Introducing a new platform for strategic growth
CASE STUDY
Coordle is a startup that helps organizations coordinate group travel and movement. When Founder and CEO Dr. Jen Fry wanted to take Coordle’s low-code minimum viable product (MVP) to the next level, she reached out to York IE.
The firm’s product strategy and development team helped redesign and rebuild Coordle’s product into an intuitive, feature-rich mobile app and web platform, successfully bringing it to market.
By working with York IE’s Product Strategy and Development Advisory as a Service, Coordle has:
Here, Dr. Fry shares her experience working with York IE:
The biggest challenge is finding a development team I can trust to build with my thoughts in mind. I’ve had problems with integrity, honesty and communication with development shops in the past. I need to know what’s going on.
The first thing that impressed me with York IE was that eight people were on the introductory call. The depth of what they were explaining and how they explained it immediately made me feel comfortable. They were very transparent.
York IE has also helped us pivot and iterate. We were a B2C group travel app, and now we’re a B2B platform that allows groups to move effectively and effortlessly. Suppose you think about a wellness retreat, a trade show, a conference or a sports team. In those cases, there are consistently people, a.k.a. groups, moving in the same city, state, domestically or internationally. We help you coordinate all the logistical details that tend not to be considered important.
We must give ourselves grace with building a new and innovative platform; something like this has yet to be truly built before, so there isn’t a blueprint. We have to be willing to crawl through the nuance to figure out what’s best for our customers based on feedback and what works well in the roadmap. Luckily, my team and the York IE team are on board with this approach. It doesn’t work well for some, but for us it does.
My chief of staff and I use another startup to manage our calendar, and one of our biggest issues is that they have a response rate of usually two to three days. With York IE, within 24 hours or even less, we know we will have an answer to the problem or the ability to solve the problem. Everyone is so accessible and so responsive.
Many firms are worried about upsetting their clients, so they’ll say yes to things that aren’t realistic. I appreciate having people who will tell me no. I’m a big-picture person, and I need someone to be able to say to me, “You don’t need that now,” “We can do that in a few months,” or, “If you want this, you can’t have that.”
Having someone like Evan York, who understands both the founder’s and the app developer’s perspectives, is important because, in startups, people think they need every bell and whistle, when in reality, you don’t. York IE has assisted me in narrowing down exactly what is critical for us to include in our MVP and what we will build over time.
We’ve gone back and forth in some hard moments and must keep muddling through them to build a product. You’re not going to build a scalable venture without hard moments. But it’s those moments that have created the trust and the relationships we need to be successful.