What is the difference between a freelance developer and a development team? How can you find the most established teams to work with? What is the first step to vetting a team? Get these questions and more answered by Brent Sanders, Founder of Fulton Works, a strategy and development shop based in Chicago, IL.
Tell our readers about you and your role with your development shop.
I have a background in music. I went to school for a formal education in music playing Trombone at DePaul University. In my last two years of school I found I was keeping busy developing websites for professors and musicians in the program. Building websites for artists and bands I was able to immediately identify a need to fill. After moving to NYC I focused on building a business in the service of advertising and digital agencies. I was completely driven by the satisfaction of building and shipping things that functioned. The sense of accomplishment that came with each project was addictive and turned into an obsession.
What is your specialty and focus area when it comes to development? What is your team passionate about?
Our technical speciality is bridging the front and back ends of a project under a single roof. Our service speciality is focused on product strategy with a lens focused on getting things done. We are passionate about craftsmanship and lowering the barriers to building new products. We are the best fit for projects that can benefit from feedback and contain a full-stack development problem. Our goal is to be an extension of our client and maintain a sense of shared purpose.
What do you believe makes a great development team?
Communication and location. The best strides we make are in front of whiteboards together and not on scheduled meeting times. These inspiration based meetings are like the ligaments of our structure. We encourage, push and sometimes force ourselves to be collocated with our clients. We found this to be beneficial on one of our first well known iOS apps (Shoebox by 1000memories – subsequently acquired by Ancestry). We flew out to SF to be with the development there for periods of development. We wrote our best code on-site with the client and found that to be a pattern with BeeReminded, Ponder, American Family, etc. We like to be in the same room as our clients, it makes everything better.
What tools are essential to your development process? What applications are you constantly using?
There are a handful, but the main ones we use on a daily basis include Harvest, Basecamp, Easy Backlog, Heroku, Omnigraffle and InVision.
What are the most common problems you run into with clients? Any advice for clients out there?
Clients that demand an NDA before discussing. The vast majority of ideas that clients bring us are not patentable but depend entirely on the execution of the idea. Its disappointing to find ourselves in situations where we can’t talk to clients because they don’t realize this. It just feels as if people are overly stubborn about this false formality. Its a shame because they end up going nowhere.
Why do you think it is so hard for clients to find talented developers?
The cost associated with both bringing developers on and then keeping the developers happy is greater than businesses anticipate. They look at salary as the cost of a development team but its actually much greater than that. I have more details about this and how we relay it to our customers but I could write an entire book about it.
When should a client pick a development shop over an individual developer? What is the difference and what are the pros and cons?
If they don’t mind their business being dependent on a single individual then it just might work. But, if they have to put a project on pause because somebody gets sick (or goes missing) they may have bigger problems. For any company serious about building something with a 3rd party there has to be a degree of accountability and reliance. If they have the structure to support gaps in accountability and only need an engineer then maybe elance is a better fit. If they are looking for a partner and a higher degree of reliance or accountability, a dev shop is the only solution.
What was the best project your team has worked on? Why?
Building the platform for RIPT Apparel has probably been the best project. I think their success as a homegrown business is a key factor. Their entry into the INC500 this year is in a degree a testament to our partnership. In addition the codebase is full of interesting and exciting challenges. We’ve played different roles for them over the past three years and all of them have enforced a strong relationship between us and them. Nearly every teammate has worked on some component of the site and it still feels like our baby that has grown up and been an important part of the $3.3 million in sales they did in 2013.
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