Our Clients Aren’t The Only Ones Growing

Since founding MojoTech, everything we’ve done — every project, every hire, every business decision — has been made with the goal of helping our clients be more successful.

Fortunately, delivering on that goal helps us to continue to achieve our own goals as a business. In fact, we think it’s truly the only way for a firm like ours to grow and thrive.

And grow we have.

Last year, we opened our first satellite office in NYC. Many of our clients were already based there, and the city’s vibrant tech scene has led to awesome opportunities for MojoTech to work with even more great companies.

That’s why we couldn’t be more excited about this announcement: we’ve hired an amazing product manager to lead our efforts in the Big Apple.

Erin Costanzo Cummins joins us from GetGlue, one of the hottest startups in New York, where she worked on managing products for the company’s 3M+ users.

She has extensive startup experience and a passion for product that makes her the perfect fit for our team; in addition to her product manager duties, Erin will be spearheading our growth in New York by helping with recruiting, business development and giving MojoTech a powerful presence in the city’s booming tech community.

Erin has a Bachelor of Science in Biology (woo hoo, science!) from The College of New Jersey and an MBA in Entrepreneurship from the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College.

And like the rest of us, while she loves building products, it’s not her only passion. Erin is an expert in the kitchen who makes killer shrimp tacos, and she and Nico, her Italian Greyhound, are both avid runners.

In NYC and want to talk about your product? Drop Erin a line at erin@mojotech.com.

Welcome, Erin!

-Nick (@Kishfy)

Welcoming Eli Williamson to MojoTech!

We’d like to welcome Eli Williamson to the design team at MojoTech. How could we resist a guy with his creative eye, and a resume that includes things like hacking the Microsoft Kinect platform for Home Depot?

We asked Eli some questions, and here’s what he had to say:

Welcoming Will Farrell (not that one) to MojoTech!

I’m pumped to announce another addition to our already epic engineering team— Will Farrell. Will’s got some pretty serious geek cred having worked on low level systems and protocols and is looking forward to applying his software architecture and design pattern knowledge to MojoTech’s projects. Here’s the a little Q&A with Will:

Welcoming Ryan Coughlin

We’re happy to announce the latest addition to our team, Ryan Coughlin. Ryan is an incredibly talented user experience designer, and we couldn’t be more pumped to have him on our team. Ryan’s actually been working with us as a freelancer for a bit. At first he was reluctant to move to Providence, but he’s really loved the city and the vibe at our studio, so he decided to make the move. Here’s a little Q&A with Ryan so you can learn more about the man behind the pixels.

Say hello to the new recruits.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve been quietly recruiting some amazing talent that I’m excited to introduce to you.

David Berube, a native Rhode Islander, is our Entrepreneur in Residence and is working to help our clients perfect their products, and help me grow MojoTech. Aaron Rosenberg joins us from New Jersey by way of Ohio and is a master of all things Rails, making him a huge asset to our engineering team. Aaron Snyder (our second Aaron from Ohio) joins us as a Creative Developer, and Libby Morgan came all the way from Alabama to keep everything running smoothly as Project Manager.

These four come from different states and backgrounds and have settled into entirely different functions at the bigger and brighter MojoTech. They also have differing ideas of what’s required on a deserted island (Aaron R. says a Kindle, but Libby wants a snow cone machine).

Here’s a little Q&A for you to get to know who’s behind the scenes, what they’re into, and who the “cat person” is. (Libby is the cat person, although she swears she loves Emma and Winston, our office dogs.)

The new Batchbook is here!

Batchbook just launched a totally new version of their web app, and we’re proud to say that we helped them build it!

I met with Pam O’Hara, CEO of Batchbook, about a year ago now at a little coffee shop in Warren, Rhode Island to discuss helping her team create the new and improved Batchbook. Thanks to the tight-knit Providence tech community, Pam and I already knew each other. I was super excited that she came to us, and she was equally excited for us to take on the project.

Since Batchbook had an engineering team, our role was not only to lead development efforts for the new Batchbook, but also to introduce Pam’s team to our process, tools, and workflow. Before long, we were one well-oiled machine, delivering user stories at breakneck speed.

Lately, many of our clients have wanted this sort of team augmentation / mentoring relationship, and it’s been very rewarding for us. In that role, we’re able to build great software PLUS build great engineering teams, which continues to provide a long-term value even after our engagement has ended.

Splash.fm Enters Public Beta!

When we first talked with Splash.fm’s co-founders Jason Fiedler and Alex Gatof last summer about building a music and influence-driven website, we were more than intrigued by their concept and passion for developing it.

In concept, Splash.fm was the “Klout for music”, a social network based on music discovery with the unique addition of an algorithm that would score users based on how influential their recommendations were. As a bonus, users could share and download music, making it the ultimate network for new music artists too.

Together we worked with them on design, strategy and development to bring this to fruition in just a few short months. Splash.fm launched in private beta on January 16th with hundreds users and had thousands of users by the time we cut the tape and went live on Tuesday, April 17th.

We’re packing up our mojo and moving to downcity, Providence!

This past Spring, we expanded our capabilities by establishing a new Creative Department. Our Creative team offers expertise in strategy, design, and branding. We’ve applied our talent to the rebrand of our own website, which we hope you’ll visit! Our team continues to grow in exciting new directions. We’re proud to introduce Sam Saccone, Creative Developer, Marissa Epstein, Visual Designer, and David Dufresne, a talented Rails Developer. Coupled with our recent internal growth, we are elated to announce that MojoTech has found a new home in a beautiful studio space in Downcity, Providence.

-Nick Kishfy

Loffles in the New York Times

For the last year we’ve been working with Brandon and the rest of the Loffles team to engineer their lottery raffle system, which just got written up in the New York Times. They launched in June and already have over 3,000 registered users.

Brandon pitched Loffles to us as “virtual currency meets raffles meets entertainment.” The basics of the system are as follows: You sign up for a Loffles account and provide a few details about yourself. You’ll then watch a video advertisement. After the ad plays, you’re asked a few questions about it. Once you answer them, you can enter contests for prizes.

Andrew Adam Newman from the New York Times talked to a recent graduate who says her experience with Loffles was the first time she won anything online. So far she’s won “Michael Kors sunglasses (valued at $317), an Oster electric wine bottle opener ($24) and a gift certificate to The Cheesecake Factory ($50).”

We spent a lot of time working on the Loffles specialized video player. So much so that while we were working we ended up memorizing dozens of video ads. We would hold contests with our team members to see who could recite them verbatim. As it turns out, we all could.

User experience with this type of website was key to getting consumers on board and engaged. We worked with the Loffles team to make sure the user registration was simple and easy to understand.

-Nick Kishfy

Unveiling Groove

Build a simple, fast and elegant customer support software that is better than the competition’s, in every way —This was the directive from Groove’s CEO, Alex Turnbull, on the day we first met and it’s because of that vision that Groove was so much fun, and so challenging to work on.

We’re excited that the buzz around Groove is growing. Today they got an awesome write-up on The Next Web, who called Groove “a breath of fresh air for customer support” and called it “a freshly conceived customer support solution and a beautiful, full-feature iOS application.” Let’s just say it—Groove is a pretty sexy-looking customer support platform on the outside, and it’s just as good looking once you’re inside.

We’ve been working on the strategy, design and development of Groove for the last four months. Within 7 days of launching, Groove already has well over 1,000 private beta signups. It’s completely blown all of us away. We’re proud that it’s a legitimate competitor to Assistly and Zendesk, who probably didn’t even know Groove existed up until now.

We’ve also been developing an iPhone and iPad app for Groove. With “Groove on the Go,” Groove will be accessible wherever you are, so that you’ll be able to reply to customers and assign support tickets to team members while you’re on the road (or at the golf course). Both of these apps should be launching in a few weeks. Also look for the native Groove apps for the Mac and Adobe Air.

Alex has set such high standards for Groove. Everything we build for them is compared to what their competitors have. If it doesn’t work better, fast, or smarter, it doesn’t ship. It’s really that simple.

Alex’s passion for customer service excellence drives us to constantly refine features. We are excited for Groove’s future and look forward to helping them build customer service software that sets new standards.

-Nick Kishfy