Yzag

I spent over a year searching for a company like Yzag, and the experience has been better than I had even hoped.

I came up with an app that I wanted to create, but I am not a programmer. Nonetheless, I created a company, got legal protection for my ideas, formed a strong team to lead the company, and I raised money to get it developed. We talked to more than enough development companies to understand how it worked – companies that develop software will quote you a price and a duration of time it will take, and so many reviews and forum searches led me to realize that the project would end up costing far more than I was being quoted, take longer than they said, and that the team working on it wouldn’t care about what they worked on the way I wanted. Then, when the app was finished, I wouldn’t know how to maintain it or grow it. I remembered reading the book “Delivering Happiness” by Tony Hsieh, a founder of Zappos. In the book, he explains how awful it is to outsource your primary function and have a company that just doesn’t care about your product responsible for it. It sounded like a nightmare.

I talked to development teams in large companies, and realized how good software gets developed, and I figured I would need to hire a team of developers on my own, sort of like the show Silicon Valley where they all work together out of a house. I was literally at that point where I was learning how to set that up when I met Levi, the CEO of Yzag.

Without me even having to explain what my experiences had been, he said why it doesn’t work and isn’t the right way to develop good software. He then said he is on a mission to do things the right way with his development company.

He interviewed me to see if he liked my concept and wanted to have me as a client. When he decided it was a yes, he mapped out what a potential cost would be, and explained roughly who would need to be hired to accomplish the app. The cost is based on the salary of the team that will work on it with some additional on-boarding costs. All of the team is hired to work for Yzag, but all of the key positions are dedicated, full time on that one specific client’s project, and down the line, I will even have the ability to have the full time employees leave his company and work for mine.

I differentiate between full time and part time because not all jobs related to one project need to be full time. The client ends up saving money that way and just gets billed for the time they work on the project.

My favorite part of all this was when I asked him how long it would take to complete the project and he was honest about it. He showed me how much it would roughly cost per month, and he explained that it is an ongoing process with iterative timeframes and deliverables. Because of my research, I knew that was the right answer. He gave me estimates as to how long it would take to get a beta out in the market, and how long until it would come to life in the way I envisioned, but he was real with me about the process.

Levi has really created a company that does what it should be doing, and I couldn’t be more impressed. He has been available for me and transparent about his methods. He even helps by contributing to the thought development of my app conceptually. The whole Yzag team knows what they are doing and are very accommodating throughout this process.

I would recommend Yzag to anyone looking to develop software the right way. The only other way to accomplish what Yzag does would be to create and hire an entire development department in my company, which I don’t have nearly the experience for. Yzag truly acts as an extension of my company’s brain, and it is something I never would have thought existed.