing users, TripMaster needed to bring their own product up to feature parity with the new app they had acquired.

The Andromeda development team worked closely with TripMaster to design Trip Calendar, a new calendar-based view within the existing app intended to provide an equivalent user experience for the clients of the other company who wanted to migrate to their platform while maintaining the sophisticated rules and controls required by their own clients. The end result was a system similar in functionality and performance to the Google Calendar application that had been further optimized to handle the display and management of thousands of rides per day.

As a repeat client of Andromeda’s development and design services, TripMaster was once again thrilled with the outcome of their collaboration with us. Finally, they had an important feature they had been wanting for years, and it had been completed on a timeline that fit perfectly with their business’s goals for growth and development. TripMaster’s established user base was pleased with the new view and quickly began to adopt it as a part of their daily workflows; new customers migrating to the TripMaster platform from the acquired app were able to do so without disruption of their own unique workflows. Trip Calendar was completed on time, under budget, and with zero defects reported post-launch.

Do your customers expect sophisticated visuals or user interfaces that go beyond what you’re comfortable delivering on your own? Are you encountering performance or usability issues with your most complex interfaces? The Andromeda team is happy to help you design and implement solutions for even your most challenging software needs. Send us a message through our contact form today and we’ll get the conversation started.