Tooploox

I am the Co-Lead AI Lab of Ashoka

Ashoks is the world's largest network of social entrepreneurs. We word toward a world in which every person can be a changemaker.

Referral

2-5 Employees

Ashoka had four prototypes around semantic search and AI-powered analysis of data about social entrepreneurs. The prototypes were implemented using Jupyter notebooks. The goal of the project was to consolidate the prototypes into one cohesive application with a modern user interface and an API.

We deployed the application for internal use at Ashoka. Feedback from colleagues around the world was very positive. The application is saving teams a lot of time.

Tooploox implemented the project on a pro bono basis. The team went above and beyond to make sure that the application is working for us, including support around DevOps issues that were not at all within the scope of the project.

Tooploox's team had an amazing can-do spirit. They focussed on what was needed to make the app a success, even if that meant going beyond what we had initially planned. We had partners in crime and not just a service delivery partner.

If this had been a paid engagement, the application could probably have been developed faster. That is not a reasonable standard to apply to such an extensive pro bono project, though. We are very happy with the time it took to get the app.

I'm an executive at Airspace Link, Inc.

Enable the safe integration of drones into the national airspace and communities at scale through digital infrastructure, strategic partnerships and thought leadership.

Referral

2-5 Employees

Tooploox engineers and their designer were meant to integrate seamlessly into existing teams in order to affect development and delivery of features slated for release in our major product offering. They were to deliver code and designs meeting our development and design standards and in line with our existing pipeline. The specific scope of those features was not decided ahead of time, and their team was meant to be flexible so as to help deliver whatever was necessary during the time they were working with us.

Tooploox completed nearly every deliverable asked of them on time and within spec. Any delays were known and discussed and not a reflection of the quality of their work.

We had frequent touch points and checkins with their team, and their work was managed by our own project management structure. Their engineers were flexible and receptive to the needs of our company and easily integrated into all of our cadence without issue.

Virtual Meeting

The team is wise beyond their years. They are very knowledgeable about development best practices, and I could always trust them to do things “right”. Everyone we interacted with was helpful, friendly, and interested in driving the work that needed to be done to completion.

Generally speaking there's nothing that stands out as room for improvement. It took us a bit of time to get the right mix of folks on the team, but Tooploox was very good about swapping people around until we had just the right set of people for the job.

Pluck.eco is a delivery ecosystem for farms and local businesses. We're making local delivery more sustainable and affordable for all.

Map the most important decisions for the company. Design a UI to test assumptions about customers.

They partnered with our accelerator.

The team led a four-hour assumption mapping exercise which allowed us to identify the critical assumptions that needed to be tested to prove the value and feasibility of the product. The team then designed a UI to be tested with real customers to prove out our assumptions.

My Team worked with about 5 designers and product-facing contributors throughout the process.

The designs were on-brand and focused on testing key assumptions for our product. Not only were the designs very well done, but they also had clear criteria for success established in the previous sessions. This made it possible to objectively test, whether the designs were working or not.

Tooploox used tools that made collaboration, very easy and effective. E.g. Miro - a interactive whiteboard tool

The designers and individual contributors were all very engaged with the problem. They produced clean, professional designs and forwarded resources, ideas, and examples of other companies in the space. They were more like real business partners than a typical dev studio.

A clear description of available resources and the related pricing would have been helpful for planning upfront.

I'm the Head of Engineering at Salvo Health.

We hired Tooplox for one backend engineer who can partner with our PM and current senior eng focused on building out a lot of the backend infrastructure to support our Beta and post-Beta member and care team experience services.

This vendor was hired by the ex-CTO who has had a good working relationship with Tooplox for several years.

The engineer was mainly focused on a variety of projects to evolve our backend infra, build out Fastify based api services, and a variety of other projects that laddered up to multiple launched features.

1 Backend Engineer.

The engineer was a fantastic addition to our team. Completed most, if not all, deliverables on time with high quality. They are careful with quality, set a high bar for themselves, and execute with satisfactory speed.

The engineer was added on to our engineer team just as any other full-time hire would. He participated in all the team rituals (standups, sprint planning, retros, etc..). He was active in Slack and email.

Very easy to communicate with, receptive to feedback, and made an effort to meet in person.

The only nit I'd add is I wish they were proactive in adding automated test coverage as part of the successful commits and launches.

I’m the founder and CTO of a software company called Adaptive. We make software and do billing and expense management for construction companies.

We hired them to help us with our engineering efforts.

Tooploox provides additional resources for our engineering team. At the moment, we’re working on a web development project. They’ve provided three experienced engineers to help us build out new front- and backend features from scratch, including integrations with third-party platforms. Key technologies being used for the site are Django, Python, Heroku, React, and JavaScript.

Currently, we work strictly with three full stack engineers from their team. We also worked with a project manager, QA engineer, and an ML engineer on a short-term basis.

They were introduced to us by a former colleague of mine.

We’ve spent around $150,000.

We started working together in October 2021, and our engagement is still ongoing.

The three engineers that we work with are all top-notch — their code quality is very good. They also frequently comment on other people’s code, providing really helpful advice and suggestions for improvement.

Their communication skills are very strong, and we mainly interact through Slack and use Zoom for video calls. We also use Jira for tracking tasks and Github for our code management.

We’re really impressed with their engineers’ ability to learn new things. They’re really smart and versatile people who can jump in and understand new technologies quickly. That’s why I always feel confident in giving them any type of task.

They couldn’t provide us with resources in some areas. Nevertheless, our engagement with them has been great.

Make sure to pull their engineers into your organization as tightly as you can, involving them in the planning and decision-making process. Based on our experience, they really have a lot of good insights to offer.