Guarana Technologies

As a solo bootstrapping non-technical founder, Guarana was very patient and educated me without judgment. They were very clear in their requests for information for me, in their quotations and their invoicing - very professional. The product was nearly flawless from the first beta release, and Guarana worked out the bugs very quickly. They met their budget and schedule, which was important because the app is a travel app and we were trying to release before the holiday travel season. We all laughed a lot during the development, which I believe is the way to do business. Guarana also stepped in to help with a few graphics issues while scaling back features from our clickable prototype that I brought to the project, even though they aren't a design firm.

We did run into one challenge with the security of the Heroku/Parse database system we used. I don't even know what our options were, but I was surprised that we didn't have levels of access in the database that would have prevented a data entry freelancer from deleting data when I terminated them. Again, I'm not a tech guy and don't know what database security options are available with other systems, but another data entry teammate ended up suggesting another system that is more cumbersome but more secure. It's really part of my learning curve, but I wish we had discussed the database system more up front.

Overall, my experience with Guarana has beenn fantastic. I will continue to work with them on further development until my company can afford an in-house engineer (which Guarana has said they will facilitate the transition to). I have already recommended them to a friend who's established company has been struggling to develop their mobile technology, and it appears that the relationship is progressing well. I would have given them 4.8 stars, as I think they're a great operation, but take a couple of 10ths off for the database issue, and because everyone has room to improve.