Singlemind

I am the Senior Marketing and Social Media Manager of a gaming company

Video game development

Referral

2-5 Employees

Rebrand and relaunch the studio's website, which Singlemind previously created. This included redesigning the site template, publishing new pages to expand on what it's like to work at the studio, career opportunities, and establish a blog. Design and launch a webpage for the studio's first video game. This involved designing a secondary template based on the game's design system and completing updates and design changes to the page throughout the launch campaign.

Everything was completed in a timely manner and within budget. Our Singlemind point of contact also worked closely with us to ensure our vision aligned with our available budget, and was able to offer excellent solutions and alternatives to make our website vision possible.

Email or Messaging App

I was impressed with their high-quality work. Friendly, understanding, and collaborative teammates.

Not at this time.

SingleMind was hired to overhaul a video game startup's WordPress platform, improving it in order to attract suitable candidates on their posted job listings. The team developed numerous mockups for the client.

The team was able to grasp the requirements of the client and produce a platform that resonates with the company's brand and identity. SingleMind was also instrumental in making the platform fast and accessible. They were communicative, meticulous, and helpful.

My company, Ascendant Studios, is a video game startup in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on our first big title. I am a Producer (project manager), though I also handle auxiliary tasks that the development team does not have time for, such as social media and recruiting.

We hired Single Mind to overhaul our website to better represent the company and attract top tier talent.

Single Mind was recommended by a partner of ours. After speaking with several potential web developers, we chose SingleMind because they were both responsive to our needs and concerns and also had a good price point.

The ask was to create a website with three distinct pages. Our chief requirements were a clean, modern look that was on part with other companies in our industry, as well as a job listings section and a section about our team. SingleMind was able to accomplish all this through the use of Wordpress. We begun with a couple of meetings to nail down our requirements for the website and have SingleMind learn more about us as a company.

Their project manager was our chief contact, though we were also regularly in touch with their developer and designer throughout various stages of the process. I am unsure of how many folks were involved behind the scenes.

We don't heavily track things like click throughs or engagement, but our new website is much better at explaining who we are and what we do than our old site. It is much easier to update and automatically syncs with our job platform to ensure that everything is accurate and saves me a lot of work.

In addition to video calls at every major milestone, SingleMind and Ascendant shared a slack channel and private messages wherein SingleMind would share links to their progress and we could all ask and answer questions. We communicated multiple times a week, near daily when it came to the final stretch and launching the site.

SingleMind did not just execute on the requirements that they were given and call it a day (as was the case with many companies I've worked with in the past). Instead of just asking for a checklist and getting our brand guide, they took the time to dive into what sort of company we were, what sort of people we wanted to attract, and what we wanted to say about ourselves in our digital presence.

None. We felt like they were wonderful partners throughout this whole process.

Overall rating: 5

Powell's Bookstore is the world’s largest independent bookstore, with a reputation for offering a wide selection of books and a unique in-store experience since 1971.

At a high level, we were initially looking to address a myriad of legacy technical and software development process issues that stemmed from aging systems and technical debt, with the goal of getting new/improved customer experiences to market.

The initial engagement with Singlemind started as a technical and software process Discovery designed to evaluate and make process improvement recommendations.

The Singlemind team has provided direct services and staff coverage in a variety of roles; Interim CTO and Interim Director of Product, Senior Solutions Architect, Program Management, DevOps, QA, UI/UX Design Leadership, and Full Stack Development.

We were introduced to Singlemind through a referral by one of our Senior Engineers on staff. After evaluating several firms, we determined that they had the right mix of breadth in their service offerings and depth of senior level experience to meet our needs.

>$1.5M

The primary work has begun to wind down, but we continue to leverage some software engineering services.

Singlemind provided project management and led the development work for Powell’s Books Online Buy Back (OBB) tool, one of our primary channels for acquiring used books.

The Singlemind team worked closely with our IT leadership as well as subject matter experts from across the company. The communication was clear and timely and the project was completed on time and on budget.

During the time that Powell’s was engaged with Singlemind, Powell’s IT team experienced significant resource turnover. Singlemind was able to augment staffing as well as step into critical leadership roles.

While communication lines were always open and the entire team was responsive, I would have liked clearer documentation of project status.

I lead product management and marketing efforts for a manufacturing company.

We had designed a new product we wanted to bring to the market quickly, so we engaged SingleMind to augment our development resources. We aimed to streamline the development process and promptly release the product to market.

SingleMind essentially advised us through the development process to ensure we made the right decisions for our product. SingleMind was involved in all aspects of the design process. They helped us develop a strategy to achieve our end goal and devised a plan for how we could bring our vision to fruition and meet our go-to-market deliverables.

We worked with about five team members from SingleMind, including developers, a UI/UX expert, and a project manager. The project manager also acted as a senior architect and lead developer.

We found SingleMind through a referral. When we met them, they asked great questions about our goals and the challenges we faced. They grasped our problem quickly and proposed practical solutions right off the bat, so we decided to move forward.

We invested roughly $500,000 in the project with SingleMind.

We worked with SingleMind between January 2019–March 2021.

SingleMind gave us great UI plans that ranked highly during our initial market feedback sessions. They came up with innovative methods to get us from point A to point B without derailing the UX, and we’re pleased with the final designs and architecture.

SingleMind managed the project well and addressed problems as soon as they arose. They made several suggestions that improved our team communication and worked alongside us to integrate the project into Jira.

SingleMind was a very confident, technically skilled development partner. I was particularly impressed by their comprehensive, consultative approach; they provided us with several options to achieve our goals. They always outlined each potential development decision's pros, cons, and trade-offs.

I have nothing SingleMind could improve on.

Be very transparent about your project goals, objectives, and constraints. Being transparent will enable SingleMind to guide your development decisions and deliver the best possible outcome, rather than just executing what you ask for.

BeyondHQ is a software platform that powers interactive location analytics for geographically distributed organizations. I am the Head of Product.

Initially we were in search of help augmenting our development resources to help get our product to market more quickly. That engagement quickly turned into a more strategic relationship that addressed needs on the product design and architecture fronts.

We looked into over 20 development firms based in the United States and Canada. Out of these, we selected 5 firms to contact based on their previous work and online reviews. After speaking with SingleMind and learning about their product development process as well as meeting with their team members on design and technology architecture, they seemed like the perfect partner for us.

Project Manager Defining and triaging backlog in 2-week sprints. Tracking budgets and sprint commitments, and working with the team to ensure a successful outcome (or manage expectations accordingly). Technical (architect / senior developer) Defining technical approach based on requested features, additions, and other changes.

3 - technical architecture, software developer, design

We were able to spin out another version of our product within 3 months. This was crucial in our sales timeline. Our original engagement with them was supposed to be just the 3 months, but due to the quality and how quickly they work, we have stayed on with them and this is now an ongoing engagement.

Singlemind team is incredibly responsive. I always hear back from them We mostly communicate through Slack and track our work in JIRA on a day to day basis.

Singlemind is incredibly flexible, both in finding time for us and in supplementing our needs. They have been able to provide a cost-effective solution for us that we could not find with any other partner we spoke with.

We also needed help in marketing, but Singlemind doesn't do marketing! They are focused on providing the best product development solution.

I’m the chairman & CEO of Origins FTD Inc., a for-profit company, and a sister organization is Origins FTD Foundation, a non-profit public charity. We’re focused on maternal and child health and we’re developing a mobile health educational platform to address the four million live births every year in the United States to men and women that are conceiving.

The educational platform that we are developing is focused on fetal origins of disease and the epigenetics behind fetal origins and how they are biologically programmed between the mother and the fetus during gestation and postnatally between the mother, father and support group, up to baby’s age 2. We have a huge medical library that includes outcome studies, articles on gestational, gestational diabetes, various complications the family might encounter during the nine months of pregnancy and also postnatally the problems that they might encounter or questions they might like answers to as it regards parenting.

We contracted with them to integrate our various partners’ software into a mobile health platform that will exist in the cloud and be available to pregnant women and their husbands or partners and families on a smartphone. It would also be available on a laptop or a tablet.

They have a wonderful group of professionals that deal in the world of digitization and digital media. The main person I interact with is Cort (President/Founder, SingleMind). We’ve had as many as eight people working on the project. A core group of four has worked on the initial prototype of the Avatar. Peripherally, there were another 3-4 people who would be called in to do various bits and pieces of the contract.

I did an extensive analysis of people that SingleMind competes with. I found them to have the broadest base of talent. They were better able to handle the complexity of the software project all under one good manager, Cort. He has a number of directors in his group that have also been around the block and have done some serious work for very large companies.

We started working together in 2017 and the work is ongoing.

It’s a huge project. Cort has made the comment that this is like trying to boil the ocean. I have an app with an Avatar on my phone that I have been able to show to OBGYNs, to the National Institute of Health, to the National Institute of Child Health and Development, to a variety of other people in the maternal and child health area. Then, I can weave my own narrative around showing somebody the icon on my phone.

There’s a lot of flexibility that exists within their group. They’ve been very easy to deal with. They’re incredibly smart people. From my standpoint and the due diligence I did on over a dozen different software integrators, their competence is extraordinary. They’re very professional.

The biggest thing I’d give them credit for is their heart. This is a project all about doing good in the world and their team get it. If you were a fly on the wall in one of our meetings, your mouth would drop open with awe over the level of compassion and empathy and heart that this team has shared with me. They’ve been extraordinary listeners.

No, there’s nothing they can improve on.

They’re very open. Cort and the team have integrity. They have goodwill in how they’re dealing with me.