The Ask
We have done market research and we have a strong idea of the product we need to take to market. Work with us to deploy the MVP of our platform and provide design and technical support until we build our own team.
The Observation
For non-technical founders, designing and getting a digital product to market can be a nightmare. Choosing the right partner to work with is a challenge due to technical knowledge gaps. Additionally, the process of building the product is full of pitfalls when you don’t have experience managing design and developer teams.
The Process
Key activities:
- Lean canvas session to hone down on what to build as the MVP
- Development of the Merchant Android Mobile Application allowing vendors to manage their webshops
- Development of the m-commerce website allowing customers to make purchases. A mobile-first approach was chosen because of customer behaviors observed during the research phase
Technology choices:
- Merchant Android app - Ionic for the MVP, ported later by SkyGarden to React Native
- M-commerce site front-end - AngularJs, ported to ReactJs by iSC
- Back-end - Core e-commerce service in Django Oscar, several microservices in Flask
- Deployment - originally on Heroku and ported later to Microsoft Azure by iSC
- Database - initially on Postgres and changed to MsSQL on moving to Microsoft Azure.
Outcomes
iSC’s work with SkyGarden spanned over 11 months. During that period we managed to:
- Develop and launch the MVP of the merchant app in 6 weeks allowing the SkyGarden team to onboard merchants
- Ship the first version of the m-commerce solution allowing buyers to order from SkyGarden
- Continued improving different aspects of the platform
- Worked with the SkyGarden team to show them how to manage development teams and build a digital product
Within the 11 months, SkyGarden was able to onboard about 5,700 merchants on their platform. They also got significant traction (we are unable to disclose the exact numbers) in terms of sales and brand recognition.
In February 2018, SkyGarden raised a seed investment round amounting to $1.2 million to scale their offerings. The lead developer on the project, James Mwai, joined the SkyGarden team as a Co-founder and CTO.
