Spiral Scout

Empowering students and landing multi-million dollar deals. Benchmark Education is transforming education for the digital age through custom eLearning development in the classroom. As a premier educational publisher, Benchmark Education is on a mission to support all students with the tools they need to succeed including struggling readers, gifted and on-level students, students with learning disabilities, and those still mastering English as a second language. Benchmark was looking to scale up their eLearning curriculum development and knew they wanted an outsourced technology partner who could support their internal technical team. They hoped that additional engineering resources would help them get more software products out to market within a short period of time and allow them to surpass their competition. The Spiral Scout team began by quickly working to gain a deeper understanding of what Benchmark did as a company and what their business goals were. We assembled a top-tier team of eLearning app developers who could lend their specialized expertise and experience in building educational tools. Our team worked closely with the internal Benchmark Education software development team as well as Benchmark product owners who helped provide direction for their digital dream.  While the majority of our work was done remotely from our Minsk offices, we regularly visited the Benchmark team at their offices in New Rochelle, New York. We worked seamlessly together to build out desktop and iPad versions as well as put together documentation to share with other Benchmark departments. This helped with the organization and getting sign-off from major stakeholders. The software we helped to write led to Benchmark winning a multi-million dollar contract with the LA Unified school district and put it in the hands of millions of students in California.  Learn more on our website Read More

Ecommerce Payment App and Inventory Management System. Chequeout provides a novel way for shoppers to purchase merchandise during physical pop-up events, virtual events, or when paying directly on a website checkout.  Their mobile payment app and inventory management system facilitates quick and easy payments through scan-and-go QR codes - bringing contactless shopping and pickup to in-person purchases, while also adding a new dimension of functionality to virtual events hosted on Zoom that seek to replicate intimate purchasing experiences like QVC or Tupperware Clubs. By combining flexible selling tools, a robust inventory management system, and helpful reporting, Chequeout wanted their platform to be the payment tech solution that removes purchase barriers and unleashes business potential. The checkout process had to be simplified down to a single QR code scan, and streamlined platforms had to be built for inventory management, order processing, shipping platforms, and a mobile application. After reviewing the scope of work with the Chequeout team, we mapped the key project goals and built a plan to include specific features on the Chequeout app and CMS. The original plan was to introduce Chequeout as a physical, in-person scan-and-go app with a backend inventory piece, with the virtual event capabilities coming later in the roadmap. However, the app happened to be released just before the pandemic hit in March 2020. With brick and mortar stores suddenly closing and in-person pop-up stores being delayed, we had to quickly pivot and transform the product into a fully online solution, converting our beta product into a live product. From the first day, there was a huge demand and the platform had hundreds of merchants and shoppers using Chequeout over Zoom to facilitate ordering and payments using QR codes.  TECHNOLOGIES: Spiral Framework, React.JS, React.Native, TypeScript, Kubernetes, PostgresQL, AWS, AWS SQS, AWS SNS, Stripe SDK. Learn more on our website Read More

Supercharging sales and raising $8M in seed investment. Made In Cookware is one of the fastest-growing premium cookware brands in the U.S. They are on a mission to make home cooking fun, accessible, and affordable with professional-quality cooking essentials all made in America. As a web-only retailer, their direct-to-consumer approach is revolutionizing the kitchen goods market like never before. We know that the best eCommerce website development practices are centered around the online customer - from the way they view and interact with products to the ease of checkout and even how they engage with the brand. We started this project by giving Made In Cookware several different options for setting up a user-focused and mobile-friendly website with an in-depth list of the pro's and con's associated with each one. With a very tight budget and a one-month launch deadline, we knew we needed to hit the ground running. Once Jake and Chip had made their choice, we worked with them to quickly scope out the project and finalize the UI/UX designs and their Shopify needs. Made In Cookware continues to grow like crazy with sales through the roof, and they have raised over $8M in seed money as of 2019 to help expand their team and product line. Spiral Scout provides ongoing outsourced web development and website maintenance support for Made In Cookware. Since the initial website was built, our team has created HTML email templates for their business and integrated them into their email service provider, Mailchimp. We also launched a survey tool for them to gauge customer feedback and interest in new products so they could make more informed business decisions around their offerings. TECHNOLOGIES: Shopify, JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, Vue.js, Facebook API, Mailchimp API, Segment.io, Google Optimize, PPC campaign, SEO optimization. Learn more on our website Read More

Flow Reading Fluency is an online learning platform that enables students aged 7-17 to increase their reading fluency and vocabulary with the guidance and monitoring of their teachers. They asked us to build their platform from the ground up in 2020 on Moodle, embedding video, audio, quizzes and additional educational content in a streamlined and customized way.    Using a combination of Moodle’s existing tech framework, and our own custom-built plugins, we successfully created Flow Reading Fluency’s 100% digital platform in a few months. The platform now helps thousands of children improve their fluency and vocabulary in person and online with minimal teacher supervision. Learn more on our website Read More

Framed & Matted launched in 2013 to change the way people custom frame their favorite prints, posters, photos, and most works on paper. They consistently deliver elegant, simple, and classic picture frames.   Buying a picture frame for a poster, print, or artwork you own is expensive and limiting. Framed and Matted wanted to design a solution that would allow their customer to customize a picture frame all the way down to the nitty-gritty details.   We helped them zero in on the best user experience for building a custom frame builder that took the user down a path towards creating the perfect custom frame. This involved a number of user experience studies and research until we found an ideal solution.   Spiral Scout built the entire site, including an eCommerce gateway, an easy to use page editor, an integrated shipping system (via the FedEx API), a complex CMS to manage user-created frames, a reseller's API and referral program, and a robust customer relationship dashboard to manage all members and orders.   TECHNOLOGIES: FedEx API, Stripe, Image Magick, Spiral CMS, PHP5, PayPal Integration, Apache, MySQL, Spiral Framework, HTML5 Canvas, CSS3, jQuery   Visitors can customize their frame via an online frame builder that allows them to drag and slide their frame to the correct size, add matting to the borders and choose their frame style. Learn more on our website Read More

After an earthquake occurs, licensed structural engineers and city inspectors are called on to assess buildings and identify structural damage as well as clear the buildings for reoccupation. As part of the STIR program, the San Francisco Public Works department wanted to bring their vision of a natural disaster app for government bodies to life to help reduce the time and costs surrounding these types of building inspections and streamline the efforts of first responders.  Decovery also facilitated more organization around assigning areas of a city to inspectors and gathering building evaluations to create robust damage reports. Ultimately, Decovery was created for use by any municipality or large business to review their buildings and create actionable building reports. CHALLENGE Over 16 weeks, Spiral Scout worked with the Department of Public Works and an outstanding team of stakeholders there to design and develop a disaster recovery app that would change the way the city would react to a manmade or natural disaster, like an earthquake for example. Decovery is short for Disaster Recovery. The Spiral Scout team knew that developing mobile apps for city government use meant creating a solution that worked quickly and effectively both on a computer and a mobile device. So we designed an “in the field” mobile app and a responsive admin website. The app allowed field inspectors to quickly compile an electronic inventory of city buildings and structures, record important information about a building (pre and post-natural disaster), and send that data back to the admin dashboard. The data collected would inform reports that could be generated in real time for city officials about the buildings and areas in a disaster zone. RESULT The Spiral Scout team built Decovery as a part of the prestigious STIR (Startups in Residence) program working with the city of San Francisco’s Public Works department. STIR connects SF government agencies with technology startups like Spiral Scout to develop software products that solve civic challenges. Learn more on our website Read More

Destination 4 Rent’s online vacation rental marketplace makes it easy for people to book short-term luxury vacation rental properties in the U.S. and Caribbean.   Destination 4 Rent was having difficulty converting visitors into customers with their original rental marketplace WordPress site. They wanted to both improve their website’s SEO and increase traffic as well as resolve technical bugs that were negatively impacting the user experience.   Though they had been able to create a real estate website with WordPress, the Destination 4 Rent team lacked the technical expertise in WordPress website development to be able to optimize their site for a smoother and more successful user experience.   Our initial approach was to involve them in a branding and design exercise that would provide insights into their website’s current UI/UX. From there we gathered additional user feedback and conducted our own quality assurance testing to identify the most problematic areas of the website. We worked with them to strategize key updates to their web and mobile sites that would more aptly address the needs of a user looking to book a vacation rental.   Because the Destination 4 Rent team was most experienced with creating a business website in WordPress and had a limited budget, our developers built out their revamped website on top of WordPress.    We crafted and customized various plugins and pulled in search results via a third-party provider called VRP Connector that was using the HomeAway API. We then integrated Stripe, their payment processor, into the new site so reservations could be seamlessly booked and sent to the third-party booking agent who would then notify the listing agents.   We knew that building customer confidence and trust was key to the redesign. We put enhancing the search tools and engineering a smoother and more secure user checkout at the top of the list. Learn more on our website Read More

Attracting enterprise clients and saving $100k+ each year. Demos are critical to the buying experience. But pre-sales teams often struggle to cope with increasing demand for live demos, and growing a team of expert solution consultants takes time.  Consensus helps businesses create a more successful and tailored sales process through video asset management solutions and interactive video demos. The custom solution allows their customers to deliver a fully customized and interactive video demo on demand to each new prospect in the sales process.  Then, as an internal “champion” shares a Consensus video with other stakeholders at the company, the system automatically discovers each of their unique interests and re-configures the sales video to educate the new stakeholders in a more personalized way. The key to scaling for Consensus was attracting more enterprise-level clients like Oracle, IBM, and HP. The demands of these types of Fortune 500 companies required Consensus to enhance their demo automation platform with a more comprehensive website system architecture, higher-level security procedures, compliance with European laws, and features like single sign-on. While we supported, maintained, and fixed the existing application focused on digital asset management for video production, we were also hard at work estimating, planning, and creating a new system architecture design to replace it. Right from the start, the upgrades our team made helped them eliminate the need for a costly third-party platform, saving them over $100k a year, as well as lowered their overall spending associated with servers, hosting, and video storage by a few thousand dollars a month. TECHNOLOGIES: Amazon AWS, PHP5/PHP7, Node.js, Codeigniter, Golang, Spiral Framework, MySQL, Influxdb, SQL, ORM, RPC, auto-scaling video processing with FFMPEG, Elixir Learn more on our website Read More

Building the world’s largest library of eLearning assets. Before eLearning Brothers was the global provider of custom eLearning design, eLearning templates, and online training for eLearning professionals, they were a couple of brothers from Salt Lake City, UT with a dream - to make online learning more engaging, more inspiring, and more awesome. eLB simultaneously needed a customer relationship management service that would organize all their customer's data for their sales team and included sales-tracking history with helpful alerts sent to salespeople when a subscription was about to expire. Spiral Scout engineered a robust, subscription-based digital asset management system (DAM) with a scalable asset library and admin dashboard. Why was a DAM system the answer? The business case for building a digital asset management system was all about saving time, boosting efficiency, and improving security.  The custom DAM system Spiral Scout built provided for both structure, organization, and a secure central repository that equipped any eLB site admin with the digital asset management tools they needed to upload multiple files, associate metadata with them, and offer them to customers for immediate download.  Since 2012 when eLearning Brothers was just a handful of employees, their team has grown to over 90 members, consistently being highlighted as one of the fastest-growing companies in Utah and the U.S. (most recently being honored in the Inc. 5000 Hall of Fame). TECHNOLOGIES: SphinxSearch, ImageMagick, CMS, PayPal, USAePay, PHP5, Apache, MySQL, Spiral Framework, HTML5, ECMAScript 5, CSS3, Spiral JavaScript toolkit, LESS CSS preprocessor. Template driven, Two-way data-binding development with Ractive.js, Audio library SoundManager 2. Learn more on our website Read More

Drew Altizer Photography is a leading full-service photography agency specializing in event and portrait photography, video production, PR, and media placement in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay area.  Like what happens with so many businesses when they start to experience substantial growth, Drew’s legacy platform for his website was unable to sufficiently scale as business picked up nor could it handle the technical demands of things he wanted customers to be able to do, like purchase photos from different high-profile events he was shooting around San Francisco.  He was losing sales daily and lacked the internal technical resources to create a photo-sharing website with a bunch of extra bells and whistles. Drew needed a web development company in San Francisco that specialized in digital asset management systems.  He was looking to engineer a brand new responsive website that both communicated important information about his services as well as allowed for millions of event photographs to be stored, shared, purchased, and distributed to the press, media clients, event guests, and the people throwing the event. He also needed to seamlessly allow website visitors to purchase digital downloads and order prints from a printing service he was using in the Bay Area. Drew had an additional unique challenge in that he needed a seamless way for his photo editors and media clients, both those who were asking him to shoot events and those looking to buy images from the events, to edit and tag images in real-time while working in different locations. This would allow them to immediately distribute photos to guests and clients. The Spiral Scout web development team kickstarted the process by drafting a technical review document that outlined the entire scope of the project. Knowing that the web design for the photography business needed to be artistic, intuitive, and on-brand, we worked closely with Drew to clearly articulate his vision and business goals.  Using that document as the blueprint, Spiral Scout assembled a team to execute the responsive website; the team included a project manager, a web designer, three engineers, and a quality assurance engineer. We essentially ended up building four admin interfaces or websites into one web application. The fully customized solution included a robust photo digital asset management component, a content distribution system for clients and the media, a fully custom eCommerce platform with a built-in customer relationship management tool for handling users and online purchases, and a collaborative editing workspace for clients, editors, and photographers so they could work in real time once an event was over to get the images out to press. We also tackled the sizeable task of migrating over all of Drew's existing photos and metadata. In the end, Spiral Scout’s web development expertise and fast execution helped deliver the final product on time and under budget based on a clearly defined spec that was written upfront and our client's feedback. Not only was it easier for Drew Altizer Photography to work and collaborate with key stakeholders that helped generate profit for his business, but the integrated custom-built eCommerce website development also drastically improved his online sales while generating more useful metrics and sales reports. Learn more on our website Read More